The broadcast didn’t stop when they did.It followed them like a shadow, replayed on cracked screens in outposts and city apartments, piped through public terminals and hijacked into private feeds. Director Hale’s voice became the night’s refrain—measured, calm, devastatingly persuasive.By the time Mira led them into the abandoned aqueduct hub before dawn, Adrian Cross was no longer just a name.He was a warning.The hub had once regulated water flow for half the region. Now it was a hollowed cathedral of concrete arches and rusted gates, half-flooded and forgotten. Rebel scouts had cleared it weeks earlier, installing minimal power and scrambling signals enough to buy them hours—maybe days.Not enough.Never enough anymore.Mira dropped her pack and turned immediately to strategy, pulling up layered maps. “They’ll tighten checkpoints within six hours. Drones will switch from patrol grids to predictive modeling.”Sari wiped snowmelt from her hair. “Meaning they won’t look for where w

Adrian felt the city before he saw it.The tunnel opened gradually, its reinforced concrete ribs giving way to fractured stone and rusted supports that hummed faintly under his skin. Not sound—something deeper. A pressure. A layered vibration that crawled along his nerves and settled behind his eyes.He stopped walking.The others took two more steps before they realized he wasn’t with them.Lyra turned first. “Adrian?”He lifted a hand—not asking for silence, but space. His breath came slow, deliberate. Every inhale dragged information with it: heat signatures bleeding through walls, power lines spidering beneath the streets above, dormant surveillance nodes half-awake and waiting for a command that hadn’t yet come.“They’ve changed the grid,” he said.Mira frowned. “Changed how?”Adrian swallowed. The sensation was hard to explain without sounding unhinged. “It’s not layered for control anymore. It’s layered for collapse.”Kapoor’s fingers paused over his tablet. “That doesn’t make

The city didn’t thank them.There were no alerts, no public statements, no emergency broadcasts retracting a threat no one had known existed. Morning came the way it always did—light leaking between buildings, transit lines humming back to full density, people stepping into routines uninterrupted.That was the problem.Adrian woke to the absence of noise.Not silence—never silence—but the subtle wrongness of systems running too smoothly. He sat up on the bunk, muscles stiff, head heavy, and let his awareness drift outward despite himself. Power loads were even. Traffic algorithms flowed without correction. Data moved in clean, efficient arcs.No turbulence.They were watching.He swung his legs over the side of the bed just as Lyra pushed the door open, already dressed, already alert.“You felt it too,” she said.He nodded. “They’ve gone quiet.”“That’s not retreat,” she replied. “That’s recalibration.”In the command room, the mood had shifted from adrenaline to unease. Kapoor stood

The first failure was small enough to ignore.Adrian almost did.It registered as a minor desynchronization in District Twelve’s sanitation grid—an automated scheduling loop that failed to resolve after a routine sensor conflict. Normally, the system would reroute crews within seconds. This time, it hesitated. Not long enough to trigger alarms. Not long enough to justify intervention.Just long enough to matter.Adrian felt it as a faint pressure behind his eyes, like a word on the tip of his tongue that refused to form. He stood near the edge of the command room, arms folded, deliberately keeping distance from the consoles. He’d learned—painfully—that proximity itself could become an invitation.Kapoor was the first to speak. “Sanitation delay in Twelve. Low priority. But the loop isn’t self-correcting.”Mira glanced up from her tablet. “How low?”“Technically acceptable,” Kapoor replied. “Functionally inefficient.”Adrian exhaled slowly.There it was again—that phrase. Technically a

Adrian dreamed of hands that never touched him.They hovered just short of contact—close enough to feel the heat, the intent, the expectation. When he moved, they moved with him. When he stopped, they waited.He woke before they closed the distance.For a moment, he didn’t know where he was. The ceiling above him was unfamiliar—too smooth, too intact. No cracks. No stains. The hum beneath the walls was softer here, tuned for habitation rather than emergency use.A relocation, then.He sat up slowly, letting awareness return in layers. The safehouse had been abandoned overnight—not in panic, but with purpose. Mira had insisted after the channel closed with the system. Too many eyes. Too much inference.Adrian rubbed his face and swung his legs over the side of the bed.The pull was there.Not strong. Not urgent.Persistent.It wasn’t coming from the system in the way it once had. There was no directional vector, no lattice of access points lighting up in his mind. Instead, it felt like