Chapter 5 Close Calls
Chapter five
Close Calls
Shadera Kael slid into the maintenance tunnels with her breath locked in her throat, the entry hatch sealing behind her with a cough of carbon and dust. The world above—its petty clamor—was snuffed in an instant, replaced by the bone-deep silence of concrete.
She pulled on her night vision, let her eyes adjust, and swallowed the dread that rose up in anyone who knew what the tunnels were built for.
Not just the movement of Veyra patrols, but the drainage of blood, sewage, life.
The city’s bowels were a place things went to die.
She moved in the dark as vermin scattered around her, boots sinking into a silt that was half mud, half industrial ash.
The beams overhead dripped a steady rain of black water, each droplet a cold needle along her collarbones.
She drew her silenced pistol with one hand, and kept the other wrapped tightly around the strap of her gear pack.
She counted the steps. Every fifty brought a new sensor in the tunnel wall, infrared eyes, milky behind spiderwebbed glass. She moved through the dead zones quickly, breathing through the balaclava covering her face.
It wasn’t the rats that bothered her, but the way they seemed to track her progress, eyes bright as carbide, never scurrying far. Like the city itself, they watched for weakness.
She passed underneath the first checkpoint between the Boundary and the Cardinal rings with no issues, and ahead of schedule, the glow from her wristwatch painting every drop of sweat a dull red.
Veyra patrol schedules were precise, and tonight the overlap was slim—just three hours, the foot traffic replaced by remote inspection drones too lazy to sweep for warm bodies.
This is where the trouble would come.
The section of tunnel running under the Cardinal was where the city’s micro-gangs camped. They knew if you made it this close to the Heart without dying, you had something worth stealing.
She heard them long before she saw them—a rattle of dice, a whisper of laughter that cut short as she neared.
She slowed her approach, pulling a blade from her thigh with her free hand, letting the darkness shroud her and counting their voices.
Two, maybe three. A hot chemical reek leaked from behind the bulkhead.
She waited for a lull in their bravado, then stepped into the alcove, pistol raised, knife hidden behind her back.
The nearest one—a Boundary man by the looks of his tattoos, all bones and buzzed scalp—lunged at her with a rusted shiv, screaming. She sidestepped, and buried her blade under his jaw. The body went limp, eyes bulging in the dark as she eased him to the floor without sound.
The second man bolted toward her, gun raised and ready to fire. But he was too slow, too high off Boundary spice. She fired once, the bullet final, catching him directly between the brows. The last of them—an older, wary man—just sat there, hands visible, shivering.
“Get out,” Shadera said, voice low. “If I see you down here again, I’ll cut you open and feed you to the rats myself.”
He vanished, leaving the stench of terror and piss behind him. She stepped over the bodies, collecting anything useful off them, then pressed on without a second thought.
This is why Shadera was feared throughout every corner of this city, even by those that did not know her name. Because when it came time to kill or be killed, she did not hesitate.
She wasn’t afraid to die, and if she was honest with herself, she probably welcomed the idea. That’s what made her lethal, what made her Jaeger Nolin’s greatest weapon.
Shadera took a right when the corridor split into two without looking up from her watch.
The tunnels were ingrained in her brain, every line and crosshatch burned in by repetition and study.
So far, it had only taken her sixty minutes.
She would pass into the Heart soon, and would need to find somewhere safe to hide until night, when she’d make the kill.
The tunnel sloped upward to the Heart’s center.
Here, the walls were lined with titanium shielding, the air colder and more antiseptic.
Even the rats had learned to keep their distance.
She found the utility alcove she’d marked weeks ago, pried open the panel, and pulled herself onto the ledge of the elevator shaft.
This was where most people died trying to sneak into the Heart. Either from the fall, or being crushed by the elevator itself if you couldn’t get out of the way. But Shadera was not most people. It was a vertical climb, handholds slick with what she hoped was only condensation.
Her fingers tightened the straps of her pack as she holstered her gun and began the climb to the top. She scaled quickly, her boots never slipping as she moved like a spider across a web.
She paused halfway up, listening.
Far above, the faint groan of industrial fans. Below, a sudden clatter—metal singing against metal. The ladder underneath her fingers began to vibrate and her breath stilled.
The sound grew louder—a mechanical whine that scraped against her bones. The elevator was coming, fast and merciless as a guillotine. Shadera’s pulse quickened, a heady rush as she climbed at a rapid pace, forcing her limbs to go faster.
Panic erupted in her chest. A rare spike of fear lancing through her stomach—not the controlled adrenaline of a kill, but the animal terror of being crushed like an insect.
The shock of it made her legs pump harder.
She gritted her teeth, forcing it down, forcing herself to remain steady.
The elevator sped toward her, a bullet in a barrel. Shadera cursed as she scrambled to get above it. It was so close now, she could feel the air compressing in her lungs, could smell the oil on its massive gears.
She hurled herself sideways into a tight space, barely squeezing inside the utility cavity as the car shot past her like a freight train, taking the guns strapped to her left thigh with it. The backdraft sucked at her legs, trying to drag her into the machinery’s hungry maw.
Shadera wedged herself deeper into the tiny space, ribs compressed until each breath was a struggle. Metal groaned around her, the building’s skeleton protesting the weight. The noise was deafening, a scream that died in an instant as the elevator stayed its course upward.
Shadera pressed herself against the cramped confines, heart a wild beast in her chest. She could feel every beat, rapid and alive, and a brief, feral grin spread across her lips as a sharp laugh shot from her throat.
So, this is what fear feels like.
When silence returned, she exhaled slowly and pulled herself back onto the shaft wall. Her hands shook—barely perceptible, but there. She clenched them into fists until the tremor stopped.
The climb resumed. Higher now, toward the Heart’s poisoned core where Greyson Serel should have been sleeping, unaware that death was scaling the walls to find him.
She reached the service hatch to the Heart’s underground garage and paused. She waited, pulse counting off the seconds. She’d memorized the guard rotations, the way the Heart’s enforcers walked their beats in lazy arcs. She listened for the telltale whir of a drone, the heavy tread of Veyra boots.
Silence.
She twisted the hatch and let it open a sliver. The light that bled through was blinding, bright and white. She pulled herself through, rolled flat onto her stomach, and pushed up from the concrete as her eyes adjusted.
The garage was a cathedral of order—rows of Veyra patrol vehicles, each lined up with the precision of military graves. Every surface gleamed, even the air seemed filtered and too still. She kept low, weaving between the glossy hulls, her own reflection distorted in the platinum trim of the cars.
She’d planned for this. Twenty-four steps from the shaft to the ground level vehicle exit, no less, no more. She took them in silence, feeling the cold seep into her bones with each measured advance.
Halfway across, she froze.
A sound—the sound of metal hitting concrete—echoed in the cavernous space.
She ducked behind the nearest vehicle, silenced pistol up and ready, blood pounding so hard she thought she could hear it leaking from her pores.
Someone was here. Someone not accounted for.
She waited. The silence dragged on, punctuated only by the distant thrum of the city’s heart above. Shadera forced herself to breathe slow, to let the adrenaline burn off into something clean, something focused.
She adjusted her grip on the gun, eyes fixed on the space between the vehicles as a shadow moved from an undercarriage.
Shadera inched forward, every instinct on a hair trigger. Whoever this was, they weren’t supposed to be here either, or they would have come out to ask for her credentials.
She moved closer, waiting for the next mistake, the next breath.
A bead of sweat slipped from her temple, trailed along the ridge of her cheekbone, and vanished into her collar. The smell of ozone and motor oil filled her nose.
Shadera retreated a half step, recalibrating her plan.
She had not come here to kill a janitor or a ghost. The target was above, behind a thousand tons of armored glass and self-importance. So, she let the shadow be, for now. She didn’t have time to pick a fight with someone who wasn’t an active threat.
With a final glance over her shoulder, she fell back against the wall and followed it up the ramp and out into the night, praying the Heart was still asleep.
Greyson lay flat on his back, spine pressed to the cold concrete beneath a Veyra patrol vehicle’s underbelly. Above, the garage’s floodlights bled through the suspension’s lattice, painting the world in razor lines and motionless shadows.
He ignored the filth, the puddles of old oil seeping through his uniform. Instead, he kept his focus on his work—tucking the black foil packets deep into the undercarriage. Each movement was a calculated betrayal—one slipup, and the Heart would devour him.