I don’t pray.
I don’t bargain.
I rehearse what I’m going to do when the door opens.
I roll my shoulders carefully.
I plant my feet.
I prepare.
Because whatever happens next, I am not going to be on my knees when it does.
CHAPTER 24
TUR
The tunnel exhales cold air into my face the moment I drop through the rusted service hatch and seal it quietly behind me, the temperature difference biting through the seams of my armor and raising gooseflesh along my spine as if the earth itself is warning me that I am stepping into a grave that never finished swallowing what it was built to bury.
The passage slopes downward at a shallow angle, narrow enough that my shoulders brush flaking concrete on both sides, the walls veined with old conduit lines and corroded coolant pipes that tick faintly as chilled fluid moves through them somewhere deeper in the system, a sound so soft and irregular it would vanish into the background noise of a modern transit hub, but down here it registers like breathing.
The air smells like dust that hasn’t been disturbed in decades, like oxidized metal and old water and something faintly electric, the residue of ancient power grids that still hum just under the threshold of human hearing, and every step I take sends a thin crunch of grit echoing too loudly in my ears until I slow my gait and shift my weight to the edges of my boots, rolling my steps the way they taught me when silence was survival instead of preference.
This is Reaper-era construction.
I can feel it in my bones.
The proportions are wrong for modern human engineers, the ceiling just slightly too low, the corners too rounded, the load-bearing struts spaced according to structural math that predates Alliance standardization, and there’s a familiar wrongness in the geometry that makes the jalshagar stir faintly behind my ribs, not feral, not hungry, just… aware.
Like something old recognizing its own reflection.
“Asset containment perimeter reached,” my comm whispers in my ear, the Alliance command channel cutting through the quiet like a blade. “Tur, abort infiltration. Your heat signature just tripped deep-layer surveillance. This is a direct order.”
I don’t answer.
I slow to a stop at the first junction, crouching low and pressing my gloved palm against the concrete wall, closing my eyes long enough to let my senses stretch outward through the building’s bones the way they always have, the way I’ve spent fifteen years pretending I forgot how to do.
There.
Two guards above me, one floor up, their boots vibrating faintly through the ceiling as they pace the perimeter corridor in lazy, overlapping loops.
Three more near the service elevator shaft forty meters ahead, their body heat bleeding through the walls like dull orange smears against the black background of my thermal overlay.
I reach into the pouch at my thigh and pull out a neural disruptor charge no bigger than a coin, rolling it between my fingers once before slapping it flat against the wall just below the ceiling junction where the old power conduit runs.
The adhesive seals with a soft click.
I step back, count to three, and detonate it.
The explosion is silent.
The lights flicker.
Then die.
Somewhere above me, boots stumble and someone yells, the sound muffled and distant, followed immediately by the deep, unhappy groan of a legacy power grid trying to reroute around a sudden failure.
“Perimeter grid instability detected,” my comm chirps urgently. “Tur, stand down. You are triggering cascading system faults.”
