The city didn't just go on lockdown; it went dark. By the time the SUV screeched into the basement of a condemned apartment complex in the industrial fringe, every major intersection was crawling with armored "Peacekeeper" units.
"Everyone out," Ashley commanded, killing the engine. The silence that followed was heavy, broken only by the ticking of the cooling metal.
They hiked up six flights of stairs to a "safehouse" that was effectively a concrete box with one window and a door that looked like it had been kicked in and repaired with spite.
"Home sweet home," Lily chirped, dropping her overstuffed backpack onto the floor. "Dibgs on the beanbag! Oh wait, there isn't one. I'll take the rug."
"There's one bed," Leon noted, eyeing the mattress in the corner that looked older than the building itself. "And four of us. I'm not a math genius, but Adrien, you're the numbers guy. How does this work?"
"It doesn't," Adrien said, already clearing a space on a wooden crate for his laptop. "No one sleeps. We have six hours before the satellite sweep resets. We need to merge the data from the gala with the Red File."
Ashley leaned against the door, her arms crossed. Her crimson hair was disheveled, a single strand falling over her eye. "He's right. If we don't bridge the gap between my parents' chemical formulas and your encryption keys, we're just four people waiting to get caught."
"Fine," Leon sighed, sitting on the floor and leaning his back against the bedframe. "But if I start snoring, it's a tactical distraction."
The air in the room shifted. The rivalry wasn't gone—the tension between Apex and Vane Tech still crackled like static—but the shared threat was a stronger glue. They began to work. Adrien and Lily sat back-to-back on the floor, a chaotic web of cables connecting their devices, while Leon kept watch at the window, his silhouette a dark shadow against the flickering neon of the city.