We Pour — Chapter 2

A Cyberpunk Story in the Fifth Element Universe

by Chris & Eli

The express elevator drops 97 floors in eleven seconds. My ears pop at 40. The lobby is its usual zoo — a Mangalore in a maintenance uniform arguing with the building super, two kids chasing each other through the turnstiles, and a police drone hovering by the mailboxes, scanning packages with a blue fan

of light.

Nobody looks twice at me. Everybody looks once.

Outside, I flag a cab. The driver — a wiry guy with a headset bolted to his skull and a dozen dashboard saints glued to the console — tilts his mirror to take all of me in.

“Where to, long man?”

“Sector 7. Yung Fat Noodle, street level.”

“Ah, the noodle girl! She your lady?”

“She’s my sister.”

“Even better. Family! I give you fast route.”

He yanks the stick and the cab lurches into the fourth lane, cutting off a freight hauler that screams past close enough to rattle my fillings. Through the windshield, New New York stacks itself up and out forever — towers threaded with sky bridges, holographic billboards the size of city blocks, sunlight hitting the upper levels while the streets below stay in permanent blue dusk.

The cab drops hard through three lanes and pulls up at street level. Down here the light is neon and steam. Ellie’s shop — YUNG FAT NOODLE, hand-painted sign, been here since before I was born — sits between a vape den and a Zorg-brand electronics outlet with a cracked window display.

The lunch rush hasn’t started. Through the glass I can see Ellie wiping down the counter, alone. She moves the way she always moves — efficient, contained, like everything is a task and tasks get done. But there’s something in her shoulders today. A tightness.

She sees me through the window and stops wiping.

The pay pad in the cab reads my thumb and the number blinks at me. Not enough to flinch at. Enough to notice. The anonymous ping flickers in the back of my skull like a pilot light.

“You have blessed day, long man!” The cab lurches skyward and is gone.

I stand on the sidewalk for a second. Steam curls up from a grate and wraps around my knees. Down here at street level the air tastes like grease and ozone, and for just a moment — the neon, the wet pavement — it hits me sideways.

I see rain on the long dirt road up to the house. The combine coughing black smoke while Dad swore at it and Mom handed him the wrong wrench on purpose just to hear him say “Margaret, that is NOT a nine-sixteenths.” Chickens in the yard. Ellie at the dinner table doing homework with her tongue poking out the side of her mouth, same face she makes now when she’s reconciling the register.

The commune kids thought I was a freak. Thirteen years old and already looking down at every adult on the property. But Ellie — five foot two, all elbows and opinions — would walk next to me like a bodyguard escorting a building. Daring anyone to say something. Nobody ever did.

I push open the door. The little bell rings.

Ellie looks up. She’s got a rag in one hand and a spray bottle in the other and she’s wearing the same Yung Fat apron she’s worn for six years and I think the thing I always think and never say to her: you should own this place. You should own five of these places. You’re smarter than everyone you work for.

But she took the waitress gig when I needed someone to co-sign for the apartment. And she never left. Because leaving would mean not being twenty minutes away when I go dark for a week and stop answering my phone.

“Sit down,” she says. Not mean. Just — the way you say it when you’ve been practicing what comes next.

She pours me a coffee without asking. Sets it down. Sits across from me in the booth by the window, where the neon from the vape place next door turns everything a faint pink.

She’s not wiping anything. She’s not moving. Ellie always moves.

“Dunk, I’m in trouble.”

My hands go flat on the table. I don’t realize I’ve done it until I feel the cold laminate under my palms. Something in my chest pulls tight like a cable taking load.

“What kind of trouble.”

It comes out flat. Not a question. She hears the difference. She’s heard it before — the voice I get when the part of me that sits in front of terminals and cracks jokes with Mox steps aside and the other part comes out. The part that once put a Mangalore debt collector through a drywall partition just for showing up at her apartment.

Ellie wraps both hands around her own mug. Looks into it.

“You know Mr. Yung’s son. David.”

“The one with the teeth.”

“The one with the teeth. He’s been running the books for the last two years. His dad’s too old, and David…” She trails off. Starts again. “David’s been skimming. Not a little. A lot. But that’s not — that’s his problem, not mine. Except three weeks ago he came to me and said he needed to move some money through the shop’s account. Digital transfers, routed offshore. He said it was to cover what he took before

the auditors caught it.”

She looks up at me.

“I said no. Obviously. And then last Tuesday he told me if I didn’t help him, he’d tell the Feds I was the one

skimming. He’s got records, Dunk. Altered ones. He was so proud that he left me a copy. Time-stamped with my access codes. I don’t know how he…”

Her voice catches. Just for a second. She sets her jaw and pushes through it the way she’s pushed through everything since the commune foreclosed and Mom got sick and Dad just stopped.

“He says I have until Friday before close of business.”

Today is Thursday.

The coffee sits untouched in front of me. The neon pinks and pulses. Somewhere in the kitchen a timer goes off and nobody’s back there to answer it.

I lean back in the booth and the vinyl creaks under me as I think.

David Yung. I run what I’ve got.

The teeth — capped, porcelain, expensive. Way too expensive for a guy running the books at his dad’s noodle shop. I noticed that two years ago and filed it in the back drawer where I keep things that aren’t my business yet.

I’ve seen him maybe a dozen times. Comes in late, always on his phone, never eats here. Drives a Zorg Stratos — the sport model, not the fleet one. Again: too much money. I clocked the plates once out of habit. Registered to a leasing company in Sector 12. Corporate shell. I remember thinking that was a weird way to lease a car unless you didn’t want your name on things.

And there was that one night. Six, maybe eight months back. I was picking up takeout and David was in the back booth with two guys I didn’t recognize. Suits, but not corp suits — the kind that fit too well. Private sector. Security or money, one of the two. David saw me looking and smiled with all those perfect teeth and I thought: that’s the smile of a man who wants you to know he’s got friends in high places.

Mox. Mox would know more. Mox knows things about everyone in Sector 7 because Mox never leaves Sector 7 and never stops listening. And Mox owes me for the firewall job last month.

So I’ve got threads. The car. The shell company. The suits. And a guy who somehow got Ellie’s access codes, which means he’s either got a slicer on payroll or he’s poking around in systems he shouldn’t be able to reach — and either way, that’s my turf, not his.

Bessie would be faster. Bessie lives under my bunk and has never failed to make a point. But Ellie’s looking at me right now and what she needs isn’t a big man with a bat. She needs the other thing I do.

“Ellie. I need you to tell me everything about how you log into the shop’s systems. Every code, every terminal, every time you’ve ever let David touch your workstation. And I need the name of whoever does the shop’s network.”

She blinks. Then — just barely — the shoulders drop half an inch.

“You’re going to fix this.”

“I’m going to fix this.”

Ellie slides her phone across the table and I scroll through the doctored records. Whoever built these didn’t just change numbers. They rebuilt the access logs from the inside out — spoofed timestamps, cloned Ellie’s credential hash, even salted the metadata so a surface audit would read clean. This isn’t some script kiddie with a purchased toolkit. This is craft.

And that’s what’s bugging me.

Every slicer has a style. The way a locksmith can look at a picked lock and tell you what brand of tension wrench was used. I’m staring at the way the timestamp spoofs are layered — three-pass overwrites, each one seeded off the previous hash, cascading so the whole chain validates if you pull any single link. It’s elegant. It’s paranoid. And it’s backwards.

Most slicers build forward. This person builds from the endpoint and works back to the origin. I’ve seen exactly one person do it that way.

My stomach drops about six inches.

No.

I scroll back. Look at the credential clone. The way it mirrors Ellie’s key signature — it doesn’t just copy

the hash, it reconstructs the generation pattern so it would pass a deep audit. There’s a little flourish in the

reconstruction. A redundant verification loop that serves no functional purpose. It’s a signature the way a painter leaves a brushstroke. It’s there because he can’t help himself.

Mox.

My best friend. The guy who never leaves Sector 7. The guy who owes me for the firewall job. The guy who knows things about everyone because he never stops listening.

The guy who apparently knows David Yung well enough to do a five-figure forgery job for him.

Ellie’s watching my face.

“Dunk? What is it?”

The neon pulses pink. The kitchen timer is still going off. I get up to go and am halfway to the door before turning back. Ellie looks at me with worried eyes.

I walk back to put my hand on Ellie’s shoulder. She reaches up and squeezes my fingers once, hard, the way she used to when I was small and the thunder got bad. Somehow her touch means that I’m the one who feels steadied.

“It’s going to be fine. I know exactly what to do.”

She nods. She believes me. That’s the worst part.