BLOODCAPE

The hallway lights of Tower Four were dimmed to their after-hours setting—soft blue glows under the floor trim, just enough to navigate by without triggering the motion sensors. Hernan moved like a whisper through the steel corridor, wearing civilian sweats and a gray hoodie stitched with "D6 Memorial Team." Just another off-duty hero burning midnight time.

But tucked beneath his arm was a matte-black utility tablet encased in signal-dampening foam—Nico’s stealth rig, jury-rigged for silent uplinks and hidden access.

He passed no one.

The lab was four levels below surface, marked Tactical Comms Archive A17, protected by a retinal scan, key code, and voice verification. Hernan bypassed all three with a chained override loop Nico had reluctantly coded months ago "for emergencies."

This qualified.

The door hissed open. Hernan stepped inside.

The room was a vault—walls lined with crystalline uplink pillars, their interior tech glowing faintly, as if dreaming. An inactive holotable rested in the center, surrounded by four cushioned observation chairs. No windows. No cameras. Just ghosts of digital records.

He moved quickly.

The rig’s tether latched into a hard port, and green text filled the air around him, refracted by light-glass. His eyes scanned the threads: timestamps, mission IDs, metadata tags, sender-receiver logs.

Then:Z-07 > Z-05 // PRIORITY LINK // CHANNEL CLOSEDTimestamp: Six weeks ago.

Hernan froze.