The entrance to Neo's territory was less a gate and more a wound, a jagged gash in the earth where the city's eastern suburbs had collapsed into a labyrinth of old mine shafts and repurposed industrial tunnels. The air smelled of rust, damp stone, and something acrid, like burnt coolant.
Orin waited for them in the shadow of a broken excavator. He was a lean, wiry man in his late thirties, with sunken cheeks and eyes that moved too quickly, scanning for threats even when there were none. Vex had described him as "my best burrower"—a former miner who'd survived the virus by learning the bones of the earth better than the monsters did. Orin wore a patched leather coat over a scavenged chest rig, and his left hand was a crude prosthetic of interlocking metal plates, salvaged from scrap. He didn't smile when Julian approached. He just nodded, once.
"You're the Ghost," Orin said.
Julian didn't bother confirming or denying. "You know the way in."
