(Sipho — POV)
The investor's office smelled of glass cleaner and arrogance. Sipho keyed that scent the way he keyed routes—what people polished and what they left to rot. He sat across from a table that could buy his van twice over and kept his hands deliberately still.
"Your numbers are solid," the investor said, tapping his tablet. "Margins are thin."
"They're honest," Sipho replied.
The investor's smile had no teeth. "Honesty doesn't scale on its own."
Sipho let the line fall. He had learned not to argue with gravity. "Neither does speed without care. That's why we manage the last mile for traders who need hands they can trust."
"And yet," the investor said, eyes lifting, "you came without the prototypes."
Sipho's throat tightened. "They were stolen this morning."
Silence reconfigured the room. The assistant stopped typing. The investor considered him as if weighing a small animal for consumption. "You understand why this is difficult."
"I do," Sipho said. He breathed and kept his voice even. "Forty-eight hours. I'll bring the units back. If I don't, you walk."
"Forty-eight hours." The investor said it like a verdict. "No extensions."
The meeting dissolved into paper handshakes and polite goodbyes. Sipho rose with a timer ticking somewhere behind his ribs.
Outside, the city hit him with heat and honk. His phone vibrated against his thigh. Junior: Naledi went to the market. Said she had a lead.
His stomach dropped. Gratitude stacked on top of a sudden hot shame—his mess had spilled into her day. His palm went damp across the phone. He should have been there. He should have protected that bag himself.
He dialed and it rang once, twice. No answer. He left a short, clipped message: Stay safe. Call me. His voice sounded smaller than he wanted.
As he closed his phone, a terse text cut him off like a belt: Rashid: Five days still. No excuses. The line read like a blade. The two deadlines sat together now—forty-eight hours and five days—and the space between them was nothing.
He grabbed a cab and fed the driver directions with the same precision he used to route riders. The city blurred into corridors of urgency: a vendor's shout, a woman haggling for tomatoes, the metallic pop of a crate being dropped.
At Mandla's kiosk the air smelled of diesel and fried onions. Naledi stood with her back straight, talking quietly into Mandla's ear. When she saw him she gave a nod that was part relief, part business.
"You shouldn't be here," Sipho said before he could temper it.
"You shouldn't have left," she shot back, ledger-calm as ever.
Mandla waved them closer. "The bag came through. They dumped it in a storage shed behind the third row."
Sipho's jaw clenched. He felt the ledger in his chest: unpaid invoices, fuel bills stacking like dominoes, the rent that loomed as a question mark. He also felt something else—an acute, sharp gratitude that tasted like guilt.
He told himself to keep control. He marched to the shed with Naledi at his shoulder. The shed smelled of old oil and sweat. Two men stood near a bakkie, their conversation low and guarded.
"That bag's mine," Sipho said, stepping forward with the authority of a man who lived by collections and deliveries.
One man laughed; the other studied Naledi as if reassessing her currency. Naledi's voice cut the space: "Those TechBridge units are serialized. If you try to sell them, they flag you. Keep them and you'll be cut out of the market. Return them and you get paid."
The practical threat landed harder than the money. Consequences work in this city.
The man spat and named a price. Sipho named a higher one that made his chest pinch. Naledi watched him, expression flat but not unsympathetic. When the exchange happened, the bag felt heavier on his shoulder, the zipper's resistance a reminder of how fragile proof can be.
Back in the cab, Sipho finally let out a breath that sounded like surrender and relief braided together. "Thank you," he said to Mandla, meaning more than the cash he handed over.
Naledi folded into the seat opposite him like someone returning to an ordered ledger. "You didn't have to risk this," he said, voice thick.
"It was a trade," she said. "You paid. I made sure the numbers said what needed to be true."
He wanted to apologize for tainting her morning with his chaos, for the way his failure had become her problem. Instead he said, "I won't forget."
They reached his office and he opened the bag in the light: the TechBridge boxes sat intact—small, clinical, the kind of thing investors touch to believe.
His phone chirped. Investor assistant: Tomorrow, 9:00 a.m. Bring everything.
Sipho felt forty-eight hours collapse into a single thin line. He pocketed his phone, feeling both steadier and smaller—steadier because he had the prototypes, smaller because Naledi had been the one to get them back.
As they parted, Rashid's text pulsed again: Five days. I don't enjoy waiting.
Sipho cradled the bag like fragile truth. For the first time all day, the map in his head steadied—because he was not carrying it alone. But the deadlines remained: investor's patience and Rashid's teeth. The next forty-eight hours would be a race run on two tracks at once.