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CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN: WHAT SURVIVES THE FIRE
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
CHAPTER SEVENTY SIX: THE PLACE WHERE SIGNALS DIE
The tunnel ended without warning.Not a door. Not a collapse. Just absence.Adrian barely caught himself before stepping into open air. He dropped to one knee at the lip of the chamber, pulse steady despite the chaos still ringing in his ears. The blind spot Irena had given him hummed faintly against his palm, warm like something alive.Below him stretched a cavern carved out of bedrock and forgotten infrastructure, wide enough to swallow a city block. Old antenna towers rose from the floor like skeletal fingers. Fiber optic lines drooped in tangled arcs, their cores dark. No active lights. No screens. No noise except the slow drip of water echoing through the void.A dead zone.The kind Cipher pretended did not exist.Adrian exhaled slowly and dropped down.His boots hit gravel and rusted metal. The air was cold and dry, stripped of the electric pressure he had grown used to. For the first time in days, the constant sense of being observed dulled. Not gone. Just muted.This place was
CHAPTER SEVENTY FIVE: THE LIE THAT BLEEDS
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
CHAPTER SEVENTY FOUR: THE COST OF CHOOSING WRONG
The tunnel shook.Not from collapse but from recalculation.Cipher did not waste anger. It wasted nothing. When Irena Kovac sealed the fork and declared engagement, the system did not rage or panic. It adjusted trajectories, rerouted drones, reassigned probability trees.Adrian felt it in the air as he ran.The blind spot device pulsed once against his palm, warm, almost alive. Twelve minutes. That was all Irena had bought him. Twelve minutes of absence in a world that refused to let him vanish.The tunnel sloped downward, curving left, then right, then opening into a maintenance vault layered with rusted machinery and hanging cables. Adrian slowed, breath controlled, boots silent against damp metal. He pressed himself into the shadows and listened.Above him, muffled through concrete and steel, gunfire echoed.Short bursts. Controlled. Cipher doctrine.Then something worse.Silence.Not the kind that followed victory. The kind that followed containment.Adrian closed his eyes for hal
CHAPTER SEVENTY THREE: THE TWELVE MINUTES THAT BURN
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
CHAPTER SEVENTY TWO: THE BLIND SPOT AFTER THE KISS
The tunnel swallowed Adrian whole.Metal groaned shut behind him as the emergency seal slammed into place, drowning out the gunfire and Irena’s voice mid-command. The sound cut clean, like a wire snapped under tension. For a heartbeat he stood there, hand still half-raised where her back had been, breath uneven, the taste of smoke and rain lingering in his mouth.Twelve minutes.That was all she had given him.Adrian forced himself to move.The service tunnel sloped downward, damp and narrow, cables snaking along the walls like exposed nerves. Emergency lights flickered at irregular intervals, painting the concrete in bruised reds and dying ambers. He ran, boots splashing through shallow water, mind splitting into compartments the way it always did under pressure.One part counted time.One part mapped exits.One part replayed her kiss with dangerous clarity.Calculated, she had said.Misdirection.A lie meant to protect them both.And yet his pulse refused to steady.He reached the f
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