Proxy was not asleep when morning arrived, which is to say he also was not awake. There exists, between those two states, a narrow territory of grey compromise where the body rests while the mind continues its small, stubborn labor. He was there, drifting through it, his deck still looping the passive camera cycle it had been running since midnight.
Then Nyx placed her hand on his face and physically turned his head toward her.
The grey territory collapsed immediately.
"You look terrible," she said.
She examined him with the steady attention she usually reserved for threats. Being evaluated like hostile terrain before breakfast felt, he thought, unfair but technically consistent.
"Good morning to you too."
"Did you sleep at all?"
"I slept some."
She made a small sound in response, an auditory expression of doubt. She sat up as if the matter required physical escalation. Her hair fell over one shoulder while she scanned the suite with the bubbly alertness of someone who had awakened completely in a single step.
He observed this energy with quiet suspicion. Morning enthusiasm struck him as fundamentally unreasonable.
"Sit up," she said.
"I'm comfortable."
"You're going to be more comfortable sitting up."
She was already standing by the time she finished the sentence. Negotiation had never been part of the plan. She retrieved one of the water units from his pack without asking, handed it to him, and then simply watched him.
Which is to say, she waited for him.
Proxy had encountered that look before. It meant inevitability.
He sat up.
Then he drank.
Nyx moved through the morning with the thoroughness she reserved specifically for matters involving him. She checked his jaw where the graze from before had once been. The injury had long since faded to nothing visible, but she ran her thumb across the spot anyway, as if verifying the absence personally.
Satisfied, she adjusted his collar.
Then she noticed a small bruise on his forearm. He couldn't remember where it had come from, which meant it had probably happened during something inconvenient. She watched it for a long moment, her expression carefully neutral in the way that suggested she was deciding whether the bruise had earned an emotional response.
"It's fine," he said.
"I know it's fine."
She licked her thumb and pressed it lightly against the mark, testing the reaction.
"I'm just looking."
Proxy felt he had no choice other than to allow it.
That out of the way, they had breakfast sitting at the edge of the bed. The suite's gold ambient lighting attempted to perform a miracle by making ration blocks appear appropriate for a presidential suite with no success.
Lighting could imply luxury, but it could not transform compressed nutrient bricks into cuisine. The blocks themselves were dense and flavored according to what the packaging confidently described as acceptable approximations of real food.
"This one says it's chicken," Nyx said.
She read the stamped label with genuine curiosity.
"It says it contains artificial protein compounds."
"That's almost the same thing."
"It's not close to the same thing."
She ate it anyway without complaint. That suggested either a high tolerance for disappointment or a very clear understanding of priorities. When he finished the first water unit, she handed him the second half without comment.
"So," she said. "Today."
"Today."
He brought the deck fully online, checking the camera network properly for the first time since waking. The two figures from the lower floors had resumed movement. He caught them in the east ground-floor corridor, advancing slowly toward the lobby. Their pace suggested alertness but not urgency. Searching for something, maybe.
He kept the feed running in the background.
"We need to think about our next move," he said. "We can't hole up here forever-"
The sound reached them through the smart glass before anything appeared outside.
A low, industrial pulse beating against the morning air. Proxy recognized the frequency pattern almost immediately.
Nyx turned toward the window.
Through the floor-to-ceiling glass they watched a heliplane pass low over the resort.
Beneath the fuselage, a descent chute had opened.
A cargo crate descended slowly toward the resort's golf course, suspended on the automated chute. It was enormous, large enough to hold a small car if someone had decided to store one sideways.
When it reached the ground it struck the open grass with a heavy impact that created a small crater. The chute collapsed around it afterward, folding into soft waves of grey fabric.
Even from this distance, the corporate logo on the crate's side was unmistakable.
The heliplane banked once and disappeared.
Nyx watched the empty sky for a moment.
Then she looked at him.
"Do we go?"
Proxy was already on the cameras.
The two contestants from the lower floors had stopped moving in the corridor. They had heard the drop too. Through the lobby feed he saw them change direction immediately, heading toward one of the exterior exits.
He switched to the exterior cameras.
The resort's outer coverage lit up across his vision.
One feed caught two more figures emerging from the northern tree line. They were approaching the golf course separately, each on a different route. The spacing between them was too wide to indicate a team. The second figure moved faster, as if attempting to arrive before the first.
Four people.
All gunning for the drop.
His instinct recommended staying exactly where he was. He had a secured room with a single entrance, complete camera coverage, and a locked elevator.
Leaving that position to walk into a four-person battlegrounds in the middle of an open golf course was, from a purely strategic perspective, an outstanding way to ruin an otherwise reasonable morning.
But.
The corporation had said supply drops would occur at their discretion.
This was the first one.
Which meant the corporation was also watching. Somewhere above the course there would already be drone coverage capturing the scene. A conflict for a supply crate created good broadcast material.
Two contestants remaining in a presidential suite eating fake chicken protein compounds created considerably less.
The ending arrived when the audience stopped caring.
"Yeah," he said. "We go."
He was already standing, sliding the backpack onto his shoulders and checking the handgun at his hip.
"See if an opportunity pops up."
Nyx was already armed.
"How many?" she asked.
"Four total, including the two from this building. Two more came out of the jungle on separate points."
He pulled the elevator through the deck interface.
"They're not a team."
She nodded once. The softness from a few minutes ago was still visible in her expression. It coexisted, rather seamlessly, with the way her hand had settled comfortably on the SMG grip.
He locked the suite behind them.
The camera feeds remained active in his vision as they stepped into the elevator.
The lobby floors below were empty now. The two contestants from the lower levels had already exited.
The golf course lay roughly three minutes from the resort's east entrance.
Proxy watched the four signals through the external cameras while the elevator descended. He considered, briefly, the outcome produced when four unfamiliar contestants arrived at the same objective with conflicting priorities.
Nothing good.
That was the short answer.
He went anyway.