Tamar Street
Lanova - Mid Tiers, 19th Day of The Sun Year
12:30 PM
The steak was rare, as requested—lightly seared, cuttable with the side of a fork, juices pooling at the base of the porcelain plate. He moved slowly as he sliced, posture relaxed, wrist loose, like a man with nowhere to be. He chewed in silence, savoring the balance of heat and salt, the sharpness of wine vinegar against soft-roasted potatoes. Everything on the plate was measured, refined, like the rest of the restaurant. Music played low through discreet audio nodes hidden behind sculpted wall fixtures. Linen napkins folded into spirals. Even the cutlery shimmered with the faint gold hue that marked upper-mid-tier dining. It was the kind of place where people came to forget the lower floors existed.
He fit in well, at least today. The double-breasted suit wrapped clean over his frame, dark red so deep it bordered on black, catching subtle warmth when the terrace light shifted. The shirt beneath was pitch black, crisp, tucked flawlessly beneath a tie of oil-slick silk, threaded with gold and crimson at the knot and the tip—a handcrafted affectation designed to draw just enough attention, but never too much. His shoes, clean oil-black with a high-polish finish, mirrored the sky in faint, distorted reflections. He sat still, composed, deliberate in everything motion. To anyone glancing from across the terrace, he was another wealthy professional enjoying a midday reprieve from Tamar Street's chaos. No one would suspect that his face wasn't real.
The mesh overlay hid the details well: bone shadow subtly softened, iris hue adjusted a shade or two into something forgettable, even his posture and gait reprogrammed just slightly. The illusion was full-body and deep-code, a design of his own making—portable, non-invasive, untraceable. It had to be. Ever since Jasmine launched the internal investigation within Alata Corp's 8th Combat Division, he had known it was only a matter of time before someone reviewed the surveillance metadata from the attack. Maybe someone already had. His proximity to the site, the timing of his presence in the Plaza, even his ghost-signal surveillance pings, individually, nothing suspicious. Together, they were a trail. And while Jasmine hadn't named any suspects yet, it was only smart to assume she would. So, for now, he moved quietly under another name, in another face, behind another life..
He was halfway through the steak, eyes on the sprawling artery below. Tamar Street, midday. A chaos of astrocars, drone convoys, layered traffic signals that blinked in too many languages at once. Street-level crowds ebbed and flowed in shifting patterns: delivery bots darting past vendors, low-tier executives arguing through mirrored glass phones, an underdressed broker sprinting behind a self-driving cab. Everything moved in rhythm, and from here—on the third-tier terrace of Sable Line, a rooftop restaurant shielded by noise dampeners and retractable glass—he had a perfect view of it all. His attention passed over the angles of the nearby buildings, the reflection lines in the upper windows, the rusted scaffolding six stories down where a sniper might nest, if someone really wanted to cause a scene.
He cataloged each point absently. A habit more than a conscious act. Escape routes. Dead zones. The angle of the serving entrance in the back and the delay in security response time, nineteen seconds, based on the last test ping. The hostess had glanced too long at his tie but never made eye contact again. The server was ex-military, by posture. The man at the table near the railing had checked his watch three times in under ten minutes but hadn't ordered anything else. Unimportant, but noted.
It had been three days since the fight.
Three days since he sat above Spark Plaza, watching Jasmine collapse into violence like a blade snapping under pressure. Three days since she'd resisted unleashing her Ego—by instinct, maybe, or fear. Since then, she had vanished from the usual circuits. No open comms. No movement outside Alata territory. Rumor had it she had initiated a closed-unit investigation under the 8th Combat Division. Unsanctioned, but tolerated. For now.
He cut another sliver of steak, dragged it lightly through the smear of black pepper sauce, and lifted it to his mouth. Jasmine was a ghost with a pulse—bleeding, wounded, but walking. She should have been erased. That's what the five who came after her had been for. Not intimidation. Not message-sending. Erasure. And they had failed.
The price of his contract—18.2 Tinium—had begun to itch under his skin. No surveillance job paid that much. Not even close. That was the kind of number you used when you wanted to bury a name without leaving a hole. He hadn't realized it at first. The data packet had been clean, encrypted, and relayed through high-tier channels. Everything screamed "professional." But it was too smooth, too easy. It had felt surgical when it should've felt messy. Now, the smell of blood was finally starting to leak through the polish.
He rested his fork and took a sip from his glass, the red liquor sharp with fermented spice. His eyes drifted to the digital menu built into the black-glass tabletop. With a tap, the restaurant UI faded, replaced by his personal interface—disguised, filtered through layers of civilian operating code. The contract was still active.
CODE J-05
STATUS: ACTIVE
PATTERN: UNSTABLE
LAST CONFIRMED SIGHTING: +13:22 HOURS
PRIORITY: NO CHANGE
He studied the data for a moment, then closed it with another tap.
Since the bar, he'd been looking deeper. Cross-referencing attack signatures, obscure equipment sources, whispered names pulled from the Depths, and scrubbed from public feeds. Whoever sent those five wasn't part of any gang. Not corporate muscle either. They were something else. Something precise. Coordinated. The kind of quiet that made noise feel safer.
The attackers weren't hired muscle. That much was clear now. Their technique had been too fluid, their gear custom, their tactics precise. Not corporate, not gang-linked. Something rarer. Cleaner. And that meant someone with reach. Someone who could bury a trail beneath seven layers of redacted proxy networks and still leave just enough of a breadcrumb to lure a freelancer into place. The job had been pitched as a surveillance op—track movements, monitor behavior, tag for patterns. But surveillance didn't cost eighteen-point-two Tinium. That was blackout money. Clean slate money. The kind of payout reserved for jobs that required not only silence but absence.
You didn't pay that much to watch someone.
You paid it to know exactly when they stopped following orders.
He finished the last bite of steak, cleaned his mouth with the napkin, and folded it neatly beside the plate. Leaning back in his chair, he let his eyes drift again toward the street below. Tamar pulsed with life, cars weaving in perfect disorder, crowds in motion like a living circuit. The filtered wind brought with it the sharp scent of engine coolant, street vendor spice, and artificial cologne. Jasmine was still out there, somewhere. Bleeding. Digging. Drawing closer to something she couldn't see yet. And he couldn't help but follow the movement like a wire tightening around both of them.
He told himself it was professional interest. That it was just about the contract, the data inconsistencies, and the cost. But the truth pressed deeper. It was the way she fought. The way she refused to fall. The way she'd looked over her shoulder after the fight, like she knew someone had been watching. There were too many people in this city pretending they were gods. Jasmine wasn't pretending. She was surviving. Barely. And something inside him wanted to know why, why her, why now, why the game had changed.
The contract was still active. But the hunter no longer moved for pay alone. The puzzle had become personal. And he was already too deep to walk away.
----
General Headquarters Sector 231
Lanova - Mid Tiers, 19th Day of The Sun Year
12.30 PM
The surveillance feeds were silent, but her mind wouldn't stop running.
Jasmine sat in the dim light of her office, boots up on the desk, back pressed deep into the synthetic leather chair that hissed slightly each time she shifted her weight. Lines of data flickered across the tri-angled monitors in front of her: traffic scans, facial recognition sweeps, biometric echoes, heat trails from drone patrols. She'd pulled half of Lanova's mid-tier sensor network into her personal access just to rerun the past three days. Still, the feeds turned up nothing. Nothing real. Nothing solid. Just a hollow where a man should've been.
Her hand curled into a fist as she leaned forward and paused a drone feed mid-frame. A busy sidewalk, one layer below Spark Plaza. Dozens of faces, all tagged, moving in and out of range. And on the bench in the corner—him. Perfect posture. Composed. Like he wasn't hiding, because he didn't need to.
He'd been there at the end of it all. Three days ago, right after the fight, when she was half-dead and bleeding out behind the ruined bar. She remembered everything with painful clarity: the sting in her lungs, the cut across her side, the bone-deep ache in her shoulder—and that man, sitting under the sputtering streetlamp like he belonged there. He hadn't moved. Not when she stumbled out the side door. Not when she limped past him. Not even when their eyes locked for the briefest second. He just watched. Calm. Present. Almost curious.
She remembered the clothes, too. A dark blue turtleneck, impossibly smooth, the kind of fabric that didn't crease or fray, paired with sleek black trousers and a coat draped behind him like a tailored shadow. No weapons were visible. No insignia. Just presence. He didn't radiate danger like most operators. He radiated confidence—deep, quiet, suffocating. The kind of confidence you earn by never failing. The kind that said, If I wanted you dead, you wouldn't be here to wonder why I didn't.
She rubbed her temple, muscles tight. It made no sense. He hadn't attacked. Hadn't spoken. Hadn't interfered, even when he had the perfect opportunity. He just let her walk away. And that—more than anything else—was the reason she couldn't stop thinking about him. She'd reviewed the footage from Spark Plaza a dozen times. Scrubbed every audio channel, infrared pulse, and motion signature. The man wasn't in any public database. Not civilian. Not military. Not even blacklisted. Whoever he was, he didn't exist. And yet he sat there like the city belonged to him.
Outside her window, the lights of Lanova pulsed and shifted like veins in a living machine. Sector 231 buzzed with traffic and echo-trails from astrocars threading between towers. On the surface, it looked controlled—precise. But she'd lived here long enough to know the truth: the deeper you went into the tiers, the more the order rotted. Everything down there ran on secrets and blood, and lately, both had been flowing in the wrong direction.
Her office—bare, clean, strictly functional—was adjacent to what used to be Chain's command room. Now it sat sealed and dark behind reinforced glass, waiting for someone higher up to sign off on its dissection. Jasmine hadn't gone in since the attack. She could still picture his body slumped across the desk, chest torn open in complete silence. Whoever killed him had used an Authority Ego strong enough to bend space, suppress every sensor, and erase all alarms. No noise. No trace. That kind of power should've been locked away in the Apex. But here it was, used like a blade in a back alley.
She turned away from the monitors and walked to the wide window lining her office wall. Her reflection was faint, ghosted against the city below. A high collar wrapped around her neck like armor. The shadows beneath her eyes hadn't faded. She hadn't slept—not really. Not since the fifth attacker dropped in the bar and she barely walked away. Her muscles still hurt from that fight. Her fingers had bruised knuckles. But none of that lingered like the image of that man sitting on the bench, perfectly still, eyes following her every move.
He was a professional. That much was certain. But whose side was he on? If he was working for the people who sent those masked bastards to kill her, why didn't he act? And if he wasn't—if he was something else entirely, then what the hell was his role in this?
She didn't have answers. Only fragments. She knew how to track suspects, map movement, and trace patterns. But this man had left none. No thermal shadow. No gait profile. No retinal pattern. Nothing the system could lock onto. The best her team had managed was a vague match on build and posture, two flagged results, both useless. One was dead, the other incarcerated in a Tier-4 prison under constant surveillance. Meanwhile, this ghost had disappeared like smoke in the air.
Her jaw clenched as she returned to her desk and sat back down. She'd kept the investigation off official channels as long as she could, but it wouldn't stay quiet forever. Command would want results soon. A name. A report. Anything to explain why one of their elite officers had been killed and why she, a top-ranked combat agent, had nearly been taken out in a blacked-out op inside a corporate-controlled zone.
But Jasmine didn't want to report it; she wanted to find that man.
She leaned back in the chair, eyes dry, body aching. For a few minutes, she'd let herself spiral, replaying that man's stillness, the cold precision of his gaze, the way he sat like a blade that chose not to cut. But obsession clouded pattern recognition. She needed distance. A different thread to pull. Something older. Closer.
Claude.
The thought came uninvited, like a quiet knock against her ribcage.
She hadn't heard from him since that night, the night before it all fell apart, before the masked bastards came for her in the bar. They'd been in that high-rise apartment near the outer spires, staring down at the city like two ghosts watching the world they helped build rot from the inside. He hadn't said much; he never did. But there was something different in him that night. A tension behind his mechanical stillness. As if he already knew something was coming, but couldn't name it.
He'd told her he'd meet her in the center of the city, two hours later. A quiet promise, buried under the weight of routine. But she never made it. And neither did he.
She brought up the secure directory and typed in his tag: CLAUDE-0927. It blinked back at her in sterile font: Status: Dormant. Last signal: 16th Sun, 3:02 AM. Location: Unknown. That was forty minutes after he left her. After the goodbye. After the cigarette and the firelight and the small, rare moment of peace.
Claude didn't just go dark.
Even as she watched the signal decay across her interface, part of her still expected his voice to punch through, gravel-thick, dry, always late by two seconds. But the silence held. And that alone set every nerve in her body on edge.
He was more machine now than man, but only because the war had demanded it. They'd fought together during the Battle of Dawn—the first real war of the Celare Era, long before Lanova ever wore a crown of skybridges and Tier-2 sanctuaries. Back then, he'd been whole. Quiet, sure, but organic. He'd lost most of his body in the seventh wave near the Silver Basin, when their entire forward team was wiped out in under ninety seconds. Jasmine had pulled him out of the rubble with a dislocated shoulder and two fractured ribs, dragging him across broken rail lines with a stim needle in her teeth. His pulse was fading. His lungs were failing. They could've let him die. Most would have.
But Claude had already refused death once. That made him different.
He didn't just survive the reconstruction, he defined it. Where others tried to preserve humanity, he discarded it like obsolete tech. Replaced flesh with tungsten-fiber musculature. Exchanged his optic nerve for spectral tracking. His left arm alone contained more processing power than most city-tier logistics drones. He never smiled. But he watched people like he was recording for later. And for some reason, he'd chosen her as the one person he didn't walk away from.
Their bond had never needed explanation. There were no titles, no definitions, just a decades-deep current of loyalty and violence braided together by experience. Not after the war. Not after Dawn. Not after that week where the sky broke open and the world split itself between the augmented and the dead. They'd seen too much together to ever need words. What passed between them lived in glances, unfinished phrases, muscle memory. Jasmine had once pulled shrapnel from Claude's side with a combat knife while orbital sirens screamed overhead and the sky glowed with artificial lightning. He'd returned the favor three months later when she went down in the Wastes, dragging her from the wreckage of a collapsed command crawler under a hail of phosphor rounds, half his body already broken, one eye fused shut from heat damage. They never talked about it. They never needed to.
They weren't lovers. Not quite friends. Something else, more precise. Sharper. Like twin blades forged in the same fire, tempered by different heat. Jasmine was the edge meant to cut without hesitation. Claude was the one who knew when not to. He was her anchor, unshakable, precise, a presence defined not by warmth, but by unflinching constancy. Claude had always been the person who didn't blink, didn't flinch, didn't lose signal when everything else failed. She'd come to rely on that constancy more than she ever admitted. And now he was gone, and the silence felt like a breach in the hull of something larger than her understanding.
She dug deeper, bypassing the civilian layers of the feed archive, tunneling straight into the Tier-3 node access stack, a backdoor Claude himself had shown her how to exploit years ago when surveillance was still bound by legal codes. Jasmine ran the scrape manually, frame by frame, forcing the system to spit out every heat trace logged between 2:30 and 4:00 AM across the central district. At first, it was all static and ghost noise—thermal bleeds from street grills, echo shadows from passing aircars, residual heat from body-mod vendors and off-license arctech. But then a blip. One frame. Render-failed, interpolated, degraded to shit—but unmistakable.
A silhouette. Tall. Broad-shouldered. Crossing through the tram depot's north edge with something heavy dragging behind. The algorithm couldn't identify the mass; its heat was too consistent, too smooth, but the posture was a signature in itself. Slight shift in the right hip. Delayed arm swing on the dominant side. Servo lag. Jasmine had seen Claude walk that way since the Black Shore recovery mission, after the augments in his shoulder were fused over trauma plating. No one else moved like that. It was him. It had to be.
But the feed ended before she could trace the arc. No exit footage. No directional tag. No trace on the motion logs. No audio ping. No EM residue. Nothing. The system didn't just lose him, it forgot he was there. As if someone had reached into the digital lattice of Lanova's surveillance web and cut him out without leaving a ripple.
She sat motionless, staring through her own reflection ghosted across the surface of the console screen. The city beyond her window was a kaleidoscope of movement and artificial purpose, clean lines, flickering ads, heat, and neon masked as life. And yet somewhere in that chaos, Claude had walked off the grid. Deliberately. Quietly. Like a soldier slipping back into the dark just before a storm.
She thought of something he'd once said to her after a failed mission in the marsh slums of Vareth-2. They'd both been bleeding, covered in the ash of synthetic fog and biopunk failure, crouched behind a fallen mech chassis. He hadn't looked at her when he said it, just stared ahead, voice like gravel being stirred. "The Game isn't about who wins. It's about who gets counted." She hadn't understood it then. She was still fresh, righteous, eager, too bound to the idea of loyalty. She thought he meant kill counts. Battle honors. Tactical decisions. But now she felt the shape of the truth he'd tried to hand her. The Game wasn't war. It was survival inside a war that never stopped. A system that erased those who stopped being useful. The ones who got counted weren't the victors; they were the ones who weren't erased.
If Claude had gone dark, it wasn't an accident. He hadn't been taken. He hadn't run. He was moving off-grid with intention. He'd seen something—understood it before she did—and slipped beneath the noise before it swallowed him. It was strategy. Claude didn't scream. He didn't send distress signals. He made calculated exits and waited for others to catch up.
But what scared her—truly scared her—was the possibility that this time, he wasn't just disappearing for survival. He might've been vanishing for good.
And if Claude, the most immovable soul she'd ever known, had chosen to vanish without a trace, then whatever he saw was larger than Chain's death. Larger than the blackout attack. Larger than the man on the bench. This wasn't personal. This was tectonic.
Her jaw locked tight, the line of her mouth drawn like a cut. She was going to find him. Not because Command would ask. Not because she needed answers. But because he was Claude. Because he had pulled her out of hell more than once. Because if he had vanished, he must have thought it was the only way left to fight. And she had never once let him fight alone.
Because if Claude was scared, if Claude was hiding, then the rest of them were already dead. They just hadn't noticed the silence yet.
----
He stepped out of the restaurant some minutes later. The security glass peeled back with a hydraulic hiss, letting the ambient roar of Tamar Street flood back into his ears, raw, undiluted, alive. Dry, static-laced wind skimmed along the skin of his cheeks, bringing with it the distinct metallic tang of synth-ozone and chemical-treated concrete. The filtered blue sky panels overhead flickered slightly as a drone zipped by, its undercarriage flashing warning colors as it banked too hard into traffic. Down below, chaos moved like music: ad-drones weaving through the sky like bright, buzzing insects; vendors yelling over one another in eight languages; the engine howl of overclocked astrocycles bouncing off steel-and-glass towers. Tamar Street didn't rest, not even when the sun panels dimmed. It merely shifted tone, from scream to whisper, from surface to shadow.
He didn't take the tram, not here. Not in this district. Too much attention, too many scans. Instead, he cut through the alley web behind the transit arcade, where outdated security systems blinked half-dead and scanner drones took their time sweeping for violations. He moved with casual precision, cutting through the back arteries of the Commercial District toward the border where the Neon Mile stretched out like an electric artery.
The Mile wasn't a street. It was an ecosystem—part bazaar, part tech expo, part war zone. A one-mile stretch that bled between the Commercial and Research Districts like a scar no one wanted to close. It had no formal border, no official entrance. You just knew when you were in it—when the air shifted, when the buildings thinned into layered scaffolds and makeshift platforms, when advertisements screamed at you from neon lips and projection skins flickered over the faces of strangers.
Shops stacked like vertical cards, walkways tangled in synth-steel webbing, light bleeding in through translucent tarp roofs that fluttered beneath the weight of passing transport. Somewhere high above, the Axion Markets Authority monitored everything through layered feeds and drone eyes—recording, regulating, and cataloging—while down below, the Veil Cartel collected its tax in blood and credits. You wanted med implants, bloodprint scramblers, cortex jacks, or anti-AMA gear? You found it in the Mile. Just don't ask where it came from, or who died to get it there.
He walked under a curtain of shifting LEDs displaying a series of offers in hollow-script: MEMORY THREAD CLEANING - 2.9kT / AUTO-SKIN REGEN - 4.4kT / AI-BOND DISSOLUTION (NO QUESTIONS) - 9.1kT. A man with a chest full of ports barked a laugh through a voice modulator. Kids with nerve tattoos and jackal grins sold black-market personality kernels on the sidewalk like candy. Every fifth step brought him into contact with another scent: ozone, burning plastic, grease, street food, formaldehyde. Voices stacked over each other like signals trying to break through the distortion. It was all real, all alive. The Neon Mile didn't pretend to be clean. That was its charm.
He passed a shop that had once been a surgery tent during the Dawn Wars; he remembered it well. Two AMA bounty officers had cornered him there once, back when he was still paying for his sister's extraction and dodging Veil smugglers who thought he owed them for a botched data job. It ended with a dead officer, a ruined med-bed, and thirty-two stitches in his leg. He still remembered the sound of the surgeon's teeth grinding as they worked on him in silence, not asking questions.
The AMA had rules—too many—but they kept the front-end clean. They ran permits, weapon trace registries, modification caps, and ran constant background drags through neural-link records. They were the law. Just not always justice. And when someone slipped, the Veil stepped in, not for order, but for profit. The Cartel ran half the stalls here, either directly or through shell operators. They controlled the shipping paths, the underground vaults, the off-record encryption services, and most of the debt. You crossed them only once. He had twice. First for ethics. Then for family. Neither time had been clean.
He stopped at two vendor corridors. The first sold weapons—mostly glossy street-level fare, collapsible monoblades, wrist-loaded flechette pods, a few energy-burst prototypes with barely stabilized casings. Most of it was for show. For the desperate. Buyers wanted to look dangerous during The Game, even if they didn't survive the first encounter.
The second stall was louder. All Ego-enhancers, placebo tech, and market-legal catalysts with flashy names and little substance. Amulets promising resonance amplification. Vials of "neuro-liquid" supposed to improve connection latency. Even fake Apex-tier node tokens—scrap metal painted gold and blessed by some scam-ritual AI. He'd watched a kid buy one, face glowing with hope. He said nothing. No one wanted the truth when they were gambling for a future.
And the next edition of The Game was coming fast. Next week, in fact. The city already felt it, buzzing low, like machinery warming up. Recruits gathering. Hunters prepping. Viewless whispering through the slums. Everyone wanted to be chosen, or feared being chosen, or feared not being chosen enough. Curious, he thought. Curious to see who they'd send this time.
Spark's place was still a cryptic relic tucked beneath the Neon Mile's buzzing chaos, wedged in the gutted infrastructure of an old ventilation artery that hadn't been used since the Sub-Lung riots. You wouldn't find it unless you knew the glitch in the holographic signage—unless you caught the break in the looping advert for SkinWeave Pro, just to the left of a counterfeit med-implant stall. The entrance was disguised beneath warped synth-glass and a flickering biometric panel faking dead tech. He knocked twice—soft, then sharp. The wall buzzed faintly, light pulsing under the surface like something breathing. The second knock triggered the lock.
A section of the wall slid open with a hydraulic grunt, revealing a flood of pale, green-tinted light. The interior smelled of copper, ozone, and old synth-oil—like the ghost of a machine still dreaming of the war it fought in. It was colder inside, climate-controlled by algae-based coolant rigs Spark had grown himself in pressure tanks. Cable nests spread like roots across the walls and floors, feeding rows of servers, datacores, and partially dismantled tech projects that blinked with half-lives. Suspended manipulators hung from the ceiling like the limbs of robotic jellyfish. Over it all, low jazz whispered from hidden audio nodes, warping slightly as it passed through corrupted filters. He stepped in.
"You look like rusted hell," came the voice from the far console.
He didn't even look. "Nice to see you too, Spark."
Lumien Colbet—Spark to anyone who valued speed over sentiment—emerged from behind a suspended display cluster. His irises flickered silver before calibrating to a washed-out, almost-human blue. His coat was patched together from thermal scrap mesh and stripped tactical plating, held together with exposed circuitry and a few tasteful weld burns. His hair was up, secured with a carbon-wire clip, and he moved barefoot across the steel floor with weightless precision.
"You bring something useful, or just here to breathe my oxygen and drain my bandwidth?"
He reached into his coat and pulled out a slim data drive and a wrapped swatch of synth-fabric sealed in a cold pack. "Both. But mostly this. After the hit at Spark Plaza, I searched the site. Found traces of Automata-grade oil-blood. The old variant. Can't buy it anymore—unless you've got AMA clearance or Cartel blessing."
Spark's brow lifted. "This was three days ago, yeah? That's when Jasmine dropped off the grid."
He nodded. "She barely made it out. Five aggressors. All terminated. But the scene didn't make sense—too clean, no remains except hers. This was all I found."
Spark took the sample, examining it under a narrow scanner strip. "You tracked them?"
"Partially. I traced a residual heat trail through a ventilation subnode. Looked like it hadn't been used in years. Found echoes of a deep-dive scrape, too. Someone tried to leech her Ego latency—extractive-level. Took her signal pattern, maybe more."
"Illegal tech," Spark muttered, narrowing his eyes.
"Leviathan-grade specter rig," he added. "Black-tier architecture. Custom build."
Spark turned back to the console, feeding the sample into a processor. Blue-white lights flared across his screen. "This isn't just legacy tech," he muttered after a moment. "It's retrofitted. Modified to mask resonance drift and latency spiking. Industrial clean-up signatures are masked. AMA wouldn't touch this. Only one family still does refits like this."
"The Veil."
"Yeah." Spark exhaled. "Which means it wasn't just hired Cartel muscle. It was personal. Precision-engineered."
He nodded slowly, leaning back against a worn workbench. "That's what I figured."
"You know what this means, Adam", Spark said, his voice low, gaze fixed on the data. "If they're using Veil retrofit tech on Ego-class scrapes..."
He didn't answer. He just stared back, the echo of Jasmine's blood on the tile still etched into his mind.
The Game had already begun.
They were just catching up.