Chapter 53
Lance
The first shock comes before the first checkpoint: a hum in the tunnel, low and dirty, crawling up the bones in my feet.
Static electricity crackles through the recycled air, making every strand of hair stand at attention.
The closer we get to Authority’s underbelly, the worse it gets.
Like the entire grid wants to spit us out, but can’t.
Markus leads, a silent bolt through the darkness, one arm always reaching ahead to probe the path for tripwires or surprise grating.
Rosie is at my back, shotgun loose in her grip, boots landing cat-quiet even on the grated floor.
I take middle, watching both ends, left hand on the pump handle of the gun, right hand…
always drifting to the ring finger, twisting at nothing.
We move fast, skipping the mapped corridors and taking maintenance shafts instead.
Every few meters the concrete walls change color—sometimes brown with mold, sometimes wet with condensation that shivers down in perfect little rivulets, catching what light there is and spraying it around like broken glass.
The air tastes of solder and something worse: an aftertaste of burnt ozone, not quite like the lab, but close enough to sting the back of my throat with memory.
There’s a trick the Authority engineers used when designing these tunnels—every corridor is just slightly off-axis from the next, never running straight for more than a hundred meters before bending, splitting, or doubling back.
It was supposed to fuck with pursuers, or with anyone dumb enough to try mapping the place from memory.
But Diana mapped it. Mapped it in her head, mapped it in mine, and now every step feels like retracing her footprints, a ghost march with my boots landing just out of sync with hers.
I catch the first hallucination at the stairwell to sublevel three. It’s her laughter, faint at first—a hiss in the power lines, an oscillation in the ballast of the flickering lamps. But as I get closer, the laugh resolves into her actual voice, syllables breaking like brittle sticks:
“Don’t get lost, Kang. If you get lost, I’m not coming to find you.”
I know it’s not real. I know it. But my chest tightens anyway, and my jaw clamps until I taste iron.
At the bottom of the stairs, Markus holds up a fist. We stop. There’s movement ahead—a scuff of rubber on steel, a wet cough echoing in the service duct. Rosie drops into a crouch behind me, chin tucked and gun ready. I flick my safety off, then back on, muscle memory faster than thought.
Markus gestures: one. Two fingers, then a sweep left. Rosie nods, shifts her angle. I count the steps as we move. Three, two, one—
The guard is Authority, but not regular.
Private contractor. I know by the boots and the haircut.
He’s half asleep at the junction, gun dangling from his sling, the light of his tablet painting his face blue-white in the dark.
He’s the first person I’ve seen in hours who looks less alive than the corridor itself.
We don’t kill him. Markus handles it—a quick loop of garrote, a sharp twist, a quiet shuffle to the floor.
Rosie checks the pockets for badges, creds, anything that might buy us a few seconds if things go loud.
I watch the body, waiting for it to get back up, half-expecting Diana to pop out from behind and say, “That’s not how you do a silent kill, Kang.
” But the body stays down. Diana stays gone.
We keep moving.
The next sector is worse. Authority must be running some kind of resonance scan; every ten meters, a grid of red light fans out, sweeps the tunnel, then blinks off.
Rosie and I have to time our movements to the sweep, moving only when the sensors reset, freezing in place when the lines are live.
Markus, godless bastard, just walks right through, confident the old tattoo magic is enough to scramble the signature.
During one hold, hunkered behind a busted drone charging station, I get another wave.
This time it’s her silhouette, projected on the far wall by a glitching ceiling light.
She’s walking away, hair up, lab coat billowing.
Not real, not possible, but I reach out anyway, hand shaking as it closes on empty air.
Rosie nudges me. “You seeing things, Captain?”
I blink, shake my head. “Nothing useful.”
She grins, but there’s pity in it. “You’ll catch up to her. You always do.”
I don’t answer. I just rub my ring finger harder.
At the next breach, a flood of heat hits us—vented from the main generator, cycling on emergency now that the complex is half-crippled by the last raid.
The air is so thick with humidity I feel it collect on my eyelashes, running down my nose in stings of saline and sweat.
Rosie’s shirt goes transparent in patches, but she ignores it, her mind running miles ahead.
Markus peels his glove off to better grip the service ladder, and I see the network of scars and home-inked tattoos spiraling up his palm.
Even the Authority couldn’t scrape those off.
At sublevel five, we break through into the admin ring—a circular corridor lined with blast doors and recessed security nodes.
The walls here are pristine, untouched by mold or soot, white as the day they were poured.
The lighting is different too: a cold, blue-white that eats shadows and makes everyone look like ghosts.
This is where I really lose it. The hum is gone, replaced by a dead silence so absolute I hear my own pulse, echoing back and forth like it’s trying to get away from me.
I remember Diana’s description of this place, how she said the blue light made her feel like a cell sample, how she used to whistle tunelessly so she wouldn’t dissolve in the quiet.
I want to whistle now, but my throat won’t work.
Markus stops, raises a hand: two o’clock, thirty meters, movement behind the observation glass.
I see the shimmer, too—a figure, Authority blue, pacing the length of the security booth.
I signal Rosie: left flank, soft entry. We take it slow, using the blind spots between the lights, moving in parallel until we’re ten meters out.
The glass is bulletproof, but the seal at the bottom isn’t perfect.
Rosie wedges a folded wedge of plastic explosive against the edge, Markus wires it with a coil of filament.
The countdown is five seconds, no time to second-guess.
I count down with my fingers, slow and steady, and at zero Markus hits the trigger.
The blast is quiet, more a pop than a boom. The guard inside doesn’t even get a chance to react before Markus is through, knife up, hand over mouth. It’s a clean kill, textbook. Rosie drops in after, scooping up the guard’s badge and dragging the body out of sight.
I follow, but stop at the threshold. Because for one split second, when the glass went, I saw her face reflected in it. Not the guarded—Diana. Clear as day, standing over my shoulder, eyes wide, mouth moving in silent warning.
I almost drop the gun.
Markus doesn’t notice. Rosie does. She puts a hand on my shoulder, squeezes.
“You okay, Kang?” she whispers.
“Fine,” I say. “Just—”
I don’t finish. There’s no word for this.
We press on. The last stretch is the hardest—a choke point where the Authority expected resistance. The corridor narrows, bottlenecking into a single blast door, flanked by two machine gun nests, both manned and live.
We pull back, regroup. Rosie checks her shells, fingers moving so fast I barely see the motion. Markus swaps out the knife for a compact SMG, checks the mag, then points at me.
“Call it,” he says.
I count the guards. Four, maybe five. One in the left nest, two in the right, another two at the door. They’re Authority, but tired. Hungry for a break. They’re talking, heads close, weapons down.
I run the plan in my head, but nothing fits. Not unless we go loud, not unless we’re ready to kill everyone in the room.
Diana would have a plan. Diana always had a plan.
I close my eyes, breathe, and see the map of the tunnels. The way she would see it. The ducts above, the fire suppression lines, the bundle of cables running parallel to the floor.
I signal Markus: cover left. Rosie: take the high ground. I go low, crawling under the exposed conduit, praying the guards are too bored to notice a shadow sliding across the dirty tile.
At the ten meter mark, I pause. The air is thicker than ever, charged with something I can’t name. The guards are louder now, voices echoing off the walls. They’re telling jokes, Authority jokes, the kind that only make sense if you were bred for war and never learned to laugh.
I listen, and in the background, under the noise, I hear her again. Diana, laughing.
This time it isn’t a hallucination. It’s the real thing, piped in through the PA, a snippet of her voice from some long-forgotten audio log. Someone in the control booth must have triggered it by accident.
The guards freeze. One of them stands, head cocked, listening.
That’s when we move.
Markus pops the left guard, two shots. Rosie takes the high with a flashbang, then sweeps the second nest with scattershot. I’m on the ground, sliding behind the main desk, and I put two rounds into the nearest boot I see. The guard goes down hard, gun clattering.
I stay low, crawling forward, gun at the ready. Markus finishes the last one, drag-and-drop into the corner. Rosie checks the blast door: sealed, but with a manual override.
I’m breathing hard. My face is wet, but I don’t know if it’s sweat or blood.
“Nice job,” Rosie says, flicking the safety on her shotgun. “You hear that laugh, too?”
I nod.
She grins. “She’s still ahead of us.”
I look at the door, at the override panel.
“Not for long,” I say.
Markus strips the guards for ammo, Rosie reloads, and I press my palm to the panel. The lock disengages with a shudder, the door sliding back on ancient tracks.