Milo Edris promised eight runaways he'd move them past the wall before dawn. Now a patrol sweep had sealed the restricted sector, and his safe route was gone. He crouched in a maintenance duct, robotic hand pressed to the grate, and watched drone lights crawl across the floor below. Somewhere behind the checkpoint, his people waited in a cold storage bay. He had built his whole life around one plan: a hidden waystation where the hunted could vanish. Tonight the hunt had reached him first. He flipped his x-ray patch down. Through the wall, the scanners read as bright pillars, evenly spaced. Ten meters between them. No gap wide enough for a child to slip. "You look like a man who already lost," a voice said behind him. Remi Voss dropped into the duct without asking. She still clutched a cargo manifest in one fist, grease black under her nails. Milo had hired her a dozen times to haul crates. She always screamed him up on price, then handed half the fee back to move refugees. He trusted almost no one. He trusted her boots. "Sweep locked the sector," Milo said. "Eight people. Dawn deadline. No route." Remi thumbed her manifest. "Freight override. There's a scheduled cargo pull at the east dock, four minutes from now. Automated. The scanners drop to let the loaders pass." "Drop for how long?" "Ninety seconds." She grinned, but her eyes stayed hard. "You'd owe me double." "I'll owe you triple. Move." They crawled fast. Milo's helmet banged the duct wall. At the storage bay he wrenched the grate and dropped through. Eight faces turned to him, pale and silent. A mother held a boy against her chest. "On my mark, we run for the east dock," Milo whispered. "No stopping. No sound." Remi worked a wall panel, splicing wires with a tool from her belt. The manifest fell forgotten at her feet. "Freight window opens now," she said. "Go." Milo led them out low and fast. The scanner pillars flickered and died. He counted in his head. Thirty. Forty. The loaders rolled past, blind machines pushing crates. He shoved his people between them, one by one, into a container marked for the outer yards. Sixty. Seventy. The boy stumbled. Milo caught him with the metal arm and lifted him inside. Eighty. The container sealed. The pillars snapped back to life just as the last of them vanished behind steel. They were out. Milo's chest heaved. Then his patch caught something new. A single scanner near the dock had logged a shape it couldn't match. His metal arm. The system flagged it and pinged the patrol net. Remi read his face. "They tagged something." "They tagged me," Milo said. The freight container was already rolling free with his runaways safe inside. But a patrol drone was turning now, tracing a heat signature straight back to the duct where he still stood. He'd saved eight people. He had eleven seconds before the drone found the ninth.