BLOODCAPE

The weather station loomed above Sector Eleven like a relic from another theology — part shrine, part ruin. It stood crooked on its plateau of steel, overlooking the city’s soft lattice of fog and flickering light. Shattered vent ducts hissed in the wind. Rusted turbines slept in coils. And above it all, the sky churned with synthetic cloud formations — a swirling tapestry of forecasted memory and quiet dread.

Dekra crouched beside a tangle of junction panels near the tower’s skeletal base, fiber lines trailing from her sleeve like borrowed nerves. Her eyes glowed dimly as glyphs crawled across her retinas — sickly, stuttering blue.

Aya watched her from a few paces away, one hand resting near her sidearm. "I thought this station was disconnected."

"It is," Dekra murmured. "Or it was. Scorpio re-looped it through a ghost node we blacklisted last cycle."

"Looped for what?" Iro asked, pacing behind them with his rifle lowered but not relaxed.

Dekra didn’t look up. "Empathy splices."

Hernan, silent until now, tilted his head. "What the hell is that?"

With a flick of her gauntlet, Dekra pushed the raw data into visual render. What had been glyphs became curved pulse maps — jagged spikes and troughs, as though someone were measuring emotion in blood pressure.

"He’s not broadcasting ideology anymore," she said. "He’s broadcasting you. Or fragments of you. Feelings harvested from your behavior—admiration, fear, trust, command presence. Snapshots of emotional response patterns taken from before the fracture."

Aya’s voice dropped. "He’s reprogramming the city using Hernan’s soul."

"No," Dekra replied. "He’s using something better. Their memory of Hernan’s soul."