Chapter 274"The dead zones don't talk," Miller snarled, his voice dropping an octave into a cold, lethal register that cut straight through the whistling wind outside. "Nothing down there is alive except rust and old bones. Reroute the local grid scan. If it's a ghost signal from an old terminal interface, dump a forty-amp surge straight down the line and fry the circuit board." Inside the freezing drainage pipe, Noah’s breath hitched. A sudden, violent tremor shot through his arm, his fingers tightening so hard around Elias's wrist that the bone ached. "They're going to dump the line," Noah whispered, his voice shaking with a terrifying clarity that threatened to pierce the thin metal barrier separating them from the patrol. "If that forty-amp surge hits the junction box three meters below us, it won't just fry the circuit board. It'll backfeed straight into my neural-link and blow my skull wide open." Eli

Chapter 276The ozone burn tasted like copper on the back of Elias’s tongue, sharp and vile, cutting straight through the frozen lungfuls of ash-laden air he dragged in as he hauled Noah deeper into the gloom of the pipe. Behind them, the shriek of the forty-amp Coalition surge died down with a sickly, dying whine, leaving behind the heavy, dead thrum of superheated metal cooling in the frost. "They're going to try it again," Noah gasped, his voice trembling as he stumbled over a rivet in the drainage floor, his fingers clawing uselessly at his left shoulder where the stray spark had charred clean through his jacket to the skin beneath. "The surge... it didn't just hit the junction. It pinged the whole local circuit. They know we're in this sector, Elias." "They know something is down here," Elias corrected, shoving Noah forward before dropping to one knee to wedge a heavy iron scrap bar—salvaged from the Rust-Eater camp t

Chapter 278"Do it fast," Elias warned, his tactical knife already out, the edge catching the pale, sickly luminescence of the frost-choked drainage walls. "Because Miller's men aren't going to wait for you to find the right radio station. If we stay in this frozen tube another two minutes, we're going to freeze to the plates or turn into target practice." Noah didn't answer. His eyes rolled back just enough to show the milky blue ring of his iris, a physiological tell Elias had learned to dread over the past six hundred miles of ash and ruin. The boy's whole body went rigid, leaning against the cold lead-lined wall of the pipe as a low, tooth-rattling vibration hummed through the air. It wasn't a sound you heard with your ears; it was a frequency that rattled the fillings in your teeth and made the hair on your arms stand up in frozen salute. Outside, the muffled thud of heavy military boots rang against the grated iron platform.