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“Lethal, non-lethal—I don’t care,” I snap, loading the sidearm. “My primary goal is Diana. Anyone or anything that gets in the way is collateral. You focus on the Authority. I’ll focus on the one person who matters. Clear?”
I brief the team in thirty seconds. “Diana left Sanctuary sometime before dawn. Best guess, she’s heading to the node. We follow, keep eyes out for Authority, and do not engage her. She is our primary objective.”
One of the runners—name’s Markus, or maybe Markov—raises a hand. “What’s the plan if we intercept her?”
“We bring her home,” I say. “Alive, and with whatever she’s carrying.”
Rosie snorts, but doesn’t argue.
I finish with: “If Authority’s already there, we go in. No half measures.”
We gear up and head to the East tunnel, pace brutal. Every step, I replay last night...
At the first junction, Markus freezes, holds up a fist. The signal is clear: movement ahead. Rosie kills the lantern, and we drop into a crouch.
I hear it, too—footsteps, but not Authority. Too light, too fast.
A shadow darts across the corridor, ducking into a side passage. I gesture for Rosie to stay, then take Markus and follow.
The runner is good—fast, unpredictable... At the end of the line, I find her: not Dee, but a Sanctuary courier, wild-eyed and sweating.
She sees the shotgun, goes white. “I’m just relaying,” she says, holding up both hands.
I lower the gun, motion her forward. “Report. Now.”
She swallows, hard. “Message for Maven. The node is hot. Authority sent a full squad this morning—drones, dogs, the whole thing.”
Rosie curses behind me. I do the math—Dee might be ahead, or caught in between. The panic that had been simmering finally boiled over, fueled by the Authority’s presence. A raw, choked sound of fury tore from my throat. Markus flinched. The world tilted, the mission, the virus, the Sanctuary—all dissolving into the sole, burning fact that Diana was now running straight into the waiting jaws of the thing that created us. I jammed the shotgun barrel toward the floor. “We move, now! Every fucking second counts!”
Lance
The first shock comes before the first checkpoint: a hum in the tunnel, low and dirty, crawling up the bones in my feet. Static electricity crackles through the recycled air, making every strand of hair stand at attention. The closer we get to Authority’s underbelly, the worse it gets. Like the entire grid wants to spit us out, but can’t.
Markus leads, a silent bolt through the darkness, one arm always reaching ahead to probe the path for tripwires or surprise grating. Rosie is at my back, shotgun loose in her grip, boots landing cat-quiet even on the grated floor. I take middle, watching both ends, left hand on the pump handle of the gun, right hand… always drifting to the ring finger, twisting at nothing.
We move fast, skipping the mapped corridors and taking maintenance shafts instead. Every few meters the concrete walls change color—sometimes brown with mold, sometimes wet with condensation that shivers down in perfect little rivulets, catching what light there is and spraying it around like broken glass. The air tastes of solder and something worse: an aftertaste of burnt ozone, not quite like the lab, but close enough to sting the back of my throat with memory.
There’s a trick the Authority engineers used when designing these tunnels—every corridor is just slightly off-axis from the next, never running straight for more than a hundred meters before bending, splitting, or doubling back. It was supposed to fuck with pursuers, or with anyone dumb enough to try mapping the place from memory. But Diana mapped it. Mapped it in her head, mapped it in mine, and now every step feels like retracing her footprints, a ghost march with my boots landing just out of sync with hers.
I catch the first hallucination at the stairwell to sublevel three. It’s her laughter, faint at first—a hiss in the power lines, an oscillation in the ballast of the flickering lamps. But as I get closer, the laugh resolves into her actual voice, syllables breaking like brittle sticks:
“Don’t get lost, Kang. If you get lost, I’m not coming to find you.”
I know it’s not real. I know it. But my chest tightens anyway, and my jaw clamps until I taste iron.
At the bottom of the stairs, Markus holds up a fist. We stop. There’s movement ahead—a scuff of rubber on steel, a wet cough echoing in the service duct. Rosie drops into a crouch behind me, chin tucked and gun ready. I flick my safety off, then back on, muscle memory faster than thought.
Markus gestures: one. Two fingers, then a sweep left. Rosie nods, shifts her angle. I count the steps as we move. Three, two, one—
The guard is Authority, but not regular. Private contractor. I know by the boots and the haircut. He’s half asleep at the junction, gun dangling from his sling, the light of his tablet painting his face blue-white in the dark. He’s the first person I’ve seen in hours who looks less alive than the corridor itself.
We don’t kill him. Markus handles it—a quick loop of garrote, a sharp twist, a quiet shuffle to the floor. Rosie checks the pockets for badges, creds, anything that might buy us a few seconds if things go loud. I watch the body, waiting for it to get back up, half-expecting Diana to pop out from behind and say, “That’s not how you do a silent kill, Kang.” But the body stays down. Diana stays gone.
We keep moving.
The next sector is worse. Authority must be running some kind of resonance scan; every ten meters, a grid of red light fans out, sweeps the tunnel, then blinks off. Rosie and I have to time our movements to the sweep, moving only when the sensors reset, freezing in place when the lines are live. Markus, godless bastard, just walks right through, confident the old tattoo magic is enough to scramble the signature.
During one hold, hunkered behind a busted drone charging station, I get another wave. This time it’s her silhouette, projected on the far wall by a glitching ceiling light. She’s walking away, hair up, lab coat billowing. Not real, not possible, but I reach out anyway, hand shaking as it closes on empty air.
