The Scrap Gardens sprawled beneath the old overpass tunnels, a tangle of rusted metal and stubborn life. Somebody had welded broken drone frames into trellises years ago, making them look vaguely tree-shaped if you squinted and were willing to lower your standards. Amazingly, a few sparse herbs were growing from cracked coolant pipes nearby. A hand-painted sign on the planter read:
IF IT GROWS, DON’T HACK IT.
Stepping around a cluster of scavengers dismantling a delivery drone, Minjae headed deeper into the garden. Patch Clinic 04 needed replacement diagnostic boards, and, in return, they’d offered him six maintenance credits and priority queue access for the next month.
It was a terrible deal.
Unfortunately, it was the best one he’d found all week.
He adjusted his headlamp and muttered to himself as he rummaged through a pile of discarded circuit casings. “Perfect, more junk pretending to be parts. Exactly what I need.”
Further back, a few people worked among the metal planters, tending herbs and repairing irrigation lines, or digging through salvage piles that had long since become part of the landscape. Everybody tended to ignore each other here, which suited Minjae fine. He had no idea who maintained half of this place, but every time he came through, there seemed to be another planter, another patch of greenery, another sign reminding people not to steal things.
Which suggested people were absolutely stealing things.
Minjae crouched beside a maintenance crate and dug through a nest of tangled wiring. Most of it was useless. Some of it was actively insulting.
“Come on,” he murmured, “one diagnostic board. That’s all I need. Surely somebody abandoned one before civilisation collapsed…” His fingers brushed a corroded connector, which was useless. Then a cracked relay housing. Also useless. Half a drone wing. Hm, potentially decorative… and potentially aerodynamic, but also completely irrelevant to his current problem.
He was halfway through prying a usable screw from a rusted panel when the silence shattered.
“KRAA!”
Jolting, Minjae nearly drove his screwdriver through his thumb. “What the actual—?” He turned as the sudden sound ricocheted through the tunnel. Searching the shadows behind him, all he could find were old steam vents, scaffolding and deeper, longer shadows.
Then—
A shape detached itself from the upper struts above him.
“Kraa.”
The shape landed on a beam nearby, black wings shuddering with a metallic glint. The crow’s feathers were slick and gleaming; it stared down at Minjae through one glassy eye.
Minjae blinked at it. “You lost? This isn’t the avian district, you know.”
The crow tilted its head, made a sound that could only be described as judgmental, and hopped closer on the beam.
“Oh, good,” Minjae said dryly. “An audience.”
The bird cawed again, louder this time.
“Yeah, yeah. Mock the human. Classic.”
Turning back to his toolkit, he tried to ignore the sensation of being watched, though it was hard with the crow’s claws clicking on the metal and that beady eye following his every movement. When a loose washer rolled from one of the salvage piles, the crow immediately hopped down and stole it.
Minjae glared. The bird stared back at him.
Then, very deliberately, it dropped the washer into a patch of mud beside the nearest planter.
Minjae narrowed his eyes at it but said nothing. He was already getting distracted and he didn’t need this. What he needed was to get paid.
After another frustrating ten minutes of finding nothing useful, he packed up and headed out.
The sound of flapping wings echoed after him, but Minjae didn’t look back. He didn’t need to; the claws clicking from beam to strut overhead were keeping pace with him just fine.
“Don’t even think about it,” he muttered, picking up his pace.
“Kraa.” The claws overhead sped up, too.
Minjae sighed. “Fantastic.”
By the time he reached the upper tunnels, the familiar thrum of home had started bleeding through the walls: the chatter of low voices, the occasional laugh, and music, signalling that everyone else was still awake.
~*~
The Ghost Lines base buzzed with the usual evening nonsense when Minjae returned.
Cables sprawled across the floor in blatant violation of at least three safety regulations that nobody had bothered writing down. Somewhere in the back of the room, a half-finished synth track rattled the walls. Kairo was hunched over his latest project, headphones around his neck, adding entirely unnecessary bass to a track that already had too much bass in Minjae’s opinion.
Across the room, Soahn sat cross-legged beside the main console, neural link flashing softly as data streamed across his screens. Whether he was monitoring tunnel traffic, rewriting a security protocol, or accidentally inventing a new operating system again, Minjae couldn't tell.
Onyx occupied the workbench beneath the blinking strip-light, methodically servicing his exo-rig with the concentration of a man preparing for war against a particularly aggressive spreadsheet.
Rayne lounged on the sofa, which had somehow survived another month without collapsing. He appeared to be doing absolutely nothing, which, knowing Rayne, probably meant he was internally doing six things simultaneously.
For a few seconds, everything felt strangely normal.
“I bring gifts,” Minjae announced, dropping his haul onto the nearest table. The collection clunked and clattered, but to him it mainly sounded like disappointment.
Kairo glanced over. “Successful trip?”
“If by successful you mean I found fourteen kilograms of rust and one screw, then yes.”
“Nice.”
“It really isn’t.” Minjae was about to ask what everyone was up to later, when something flapped noisily behind him.
He closed his eyes. “No.”
Another flap.
“Oh no,” Kairo said immediately.
The black shape swept through the hatchway, circled the room once and then landed squarely on the back of Minjae’s chair as though it had paid rent.
The room went silent.
The crow puffed its feathers. “Kraa,” it said.
“No. No, no,” Minjae said. “Absolutely not. Get out.”
The crow cocked its head in his direction and then began to preen its feathers, completely unbothered.
Kairo burst out laughing. “Wait, did you make friends with a bird?”
Soahn, who was grinning now, said, “You know, it’s statistically unlikely for wildlife to imprint on sarcasm, but not impossible.”
“Oh, shut up,” Minjae grumbled.
Frowning, Onyx studied the bird for a few seconds, and then, apparently deciding it wasn’t an immediate threat to national security, he returned to his work. “Don’t let it near my rig.”
Rayne simply watched curiously from the sofa as the bird fluffed its feathers and let out a sound that could only be described as triumphant chaos incarnate.
“I think,” Kairo said, all too happy, “our Min-Min’s been adopted.”
Minjae groaned. “Somebody end me. Please.”
~*~
Unfortunately, the next day the crow was still there. Minjae discovered this when he arrived at his workstation and found it already occupied, the crow sitting directly in front of his terminal, watching without a care in the world.
“Move,” he said.
The crow blinked and then clicked its beak.
Sighing, Minjae flopped down into his chair. Around him, the base started to come alive as usual — Kairo working on a track, Soahn quickly vanishing into a forest of diagnostics windows, Onyx repairing something expensive-looking, Rayne being Rayne. Nobody seemed particularly concerned that a wild bird had somehow taken up residence.
Trying his best to ignore it, Minjae pulled up a new window on his console and began sorting supply requests from across The Ghost Lines. Three Patch Clinics needed replacement components, somebody in South Junction was requesting water filtration cartridges, and one message simply read:
URGENT. WHO STOLE MY GOAT?
Minjae stared at the message for a moment and then silently moved it into the Not My Problem folder.
All the while, the crow watched the monitor, tracking the cursor with its strange eye, cocking its head when Minjae started typing. “Don’t look so interested. It isn’t like you can read this,” he muttered.
In response, the crow bent its head smoothly and pecked the keyboard.
Three windows closed instantly.
“Oh, come on,” Minjae said, and spent the next few seconds re-opening them. “You menace.”
The crow pecked the keyboard again, and the monitor brightness dropped to zero.
“For fuck’s sake!”
Behind him, he heard Kairo snort. “It’s like it knows what it’s doing.”
“Hush, you,” Minjae said, scowling at his screen. The crow merely puffed itself up proudly.
“I think it likes computers,” Kairo said.
“I think it likes causing trouble,” Minjae replied.
The crow clicked its beak again.
“Yeah,” said Kairo. “You’ve got things in common.”
“Its frequency range falls into the mid-harmonic,” Soahn said from across the room. “You could sample it.”
“Please don’t give Kairo ideas,” Minjae told him.
But Kairo had already perked up at that. “Ooh.”
“You sample this thing,” Minjae warned. “And I’m deleting the track myself.”
“We should at least give it a name,” Soahn suggested. “It feels weird calling it ‘it’ or ‘this thing’ all the time.”
“Traitor,” Minjae muttered.
Weirdly, everyone fell silent after that, as if they were genuinely considering name options for a bloody bird that had no right to exist, let alone live, in their space.
“We aren’t naming the bird,” Minjae said, before anyone could come up with ideas. “Everyone shut up. I need to finish patching this network loop before it eats itself.”
“Patch,” Rayne said.
“Oh! Patch is excellent,” Kairo said. “Okay, it’s official.”
“No,” Minjae sighed, flicking his fingers toward the bird in the hope that it might go away. It didn’t. “Nothing is official. I thought you were on my side, Rayne.”
“I don’t take sides,” Rayne said.
The bird strutted along the edge of Minjae’s desk like it owned the place, and Minjae closed his eyes, trying to find a pocket of tranquillity in all the nonsense. But unfortunately, it seemed he was clean out of tranquillity.
And somehow, that was how it began.
Within days, Patch had settled into a routine. When it wasn’t judging Minjae, it was stealing stuff. By the third day, it’d taken four of his spare screws, two resistors, and the corner of a protein bar he’d been saving. He caught it in the act beside his console one afternoon, pecking through snack crumbs with the casual confidence of a creature that knew it couldn’t be stopped.
“Oi! That’s mine,” he snapped, lunging for it.
Patch blinked at him and then deliberately dropped a shiny bolt straight into his coffee mug. The plop echoed like punctuation.
Kairo nearly fell off his chair laughing. Onyx tried and failed to hide a smile.
Minjae just stared at the ripples spreading through his cup. That had been fresh coffee, and not synthbrew or roasted fungus pretending to be coffee. Actual imported coffee that some black-market runner had risked half a dozen checkpoints to bring into The Ghost Lines. “I will end you.”
Patch merely croaked and tilted its head as if to say: Okay buddy, go ahead and try.
~*~
The next few days blurred into a weird new routine: everything went on as usual, but now Patch appeared whenever Minjae sat down to work. Nobody knew where she went the rest of the time or where she slept, only that she turned up every morning, sooner or later. Usually on his chair, but occasionally on his terminal. Once, inexplicably, inside an empty supply crate, which Minjae had to admit was hilarious because she’d made Onyx jump when he’d opened it.
Minjae gave up asking questions after that.
Patch sat on the edge of his console, feathers catching the low light, one good eye glinting like a drop of oil. Minjae found himself wondering what had happened to the other eye, though it wasn’t like he could ask her. Not that he would’ve if he could.
Still.
Everyone was a bit damaged. Even the wildlife, apparently.
Every now and then, Patch shifted her weight and made a low krrk, a tiny echo that played in time with the clicks of Minjae’s typing.
Minjae frowned and paused, fingers hovering above the keys. The bird went still too, head angled, listening.
When he started again, the sound followed — krrk, krrk, krrk - soft, syncopated, almost like the crow was trying to match his rhythm.
“Great,” he muttered, half-amused, half-unsettled. “You’ve learned percussion now.”
Patch gave a faint croak in reply.
Rubbing his temples, Minjae settled back in his chair. “All right. I guess you’re the new intern, then. Just don’t expect pay.”
Patch stared at him.
“Yeah, yeah, I know. You probably want equity. Everybody wants equity these days.”
At some point, Minjae realised he’d started typing more quietly when Patch was nearby. Not because he liked the bird — that would be ridiculous. But… the quieter keys seemed to bother it less. Eventually, he hot-swapped the blue switches in his keyboard to red, the thunk smoother, softer, more buttery.
Patch spent the rest of the afternoon perched on the corner of his desk. Minjae refused to draw any conclusions from this.
~*~
The bunker had grown quieter over the past hour. Kairo had finally disappeared in search of food. Soahn's diagnostics windows had gone dark one by one. Somewhere deeper in the tunnels, Onyx was probably still pretending maintenance counted as a hobby.
Only Patch remained.
The crow sat on the corner of Minjae’s workstation, as usual, feathers puffed slightly against the chill drifting through the old ventilation shafts; it watched, but not in a judgmental way this time. Just watching with gentle curiosity.
Minjae rested his elbows on the desk and stared back.
Patch tilted its head.
Something about the movement tugged unexpectedly at an old memory, and Minjae huffed a laugh that wasn’t really about amusement. “You know, my mum would’ve hated you,” he said. “She couldn’t stand birds. Said they brought bad luck.” He shook his head. “Guess she was right, because here I am, underground, talking to a crow.”
He tried to sound like he was joking, but the words tasted strange on his tongue, like something old and unspoken. The screen reflected in the crow’s eyes, cycling between lines of code and his own tired face.
For a moment, he thought about his sister. The last message that he never sent. Her anxiety about leaving for uni. The way she'd laugh halfway through a conversation and lose track of what she was saying. The graduation he never got to see. He wondered if she’d think this was funny — him, the family screw-up, keeping a crow for company in a dead undercity.
He blinked hard and turned back to the console. “Don’t look at me like that,” he muttered. “You’re not my therapist.”
Patch hopped closer and tapped her beak once against a key. The terminal pinged—
—And the code he was working on compiled perfectly.
“Wait…” Minjae stared at the screen. Then at the bird.
The crow croaked and then climbed onto his shoulder, settling there as though she had always belonged.
He didn’t move, just leaned back in his chair, letting the quiet spin around them.
Somewhere above, the city slept. Below, the lights trembled on the screen, a single line of text looping steadily and clean:
BUILD COMPLETE. NO ERRORS FOUND.
~*~
Morning crept into The Ghost Lines the way everything did down here: filtered through metal and dust, turning the air a soft grey-blue. Someone's playlist drifted quietly through the bunker, all sleepy bass and semi-finished harmonies. The smell of burnt synthetic coffee lingered stubbornly in the air.
Minjae was already awake, but he wasn’t working for once. Instead, he sat at the main table with a chipped mug in one hand and yesterday’s maintenance logs open on a tablet beside him.
Patch, at some point, had hopped up on his shoulder and was now sitting there looking entirely too pleased about the arrangement.
Eventually, Kairo emerged from behind a nest of amps and cables. He took one look at them and beamed. “Oh my God.”
“No,” Minjae said.
“You’ve got a shoulder bird. Like a pirate!”
“Quiet.”
“That’s uncannily fitting, you know.”
“Shut up.”
Patch unhelpfully clicked her beak.
“See?” Kairo said. “Even shoulder bird agrees.”
Minjae said nothing and took a long sip of his coffee.
Onyx appeared next, immaculate and terrifying as usual. He arched an eyebrow as he entered the bunker. “So,” he said. “Patch got the job.”
Minjae didn’t look up. “Best intern I’ve ever had. Doesn’t talk back. Much.”
Patch clicked imperiously and began to preen her feathers at the same moment Minjae’s tablet flashed up a new alert from maintenance. Huh, somebody had found the goat. Minjae quietly closed the notification.
When Soahn appeared, he eyed Minjae and Patch and a light smile spread across his mouth. “Premiere team.”
“Yeah, look at that,” Kairo said. “Coffee, attitude. Emotional damage. That’s mentorship in action.”
“You’re just jealous my intern’s more productive than you.” Minjae took another swig of coffee, ignoring the snickers.
“Jealous?” Kairo scoffed. “No, I’m inspired. We should get her on vocals.”
Minjae rolled his eyes. “Leave her alone. She’s fine as she is.” The words were out before he really thought about them.
Kairo grinned immediately. “Oh, that’s it. You’re attached.”
“I am not.”
“You absolutely are.”
“Kairo.”
“Shoulder bird.”
Minjae frowned into his mug. “Ugh.” And Patch remained where she was, perched on Minjae’s shoulder, proud as anything, like she’d always been there. “I should’ve gone into management,” Minjae muttered to himself, and Patch clicked very softly at that, like she was in on the joke.
Across the bunker, Kairo's music drifted through the speakers. Maintenance alerts trickled in. Somebody shouted about missing tools.
Life in The Ghost Lines carried on.
And for once, Minjae didn't mind.