The manufacturing zone was a graveyard of purpose. Hulking shells of factories stood silent, their windows blind, their loading docks choked with weeds pushing through cracked asphalt. The textile mill was a soot-stained brick monolith at the end of a cul-de-sac, surrounded by a high, chain-link fence topped with rusting barbed wire. A sign warned of structural instability and unauthorized entry. It was the perfect camouflage—too dilapidated to be of interest, too dangerous to be casually explored.
Kael observed from the shadow of a neighboring warehouse's corpse for two hours. He saw no movement on the roof where the maintenance pod should be. No heat signatures from his stolen, low-grade thermal scope. No telltale electronic hum on his scavenged frequency sniffer. Either Dr. Thorne was incredibly disciplined, or she was gone. Or the trap had already been sprung.
His old routine would have dictated a slow, meticulous infiltration: find the weak point in the fence, disable any dormant sensors, approach the building from a blind angle, scale it, neutralize the target. A sequence of steps leading to an outcome.
That routine was now the trap. It was what they would expect. Sol, or anyone like him, would be watching for a professional approach. They would have the perimeter seeded with non-standard sensors, keyed to detect the subtle signs of another operative's tradecraft—the specific EM signature of a lock-pick, the pressure pattern of a climber's micro-grapples, the thermal bloom of a body using controlled exertion.
He had to be something else. Not a ghost, not a predator. A piece of debris.
He found a section of the fence near the back, where the chain-link was partially pulled away from its post, hidden by a mound of collapsed roofing material. Not a clean cut, but a natural-looking failure. He didn't repair it or widen it. He squeezed through, letting a rusty wire snag and tear his jacket. He didn't pause. He left a thread of cheap synthetic fabric behind, a marker of careless passage.
Inside the compound, he didn't hug the walls or move in shadows. He walked across the open yard towards the main mill door, his posture slumped, his steps shuffling, mimicking the thousand homeless scavengers who picked through places like this. He hummed tunelessly under his breath, a sound of vacant disregard. He was not hiding. He was being invisible by being utterly unremarkable.
The main doors were chained shut. He didn't try to pick the lock. He went to a ground-level window, its glass long gone, and clambered through, making more noise than necessary, knocking loose a piece of rotten framing. He landed inside in a cloud of dust, coughing theatrically.
The interior was a cathedral of decay. Giant, silent looms stood like fossilized skeletons under shafts of grimy light from broken skylights. The air was thick with the smell of mold, old oil, and pigeon droppings. He listened. Only the drip of water and the coo of nesting birds.
His destination was the roof. The internal stairs would be the obvious route, and therefore, the most likely place for a trap. He looked up. The ceiling was high, crisscrossed by rusting steel support beams and the remnants of a conveyor system.
He shed the scavenger act. His movements became fluid, precise. He found a hanging chain, part of an old hoist. He tested it; it held. He climbed, hand over hand, up into the steel forest of the ceiling. He moved laterally along the beams, a silent shadow forty feet above the floor, avoiding the clear paths below.
He found a service ladder bolted to a structural column, leading up to a roof access hatch. The hatch was secured with a simple bolt, corroded shut. From a tool pocket, he took a small applicator and squeezed a bead of clear chemical agent onto the bolt. It hissed, eating through the rust in seconds. He pushed the hatch open a crack.
Dusk was settling, the sky a deeper shade of orange. The roof was a flat expanse of cracked tar and gravel, dotted with the skeletal remains of ventilation housings. And there, near the far edge, was the maintenance pod. It was an old crew module, retrofitted. A single, reinforced window showed a dim, warm light within. A cable ran from it to a small, cleverly camouflaged solar array.
Life. She was here.
He didn't approach the pod. He found cover behind a large exhaust fan housing and watched. For another hour. He saw no movement at the window. No shadow. No sign of the boy. The routine screamed at him: *Confirm the target. Execute the objective.* But the objective was gone. He was here to… what? Warn her? That was a sentimental impulse, and sentiment was a trap. Give her Lin's story? To what end?
He was about to move when he saw it. A glint, from the roof edge of the adjacent warehouse. A reflection, gone in an instant. A scope. Sol was here. He wasn't inside the perimeter. He was outside, patient, watching the watcher. He had anticipated that someone might come for Thorne, and he had set up to observe the approach. Kael's "scavenger" entrance might have fooled automated systems, but Sol was a human eye. He would have seen the careful shift in behavior, the climb into the ceiling.
Kael was not the hunter. He was the bait in Sol's trap. The routine—the observation, the approach—had been a predictable pattern Sol had exploited.
Kael remained perfectly still. To move now would be to confirm Sol's suspicion. He had to wait him out. Or force his hand.
He looked at the pod. The warm light. The story inside. Lin's hand tapping in the water. The blue sample. The failed, mutating cleanup. All of it, a few yards away, separated by a sheet of metal and a pane of glass.
And a sniper's line of sight.
He made a decision. It wasn't tactical. It was a rejection of the trap's logic. If the routine was predictable, he would break the routine in the most fundamental way.
He stood up. He stepped out from behind the fan housing into the open, fully visible on the rooftop against the darkening sky. He made no attempt to hide. He simply stood there, facing the direction of the glint.
He raised his hands, slowly, to shoulder height. A universal sign. He was not advancing. He was not threatening. He was presenting himself.
For a long minute, nothing happened. The wind picked up, whistling over the gravel. Then, a figure detached itself from the shadows on the distant warehouse roof. Sol stood up. Even at this distance, his posture was relaxed, assured. He raised a hand, not in greeting, but in acknowledgment. *I see you.*
Then Sol pointed. Not at Kael. At the maintenance pod.
The message was clear. *She is the objective. You are a secondary complication. Stand down, or become primary.*
Kael didn't move. He stood between Sol and the pod, a human shield of negligible value. He knew Sol's file. Sol would not negotiate. He would calculate the simplest path to the objective. A single, high-velocity round through Kael's center mass would clear the path, and a second through the pod's window would end the story. The ordnance would be untraceable. Two bodies on a derelict roof. Just another piece of urban decay.
Kael slowly lowered his right hand, keeping his left raised. With his right, he pointed to his own chest, then made a sharp, cutting motion across his throat. Then he pointed at Sol, and made a "come here" gesture.
He was offering a trade. Himself for her. A straightforward transaction. He was the defect. She was just a loose end. Containing the defect was the higher priority for the system. He was betting Sol's logic would see the efficiency in it: eliminate the unpredictable variable first, then the static target.
On the distant roof, Sol seemed to consider. He lowered his pointing hand. Then he nodded once.
He was accepting the trade.
Sol turned and disappeared from the roof edge. He was coming down, to cross the gap, to close the distance for a clean, quiet termination. Kael had bought minutes at most.
He turned and ran for the maintenance pod.