EXCEPRT from Chapter 3, Part I of 'VICTORY TREMORS' by T.A. Moore:

She doesn’t gesture to the ceiling. She gestures to the kitchen bench. The ration tin sits there like a joke that’s stopped being funny. She taps it with her fingernail. The sound is thin. Hollow.

“They said the bots would make us rich,” she says. “But I’m still rationing like a criminal.” She flips the lid. Inside is a smear of flour and the sweet-sour smell of almost-food.

My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. My stomach tightens — not with hunger, with the humiliation of noticing it.

Her hand trembles. She smiles anyway — the kind of smile you wear when you’ve stopped asking politely. “If you won’t act,” she says, “I will.”

Who am I? Aaranya Duff. Prosecutor of other people’s motives. Fluent in everyone else’s reasons. Illiterate in my own.

And that not-knowing is starting to cost both of us.

Then—boots.

Real boots. Not memory-boots. On the pavement. Coming up fast.

Lilith’s head snaps toward the door. For a second she looks almost delighted — as if the world has finally stopped being abstract and become physical.

My stomach drops. My body keeps better records than the law.

We move to the kitchen — not because it’s safer, but because pretending there’s a safer place helps us breathe.

The kettle sits empty, offended. The counter is cold. Lilith’s peppermint-tea cup is a circle on the bench with lipstick smudged on the rim like a fingerprint she planted on purpose.

Her anger leaves physical evidence.

She shoves the almost-empty ration tin toward me. “If you won’t act, I will. Tonight.”

“I have to go to work,” I say — and hear the cowardice settle into the sentence.

Lilith’s laugh is soft and lethal. “Go prosecute a miracle. See if it saves me.”

My phone vibrates again.

A.O.> Door contact: imminent.

A.O.> Recommendation: do not speculate.

A.O.> Confidence: unknown.

That’s it. No comfort. No sermon. No “mentor.” Just a machine refusing to be useful in the way I crave.

My wristband changes — not pain yet. A warning heat. My skin prickles under it like shame.

Lilith glances at the screen. “It talks like it’s afraid.”

“It talks like it’s constrained,” I say — and hate the tenderness leaking into my defence.

Lilith leans in, close enough that the telescreen could mistake our proximity for affection.

“Here’s my fear,” she whispers. “Not that it knows too much. That you want it to.”

The kitchen window offers only a sliver of Wellington, but it’s enough to prove the world persists even when we don’t.

Outside: wet pavement; laundry strung like surrendered flags; a couple hurrying a child beneath the long shadow of a drone.

My breath fogs the glass — proof I haven’t been fully digitised.

Across the city, buildings lean inward as if listening. Solar apartments. Monolithic ministries. And, downhill, my SIS tower reflects a cold blue halo.

Lilith presses her fingertips to the fogged pane.

“Aotearoa used to feel like a refuge,” she says quietly. “Now it feels like an anteroom.”

“Anteroom to what?” I ask, because asking is safer than answering.

She doesn’t look at me. “To someone else’s reaction.”

The reveal: “I’ve been meeting with someone.”

She keeps staring at the street like she’s already halfway out of my life.

“There’s something else,” she says — steady in the way a fault line is steady right before it breaks.

I freeze. “Lilith?”

“I’ve been meeting with someone.”

My ribcage locks.

“A man.”

The word lodges like a stone. My first instinct isn’t jealousy. It’s to check whether the telescreen caught my flinch.

And there it is — the tiniest flicker in the corner of the screen. Not a siren. Not a warning.

A recalculation... The system offering another deal... a corrupt alternate.

Lilith finally turns and looks at me.

“Now,” she says, “tell me which side you’re on.”

And my mouth fills with the taste of coins again — my body trying to bribe the truth.