I pull up a new holo window and start building the trap—false metadata, controlled leak timing, a breadcrumb trail through public networks that looks accidental but isn’t.
My fingers move fast. My heart moves faster.
Because somewhere on Gur, Nine “trade reps” are asking for me by name.
And somewhere behind them, someone Council-tier is watching the alarm we just triggered—deciding whether to crush us quietly or take the bait.
I look up at Lonari.
“Containment plan?” I ask.
Lonari’s eyes are hard, steady. “I’ll build a box so tight they’ll think the universe shrank.”
I swallow, then nod once.
“Cool,” I whisper. “Let’s make them move.”
CHAPTER 32
LONARI
Gur’s old mining tunnels smell like wet stone, machine oil, and history that never got forgiven.
The air down here is colder than it should be, the kind of cold that crawls under your scales and sits there, smug. Condensation beads on the ribs of rusted support arches. Water drips somewhere in the dark with a steady, maddening patience—plink… plink… plink—like the planet is counting down to something.
Which, honestly, it is.
I stand in the mouth of Tunnel Seventeen with a hood up and my hands tucked in the pockets of a maintenance coat that isn’t mine. It’s stained with old grease and smells like somebody else’s sweat. Perfect camouflage. In this city, if you don’t look like you belong, you’re either rich or dead.
Tonight, I’m neither.
“Convoy is rolling,” Rook murmurs in my ear. His voice is a whisper threaded through Ghostline, clean and private. “Decoy One is on schedule. Spoofed cameras are live.”
“Good,” I reply.
Above us, the surface world glitters—casino lights, market neon, the false heartbeat of commerce. Down here, it’s all bones.Gur’s industrial underbelly. The tunnels that fed the city long before it learned to pretend it was civilized.
This is where you move things you don’t want seen.
Like a woman the Nine is hunting.
Or, in our case, theideaof her.
Jordan’s bait packet went out two hours ago—just enough time to travel through public channels, get “accidentally” mirrored in the right dirty corners, and land on screens belonging to people who think secrets are currency.
The packet is a beautiful lie: a metadata trail that screamsHigh Lantern evidence hereand a transport schedule that says Jordan is being moved through these tunnels under Kaijen protection.
It is, in the strictest sense, fiction.
Jordan is not in the convoy.
Jordan is safe in the Nun, surrounded by more steel than a warship hull, and she is absolutely furious about it.
I can still hear her voice from earlier, sharp as broken glass:
“You are not putting me in a bunker.”
I’d leaned close enough that she could smell the truth on me and said, “I’m not putting you anywhere. I’m keeping you alive.”
