Every surge of adrenaline, every spike of aggression, every tremor of restraint failure has always had a clean diagnostic pathway.
This doesn’t.
This feels like something is reaching for me through the city.
And I don’t know why.
I sit there, perfectly still, the intel feed scrolling unnoticed in front of me, while that unfamiliar pressure coils tighter behind my sternum, dragging my attention toward the restaurant district like a hook set into my spine.
The pressure behind my sternum sharpens.
Not metaphorically.
Not poetically.
It tightens the way a fist tightens around fabric, the way a gravitational well tightens around debris, drawing everythinginexorably inward toward a single point of collapse. My breath stutters halfway out of my lungs, and I have to consciously force air back in through my nose, slow and controlled, the way they taught me when my nervous system tried to misfire under stress.
This is not stress.
This is directional.
My hand lifts toward the terminal without conscious permission from the part of my brain that still thinks it’s in charge.
“Reroute feeds,” I tell it quietly, my voice sounding wrong in my own ears, rougher, tighter. “Lower-district traffic. Maintenance corridors. Syndicate dark channels only.”
The terminal pulses once in acknowledgment and begins restructuring the data lattice in front of me, collapsing citywide noise into a narrower, deeper funnel of information that flows like liquid shadow down the screen.
I tell myself I am only gathering context.
That this is professional curiosity.
That this is threat analysis discipline, not compulsion.
The pressure in my ribs responds to the lie by tightening another half-degree.
The first thing that resolves is vehicular telemetry.
Unregistered convoy signatures, running cold, no transponder IDs, heat profiles flattened to near background levels. The kind of signature you only see when someone is actively trying not to be seen by municipal sensors and Alliance orbital sweeps.
They are moving through maintenance corridors that were sealed off after the last infrastructure collapse and never properly remapped into the public grid.
Of course they are.
Glimner always liked theatrics layered over competence.
I expand one of the convoy feeds, pulling its route trace into a three-dimensional city schematic.
The line glows faint red as it threads its way through power alleys, drainage tunnels, and utility service spines that only syndicates and city engineers still remember exist.
Straight toward the restaurant district.
My jaw tightens.
“Don’t,” I murmur to myself again, but the word has lost all authority.
The pressure behind my sternum tugs harder, dragging my attention forward along the glowing route line like my nervous system has suddenly acquired a leash.
I bring up a second layer.
