BLOODCAPE

The archive hadn’t changed — but everything inside it had.

The schematics rotated slowly above the central vault platform like a solar system of dead bones, skeletal rings of kinetic maps circling a black data core at the center. The light they cast wasn’t warm. It was surgical. Cold.

In that silence, the plans to breach Scorpio’s final vault looked less like a strategy and more like an autopsy in progress.

Dekra moved through the projections with casual authority, her fingers leaving faint afterimages as she selected three different access paths and stretched them into a triangular pattern.

"Three routes," she said. "One still breathes. One’s rigged to devour you from the inside out. The last one caved in two years ago — not from damage, from abandonment. If you guess wrong, I’m not dragging your nervous system back in a sack."

Iro crouched nearby, unspooling a long case of concussive charges. He wasn’t tense — just focused, the way he always got before entering a place designed to erase people instead of kill them. His voice stayed flat.

"The trap’s on B?"

"Confirmed," Dekra said. "But it’s not a bomb. It’s a recursive echo array — Scorpio’s version of a memory prison. Walk in, and your perception loops. You think you’re leaving, but you never did."

"Zodiac ghost tech," Iro muttered. "Didn’t think that was ever field-ready."

"It wasn’t," she said. "But he didn’t care about readiness. He cared about proof."

In the rear corner of the archive, Aya sat at an auxiliary console alone, low light sliding across her features. She had the biometric readout of the courier Hernan killed displayed again — frozen on a single frame. Not the moment the blade struck, but the one just before. The courier’s eyes — mid-shift, jaw tense, something too human flickering in the fear. Something familiar.