No blood.
No scuffle.
Just an absence where she stood.
I move forward slowly, scanning the ground.
There—by the center monolith. A single bootprint, too small for any of the guards, pressed into the dust just hard enough to hold its shape.
She didn’t run.
She stood.
I crouch and press my hand against the edge of the print. The warmth hasn’t fully left it.
The static charge in the air prickles against my palm. There was a stun blast here, recent—still off-gassing from the polymer in the decking.
They moved fast.
Too fast.
Like they were waiting for her.
Which means someone sold her out.
I rise, jaw tight, and tap into the underlayer systems with my wristband.
The formal logs are scrubbed. Typical. But they’re never fast enough to clean the heat trails. Not if you know what to look for.
Thermal echoes. Pressure deltas. Environmental anomalies from corridor depressurization as they moved her offsite.
I route through the dampened diagnostic feedback Serat taught me how to crack—old-school stuff, pre-Obol. It pings like sonar across the deck grids.
She’s not in holding.
She’s in deep containment.
Sublevel H.
They’re scared of her.
They should be.
The corridor narrows as I descend, the air thick with recycled grit and the faint scent of solder—someone’s been down here recently, rerouting power, maybe prepping for lockdown. A haze clings to the edges of the light fixtures like old breath that never cleared.
The bulkheads close in around me. The sound of my steps dulls. The walls stop echoing. That’s how you know you’ve reached the real heart of a place—the parts not made for show. No windows. No access ports. Just steel and silence and a system that was never designed to let anyone out.
I follow the pulse of Mara’s presence like it’s tethered to my chest.
Each junction I pass has been magnet-sealed. No data trail. But the pressure sensors logged her weight, even if the grid tried to suppress it.
She walked this hall under her own power.
Head high.
Cuffs on.
Didn’t fight.
