“I need air.”Three simple words, but they barely made it past the constriction in my throat. The weight of everything pressed against the base of my skull, a pressure that threatened to split me open from the inside.The conference room's recycled atmosphere clung to my skin, made worse by the suit I wore. Its fabric alone was worth more than every credit I'd ever touched. Hours ago, the Elder Meguca sitting across from me had wanted me dead. Now she’d casually threatened me after CYPHER, the CYPHER, dismantled weeks of my desperate struggle in minutes with the casual efficiency of signing a document.With a few simple words, it had forced a government overseeing billions to acknowledge what they'd spent decades ignoring: the fourth district existed. We existed. And now, suddenly, we mattered.That same CYPHER had also instated my own personal assistant, and then put into my hands the lives of two-million hypothetical humans. To spend at my leisure in exchange for services only CYPHER could offer.The walls pressed inward with each shallow pull of air that wouldn't quite fill my lungs.Before my legs finished pushing me upright, the door swung open with a silent hiss, revealing an elevator, and the ceiling lights shifted to green. The light’s glow lit the way through empty metal corridors where someone's spicy protein shake still haunted the recycled air. The elevator, devoid of any buttons, swallowed me without asking for a destination, carrying me upwards until the doors parted with a soft ding.Nothing in my life had prepared me for the relief of that first (...)