Nine certified kitchens go dark in the same second, at sunrise, on a station that runs on them. Amsa has her hands inside the wall of one of them when it happens. She had re-seated that node ten minutes earlier, with three logs in front of her agreeing the board was healthy. Healthy boards do not lose a license. They get told to.

By sunset, three of the owners are dead. Every one of them a cook who had insisted on signing for their own supply.

Amsa fixes the machines these rooms live on, so she knows a switch from a fault. Nobody went door to door. Somebody reached the registry itself and pulled nine green lights at once, one breaker instead of nine lamps, and that is not a reach you get by accident. You get it by being owed it, or by already being inside it.

Then she reads a cold-chain manifest properly, and stops. The cold in these kitchens was never sized to keep food. The green light that swears a human hand touched your dinner has been vouching for something else entirely, load after load, and every certified room on the route signed for it.

Kvor works it from the Mars side, because an order like that has to come from up there. Amsa works the rooms. And Yusuf, the chef whose cold-store she has repaired more times than she has billed him for, will not cancel his last service, which leaves exactly one door the people who arranged all of this cannot lock.

Nine kitchens. Three dead owners. One full house, walking in.

Last Service — Book 5 of the Amsa Logs. Releases November 3, 2026.

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