The black hovercar cut the engine and glided silently into the shadow of a derelict ventilation tower on the edge of Sector D-6.
The moment the hatch opened, the difference in the air was violent.
Gone was the chaotic, living stench of the Ghost Market—the sweat, the spice, the rust. Here, the air was dead. It was frigid, filtered, and smelled intensely of Industrial Bleach.
Vance stepped out, his leather boots crunching on clean, grey gravel. He adjusted his collar against the biting wind and looked up.
To his synesthetic senses, the smell of bleach wasn't just a chemical; it was the scent of Paranoia. It was the smell of a crime scene scrubbed too perfectly, layers of disinfectant trying to hide the rot underneath.
"It's too quiet," Cerberus whispered, standing beside Vance. The boy in black tactical gear looked uncomfortable. His instincts, honed in the blood-soaked Arena, were screaming. In the wild, total silence usually meant a predator was watching.
"It's not quiet. It's just... holding its breath."
Vance adjusted his sunglasses. Through the lenses, aided by the data chip Old Ghost had provided, the world was overlaid with a complex web of augmented reality data.
In the distance, piercing the gloom, stood the All-Seeing Surveillance Center. It was a massive, needle-like tower covered in thousands of hexagonal glass panels. It looked like the compound eye of a giant fly, reflecting the cold lights of the district, staring unblinkingly at the ants crawling below.
"Envy controls 80% of the cameras in District 9," Vance said, his voice low, breath clouding in the cold air. "He knows who sleeps with whom, who steals rations, who whispers rebellion in the dark. He hoards these secrets like a dragon hoards gold."
"But dragons always have a weakness. They think their scales are impenetrable."
Vance tapped his temple. "Let's go. We have a show to start."
They moved to the service entrance marked on the blueprint. It was a heavy blast door, painted a clinical white.
Vance pulled out the cloned electronic key. Beep. The light turned green. The door hissed open, revealing a hallway that stretched out like the throat of a giant, pale beast.
The interior was terrifyingly pristine. The floor was tiled in white ceramic, the walls were white polymer, and the lights were a harsh, shadowless fluorescent glare.
"Welcome to the White Tomb," Vance murmured.
He stopped Cerberus with a hand gesture before they took a single step inside.
"Don't move. Look."
Vance pointed down the empty corridor. To the naked eye, it was just a hallway. But Vance's eyes were tracking something else.
Every five meters, a spherical camera hung from the ceiling. They were sleek, black orbs, rotating silently in their sockets.
"Argus AI System," Vance analyzed, his eyes darting behind his sunglasses. "It processes visual data from three thousand cameras simultaneously. It claims to have no blind spots."
On his retinal display, red cones of vision swept across the floor like searchlights. They overlapped, shifted, and covered every inch of the tiles. It looked like a chaotic storm of red light.
But Vance closed his eyes for a second, inhaling deeply.
Under the overwhelming bleach, he caught a faint, rhythmic scent. It smelled like Ozone and Hot Copper.
It was the smell of the servers processing data. The smell of the machine's heartbeat.
"Randomness is a lie," Vance opened his eyes, a sharp grin appearing. "The cameras rotate based on a pseudo-random algorithm. But the server has a cooling cycle. Every time it switches focus, there is a 0.5-second processing lag."
"See that?" Vance pointed to the third camera.
Whir-click. The camera jerked to the left.
"It moves. It stops. Then it transmits. In that gap between the stop and the transmit... the hallway doesn't exist to the AI."
Vance pulled a vial of high-concentration aerosol spray from his belt.
"Equipment check. Anti-infrared coating?"
Cerberus nodded, tapping his chest armor. "Applied."
"Good. Remember the rhythm. Don't look at the cameras. Look at my feet. Where I step, you step. When I freeze, you freeze. You are not a person tonight, Cerberus. You are my shadow."
Vance popped a cube of high-glucose sugar into his mouth, crunching it loudly. The sweetness rushed to his brain, fueling the overclocked engine inside his skull. The phantom pain in his neural port began to throb—a warning that he was about to push his limits.
"Three... two... one... Mark."
Vance moved.
He didn't run. Running was predictable. He slid forward, his movement jagged and unnatural.
He stepped onto the first white tile. Above him, a camera whirred, its black lens swinging directly toward him.
To any human guard watching a monitor, Vance was about to be spotted.
But just as the lens locked onto his coordinates, Vance shifted his weight. He froze mid-step, his body contorted at a strange angle, perfectly hiding in the shadow cast by a support pillar.
The camera stared at him for 0.1 seconds. The AI processed the frame.
[Analysis: Shadow. Threat: Null.]
The camera swung away.
"Move," Vance hissed.
Cerberus glided forward, his boots silent. He occupied the exact space Vance had just vacated.
They moved down the hallway in a bizarre, broken waltz. Step, pause, slide left, freeze. To an outside observer, they would look like a glitch in a video file, stuttering through reality.
Suddenly, Vance stopped dead.
He held up a fist. Cerberus froze instantly, balancing on one leg like a statue.
"Lasers," Vance whispered. "Full spectrum. Invisible."
He sprayed the aerosol into the air.
Hiss.
As the fine mist settled, a deadly web of red lines materialized in the empty air ahead. The laser grid was dense, shifting in a complex, undulating pattern like a living net made of light.
"Variable frequency," Vance murmured, his eyes tracking the beams, sweat beading on his forehead. "It changes every 1.2 seconds. Touch one, and the turrets drop from the ceiling."
The grid shifted. Vertical bars became horizontal. Then a crosshatch. It was a meat grinder waiting for meat.
But Vance smelled it again. A sudden spike of Burnt Sugar.
The laser emitters were old. When the pattern reset, the capacitors needed a fraction of a second to recharge.
"There's a tear in the net," Vance said, his voice tight. "When the grid resets, the bottom three beams flicker off for exactly 0.2 seconds."
He looked at Cerberus. "Can you slide under a 30-centimeter gap in 0.2 seconds?"
The boy didn't answer. He just lowered his center of gravity, his muscles coiling like compressed springs.
Vance watched the shimmering red web. He counted the rhythm of the burnt sugar scent pulsing in the air.
Pulse. Pulse. Pulse.
"Now!"
Cerberus launched.
The boy didn't just slide; he became a blur of black ink. He shot across the polished tiles, flat on his back, sliding under the lethal grid exactly as the bottom lasers blinked out.
His nose was inches from the deadly red light above him.
He rolled to his feet on the other side, safe.
Vance followed. He didn't slide. He waited for the next reset, the scent of burnt sugar peaking in his nose.
He jumped.
It was a leap of faith into a mathematical gap. His trench coat flared. For a split second, he was suspended in the middle of the laser web.
Click. The grid reset.
The lasers reappeared, humming with lethal energy. But Vance was already on the other side, landing silently beside Cerberus.
Behind them, the red net glowed angrily, slicing the empty air where they had just been.
Vance exhaled a long breath, wiping a trickle of blood from his nose. His brain felt like it was vibrating.
"Level 1 cleared," Vance whispered, a manic grin spreading across his face. "But the real headache starts now. The eyes were just the appetizer."
He pointed to the corridor ahead, where the walls changed from smooth plastic to sound-absorbing foam.
"Next... are the ears."