BLOODCAPE

The city was wrong.

Not broken. Not burning. Just... wrong.

They emerged from the Zodiac freight tunnel in silence, boots thudding softly against concrete slick with condensation. Hernan blinked into the open space of the Sector Nine transit corridor, where sodium-vapor lights once bathed commuters in washed-out yellow. Now, the lights pulsed faint blue, rhythmic, wrong — like breath being held just a little too long.

Aya stepped out behind him. Iro followed, rifle half-slung, scanning rooftops without being told. Dekra came last, her cloak trailing like smoke, collecting ambient noise like static.

Nothing had changed in structure. The signs were the same. The benches. The distant echo of a train along an unseen line. But everything else — the feel of it — had shifted. The atmosphere was layered now, like another version of the city had been painted thinly over this one, and the new paint hadn’t dried.

"Lighting grid’s off by thirty-two nanoseconds," Iro muttered, eyes on his HUD. "They rewired the tempo."

"Why?" Aya asked.

"To make people feel unsettled," Dekra said. "It makes them more likely to accept new certainties when offered."

A vendor stall that used to sell synth-noodles now displayed prefab armor patches emblazoned with a sleek, abstracted emblem — an angular "E" formed from broken chain-links. Above it, a screen flickered in perfect intervals.

ECHO DEPLOYMENT READINESS: TRUST WHAT’S RETURNED.

Aya’s jaw tightened. "We weren’t gone long enough for this."