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Deadlands Perimeter / Fringe of Zone Grey-6

Cycle 25:29 / High Alert Period

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The sky bled orange and green in soft pulses overhead-too slow to be called lightning, too constant to be natural. Somewhere behind the clouds, Olympia's floating citadel pulsed like a phantom sun. Its light never touched the ground.

Hsiao crouched behind the ribcage of a rusted exo-loader, breath tight behind his cracked rebreather. A warning glyph flickered across the corner of his visor-

Zone Grey-6 Perimeter / Entry Forbidden / Termination Protocols Active...

The phrase termination protocols didn't mean "turn back." It meant: No warnings. No arrests. No IDs. Just light. And then ash.

He adjusted the cloak Dekra gave him. It hung stiff against his frame, soaked with camo-baffle dust and desperation. A low hum came from the east-drone sweep incoming.

He had maybe ninety seconds to cross the kill-field.

Beyond it?

The buried transit line.

The ghost rail.

A decayed artery once used by Dynasty supply lines-now forgotten beneath collapsed tunnelwork and magnetic waste.

If he made it there, he'd be inside the perimeter.

If not... well. The system was good at making people disappear. It had done it to him once already.

He sprinted low across the mud-cracked basin. The old synth-asphalt hissed beneath his boots, reacting to the heat of his steps. Static jumped across his arms. His subdermal filaments flared briefly-bright, blue, like a beacon.

Too bright.

"Shit," he cursed under his breath, yanking the cloak tighter.

The fabric hissed as it overcompensated, flooding itself with decoy pulses-a tactic that hadn't been tested since the Collapse.

Behind him, the low whir of the drone patrol shifted pitch. Its sensors flared red in his HUD overlay.

Detection imminent...

Hsiao dove behind a sloped slab of ferroglass just as the patrol swept over. Its spotlight cut through the ash-mist like a scalpel, hunting.

Then-

A pause.

The light lingered on the edge of the slab.

Hsiao stopped breathing.

His muscles screamed, but he didn't move. Not a twitch.

A second passed.

Then another.

The drone emitted a small, warbling click.

Query rejected...

It moved on.

Hsiao waited five more seconds-longer than needed-before crawling on his stomach toward the broken drainage grate embedded in the hillside beyond. The ghost rail was buried beneath.

The grate was warped, rusted, half-fused to the surrounding stone. He braced both hands against it, gritting his teeth, and heaved.

It didn't budge.

He planted a boot.

Pushed harder.

A crack shot through his wristband's casing-the fake ID Dekra gave him-but the grate gave, snapping free with a shriek that made his blood go cold.

He froze.

Silence.

Then... nothing.

No alarms. No light.

Just the howl of distant wind and the drone's soft hum drifting away.

He slipped into the tunnel.

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Interior: Subrail-3 / Abandoned
DynTrack Vein

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The corridor was wet and humming, like a throat swallowing the world. Black mold covered the walls in veiny constellations. Broken power lines sparked with languid, underwater rhythm.

Hsiao pulled his hood tighter, stepping carefully between collapsed ductwork and shattered skeletal drones.

Old ID posters still clung to the wall-most too waterlogged to read. A few showed half-faces, split with digital rot. "EVERY UNIT COUNTS," one declared.

He didn't stop moving.

This place felt old in a wrong way.

Time-warped. Reality-thinned.

And somewhere in the dark, a voice pulsed in his head going 'You shouldn't be here.'

He shivered. His hands began to glow again.

The shift was accelerating.

He had to move.

Up ahead, the tunnel opened into a sealed access gate-a Dynasty checkpoint long since powered down, its biometric readers still intact.

He stepped up to the console.

Held his breath.

Pressed the cracked wristband to the scanner.

It blinked. Once.

Then again.

ID Not Found. Matching Stray Signature...

Override Accepted. Ghost Imprint Detected. Clearance: Deniable Blackfile (K-Class)...

Hsiao stared at the screen.

WELCOME BACK...

Then a hiss. A metallic moan. The door clicks opened.

It's a door sliding sideways into the dead.

He didn't know what K-Class meant.

He didn't know why it let him in.

But something in his blood reacted. Familiarity. Like his body remembered what his mind had long forgotten.

He stepped into the corridor beyond.

He was in.

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New Olympia / Lower Tier Access Halls

Cycle 25:31 / Surveillance Blindspot

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The sky wasn't real around here. He knew that for a fact.

It looked real-brushed in layers of synthetic blue and rotating cloud matrices, sprayed through precision-controlled weather nodes like digital perfume. But it tasted like nothing. Like sterilized air and polished chrome.

Hsiao crouched in the shadow of a maintenance archway, eyes wide behind a cracked visor, watching Skycity breathe around him.

It pulsed with manufactured rhythm. Every tier shifted on rotating tracks-neon veins of commerce, residential towers suspended by coil-bands, shimmerglass monorails that cut through the vertical maze with silent, perfect grace.

Every surface gleamed with the unnatural shine of Dynasty-standard sealants. The buildings rose not with purpose, but with ego-some like spires wrapped in hovering advertisement rings, others shaped like cascading data towers made of fractalized steel, always climbing, always moving.

And the people.

Humans, yes-but barely.

Faces scrubbed to flawlessness, irises glowing faint with HUD-laced overlays. Foreheads marked with the soft glow of interface nodes, skin tattooed with rank-thread indicators-like veins of light stitched beneath the flesh.

They moved like they were part of a system he no longer belonged to-fluid, orderly, plugged in.

Then came the Hybrids.

He hadn't seen them up close before-at least, not that he could remember. Long-limbed, smooth-featured, too symmetrical. Their ears were too sharp, their spines elongated subtly beneath clothes that looked ceremonial and functional all at once. He spotted one with ocular implants trailing light like tracer fire. Another had breathing vents etched down the sides of her neck, softly exhaling vapor.

They didn't look like they were trying to be anything. They were.

Officials moved with others orbiting around them-drones, aides, microservos skittering at their boots. Their clothing was embroidered with Dynasty crests and encoded threads only readable to AI eyes. Their words buzzed through earpieces and shortwave bursts, far beyond the comprehension of anyone unlinked.

Vehicles hovered without sound-one-man pods gliding on directional beams, courier bikes weaving through beamways, transports large enough to cast mobile shadows over entire sectors.

Even the noise was wrong.

It didn't sound like a city. It sounded like a machine pretending to be one.

There was a language to it, too-Dynatalk, they called it. Rapid, clipped syllables mixed with embedded code-phrases. He caught a few words.

"Sector-lock initiated..."
"Echelon Five under deviation..."
"Civilian compliance: 97.4%..."

Each phrase landed in his ears like puzzle pieces to a life he'd once lived.
But none of them meant anything now.

He tried not to panic. But every step he took felt visible. Even in the shadows. Even with Dekra's cloak pulled high.

The world knew he didn't belong.

Glitches stirred behind his eyes. Flickers.

A boy laughing in a training field.

The feel of a smooth collar being buttoned.

The sting of antiseptic.

Turquoise eyes, close-angry, exasperated-

"You're gonna die one day, and I'm gonna celebrate it-"

He gasped. The memory cut off like a skipped frame.

Hsiao ducked into an alley lined with exhaust vents. Sweat slicked his brow. The glow in his fingers was fading-thankfully-but he knew it would return.

The implant's ghost was still inside him. And the city knew.

He moved lower, into the skeletal veins of the infrastructure.

Under old tracks. Through power duct corridors.

Beneath the city's spine.

He didn't know how he made it past the last checkpoint. Maybe the scanner glitched. Maybe something in the system recognized him and chose silence. That was almost worse.

Eventually, exhausted, heart hammering, he stumbled into a shallow atrium-an old rain-collection garden now long dry, ringed in shattered glass tiles and vines that had no right growing in such clean air.

He crouched to rest beneath a rusted spire, cloak wrapped tight, eyes scanning.

"Do you always breathe that loud when you're trying to hide?"

Hsiao jerked upright, hand flying to the handle of the stub gun Dekra gave him-only to find himself staring at a girl.

No-a young woman.

Standing six feet away, between two overgrown ferns, as if she'd grown there herself.

Her hair was strawberry-blonde, tied with a white ribbon so clean it looked like it hadn't touched a speck of dust in years. Her dress-a white puffed thing with seams that suggested it had once belonged to someone rich-hung off her like a forgotten memory. Pale skin. Wide eyes. Not blue. Not green. Just... shimmering somewhere in between.

She tilted her head as she looked at him. Upside down. She'd bent at the waist to get a better angle on his face.

"You've got sparkle fingers," she said, delighted. "Are you blooming?"

Hsiao stared. "What?"

She straightened up with a spin, arms floating outward like her dress had gravity of its own. "You're not lit enough to be full-phase Ghost, and you're not smooth enough to be a Standard. You smell... hmm." She stepped closer. "Unraveled. Like me."

Hsiao stepped back a half-step, wary. "You don't have an implant?"

"Nope," she grinned. "Didn't like how it made the voices in my head too loud. I took mine out with a fork."

He stared at her.

She stared back, unbothered.

"You're not a Dynasty, are you?" he asked cautiously.

"I was born and raised on Level 12A, near the mural of the blue dog that's always smiling." She said this like it explained everything. "But I don't live there anymore. I live between the floors now. It's quieter. Fewer eyes. More birds."

"Birds?"

"They're mechanical. But they try."

Hsiao blinked. He couldn't place her. Couldn't categorize her. And somehow, that made her feel... safe.

She stepped forward, hand outstretched like they'd known each other years ago.

"I'm Sethal," she said. "You look like you've been falling for a long time. Are you tired?"

He didn't take her hand. Not yet. But he didn't back away either.

"Who are you, really?"

She thought about it for a long time. "Someone who never quite became what the city wanted."

He looked into her eyes. No light behind them. No interface. No HUD feed.

No embedded command chains.

Just her. And whatever she was. Whatever she introduced to him as... Sethal.

"Hsiao. Nice to meet you too..." he whispered. "But I don't really remember who I am."