The woman appeared where no one should have been able to.Adrian noticed her only because the rain changed.Not the sound. The rhythm.One moment it struck the broken overpass in a steady metallic hiss. The next, it hesitated, splintered, as if the air itself had flinched.He slowed without stopping, instincts sharpening. The safe corridor Mara had burned open for him narrowed ahead, concrete ribs arching overhead like a collapsed throat. City power was dead here. Only emergency glow strips pulsed faintly along the ground, red and unreliable.She stood beneath one of them.Black coat. No insignia. Hair pulled back tight enough to mean business. A compact rifle hung loose in her hands, muzzle angled down, finger nowhere near the trigger.Not sloppy.Deliberate.Adrian counted three breaths before she spoke.“You’re late,” she said.Her voice carried no accent he could place. Clean. Controlled. Too calm for a kill zone.“I didn’t know we had an appointment,” Adrian replied, not breaking

The tunnel swallowed Adrian whole.Dark, damp, narrow enough that his shoulders brushed concrete on both sides as he ran. The blind spot device Irena had given him pulsed once in his palm, a low vibration like a second heartbeat, then went still. Twelve minutes. That was all Cipher would give him. Twelve minutes of nonexistence.Behind him, the tunnel sealed with a concussive thud. Metal screaming as it fused. The sound of gunfire came next, muffled but unmistakable, sharp cracks echoing through stone like distant thunder.Irena.Adrian forced himself not to slow. Not to turn back. That was the rule. Survival first. Regret later.The service tunnel bent sharply left, then split again. Old transit maps flickered through his mind, overlaid with what Cipher had rewritten. He took the narrower passage, boots splashing through ankle deep water that stank of rust and oil. Emergency lights flickered weakly, then died altogether.It's totally dark.He kept moving by memory, by feel, by instin

The tunnel ended in fire.Not the chaotic kind. This was a disciplined flame, cutting arcs of white heat that carved through concrete with surgical intent. Adrian hit the ground as the first lance burned past where his head had been a second earlier. The air screamed. The walls glowed.Cipher had found the blind spot faster than predicted.He rolled, came up on one knee, fired twice into the light source. One shot missed. The second clipped a stabilizer. The lance flickered, guttered, then died in a hiss of steam.Silence followed. Brief. Watchful.Adrian didn’t breathe. He counted heartbeats. Three. Four. Five.Movement on his right. Not a drone. Too heavy. Boots.He slid backward into the shadow of a collapsed service pillar as a Cipher assault unit advanced into the tunnel. Three operators. Black composite armor. No markings. Faces hidden behind mirrored visors.They moved wrong.Too careful. Too slow.They expected him to be broken.Adrian waited until the lead operator stepped ov

The tunnel opened into heat.Not the sharp burn of active flames, but the heavy, suffocating warmth of something that had already passed through destruction and decided to linger. Adrian emerged low and fast, rolling once before coming up behind a fractured support column. The space beyond was vast, an abandoned transit interchange gutted by age and war, its ceiling lost in darkness, its floor webbed with old tracks and newer scorch marks.He listened.No immediate pursuit. That alone told him Cipher was doing something else. They never left him alone unless they were rearranging the board.The device Irena had given him hummed faintly against his palm, its surface warm, almost alive. Twelve minutes of death. He counted without thinking. Eight already gone.Adrian moved deeper, boots silent despite the debris. His body still carried the imprint of Irena’s choice. The weight of it sat differently than loss. Loss hollowed you out. This pressed inward, sharp and present.She had stayed b

The tunnel ended without warning.One step Adrian was moving through damp concrete and echoing silence. Next, the world opened into a vast subterranean chamber carved from bedrock and reinforced with steel ribs that curved overhead like the inside of a colossal spine. Emergency lights bled red along the walls. Old rail tracks vanished into darkness on either side. The air smelled of oil, ozone, and something older, something buried too long to name.Adrian slowed, pulse steady, senses sharp.This was not random infrastructure.This was a hub.Behind him, the sealed tunnel groaned once, metal cooling after violence. Somewhere above, Cipher was still reorganizing its hunt. He had minutes at most before the blind spot Irena gave him collapsed and his ghost reappeared on every screen that mattered.He moved forward.The chamber responded.Lights flickered awake in sequence, not harsh but deliberate, illuminating platforms, consoles, dormant vehicles sealed beneath tarps marked with faded