I move.
Fast.
Quiet.
The tunnel opens into a wider service corridor lit only by emergency strips now, pale blue bands along the floor that cast long, skeletal shadows up the walls, and I ghost across it, planting a second charge on the elevator shaft control housing and a third on the primary security hub node embedded in the wall behind a badly camouflaged maintenance panel.
I don’t rush.
I don’t hesitate.
I do this the way I was trained to kill—slow, precise, and unforgiving.
The second detonation shudders through the floor.
The third one hits half a second later.
Somewhere in the building, an entire floor drops off the network like it just had its throat cut.
Alarms begin to wail, distant at first, then multiplying into a layered, echoing scream that vibrates through the concrete and into my teeth.
“Unauthorized system breach detected. All units converge on holding level four,” a distorted voice barks over the compound’s internal PA.
Good.
Come to me.
I sprint down the corridor, boots whispering over concrete, cloak drinking the emergency light into nothing as I pass beneath it, my body heat flattening into statistical noise just as three Alliance surveillance drones whip around the corner above me, their lenses locking onto where I was a heartbeat ago before my feed scrambler kicks in and turns my heat signature into a smear of corrupted pixels.
“Tur,” command snaps in my ear, no longer calm. “You are being tracked by Alliance drones. Abort immediately or you will be classified as hostile.”
“Already there,” I mutter.
I slide under a closing blast door as it slams down behind me with a teeth-rattling clang that reverberates through the corridor like a gunshot, sealing off my retreat route and isolating the holding wing exactly the way I planned.
The air here is warmer.
More humid.
It smells like concrete dust and sweat and old machinery working too hard to keep this place livable.
Voices echo from three directions now, boots pounding, weapons charging, the high-pitched whine of plasma rifles powering up slicing through the deeper alarm tones.
I take the first enforcer in the throat with a thrown knife before he even finishes rounding the corner.
He drops without a sound.
The second one fires blind down the corridor, blue-white plasma scorching a molten scar into the wall inches from my head, and I roll under it, coming up inside his reach and driving my bone spurs straight through his chest plate with a wet, metallic crunch that vibrates up my arm and into my shoulder.
His scream cuts off halfway through.
I don’t slow down.
Two more come at me from the left stairwell, one of them young enough that his hands are shaking so badly his weapon muzzle wobbles.
“Drop it!” he yells, voice cracking.
I don’t answer.
