[Ilya] "Lie?"
His tone carried genuine offence, or something performing it well enough that the difference didn't matter.
[Ilya] "I never lied. He was just some guy hiding in the dark luring people in."
He gestured vaguely back toward the tunnel.
[Ilya] "A mad man. What do you think happens to someone who lives that long? It drives them crazy. They lose their mind."
A beat.
[Ilya] "They lose their humanity."
She looked at him for a long moment. The kind of look that didn't need words to make its point.
A sigh escaped him.
[Fox] "Whatever."
She walked past him into the tunnel, boots finding the uneven ground without hesitation.
[Fox] "So."
Her voice carried hack to him, flat and practical.
[Fox] "We have to dig our way out then?"
**
Far from the rail yard, far from the tunnels and the atrium and the wooden chair left empty in the dark, a room held its breath.
No windows. No natural light. Just a screen on the far wall casting its pale glow across half a dozen figures arranged in silence. White and red robes, worn with the ease of a second skin. Veils that left faces mostly shadow, some lined with age, some smooth, all carrying the same fixed stillness of people gathered around a shared conviction.
They studied the screen without speaking.
Messages. A chain of them, each one scrutinized, cross-referenced, turned over for anything useful buried in the phrasing. Progress was slow. Progress was always slow at this stage. Their mole was still too low, too new, too visible to move carelessly.
They could wait.
They had been waiting longer than most people managed to stay alive.
The screen flickered once. Someone reached forward and scrolled down without a word.
Outside the bunker, the ruins of what had been a nuclear shelter complex stretched in every direction: concrete bones half-swallowed by soil, corridors that led nowhere, chambers that remembered a purpose they no longer served. The figures had made it their own. Dust settled on everything here with the patience of decades.
Their plan wouldn't bear fruit until she climbed higher.
**
She and Ilya emerged into grey afternoon light, covered in tunnel dust. She brushed grit from her sleeve and pulled up the map on her terminal, orienting herself. They had been assigned to a ruined city not too far from the Arcwater Ribbon. The waterlogged city was only a couple dozen kilometers out.
She studied the route without comment.
[Fox] "Victor seemed to know you."
She kept her eyes on the screen.
[Fox] "Is there some history I should know about?"
Ilya walked beside her, hands in his pockets. A moment passed before he answered.
[Ilya] "We met a while back. Same way you did, I stumbled into one of his tunnels."
His tone was measured. Giving her just enough.
[Ilya] "He seemed friendly enough at the time. But something about it sat wrong with me afterward. The whole meeting felt arranged. Like he already knew where to wait. Like he'd mapped out exactly where I'd be and just let me walk into it."
She looked up from the terminal.
[Fox] "You two don't seem to be on good terms."
[Ilya] "We're not."
[Fox] "Not going to elaborate?"
Silence settled between them, comfortable on his end and less so on hers. He had the particular stillness of someone who had decided the conversation was finished.
She looked back at the map.
They walked the rest if the way without much talk.
**
The shelter looked like nothing from the outside.
A workshop, weathered and unremarkable, the kind of building that accumulated grime and rust simply by existing long enough. Easy to walk past. Only if you knew where to look did the hidden plating reveal itself. Layered beneath the facade, flush against the walls, the concealed profiles of turrets that had never needed to fire because nobody had ever found them worth investigating.
They slipped in through the garage.
Her turret arms sat on a charging pod near the back wall, exactly where she had left them. She crossed to them and ran a gloved hand along the seam where the housing met the mounting bracket.
Her thoughts drifted to the Tidebreaker.
She hadn't owned it long enough to earn a real attachment. A few weeks of operation, a handful of engagements, one staged ambush that had traded it away as the price of entry. But it had been hers. She had claimed it, maintained it, learned the particular hesitation in its read-left leg that appeared when the hydraulics ran cold. Small things. The kind that accumulated into something resembling ownership.
She didn't know who had it now. The Church, recovering their prop from the performance she had staged for them. Or the Swarm, opportunistic, sweeping up whatever the battle had left behind.
Either way, it was gone.
She let her hand drop.
The Church.
The thought arrived with a familiar pull. She had a report to send. Information gathered, observations made, the slow accumulation of detail that justified her presence here in their eyes. She was, after all, only here to serve as a mole. That was the arrangement.
But not tonight.
The shelter's walls made her careful. She didn't know the full reach of the Swarm's monitoring, what they intercepted, what they flagged, how closely they watched their newer recruits. Sending anything from the inside was a risk she wasn't ready to take.
Tomorrow. On the mission, outside, with distance and noise and the legitimate cover of fieldwork between her and anything that might be listening.
Tomorrow. She didn't want the Swarm to intercept her messages. Not yet.