Unibot's tracker blinked red every four seconds, and each blink told an Enforcer patrol where to find him. He crouched behind a stack of crates outside a squat hut wrapped in thatch and steel piping. Six hours ago, Dr. Mecha Nix had bolted from his lab and left Unibot standing in a puddle of coolant, half-finished, still bound to obey the man who refused to grant him free will. Unibot wanted the upgrade. He wanted a mind that belonged to him. To get it, he had to find the doctor, and to find the doctor, he had to stop bleeding his location across Heliox. Kane Koanui slid the hut door open and waved him inside. Kane was broad-shouldered, tattooed from throat to wrist, and one of the few people in the city who owed Dr. Mecha Nix nothing. He pointed at the charging dock in the corner, twin grey pillars humming between coils of orange cable. "Plug in. If you want the mainframe, you go through that." Unibot stepped into the open compartment. Cables clicked into the ports along his casing. The side monitors flickered awake, and a login prompt for the cyborg mainframe scrolled up in pale green. He fed it the credentials Dr. Mecha Nix used for parts orders. The system hesitated, then opened. Unibot searched shipment logs, fuel receipts, medical scans. A single record surfaced: a coolant purchase logged that morning, routed to a supply drop two ridges east, near a cave marked on old survey maps. "Got him," Unibot said. "East ridge. He's still close." "Not for long if that light keeps blinking," Kane said. He was already unrolling a cloth of small tools on the dock's ledge. "Open your service panel. The tracker's wired to your power bus, so if I pull it wrong, you brick." He tapped Unibot's chest plate. "Hold still. Talk if it hurts." Unibot released the panel. Kane worked a driver into the seam, lifted the tracker out on its ribbon cable, and clipped two leads before the third. The red light held, held, then died. Kane dropped the small blue device into a lead-lined pouch and sealed it. "You're dark. For now." Unibot unplugged from the dock. The mainframe query still glowed on the monitor: coolant purchase, east ridge, timestamp fresh. He had a location and a clean signal shadow. He also had a new problem. The moment his tracker went silent, an alert would fire at the nearest Enforcer station, and someone would come looking for the robot who dropped off the grid. Kane shouldered a spear from the wall and nodded at the door. "We move now, or we don't move at all." Unibot stepped out of the hut and turned east.