The sublevel command lobe of District 6 was buried beneath three layers of reinforced blind protocols — below the active Mercury signal array, beneath the vault servers, below even the traceable mesh of the satellite-linked HeroNet shell.
It was quiet here. Not sterile—ancient. The air felt heavy, filtered too many times, dense with heat rot from walls no longer maintained. It smelled faintly of solder, and smoke that no one had lit.
Most operatives didn't know it existed.
Those who did had signed things that weren't technically legal, and served things that weren't officially defined.
Hernan stood alone in the command crucible—an interface chamber shaped like a broken hexagon, sloped walls studded with shutdown IO ports and archaic command rails from an earlier era. He didn't switch the lights on. Just walked through the blue-streaked dark with the precision of someone who had walked it in dreams.
