Page 138 of Fractured Loyalties

But I won’t freeze.

Because the version of me that ran is already dead.

He moves down the slope, body low, steps light. I stay on the ridge for a breath, rifle prone, tracing his outline through the scope until he disappears into the undercarriage of a freight platform.

A rustle behind me.

Lydia, silent as a shadow, joins me at the edge. She doesn’t look at me—just holds out a small palm-sized tablet, its screen already scanning for live feeds.

“No chatter yet,” she says, her voice low. “But I’m setting up a trace buffer just in case Vale ghosts the signal again.”

“Where do you need me?” I ask.

She tilts her head toward a narrow service stair cut into the ridge’s far slope. “Comms hub. Vaulted corridor, two levels down. You’ll have clean feeds. You’ll see him.”

I nod once and sling the rifle back over my shoulder.

She falls in step behind me.

We move quickly—quiet and sharp through brush and shale—into the access path that takes us into the substructure of the yard. The stairs wind downward, tighter and colder the deeper we go. By the time we reach the threshold, the hum of surveillance feeds is already in the air, electric and wrong.

We don’t speak again.

Because whatever’s about to happen next doesn’t need words.

Just witness.

Chapter 24 – Elias - The Trapdoor Beneath the Map

The metal under my boots doesn’t echo—it absorbs. Soundless. Intentional.

The entire yard is a stillborn graveyard of freight and rust, but beneath it, I can feel the vibration of something alive. Something new pretending to be old. Vale wants me to think I’m walking into a trap he designed overnight.

He didn’t. This was built months ago.

The rails don’t align the way they used to. The switches have been welded down in ways that reroute movement without alerting system pings. I recognize the structure—not because I’ve seen it before, but because it mirrors a design language I once drafted. He’s mimicking my past.

I crouch near an old switching tower and jack a relay worm into the floor duct. The diagnostic return is too clean. No noise. No buffer lag. No nested anomalies.

Which means it’s a decoy.

I pull the worm. It curls like a dead insect as I pocket it.

The entrance to the tunnel appears three car-lengths to the east. Half-buried. Partially collapsed. Staged. I lower myself in, one foot at a time, gun loose in my grip, every muscle tuned to recoil and listen.

The scent hits first. Not decay. Not blood.

Static.

A sharp, dry, coppery ghost of ozone. Not natural. Not weather.

Equipment.

There’s tech running here—deep-grid, low-frequency, masking as buried lines.

I feel it hum in my jaw before I even find the source. My back teeth vibrate slightly as I move closer to a junction box hanging from a rusted wall. Wires spill out like arteries. One blinks red.

I touch nothing. Just look.