The rebel base had never felt so fragile.For hours after the breach, the tunnels vibrated with the aftershocks of drone explosions, collapsing stone, and the echo of shouted commands bouncing off steel. Smoke clung to the air like a suffocating blanket, thick enough that Lyra had to tear part of her sleeve and tie it around Adrian’s mouth to help him breathe.Even now, long after the last intruding drone had been incinerated, the underground corridors pulsed with fear.Not fear of the government.Fear of each other.Mira marched at the front of their group, jaw tight, blood dried along her temple from the earlier blast. Behind her, Rourke hauled a portable shield generator on one shoulder as if it weighed nothing. Kapoor was limping slightly — a shrapnel graze — but he ignored it, too absorbed in decrypting the corrupted surveillance logs.Sari kept glancing over her shoulder, hand on her blade, every muscle primed to strike again if anything so much as blinked wrong.And then there

The rebel base was no longer quiet.It wasn’t alarms this time. It was worse.Whispers.They moved through the corridors like smoke—uncertain, poisonous, impossible to trace. Personnel avoided eye contact. Guards doubled their patrols without explanation. Doors that used to open automatically now required secondary clearance. Trust, once fragile but present, had fractured into jagged pieces.Mira felt it the moment she stepped out of the command wing.This base was turning on itself.She stopped short at the junction overlooking the lower operations floor. Below her, engineers argued in tight clusters. Medics whispered over open tablets. Someone had painted a crude symbol on the far wall overnight—an old government insignia, crossed through with a jagged slash.A warning.Or a challenge.Mira’s jaw tightened.“Status?” she asked quietly.Kapoor fell into step beside her, eyes darting. “Data breach confirmed. Internal transmission routed through three masked relays. Clean. Too clean.”

The rebel base was no longer quiet.It wasn’t the sound of alarms—not yet—but something worse. The low, restless hum of people who knew something was wrong and were waiting for it to break.Mira felt it the moment she stepped into the command tier. Conversations stopped mid-sentence. Heads turned. Eyes followed her—calculating, suspicious, afraid.The fracture had begun.Kapoor was already at the central console, fingers moving faster than Mira had ever seen them. Data streams flooded the holo-wall behind him, each line a potential death sentence if interpreted wrong.“They’re testing us,” Kapoor said without looking up. “Probing comms, scraping external chatter, simulating infiltration patterns.”“Government?” Mira asked.“Not directly,” Kapoor replied. “That’s what makes it worse.”Sari leaned against the bulkhead, arms folded, blade sheath visible at her back. “Proxy forces.”“Or internal leaks,” Rourke muttered.No one argued.Mira’s gaze drifted toward the observation wing—toward

The lights went out in sections.Not all at once—never all at once. That was how panic spread. Instead, the rebel base dimmed in deliberate slices, corridors plunging into shadow like a mouth closing its teeth. Emergency strips flickered on, red and narrow, painting everyone’s faces with the same harsh color.Mira felt it before the alarms caught up.“This is internal,” she said, already moving. “No external breach hits power this clean.”Kapoor was beside her, fingers flying over his tablet. “I’m seeing command overrides—someone’s ghosting the system from inside the spine.”“Say the name,” Rourke muttered.Kapoor didn’t look up. “I don’t have to.”They all knew.Across the base, a blast door slammed shut with a boom that reverberated through the stone. Somewhere to the east wing, someone screamed. Then the alarms finally wailed—late, angry, useless.Mira keyed her comm. “Sari. Status.”Static. Then Sari’s voice cut through, breathless but controlled. “Weapons locker compromised. Two

The rebel base was too quiet, not the calm-after-the-storm quiet—this was the kind that pressed against the ears, thick and deliberate, as if the stone walls themselves were listening. Emergency lights had been shut down. Corridors that were usually alive with voices and movement now stood empty, bathed in low amber glow.Mira moved through it like a shadow.Her boots barely made a sound as she passed sealed doors and dormant consoles. The breach had been contained, yes—but containment didn’t mean resolution. It meant someone had buried the problem deep enough that it could fester.And Mira knew exactly where the rot had started.She stopped outside the interrogation wing.Inside, behind reinforced glass, Kessler sat alone.His hands were folded neatly on the metal table. His posture was perfect. Too perfect. No fear. No agitation. Just patience.That, more than anything else, made Mira’s jaw tighten.She stepped inside.The door sealed behind her with a hiss.Kessler looked up and sm