I throw the blanket off, scrambling to pull on my boots. “Another hunter?”
He shakes his head once. “Crawler. Industrial-grade. It’s drilling. Surface-level. Directly above us.”
My breath sticks. “They’re building here? In this graveyard?”
“Not by chance. Someone sold access.”
I freeze. The walls here aren’t thick. If one of those construction crawlers digs too deep or drops a seismic stake… this place becomes a tomb.
Valtron moves fast, sweeping gear into his pack, stashing the rest behind a locked bulkhead. “We go subterranean.”
“Wait, you mean deeper than this?”
He looks at me like I’ve grown a second head. “You want to wait for daylight and play hide-and-seek with a terraformer?”
Good point.
I shove the last boot on, grab my compad, and follow him into the narrow rear corridor that leads deeper into the facility. The hatch groans like it resents being used, then hisses shut behind us.
The tunnels are ancient. Utility shafts that used to feed power and data through the entire block. Now they smell like damp rust and old oil. I step carefully, flashlight bobbing in my hand, casting flickers over graffiti and bullet pocks no one ever cleaned up.
Valtron moves ahead, every step measured. His bulk takes up most of the tunnel, but he glides like he was built for spaces like this. I’m still shaking a little—less from fear, more from the whiplash of always being a heartbeat from death.
We don’t speak for a while.
The silence starts to ache.
I break it. “The file wasn’t meant for me.”
Valtron doesn’t turn. “I know.”
“I mean, a guy died to send it. He probably thought it would go to a real journalist. Not a morning-show blonde with good cheekbones.”
Now he looks back.
“You dug into it anyway. That counts.”
I huff. “You’re hard to impress.”
“You’re not easy to forget.”
The heat that floods my chest is not helpful.
I press on. “The sender… his name was Callen Drax. Mid-tier systems analyst for Helios Combine. Listed dead two weeks before I got the file. Transport accident.”
Valtron snorts. “Classic.”
“Yeah. Only the ‘accident’ involved a cargo pod depressurizing mid-jump. Only cargo on board was him.”
He grunts. “That’s not just a hit. That’s a message.”
“To who?”
He stops. Faces me. “To anyone who knows what those implants really do.”
“What implants?”
His jaw tightens. “Alliance soldiers get tech. Everyone knows that. Neural syncs. Combat stims. Reflex enhancers.”
