BLOODCAPE

The medical wing had the look of something time tried to erase and failed.

What was left behind wasn’t ruin — it was memory residue. Peeling antiseptic-white walls, scorched tiles, empty beds with straps still half-buckled. The air stank of dried synthetic dopamine and ozone, like the ghost of emotion trapped in chemical aftertaste.

They moved through it without speaking. Hernan kept his eyes forward. Aya flanked left, hand near her sidearm. Iro took up the rear, his rifle cradled but alert. Dekra led, cloak whispering behind her like a rumor no one wanted to hear out loud.

She stopped at a dead-end corridor, face-to-face with a doorway half-swallowed by the bedrock. The hazard glyph above it—bio-radiation—was long dead. The frame had buckled slightly inward, like the mountain had tried to reclaim it.

Dekra didn’t hesitate. She pulled back a rusted access panel, slid two copper prongs from her gauntlet, and inserted them. The doorway hissed as if sighing in relief. Then it opened.

"Welcome to the womb," she said without a trace of irony.

Inside, the space was circular and windowless. Red floor-strip lighting pulsed faintly, just enough to illuminate the therapy chairs bolted in a semi-circle. There were six. All ancient. All stained. One still had dried blood curled like ivy across the headrest.

In the center stood a neural interface spire — dull black, coiled with fiber and memory filament. It buzzed faintly, as if sensing company for the first time in decades.

"This was Zodiac’s Splinter Anchor Node," Dekra said, approaching the spire with almost reverent caution. "They didn’t use this for healing. They used it for... rewriting."

Aya wrinkled her nose. "Smells like old tears."

"Smells like what people wanted to believe instead of what happened," Dekra corrected. "This was where broken agents came to be ’fixed’ by being rewritten. One false memory. One fracture deep enough to bury all others."