I step around a crater in the floor where the second explosion punched straight through tile and subfloor into whatever lies beneath.
This is where I picked her up.
I can still see it if I close my eyes, my nervous system replaying the moment with vicious fidelity: her blood slicking my hands, her heartbeat hammering against my chest, the way her body went slack when the pain finally knocked her out.
I don’t close my eyes.
Not yet.
I move deeper into the ruin, following the tug in my gut that isn’t the jalshagar so much as a familiar professional itch that says there is something here that does not belong and I am standing on top of it.
When I reach the center of the collapsed kitchen, I stop.
I set my feet.
I breathe in slowly through my nose.
And I let my Reaper senses unfold.
The world tilts.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
The geometry of the space reorients itself inside my skull as layers of information slide into place that normal humans never get access to: density gradients in the concrete, thermal ghostsstill clinging to metal like fingerprints, electromagnetic residue humming faintly in my teeth.
The ruin resolves into a three-dimensional ghost map of itself.
And then the ground breathes.
Not air.
Energy.
A slow, deep, subterranean pulse that I feel through the soles of my boots and the bones of my legs and straight into the base of my spine.
My stomach drops.
“Oh,” I whisper.
The sensation is unmistakable.
Transit architecture.
Old.
Very old.
Buried infrastructure running beneath the restaurant’s foundation, dormant but not dead, its power signature smothered under layers of modern construction and city noise but still there, still coiled and waiting like a hibernating animal.
Recognition hits me like vertigo.
I stagger a half-step and catch myself on the edge of the ruined counter, my fingers digging into warped stainless steel hard enough to leave dents.
“No,” I breathe.
I extend my awareness downward, past the broken subfloor, past the packed earth and utility piping, past layers of forgotten concrete poured by different regimes who never knew what they were building over.
