The Neon Mile
Lanova - Mid Tiers 19th Day of The Sun Year
3:00 PM
Adam leaned forward over Spark's cluttered terminal, his synthetic pupils narrowing as layers of data flickered across the screen. Node intercepts. Bio-spectral residue. Black-market shipment trails. Everything pointed in one direction now—The Veil Cartel. The five attackers that had come for Jasmine weren't just Cartel foot soldiers. They were something else. And if the oil-blood sample had told them anything, it was that whatever the Cartel wanted with her, it wasn't over. It was only just beginning.
Spark exhaled, dragging a hand through his static-charged hair. "You're really thinking about going down there, aren't you?"
Adam didn't answer immediately. He shifted his weight, the faint hum of his mesh overlay recalibrating along his spine. Below Tamar Street, below even the grime-slicked alleys of the Mid Tiers, the city twisted into darker, older arteries. Places the AMA refused to map. Places where The Veil didn't just operate, they ruled.
"It's been a long time," Adam murmured. "Too long. But yeah. I'm going."
Spark raised an eyebrow. "You planning to just knock on the front door? 'Hi, it's Adam. Remember me? The guy who torched your enforcer wing in '41?"
Adam offered a dry smirk. "Something like that."
But it wouldn't be that simple. The Low Tiers weren't just dangerous—they were deliberately unstable. Collapsing infrastructure. Hijacked security zones. Veil operatives embedded into the bones of the territory. And beneath even that: The Depths.
No light. No surveillance. No laws. Just the skeleton of the city's foundations—coolant veins, arc-reactors, ancient furnaces, forgotten bunkers. The Depths powered Lanova, but they weren't meant to be navigated. No civilian route. No AMA checkpoints. Just leaking energy conduits and the whisper of rot.
To reach The Veil's inner base, what they called "Maya", nested somewhere at the bottom of the Low Tier labyrinth, he would need more than guts. He'd need preparation, misdirection, and escape options already mapped.
"I'm going to need time," Adam said. "I'll leak a signal. A light trail. Jasmine's already digging. If she sees the right coordinates—half-redacted, scrambled—she won't resist following."
Spark leaned back against the algae-lit console. "Assuming she doesn't see it as a trap and come after you first."
"She might," Adam agreed. "But that's a risk I'll take. We won't get through this city alive unless we start fighting smarter."
"And how do you plan on moving through the Depths?" Spark asked. "You still got a death wish?"
"No. Just a few debts I never paid off."
That meant old names. Outlaws. Survivors. Fringe runners who knew the back veins of Lanova better than any cartographer. Some of them owed him favors. Others... well, they still wanted him dead. But either way, they'd remember him.
Spark was already flipping through his own interface. "I'll start gathering floor-shift data. Map changes, dynamic blockages, AMA security reroutes. I've got an old shell-graph from when I installed a router near the Under Line. It'll need updating, but it's a start."
Adam nodded. "Good. I'll handle the rest. Gear. Supplies. Contacting the ratlines. If I'm going down into the crawlspace of this place, I'm not doing it blind."
Spark hesitated, watching him for a beat longer than necessary. "You sure about this, Adam? The Veil hasn't forgotten you."
"That's exactly why I'm going," Adam said, voice low but sharp, like a blade being unsheathed. "No one else can get close enough to make them bleed and live to talk about it."
He let the words settle, then added with quieter gravity, "And if I can find the source of this—why they tried to erase Jasmine, what they extracted from her Ego interface—then maybe I can cut out the root. End it before it devours the rest of us."
Spark said nothing. He just watched him, knowing Adam wasn't the kind to chase ghosts without purpose. This wasn't about revenge. It wasn't even about redemption. It was about unmasking the hidden war that had already started.
Outside the window, Lanova glittered like a circuit board soaked in oil, its towers reaching up like teeth from a predator's jaw. But beneath all the neon and noise, the city was a coffin—layered, pressurized, sealed. A pyramid of light built atop a graveyard of forgotten power.
Lanova wasn't a city. It was a system. A prison with mirrored walls and manufactured freedoms. The Axion Markets Authority, with its gleaming public offices and endless subsidiaries, sold the illusion of control. Permits. Security. Bio-tag commerce. A thousand forms of surveillance masquerading as order. But AMA's reach ended at the edge of comfort. Below that, the light dissolved, and The Veil ruled.
And if the AMA was the face of control, The Veil was its shadow. They didn't ask. They traded in blood, in secrets, in debts that never expired. What AMA branded as "illegal" the Cartel simply called profitable. Ghost drugs. Authority-Ego modifiers. Black-spliced genetics. Entire cybernetic personalities ripped from stolen consciousness and sold to clients with no past. The Veil didn't just deal in the black market, they owned it. And their power didn't stop in the Low Tiers.
It ran deeper.
Adam had seen it before. Back when he still carried AMA-issued bounties on his shoulder plate and thought he could clean the filth from the corners of the city. He'd gone too far into Veil territory once. Took a job no one else would touch. Walked into the Depths with a gun, a half-broken tracker drone, and no backup. He'd returned three days later with burns on his ribs, a shattered jaw, and three kills under his belt. All off the record.
That was the last time he set foot in the Depths. Until now.
Because to reach the heart of the Cartel, to strike at Maya, meant moving through hell's basement. Past the abandoned transit systems. Past the static-choked rails and fallen support struts. Into the old energy grid: thick with reactor smog and psychotropic leakage from the city's original neural routing lines. People spoke of the Depths like they were myth. But they weren't. They were real. Forgotten maintenance floors, failed subterranean arcologies, collapsed research zones. No official maps. No light. No law.
It was said that the Depths breathed. That their walls pulsed with the leftover heat of failed experiments and buried reactors. Those machines spoke in whispers there, machine ghosts, echoes of old code trapped in the digital slag of the city's underbrain. And worse than that were the people who stayed.
Some called them Scorchers. Others, Feeders. Half-dead survivors twisted by malfunctioning mods or long-abandoned gene edits, living off whatever dripped down from the tiers above. Adam had encountered a few before. Silent. Watchful. Unwilling to speak but capable of violence as a language.
And yet, beneath all that horror, there was freedom. The Depths were the only way out of Lanova without AMA clearance or Trailblazer access, the colossal vertical rail-core reserved for Game competitors, corporate elites, and handpicked migrants. The only legal way in or out. Which meant it was also the most watched, most restricted corridor in the city. Even trying to hack the Trailblazer meant putting yourself on a blacklisted execution queue.
So, if you wanted to leave Lanova—for good, clean, and free—you went down. All the way. Through flame and bone and circuitry.
"You're going to need a map," Spark muttered. "Not the kind you can buy. One of the old ones. From when the infrastructure was still human-scaled. Not managed by city-AIs."
Adam gave him a slow nod. "I know who has one."
"Let me guess," Spark said with a grimace. "She hates your guts and probably thinks you're dead."
"Something like that."
Spark turned back to his console and pulled up the earliest node-pulse data from the sub-tier Adam had traced. The echoes confirmed it—Veil activity had spiked, cloaked under bursts of energy loss AMA had dismissed as sensor corruption. But Spark knew better. Adam did too.
It was starting.
"I'll prepare the equipment," Spark said, already moving. "You find your map. I'll start securing a clean comm line to Jasmine. No names. Just an echo trail, coded right, pointing her below. That should draw her in."
Adam stood and reached for his coat, the familiar weight of the holster and embedded tech comforting against his side. The war was already here. It had just changed shape. Quiet now. Underground.
But it wouldn't stay that way.
The city had its framework. So did the Game.
Now it was time to break both.
----
General Headquarters - Sector 231
Lanova - Mid Tiers, 19th Day of The Sun Year
3:00 PM
The air outside was cold, thinner than she expected. The terrace door sealed shut behind her with a hiss, locking away the low drone of office lights and the looping comms chatter still spilling from her desk. For the first time in three days, Jasmine Navani let her breath reach all the way to the bottom of her lungs.
The city sprawled out below, Sector 231 rendered in sharp angles and glass-veined arteries, lit by the soft-pulse signature of Managerial-tier infrastructure. It wasn't beautiful—not exactly—but there was a kind of violence in its symmetry that always made her stop. Lanova didn't hide what it was. Every sector, every blade of light, was engineered to impose hierarchy. Sector 231 sat near the top of the Mid Tiers, a crown of ambition polished for investors and Authority elite. But Jasmine knew what bled under that polish. What was paved over. What still screamed, unheard, in the structures beneath.
She rested both hands on the railing, metal cool through her gloves. Below, drones moved like insects through controlled airspace. Sky-ads flickered across adjacent towers, pitching investment portfolios and luxury cybernetic clinics. Automated window tints shifted in sequence with solar arcs. Nothing was natural. Nothing random. Even the weather here—patterned sky-drizzle and temperature-optimized wind currents—was curated to soothe the minds of those who thought they ran the world.
Three days off the grid. No press, no field reports, no interviews. Just static protocols and ghost data rerouted through back channels. And still, the news feeds clawed at the perimeter of her name like hounds. Jasmine Navani, Division Eight's rising blade. The woman who survived a silent kill order inside Spark Plaza. The agent who walked out of a blackout zone soaked in blood that wasn't hers and still refused to comment.
They all wanted the story.
But she didn't have one.
Not yet.
Her mind kept circling the same silence. Not the attack, that she could rationalize. She'd lived through worse. She'd caused worse. What haunted her was the absence. The lack of a name. The precision of the erasure. Whoever they were, they didn't just want her gone. They wanted it to look like she'd never been there to begin with.
And then there was the man on the bench. Always, always that image. Still. Unblinking. Present in a way that wasn't natural.
Jasmine pressed her palms harder into the rail. She'd stopped bleeding two days ago, but her muscles still felt wrong. Not broken—just... disrupted. As if something inside her was still catching up to the moment it should have died.
She glanced down again. Sector 231 pulsed with soft light and financial power, but even here, above the noise, she could feel the weight of Lanova closing in. The city had grown too tall, too dense, too wired into its own machinery. The Game reinforced the hierarchy every cycle—Elevate the worthy. Eliminate the rest. And people signed up for it. Trained for it. Built their entire lives around being "chosen." As if survival was merit.
She'd played that Game once. A long time ago. Back when she still believed rank meant honor, that deployment meant purpose. She still wore the scars from that era. She just didn't show them anymore.
And now it is starting again.
She exhaled slowly and pulled her eyes upward, past the towers, past the filtered sky. Somewhere above all this—beyond the Trailblazer rails and High Tier air corridors—people still believed they were free. That's what made it work. That's what kept the Game spinning.
But the truth was older. Simpler.
Freedom was a currency. And most people were broke the moment they were born.
Jasmine Navani leaned against the railing and let the wind bite at her collar. Maybe it was time to stop reacting. To stop waiting for the next target marker to show up on her visor. Chain was dead. Her Division compromised. Her name is still marked, officially, as "non-compliant"—a clever euphemism for "expendable." And the man who watched her bleed had yet to move again.
So maybe she would.
A flicker of movement below caught her eye—one of the newer ad-balloons drifting up between towers, a translucent membrane displaying a teaser for next week's Games. A new crop of faces. Hopeful, polished, reckless. She watched them cycle through, each name paired with a kill stat, a power profile, a fictional backstory engineered for public consumption.
Then she whispered, "They have no idea."
She stepped back from the railing and turned toward the door. Her reflection hovered in the glass—a blur of shadows and crimson highlights. In her eyes, she didn't see the hero they wrote about in the feeds. She saw what the war had made her.
A weapon with no clear target.
But something was coming. She could feel it in her bones, in the city's rhythm, in the way certain silences had started repeating.
And when the next signal came—no matter how faint—she would follow it.
Even if it led her straight into the dark.
The air outside bit sharp at the edges. Thinner than it should've been, like even the wind had learned to filter itself in Sector 231. Jasmine Navani stepped onto the terrace, letting the sealed door whisper shut behind her. For the first time in days, she let herself stop pretending the walls of her office were enough to hold back the noise.
Sector 231 was the heart of the Managerial District, a sanctuary of precision and order, glass-spined towers clawing into an artificial sky, the glow of economic health blinking rhythmically across advertisement hulls and data towers. Surveillance drones moved like nervous nerves through air corridors laced with low-frequency signals and corporate sovereignty. Everything below her was branded, owned, taxed, monitored. And yet it still didn't feel secure. It just felt heavy. Like the whole sector was holding its breath.
Three days. Off-grid. Ghost protocol. Media shut out. Her Division's back channels burned and redirected to static dumps. The reporters had camped at the entrance of her building for two of those days, desperate to be the first to crack the mystery of what happened in Spark Plaza. Rumors fed the news-circuit like blood to an open wound: a blackout op gone wrong. Rogue assassins. Unregistered combatants. Theories ran wild. She hadn't confirmed anything—not to Command, not to press, not even to herself. The truth was still breathing somewhere out there. She just didn't have her hands on its throat yet.
Her hands gripped the edge of the railing. The view didn't offer comfort—it never had. It was designed to sedate. Managerial districts were built for optics: make the people above feel like gods, make the people below forget how deep the city ran. Lanova was a vertical empire in its own right, a colossal island-city forged from necessity, greed, and rebellion. The Tower that rose from sea-rock to sky wasn't just architecture. It was a declaration. An act of defiance.
Defiance against the mainland. Against the empire.
Jasmine's eyes narrowed as her thoughts shifted outward—past Lanova, past the steel-blue horizon invisible behind the fogged distance, toward the monolith across the water. The Alata Empire. The vast continent-spanning colossus whose name still carved fear into maps. A superstructure of military doctrine and economic supremacy, stitched together by compliance, fueled by hyper-technology and a pathological obsession with control. They called themselves peacekeepers. But what they kept was power.
It was the Empire's long shadow that had sparked the Dawn Wars, sixty years ago. The Solar Years began with fire and ended with silence. Back then, Lanova was still a collection of Free Sectors barely learning to work together. The Empire called it rebellion. The island called it survival. They sent machines. Lanova answered with blood. EGO users, Awakened, street-fighters and underground networks holding the line against tech they barely understood. Jasmine remembered those times, with Claude and her platoon, the war had written itself into every inch of her life. Into every law. Into every glance from a high-ranking officer who remembered where the scars came from.
And Alata had never forgotten. Never forgiven. They'd embedded themselves in every economic artery since, especially through Alata Corporation, the veiled arm of the Empire masquerading as corporate benevolence. With its ocean of subsidiaries, deep-state influence, and its fingers deep in Lanova's infrastructure, Alata Corp. was no longer a company. It was a god. Jasmine wore its badge on her uniform—had worn it for years—but she'd long ago stopped believing the lines between duty and domination still existed.
EGO was illegal across the Empire's mainland. It was heresy, they claimed. Dangerous. A volatile deviation from purity of logic, of advancement. What they truly feared was that it couldn't be replicated. EGO wasn't code. It wasn't engineered. It was will—raw, volatile, unpredictable. The will to exist, to survive, to bend space and memory and matter to one's sense of self. Every person had it, but few ever heard it. Fewer still ever Awakened. Jasmine had. So had others. But the price had been exile, surveillance, silence.
They said it was forbidden because it was dangerous. The truth was, it was uncontrollable.
The Empire responded to magic and EGO not with diplomacy, but with supremacy. Advanced mechborn units. Cybernetic ghosts. Leviathan armor lines that walked like titans. Entire cities swallowed by autonomous orbital machines. And now, their reach has grown subtle. Through commerce. Through law. Through corporations like the one Jasmine was supposed to serve.
She turned her eyes back to the city. Lanova didn't bend easily, but even it had started to forget the line between resistance and compliance. The Game had become the city's way of keeping control without open war—elevate the strong, eliminate the weak, give the citizens blood in exchange for distraction. But Jasmine remembered the old intentions. The Game was never meant to be a spectacle. It was supposed to be a deterrent. Proof that the island could defend itself.
Now it was entertainment.
Below her, a new recruitment wave was already launching, ads flashing across the skyline with holographic flicker: Next Cycle Begins. Glory Awaits. Registration Closes in 48 Hours. She watched the faces appear—smiling, eager, oblivious. None of them would understand what the city really demanded of them until they were already bleeding for it.
She whispered under her breath, "You're still feeding it, even now."
The wind shifted. Jasmine pulled her coat tighter and stepped back from the railing. The man on the bench hadn't appeared again. Her team's resources were tapped. And now, Claude had vanished—left without a word, like the war had come calling for him again. It wasn't just about Spark Plaza anymore. Something deeper was surfacing. Something older than vendettas or contracts. It had the weight of war behind it.
And she could feel the shape of it pressing up from the Depths.
She turned toward the sealed door, one hand brushing the interface. The glass shimmered briefly, overlaying her reflection with her service credentials, then unlocked.
Her name still held rank. But rank didn't mean safety.
Jasmine stepped back into the office, her expression cold, eyes sharp, time to move.
----
The Neon Mile
Lanova - Mid Tiers, 19th Day of The Sun Year
4:00 PM
Adam stepped out from Spark's den into the tide of the Neon Mile, vanishing again into the pulse and chaos of the city. No words of farewell. Just a nod between ghosts. One headed deeper into the grid; the other, into the gut of something older than the Mile itself. It was always like this between them—the quiet, the movement, the shared silence of men who had seen things they could no longer name.
The Mile greeted him like it always did—with overstimulation dressed as welcome. A thousand stalls flared with synthetic color, throwing garish glows onto the damp pavement. Banners shimmered with ads for cybernetic grafts, spine coils, ego-inertia dampeners, subdermal accelerators, multi-spectrum augment kits and blacklisted thrill-serums. Neon kanji mixed with hex-codes and twisting lines of kinetic glyphs danced over plasma awnings. Artificial light pulsed down from cables webbing between the buildings, dangling like neon vines grown wild and uncaring. Below them, crowds surged. Mechanics barked from garage-bays layered in old rust and holoskin; back-alley surgeons offered mod installs for half the AMA-regulated price and one-fourth the anesthesia. Pharmacies with no doors, just steel hatches and retina scanners. Tattoo artists burned hex-ink into flesh, programming memories into bone. Merchants with cyber-joints flicked knives of light in the air to attract gamblers. Barkers offered miracle EGO stabilizers and faux-Awakening kits made of bullshit, placebo, or raw nerve gas. This was the Mile—commerce without laws, identity without permanence, a sacred chaos curated by the Veil and tolerated by the AMA because it was too big to eliminate without unraveling Lanova's economy.
Adam moved through it like smoke, unnoticed except by the few who were trained to see beyond the noise. He kept his stride measured, posture relaxed, face lowered just enough to blend. But as he wove through the eddies of vendors and buyers, he felt it—that pressure. Not physical, not immediate. More like a psychic drag on his awareness. Someone was following him. Maybe more than one.
He didn't react.
Instead, he let himself bleed into the market flow, slipping between a vendor selling chromed-out amphibious drones and a tattooist broadcasting looping footage of EGO sigils drawn in real-time onto waiting clients. He shifted angles, ducked beneath a row of incense wires burning some synthetic version of sage and metal, circled past a group of AMA market regulators inspecting a counterfeit medtech booth with expressions of polite disinterest. No one stopped him. No one even looked. But still—he felt them. Close now. Moving when he moved. Mirroring his flow. They were careful. Not Veil enforcers. Not the cartel's standard operatives. Too subtle for that. Probably freelancers. Cleaners. Scavs.
He ducked into a side alley, where the light was colder. Quieter. Rust clung to the pipes and the pavement squelched with fluid from a broken coolant line above. The Mile got stranger the deeper you went—less curated, less lit. Whole blocks down here were jury-rigged from obsolete district partitions and data nodes that hadn't been maintained in decades. Layers of history encoded into crumbling plastcrete and ancient touchstone architecture from the old Lanovan civic designs—before the first Spire even rose. This was below AMA jurisdiction. The Cartel called it the Gray Sprawl. No maps. No laws. Just tech, trade, and rot.
He leaned on a railing that overlooked a half-submerged lower platform where dealers haggled over biogel shipments in crates marked with Federation seals. From here, he could see a sliver of the sky. Not the real sky—just the ceiling of the artificial stratosphere: a curved dome of cloud and light rigs that pulsed with artificial weather and sun-cycle mimicry. The real sky above that? Always hidden. Lanova had been sealed since the end of the Dawn Wars. The clouds weren't clouds—they were filters. Humidity screens and particulate control layers fused with electromagnetic smog barriers that prevented unauthorized transmissions and aerial scans. The island city wasn't just isolated. It was cocooned. Sealed from the mainland by force and bureaucracy. All in the name of "independence."
And yet, at that moment, a breach. A flicker.
A single shaft of raw sunlight pierced through a flaw in the upper fog layer—a thin vertical spear of clarity, tracing down through smoke and steam and glass. It refracted off a cracked panel above him and sliced downward like a blade, catching his face as he turned. For a second, it revealed everything. His illusion didn't break—Spark's overlays held. But under the light, for just a moment, something true bled through.
His heterochromia. One eye, the color of scorched amber—hazel licked with flame. The other, cold ocean blue, rimmed with a faint silver pulse. Legacy of a modification that was never finished. The right side of him, fire. The left, ice. The shard of light hit him perfectly, casting a reflection in a panel across the alley—a mirror image, if only for a breath.
Behind him, movement. Not from the front. From above.
He didn't look. Not yet. Let them think he hadn't noticed. Let them commit to the tail. The longer they followed, the more exposed they became.
He pushed forward again, drifting into a more populated section of the Mile—where black market food vendors stirred strange vats of bioreactive broth, and a group of children with neural ports lit up like constellations chanted subroutines in rhythm. Music thudded in layers, stitched together from languages that hadn't existed fifty years ago. A group of ex-surgeons repurposed as tech-priests offered spinal realignments for donations, while a wall-wide display behind them looped footage from last year's Game—champions falling, rising, bleeding, screaming. The same spectacle the Empire condemned and tried to shut down, every cycle. The same one AMA licensed through a hundred subsidiaries.
He needed to lose them. Not just for his safety, but to avoid tipping them off that he knew. If they were Cartel, they wouldn't stop. If they were Federation? Worse. And if they were AMA freelancers—disavowed but sanctioned—then it meant his plan had already drawn attention.
Another alley. Another corner. A shifting lane beneath an old light-ring once used to simulate atmospheric glow, now flickering erratically. He stopped in front of an antique shop that hadn't been open in a decade, waited five seconds, then slipped behind the rusted panel beside it. An old scav route—narrow, silent. Let them pass. Let them show themselves.
He counted the seconds.
And the light, still warm on his face, began to fade. A blade of clarity swallowed again by the artificial smog, lost to the false sky. It left behind a smear of gold on the broken glass above, and a tightening in Adam's chest that hadn't been there a second before. The moment passed—but something colder took its place.
Movement.
Not from the crowd. Not the cautious gait of hired freelancers or the low-hanging presence of Cartel scouts. These were different. Precision in posture. Fluid yet too rigid to be organic. The weight of their footfalls—barely perceptible, yet perfectly timed, identical to one another. That wasn't human. That was military-grade patterning. That was programmed pursuit.
From behind the rust-stained panel, Adam shifted silently, his pupils contracting into thin, knife-edged slits. Four of them. Broad-shouldered, matte-finished armor under long gray coats built to blend against urban backdrops. Their faces were expressionless masks—no symbols, no flags. But the alloy movement of their necks, the micro-adjustments in their stance, and the faint whir of temperature-regulating systems beneath their synthetic skin gave them away.
Automa. And not the Lanovan kind.
Federation dogs.
Adam exhaled slowly through his nose, hand drifting beneath the folds of his weapon coat. His fingers brushed familiar steel, nested in foam-lined compartments. Magnetic charges. Pulse-daggers. EMP knuckles. The weight of old decisions. These weren't Cartel agents. These weren't AMA trackers.
They were bloodhounds.
Federation-built. EGO-nullifiers. Programmed to detect Ego residue, isolate signatures, and eliminate carriers with extreme prejudice. Rare outside of continental conflict zones. And never—never—authorized to operate within Lanova borders.
"I'm getting the Jasmine treatment now?" he muttered under his breath, the corner of his mouth twisting with bitter irony. It wasn't just her they wanted gone. They were widening the net. Something she triggered—some part of the attack on her or the fallout from it—wasn't isolated. The Federation was reaching in.
And if they were here, walking openly in the Mile, that meant one of two things: they were either rogue, working black through one of the lesser criminal families that dealt in import contracts and wet-ops... or the Federation had brokered something higher, something even the AMA wasn't disclosing. A backdoor protocol. A hidden arrangement. And that meant the pressure Jasmine was under wasn't just coming from the Cartel. It was triangulating.
He narrowed his eyes, watching the four automa split formation—two angling left toward a row of vape dens and cyberdoc stalls, two maintaining a slow patrol through the center of the sprawl. Scanning. Not just the market. Him.
Adam adjusted his position and recalibrated his breathing. Heart steady. Options filtered through instinct. Best way to take down four Federation-grade automa without drawing the attention of the Veil? Not in a crowded marketplace. Not here. But if he let them tail him further, he might get a read on where they were drawing their orders from. Federation ghosts don't walk in the open without a leash.
His thoughts spun as he tucked deeper behind the panel, calculating distance, crowd density, audio interference zones. Even the ambient sound of the Mile became part of the map—music bleed from a nearby synth club, the wheeze of hydraulic vents, the crackle of static over a street-level intercom. Every detail mattered. The game had changed. Again.
This wasn't surveillance anymore. This was pressure. A squeeze play. He was being herded.
The light was gone now. The shadow reclaimed his face. But that sliver of sun had marked something: a fracture in the illusion. A brief glimpse of something unfiltered, real, dangerous.
And somewhere behind those alloy masks, Adam knew—so had they.