Jago moved through the Sump’s lower levels with the quiet purpose of a predator. The argument between the Pinnacle girl and the hard-bitten Synchronist had been a signal, a fracture in the system he could exploit. He had slipped away from their self-pity and into the familiar, winding guts of the Ferrous Coil, a district where the city’s iron skeleton was perpetually sweating rust. He followed the hum of a high-energy conduit to a pre-arranged junction, a small platform overlooking a chasm of churning, automated machinery.
He did not have to wait long.
Twelve figures emerged from a service tunnel on the opposite side, their sterile white tactical gear a shocking intrusion against the grime. They moved with the silent, coordinated grace of a flock of birds, their helmeted faces devoid of humanity. They were instruments. Jago recognized their leader, a man whose posture was too perfect, his movements too precise. Corbin Vance.
Jago gave a slight nod. He had made his choice in the dark of the transit tunnel. Survival was the only ideology that never failed.
A chime, soft and discreet, sounded from the cracked datapad in his pocket. He pulled it out. A new entry appeared in his credit ledger: 50,000 credits. Below it, a single line of text from an encrypted Board of Consensus server confirmed his pardon. A clean slate. He felt the faintest tremor of something that might have been relief, but it was quickly suppressed. It was just a transaction.
— They’ll head for the lower conduits, — Jago said, his voice barely carrying over the industrial noise. — They always do.
Corbin Vance offered no reply. He simply raised a hand, and his agents fanned out, melting into the industrial tangle of gantries and pipes. The trap was sprung. Jago watched them go, then turned and vanished back into the shadows he called home.
The betrayal was a sudden shift in the air. Silja felt it first. The ambient chaos of the Sump, the random clatter and hiss, began to resolve into a pattern. Footsteps. Coordinated. From at least three directions.
— Ambush, — she hissed, grabbing Orina’s arm.
Rhys’s voice crackled over their comms, tight with alarm. — Multiple hostiles converging. Twelve of them. They’re herding us south.
The realization was a cold spike in Orina’s gut. Jago. He had sold them. The last flicker of her belief in the inherent goodness of people, a naive remnant of her Pinnacle programming, finally died. Here, there was only the transaction. Trust in anyone but the two people beside her was now a fatal liability.
— This way! — Silja pulled Orina toward a narrow gap between two colossal, groaning pistons.
The white-armored agents appeared on the catwalks above, their stun rifles leveled. They did not fire. They were containing, not killing.
— I can’t fit the frame through there, — Rhys reported, his voice strained. The massive form of his Husk-Frame was a liability in these tight quarters. — I’ll find another way. Go!
Silja and Orina scrambled into the gap. Behind them, Rhys’s machine became a bulwark. He slammed the Husk-Frame’s shoulder into a lattice of rusted support beams, sending a cascade of debris down into the alleyway they had just vacated. The path was blocked. It would not hold the agents for long.
They were in the heart of the Ferrous Coil now, a three-dimensional maze of incandescent heat and screaming metal. Pipes thick as an ancient tree trunk crisscrossed overhead, weeping scalding condensation. The air smelled of ozone and hot iron.
— They’re boxing us in, — Silja said, her eyes scanning every shadow. She could see agents moving on a parallel gantry 50 meters to their left. They were being funneled.
— Rhys, status? — Orina asked, her voice trembling but clear.
— They’re anticipating my blockades. They’re not trying to get through them, they’re just flowing around. It’s a net. — A pause, then, — I see it. Main steam conduit. On your level, 100 meters ahead.
Silja understood immediately. It was a desperate, destructive gambit.
— Do it, — she commanded.
Rhys’s Husk-Frame appeared at the end of a cross-corridor, a giant in a hall of giants. He raised the mecha’s arm, not to strike an enemy, but to target a massive, insulated pipe marked with faded hazard warnings. He drove the reinforced knuckles of its fist into a valve junction.
The shriek of tortured metal was instantaneous, followed by a deafening roar. The pipe ruptured. A cloud of high-pressure steam, thick and white and blinding, erupted into the corridor. Visibility dropped to zero. The heat was a physical blow, the sound a solid wall. The sudden change in pressure sent loose panels and debris flying.
The effort sent a shudder through the Husk-Frame’s chassis. Power levels on Rhys’s display dipped into the yellow.
— Go now! — he yelled over the comms.
Silja grabbed Orina’s hand, her grip like iron. — Don’t think. Just run.
They plunged into the scalding white fog. The world dissolved into heat and noise. Orina couldn’t see, couldn’t hear anything but the roar. She trusted the hand pulling her forward, a single point of certainty in the sensory chaos. They stumbled over unseen obstacles, their lungs burning with every breath.
They burst out of the steam cloud into another corridor, gasping, their faces slick with condensation. The roar was behind them, a temporary screen that had saved their lives. They had escaped the immediate trap.
High above, in his sterile command center, Corbin Vance watched their bio-signatures reappear on his holographic map. The steam cloud was a temporary data void, nothing more. His predictive models had already accounted for this possibility.
He had not lost them. He had simply confirmed their position.
— Asset location confirmed, — he stated to the open channel. His finger traced a circle on the map, encompassing the entire Ferrous Coil district. The circle glowed a hard, clinical red. — Net closure protocol initiated. Seal all transit points.
The team had escaped the snare, but the walls of the prison had just expanded. They were no longer being chased. They were being encircled.
The roar of the ruptured pipe faded behind them, replaced by the distant, ominous clang of magnetic locks engaging. The city itself was becoming the cage.
The steam dissipated into a thin, hot mist, clinging to the rusted iron of the gantries. The silence that followed was heavy with the promise of a new, more patient kind of threat.
