I don’t know yet how much to tell her.
I only know that if I walk back into the safehouse and say, by the way, your restaurant was sitting on top of a buried Reaper-era transit node and also I think the Alliance parked me here like a watchdog and also everything you thought was random absolutely wasn’t, her world is going to collapse in on itself for the second time in a week.
And I don’t know if that’s the thing that finally breaks her trust in me.
Ash drifts down from a collapsed beam overhead and settles on my shoulders, a fine gray dust that clings to my jacket and hair like a benediction from a very cruel god.
I stand alone in the ruins, holding a secret that could start a war and end my life either way.
My implant pings again.
Closer.
Tighter.
The triangulation net is closing.
I look down at the blackened floor where her blood soaked into tile that no longer exists.
“I didn’t choose this,” I say quietly to the empty room. “But I’m not letting them have you.”
The city hums outside.
The buried node breathes beneath my feet.
CHAPTER 11
KIMBERLY
The municipal archives live in the sub-basement of a brutalist civic building that smells like lemon cleaner, overheated wiring, and the quiet despair of underfunded bureaucracy.
It’s two in the morning when Ishaan and I slip inside through a service entrance that definitely does not show up on any public floor plan, the hallway lights dimmed to night-cycle blue and the security cameras looping on a thirty-second delay that he programmed in with three casual taps of his cybernetic hand like he was skipping a bad song.
The soft mechanical clicking of his fingers echoes too loud in the empty corridor.
“You realize,” I murmur, keeping my voice low even though the place is empty and locked down, “that if we get caught doing this, my criminal résumé is going to get wildly more impressive than I ever intended.”
He snorts quietly.
“Kim, your restaurant got firebombed by the Nine. At this point, municipal trespass is morally neutral.”
Fair.
We duck into a records room the size of a high school gymnasium, rows of compact shelving packed with physical files and aging data cores stacked like tombstones, all of it humming faintly with the low electrical purr of ancient servers that should have been decommissioned two decades ago.
The air is dry and cold, preserved like a museum exhibit nobody visits anymore.
“This is the zoning annex,” Ishaan whispers, already sliding into a terminal chair and jacking a cable into the port at the base of his wrist. “Pre-Alliance and transitional governance. Everything that didn’t migrate cleanly into the modern system lives here like a ghost.”
“Perfect,” I mutter. “Just like my entire life, apparently.”
His hand clicks again, faster now, the sound weirdly intimate in the quiet as illicit code scrolls across the terminal screen.
I pace slowly behind him, hugging my jacket tighter around my ribs because the room is freezing and my arm is still doing that low-grade molten ache thing that reminds me I almost died last week.
“Okay,” he murmurs. “I’m in. You’re going to want to sit down for this.”
“I already don’t like that tone,” I say, pulling a rolling chair over and dropping into it with a soft wince.
