Page 34 of Fractured Loyalties (Tainted Souls #2)

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.

The moment my shadow crosses the threshold, the blinking stops.

A screen pings to life on the wall behind me.

Black background. White text.

WELCOME BACK, EIDOLON.

I don’t breathe. Don’t speak. Just stare.

Another line appears.

AUTOMATED LOG ENTRY PULSE INITIATED.

Then a countdown.

00:09.

00:08.

Fuck.

I spin and dive back toward the threshold, cutting left into a second tunnel I mapped in the aerial—one Vale doesn’t know I’ve used before. My body slams into the wall just as the pulse hits.

Not a bomb. Not EMP.

A data burst.

Targeted.

It spikes through every known echo of my comms signature. Not just physical devices—bio-echoes, pattern- matched resonance frequencies. Vale is tracking my neural imprint off historical data.

It’s an attempt to tag me.

I stagger to my feet. Shoulder aching. Jaw clenched. This isn’t an assassination attempt. It’s a marker.

He wants me alive.

Because whatever this is—it’s not a trap to kill.

It’s a fucking leash.

I grip my weapon tighter and move deeper into the dark, pulse flaring in my ears. There’s no voice. No trigger. Just silence.

But that silence is shaped like his name.

And it’s starting to laugh.

The tunnel veers right, then curves downward at a slope so shallow it pretends to be natural. It’s not. It was calculated—measured to guide the body without alerting the mind. Behavior-mapped architecture.

Vale’s not just using my past. He’s refining it.

The static eases the deeper I go, replaced by something worse. Emptiness. Like whatever’s waiting ahead doesn’t breathe.

My comm clicks once.

Mara’s voice cuts in, low but steady. “You have movement. West rail. Four figures. Spread tight. They’re not searching. They’re sweeping.”

“Pattern?”

“No flanking. No cover. They’re not worried about being seen.”

Because they’re not supposed to hide. They’re supposed to be noticed.

I whisper into the bead, “Second position. Now.”

“Copy.”

The comm clicks again. Gone.

My gut twists. Not from fear. From recognition. This isn’t just a funnel—it’s a psych map. Vale’s trying to predict my responses. Herd me into a single inevitable choice. A dead end I won’t see until I’ve already bled into it.

I spot it two minutes later.

A north egress tunnel—metal-gated, camo-netted, staged like an easy out.

I don’t touch it. I just pivot slightly, enough to keep it in my periphery, and count to five.

The explosion detonates inside the tunnel itself, a directional blast from a vent hidden in the support frame. Not enough to bring the place down—just a staged collapse that kicks debris outward and shreds the illusion of escape.

A bluff dressed like sabotage.

“Nice try,” I mutter.

Dust curls down from the ceiling like breath from a dying thing.

Vale’s message is clear: every path I think I carve for myself, he already mapped the exit wounds.

Except he forgot one thing.

I don’t run forward blindly anymore. I map beneath the map.

I track left along the inner wall, fingers grazing the ridged steel, past the settling dust and into a gap—a hidden seam in the layout, missed on first glance. A maintenance hatch disguised as overflow drainage. I drop into it fast.

The tunnel twists. Narrows. Then opens.

Not into another hall.

Into a room.

High ceiling. Arched. Reinforced beams sloped like a cathedral spine. The hum of an old generator behind a grated mesh wall. Light flickers. Faint. Artificial. Blue-tinged and ugly.

And there—waiting in the center—a single drone hovers. Watching.

I freeze.

A single shape waits ahead. Not hidden.

Drone.

Hovering ten feet off the floor. Silent. Black shell. Streamlined. New gen.

It doesn’t engage.

Just rotates once.

Watches.

A screen beside it pings alive. Static. Then an image.

My face.

Then Mara’s.

The display begins to flicker through frames—surveillance images. Some new. Some from months ago. Some impossible.

He’s showing me how deep he’s dug.

How long he’s been watching.

How close he is.

I step forward, gun half-raised.

The drone clicks. Doesn’t fire. Just backs away.

Like it’s inviting me deeper.

I take the bait.

Because now I know the truth.

This isn’t his trap.

It’s mine.

And he just walked into it without realizing what I’ve become.

The hallway beyond the drone is narrower.

Older. Stone set behind steel. There’s a weight to the air now—thicker, wet at the edges like breath in a sealed room.

I slow my pace. Let the quiet stretch. Let my heartbeat flatten out until I can hear the hum behind the walls. Not electricity. Not pressure.

Voice.

Faint. Piped through an old comm grid stitched into the infrastructure. No source. Just a whisper that threads through the static.

"You always did overcorrect, Elias."

It’s his voice.

Vale.

Not recorded.

Live.

The hum sharpens. Lights flicker once above me. Then stabilize. The hall opens into a chamber flanked by glass panels fogged from age or intent.

Monitors line the left wall—each one blinking through camera feeds. Not just me. Not just the tunnel.

Mara. Sleeping. Sitting. Turning toward sound. All from different days. Different angles.

He’s been inside my network.

Not just watching.

Recording.

My spine locks as the voice filters in again.

"She was always going to be the crack in you. I just had to wait for you to stop noticing the leak."

My grip tightens on the gun.

The wall screen shifts again. Not surveillance now.

Blueprints. From one of my buried shells. Layers of data stacked in fractal recursion. Encoded keys. Dead routes. Some of them cross-referencing with the same patient aliases connected to my old covers—names now folded too close to Mara’s clinic records.

He’s forging a false trail, making it look like she helped me bury them. Building her into my past where she never was.

And he’s letting me know he has it all.

I raise my weapon and shoot the first screen. Sparks cascade. The voice doesn’t flinch.

“Touchy,” Vale says, his tone dry. “She calms you. Makes you soft. That’s why I’m going to enjoy watching you lose her.”

I step into the center of the room.

“Try it,” I growl.

Silence.

Then a low laugh.

And the ceiling lights cut out.

Pitch black.

But I don’t freeze.

Because I was born in the dark.

And he just gave me the advantage.

I holster my weapon. Slide a knife into my hand.

And wait.

Because this room isn’t haunted.

It’s wired.

And he’s still watching.

The dark folds around me like a second skin. I stay still.

No shift. Just patience.

I hear it—a click. Not mechanical. Human. A sharp inhale behind the wall to my left.

I move.

Fast. Silent.

My blade slides into my palm, angle reversed, grip bone-tight. I dart left, press my back to the cold wall, and wait.

Another breath. Closer this time.

He's here.

Vale doesn’t just watch. He wants me to hear him now. Feel him in the dark.

“Still good at hiding,” he says. Voice barely above a whisper. Close enough to hum through the wall.

I say nothing. Let silence do what bullets can’t.

“You ever wonder,” he continues, “why she stays so quiet when you leave? Why she never really asks where you’re going?”

I step toward the wall and press the hilt of my blade against a seam I feel under my fingertips.

“She doesn’t ask,” I murmur, “because she already knows.”

A pause.

Then metal groans.

The wall fractures inward.

And I see him.

Standing just inside a split alcove behind the glass wall, shadow-drenched. Pale. Not thin. But precise. Like he carved away every part of himself that didn’t serve a purpose.

“Elias,” he says, and it sounds like a memory that never belonged to either of us.

I step in.

He doesn’t move.

Only his eyes track me.

“You’re not going to shoot me,” he says.

“Why not?”

“Because you want answers.”

I tilt my head. “Then start talking.”

I don’t lower my blade. He doesn’t flinch.

Vale exhales like he’s been waiting years to speak. “It was never about her at first.”

I don’t respond. I want him to hear the silence between us like a second blade.

“She was a variable I didn’t calculate. But once I saw the way you looked at her….” He shrugs. “I understood what she was worth.”

“Careful,” I say, voice low.

“No threat,” he says, palms briefly up. “Just recognition. We all have our soft places. Yours happens to walk like a weapon and look like a wound you want to reopen every night.”

I take a step forward. He tracks it. His throat flexes, and the skin there twitches.

He’s afraid of me.

Good.

“You used her clinic to mirror aliases I burned,” I say. “You buried data in her path. You watched her sleep.”

He tilts his head. “You think I’m the only one watching?”

I stop.

That’s not a bluff.

“You have a leak,” he says. “It’s not me. It’s not even the girl. It’s the echo you left in the system.”

“What echo?”

“You.” He smiles, teeth faintly yellowed at the edges. “You’ve built yourself into too many networks. Too many feeds. Too many shells. Your name isn’t just flagged—it’s fucking replicated. Ghosts of you keep triggering alerts even when you sleep.”

He takes a step closer.

“So I followed them. Let the system tell me who you’d become. Then I found her.”

My fist clenches. My body wants to move before my mind does.

“I don’t care about your revenge,” I say. “You want to die in this room, keep talking.”

“But I don’t,” he says. “And you won’t kill me yet. Because you still think there’s a clean way out of this.”

“Isn’t there?”

He grins. “No. You got too attached. You gave her your name. Your prints. She’s carrying the weight of your ghosts, and she doesn’t even know half their names.”

I shake my head slowly. “You think she’s fragile?”

“I think she’s lethal,” he says. “That’s why I waited. Because if I went for her first, you’d never have followed the thread. But now?”

He steps back.

Now I see it. The glint of a trigger remote half-concealed in his jacket’s inner lining.

“I rigged this whole nest,” he says. “You walk out clean, she doesn’t. You take me down, the whole grid blows.”

My eyes narrow.

“You didn’t wire this,” I say.

“Didn’t I?”

“No. You don’t have the tech markers. The grid was designed by someone else. You just hijacked it.”

His mouth twitches.

I’ve struck a nerve.

“You found him,” I say. “Your brother.”

Silence.

I watch his face. The flicker. The hesitation.

“Jori’s alive,” I say—not as belief, but as bait.

He swallows.

And in that breath, I see it: not confirmation. Not denial.

Just guilt. Just grief.

He didn’t find him.

He found the hole he left.

And crawled inside it to become something else.

I flick the blade upward. Fast. Disarm movement. The remote clatters to the ground. I step in, slam him against the wall.

“You threaten her again,” I hiss, “I’ll erase you from every system that ever logged your name.”

His breath is ragged. “You think this is over?”

“No,” I say.

Then I hit him.

Once.

He drops like the lights cut.

And I leave him there.

Not because I’m done.

Because I’m not finished making him useful.

The wires behind me still whisper. But now they whisper my name.

Time to follow the thread back to her.

Because whatever Vale started, it ends with the next breath I take.

And it won’t be alone.

The corridor outside the nest’s kill-box is lit with red spill—old alarm lights pulsing dim against the concrete. The walls sweat like the place is breathing, like the system has lungs.

I dragged Vale’s slate from his pocket when I moved. He wasn’t bluffing. The room was rigged—just not to explode. It was staged to alert. To transmit. Someone else was supposed to hear that detonation.

I kill the beacon.

Three floors up, I pass rusted walkways and what look like fake sensors—cheap decoys meant to deter the lazy. At the end of the last corridor, I find it.

A door with no markings. No label. Just the faint static tick of a live feed behind it.

The room hums—not from power, but from pressure. A surveillance core. Cold air. White walls. One desk. Six monitors glowing like a pulse.

Every feed is on Mara.

Different angles. Clinic. Street. A grocery store I never took her to. All archived, time-stamped.

And one live.

The lighting is similar. But the tilt of the walls is off, the frame too narrow.

I glance at the overlay log. Lydia’s voice crackles over the secondary feed: “It’s the corridor two levels beneath the safehouse. You locked that door three days ago.”

My stomach hardens.

The stream is less than thirty seconds old.

Someone has been watching.

And it’s not Vale.

I trace the IP triangulation on the system. The signal’s bouncing, masked under a sublevel comm route. But the signature is Lydia’s.

No—wait.

Not Lydia.

Someone using her channel clearance.

My pulse hits vertical.

Whoever built this doesn’t just want to hurt her.

They want to rewrite the whole fucking narrative.

I burn every trace. Wipe the system, then rig it to collapse the grid under a code string only Lydia and I know.

Then I run.

Because whatever’s watching her from inside my system?

It was built from someone I trusted.

And I don’t trust them anymore.