BLOODCAPE

At first, the corridor felt like nothing.

The air was dry and over-filtered, every molecule scrubbed by decades of dormant sterilizers. The walls were clean to the point of aggression — flat, featureless white stretching outward on either side, broken only by the soft pulse of embedded floor panels, which flickered faintly beneath each step. No doorways. No consoles. No lights beyond the ones reacting to their bodies.

Aya stepped cautiously beside Hernan, boots scuffing the floor with a low hiss. Iro followed at her six. No one spoke. The silence wasn’t heavy — it was watching.

The first flicker came when Hernan passed the fourth panel.

A ripple across the left-hand wall — like oil behind glass — and then an image snapped into existence: grainy, desaturated, the way a memory looks when it’s been stored too long. It showed a Zodiac unit moving through a ruined alleyway. But none of them were from this team. Not even the same generation. One of them was crying. Another raised a gun.

Then it vanished.

Aya halted. "Did you see that?"

Iro scanned the wall. "Thermal’s dead. It’s not projection tech."

"It’s reactive memory material," Hernan muttered. "Zodiac used it in interrogation cells."

"Why would they line a vault with it?" Aya asked.

"Because it doesn’t record what’s happening," he said. "It records what should be remembered."