The sky was bleeding orange when they moved.

  Dawn cracked the skyline like a blade, spilling pale light across the concrete bones of Rochester. Smoke drifted lazily through the air, tinged with ash and the sharp sting of chemical fire. Below, the fires from the night raid still smoldered—glowing like scars left behind by giants.

  James stood first, HK raised, boots crunching softly over broken gravel and rusted rebar. The rooftop was silent except for the wind.

  He raised a hand in a silent signal, halting them near the western ventilation hatch—low, scorched, half-covered in soot. Better this than descending the exterior ladder into a likely killbox.

  Ghost stepped forward without a word. She crouched beside the hatch, fingertips brushing along its corroded surface, then retrieved a micro-spike from her rig and pressed it into the panel with a smooth, practiced motion. Her pupils vanished behind a pale blue glow as she synced in.

  Seconds passed.

  The lock gave a soft chirp. Unlatched.

  Ghost rose without a word. “We’re in.”

  Wrench grunted as he pulled the hatch open. Cold air spilled out from the shaft, thick with the scent of mold, oil, and something metallic beneath it—old blood.

  James dropped in first. The vent groaned under his weight, but his movement was quiet. Controlled. He led the way through the shaft, his body low, rifle angled downward. No light, save for the faint, eerie gleam of his own eyes—bioluminescent blue in the dark.

  The shaft bent sharply, then widened slightly. Ahead, a vent panel filtered light into the duct. James crept to it and paused.

  Below, a lone guard stood beneath the vent, lazily smoking with one hand on his hip, his rifle slung too low across his back. Complacent. Tired. Alive for now.

  James shifted his weight.

  With a harsh wrench of metal, he kicked the vent panel free. It clattered to the floor below. The guard looked up just in time to see James land on top of him.

  The knife entered just below the eye socket, sharp and deep. The man went limp without a sound.

  Above, Ghost peered down through the now open vent, blue eyes catching the faint light.

  James gave her a nod, waving her down.

  She dropped without hesitation. He caught her clean, lowering her to the floor without a sound.

  For a moment, her glowing eyes met his—almost the same color. A flicker of amusement passed between them.

  “Matching eyes,” she muttered. “Creepy.”

  James smirked faintly. “Yours glow a darker blue.”

  “Better tech,” she whispered, already slipping past him, silent as shadow.

  “Mine aren’t tech”

  Inside, the building was still.

  The old government facility had been repurposed by the CVC, but its bones hadn’t changed—long corridors, peeling paint, rusted security doors. Concrete walls and sagging ceiling tiles stained from years of neglect. The scent of mildew, oil, and old wiring clung to every surface. Cartel tags lined the walls—angry, jagged symbols scrawled over the faded insignias of whatever agency used to own this place.

  They moved like phantoms.

  James took point, rifle low, barrel tracking every corner and shadow. Ghost followed close behind, silent as ever. Wrench brought up the gear mid-stack, with Rios and Elias covering rear. The hallway ahead glowed with flickering emergency lights—red and amber strobes pulsing from recessed floor panels. A camera hung above like a corpse, its wires dangling where someone had yanked them out.

  Sloppy work.

  “Left corridor should lead to the main stairwell,” Ghost whispered over comms. “But it’s gridlocked. Motion sensors and heat traps—old but functional.”

  “Detour?” James asked.

  “There’s a forgotten maintenance tunnel two floors down,” she said. “It’s not on current maps, but IR shows a clear line. Might be a ratline. Might be a killbox.”

  “Everything’s a bloody trap,” Rios muttered from the rear.

  James raised a brow beneath his glasses.

  “‘Bloody’? What are you, a communist?”

  Rios didn’t respond. Ghost just snorted faintly over the link.

  They pressed on

  Footsteps.

  Slow. Measured. Just one pair.

  James raised two fingers, a silent command. The team froze.

  A lone guard wandered past the corridor intersection—a sleeveless vest hanging loose over a wiry frame, break-action shotgun slung casually over one shoulder. He was whistling. Tuneless. Aimless. His shadow stretched long along the wall as he passed... but he never turned. Never saw them.

  When the sound faded, James moved first. The others followed without a word, pivoting down the hallway from which the guard had come.

  The corridor sloped gently downward, claustrophobic and stale. Malfunctioning emergency lights buzzed overhead, pulsing dim amber in erratic bursts. It was just enough illumination to keep moving, just enough shadow to make it feel like the dark was watching.

  Each step echoed softly—concrete under boot, damp and uneven. The deeper they went, the more the building’s age began to bleed through. Chipped tiles. Exposed rebar. Water stains spiderwebbed across the ceiling like veins. The air was thick, carrying the smell of rust, mildew, and something older… something rotting beneath the surface.

  Wrench broke the silence. “Feels like the place itself wants us gone.”

  “Too bad we’re not polite guests,” Ghost murmured, her voice barely more than breath, lips curving in a dry smirk.

  Ahead, tucked behind a mound of collapsed storage and a half-rotted biohazard tarp, was a sealed maintenance door. Low, rusted, nearly hidden.

  Ghost stepped forward, already reaching for her uplink module. The device in her hand hissed softly as it powered up, cords snaking out from her wrist ports. She crouched beside the control panel and plugged in. Her pupils vanished behind a soft electric blue glow as her augment interface kicked in, code streaming across her retinas.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  James moved to cover, rifle up, sweeping the corridor with slow, precise arcs.

  Behind them, Elias shifted his weight with a nervous rustle of gear. “This doesn’t feel right.”

  “It’s not,” Rios replied flatly, barely glancing at him. “That’s why it’ll probably work.”

  A soft chime. The door unlocked with a wheeze of old hydraulics.

  Ghost rose to her feet. “We’re in.”

  With a soft hiss,

  the door groaned open, exhaling stale air like a tomb disturbed. The maintenance corridor stretched into darkness—no lights, just hanging wires, waterlogged tile, and the reek of decay. The scent hit first—metal, mildew, and something like wet concrete left to rot.

  A few ancient maintenance drones sat slumped in the corners like corpses, their corroded chassis covered in dust, optic lenses long since shattered.

  Flashlights clicked on in sequence—thin beams slicing through the gloom. James moved first, rifle raised, sweeping vents, pipes, and exposed wiring with clinical precision. The corridor was tight. Cramped. It felt less like a hallway and more like the artery of some dead industrial beast—alive only in memory, choking on dust.

  Halfway through, a sound cut the quiet.

  A faint metallic rattle.

  Then... boots.

  Distant. Muffled. Moving across old tile overhead.

  James raised a fist.

  The team froze, breath held.

  The sound passed. Overhead. Faint. Fading.

  Probably just a patrol.

  Hopefully.

  They moved again, each step softer than the last.

  Eventually, they reached a junction. The path split—narrow stairwell to the left leading upward, and a corridor branching right toward an old storage wing. Ghost stepped toward the stairs.

  James stopped her with a hand to her shoulder.

  He crouched, scanning the steps, eyes tracing each cracked tile, each fracture in the concrete.

  There.

  A seam that didn’t belong. Hair-thin. Clean.

  A pressure plate.

  He stood slowly, expression unreadable. “You were right,” he murmured. “It’s a ratline.”

  Wrench knelt beside him. “How bad?”

  James pointed. “Can’t see the full setup, but it’s wired tight. Could be an alarm. Could be worse.”

  “Detour?” Elias asked, trying—and failing—to sound casual.

  James didn’t respond right away. His eyes stayed on the trap, calculating. Searching.

  When he spoke, his voice was flat. Cold. “No detour. We move carefully. Eyes open. That one’s meant to be spotted. It’s bait—makes you miss the one behind it.”

  Ghost’s eyes narrowed. “Clever bastard.”

  “Yeah,” James muttered, rising again. “Let’s see if he’s as clever when he’s bleeding out from a slit throat.”

  James took point, stepping carefully over the pressure trap. He turned back, voice low and steady beneath the hum of exposed wiring.

  “Follow my exact footsteps.”

  The deeper they moved, the more the corridor changed. The structure was still concrete at its core, but someone had been doing surgery. Wires—old and new—ran like arteries along the walls, some neatly bundled, others hacked and twisted. A few still carried faint pulses of energy, humming with intermittent life.

  James raised a fist—halt.

  “Trip-laser,” he said, nodding toward the faint shimmer just past the junction.

  The beam hung barely above ankle level, nearly invisible. Ghost swept her scanner forward, eyes narrowing as another alert pinged.

  “Pressure switch,” she murmured, pointing at a warped tile just beyond it.

  Wrench marked the spot with a quick streak of chalk. “Too damn clean,” he muttered. “Someone’s been maintaining this mess.”

  James nodded once, grim. “Means they know about this corridor—and how it could be used.”

  As they rounded the next bend, the air shifted. Colder. Wetter. Like stepping into a crypt. The stench of mildew and ozone clung to everything. Ghost’s data-slate flickered, static crawling across the screen.

  “Signal’s degrading,” she said. “Something’s jamming HUDs and comms the deeper we go.”

  “We still good on the map?” Rios asked from the rear, eyes tracing the ceiling.

  “For now,” Ghost replied, tone clipped.

  They reached a floor-wide metal grate. James crouched and ran a hand over the corroded mesh.

  “This is where the drones would’ve exited the tunnel,” he murmured.

  Elias stepped a little too far to the side—and the rust beneath his boot shrieked.

  Everyone froze.

  Then—clang.

  A panel gave way and slammed to the concrete below in a blast of rust and dust. The sound echoed like a gunshot down the tunnel.

  Rios reacted instantly—he grabbed Elias by the collar and yanked him back with a snarl. The kid stumbled, eyes wide, breath caught.

  “Watch where you step,” Rios hissed.

  Elias gave a shaky nod, shame painted across his face.

  James didn’t look back. He just kept walking—jaw tight, eyes cold. Someone would of had to hear that they now were on a time limit.

  The corridor came to an end with another reinforced access door, its panel dark and coated in layers of grime. Ghost tapped at her slate—static. No map. No signals. Just the faint pulse of her uplink, warbled and weak.

  “This should spit us out into the command room,” she whispered, eyes narrowing at the flickering screen.

  James didn’t respond. He stepped forward, nudging the door open with the barrel of his rifle. It creaked inward on old hinges with a low groan, releasing a gust of stale air from beyond.

  The team followed him in, one by one.

  The command room yawned before them—larger than expected, deeper than it had looked on schematics. A vaulted ceiling stretched overhead, crosshatched with thick pipes and cable bundles like exposed veins. The walls were cluttered with old security monitors, most long dead, their screens cracked or glowing with weak static. A few still twitched with fuzzy feeds—grainy shots of corridors they had already cleared. Too grainy.

  At the room’s center sat a massive horseshoe-shaped table, the kind used for military coordination once upon a time. Now, it was a patchwork of retrofitted CVC tech—glitching holoprojectors, stacks of scavenged ammo, scattered datapads still blinking on low power.

  But it was empty.

  No officers. No guards. No aides. No commander.

  Nothing.

  Just the faint hum of powered-down machinery and the lingering heat of a space recently used.

  James raised a clenched fist. Hold.

  No one spoke. No one moved.

  “Clear,” Rios finally said, his voice tight, sweeping the far wall. “No heat signatures.”

  “That’s not comforting,” Ghost muttered. She moved toward the nearest console, her fingers brushing over the scorched casing. Her implants flickered as she scanned the equipment. “No signals. No uplink activity. This whole setup’s been dead for hours.”

  Wrench crouched near the power conduits, yanking back a crate to reveal exposed wires and a stripped junction box. “They gutted it. Left a shell. Like they knew we’d come here.”

  James didn’t speak. His eyes roamed the room slowly now—less for threats, more for inconsistencies. He wasn’t listening for noise.

  He was listening for absence.

  The silence was too deliberate. Too curated.

  Then his gaze lifted—upper corner of the ceiling. A small, circular vent. Open. Too clean. No airflow. No dust.

  His voice dropped into a harsh whisper.

  “Shit. Everyone—back into the tunnel.”

  But before they could move—

  CLANG.

  The door behind them slammed shut with a mechanical slam, echoing like the sound of a steel guillotine.

  Locks engaged. A low hiss filled the chamber, followed by a mechanical thunk from above.

  Red strobes burst to life, bathing the room in pulses of crimson.

  “Ambush,” James muttered.

  Wrench dove to his satchel. “Thirty seconds, I can breach the east exit!”

  He never got the chance.

  Gunfire erupted from the ceiling vents.

  The first burst shredded the far console—sparks burst like fireworks. The second volley swept low, scattering debris and punching into the floor near Ghost’s boots. She dove sideways, sliding behind the central table as rounds tore through the air above her.

  “CONTACT!” Rios barked, opening fire toward the vents.

  Figures dropped through the ceiling—three at first, then five more. Shadows in matte black armor, CVC insignias barely visible under digital camo. They moved like they’d rehearsed it a hundred times. Suppressed SMGs barked in controlled bursts. Flashbangs bounced across the floor.

  Visors gleamed in the red light.

  The room lit up in chaos.

  They had walked into the lion’s den—and now the lion was home.