The sea did not announce BRD. It simply stopped reflecting the same way, as if the surface itself had accepted a different set of rules.
Deathnazar stood inside the submersible's pressure sleeve with his hands locked behind his back, posture squared and quiet, like a guard in a corridor where nothing is allowed to drift. Violet-gray light bled through reagent glass and flattened the faces of the crew into efficient silhouettes. A strip-map of Cosmott Island scrolled across the bulkhead in measured ticks—port approaches, rail spurs, utility galleries, and the narrow points where lane geometry forces a decision. In the upper-right corner, a timer held at T-minus 03:12:00. Not the strike window. The stage window. He watched the digits the way a surgeon watches a pulse, waiting for the moment the patient becomes compliant.
A needle pressed into his forearm. Cold entered his blood, not as pain, as calibration. The cross-shaped glow in his pupils sharpened into a clean plus-sign, and the pressure of the ocean became a second uniform.
"Ruhig," he said—soft, German clipped, the word aimed at the crew more than the air. Calm.
The pilot toggled Wake Stitch. The submersible slid into the blind turbulence behind a commercial freighter, riding its churn as camouflage. On the nav overlay, the freighter's wake drew pale lines that narrowed into a safe corridor. In Deathnazar's mind it looked like an escort doctrine, inverted—same geometry, opposite purpose.
They surfaced under the sodium glare of Solyukkashan Port. Cranes held their arms out like strict sentinels, containers stacked in grids that promised order to anyone who believed order was permanent. He stepped onto wet concrete. The soles of his boots drank the seawater and left no print; an evidence discipline, not a party trick. He did not rush. The most suspicious movement in a secure zone is unnecessary urgency.
Two Solar perimeter guards rounded a container corner in reflective orange. One began to raise a radio.
Deathnazar moved as if he were processing property, not fighting a person. His left hand flicked a bone-white filament, thin as fishing line, and laced the first guard's wrist before the radio could fully tilt. His right hand compressed the second guard's elbow with a clean strike—joint alignment broken without spectacle. Their knees folded. He lowered them to the ground in controlled arcs so armor would not clack, and he placed both radios antenna-up, volume mid-level, exactly where supervisors expect them to be found. He keyed each mic once—one static click—just enough to leave a "normal check" signature in the system log.
He pressed a black custody tag onto each chest plate. Not a sticker—an RFID token with a "processed" posture baked into it. The next scanner would read compliance and move on, because people trust green lights more than they trust their own doubt.
Inside the maintenance corridor, a steel door waited with a keypad and a printed AES block: VERIFIED ENTRY ONLY. REPORT ANOMALIES. The language was disciplined, designed to keep panic from becoming policy. Deathnazar respected it in the way a lockpick respects a well-made lock.
He took out a paper-thin biomesh patch, pre-coded with a stolen contractor profile. He pressed it to the keypad. The mesh exhaled warmth and micro-sweat, mimicking a living thumbprint, and the lock accepted a human it had never met.
Past the door, the tunnel forked into a utility gallery running parallel to the port rail yard. Above him, rails sang with schedule. He walked by listening to the system's breath: freight timing, shift change, the steady pulse of a city that still believed in official routing. His objective was not power, not medicine, not broadcast. It was the trust layer between those things.
At the fence line, he did not cut wire. He waited for predictable behavior.
A maintenance cart rolled up. Two workers in orange coveralls, badges clipped high, posture trained by corridor doctrine: show ID, follow arrows, do not improvise. The cart's headlight caught Deathnazar as he stepped into the beam on purpose—just enough visibility to be plausible, not enough to invite questions.
The first worker's mouth opened to speak. Deathnazar lifted his palm.
A pale gray "dead-air" bloom spread across the asphalt, not smoke and not fog, a chemical hush that thickened the air and stole the first syllable from a radio mic. Sound arrived late and wrong, like a delayed packet. The workers' instincts leaned toward retreat. Their training leaned toward compliance. Training won.
Deathnazar took both badges with two calm pulls—ticketing, not robbery—and returned them immediately.
But they were not the same badges.
They looked identical. Their barcodes printed clean. Their scans would pass at first glance. The failure only lived in deeper verification—chain-of-custody queries, checksum prompts, redundant authentication. Tonight, he planned to make "redundant" feel like "too slow."
He tapped the cart's tablet and loaded a false work order: TRACK INSPECTION / EMERGENT HEAT FRACTURE / PRIORITY ROUTE. The phrasing was deliberately boring. Fraud that screams is easy to catch. Fraud that looks like routine inherits the lane.
He coupled the cart to a service carriage and let the system route him inland toward Solmora Prime. The freight spur accepted his request because it was asked in its own language, with the right metadata, at the right time.
During the roll-out, he opened a compact case and removed a violet ampoule: clock-tax reagent. Not poison. Not sabotage in the childish sense. A latency seed designed to add two seconds to a scan, three seconds to a dispatch confirm, one extra handshake in a credential workflow—micro-delays that look like normal congestion until they accumulate into misroutes and rushed approvals.
He snapped the ampoule into the carriage intake. Vapor diffused into ventilation like a rumor.
At Solmora Prime, the yard ran with visible competence—forklifts in marked lanes, containers scanned twice, escort paths painted fresh. The kind of place AES protects because it keeps shelters fed and hospitals stocked. Deathnazar watched the scanning discipline and measured how hard it would be to make a good clerk take a shortcut.
A Solar perimeter drone drifted overhead, orange glow under its belly, lattice scanning the yard in clean sweeps. He did not challenge it. He gave it exactly what it wanted: a yard that looked normal. He moved just outside the drone's geometry, stepping when its scan cone passed, freezing when it returned. Timing, not speed.
The administrative node required higher trust. Solis Royale.
He took the service tram from the logistics yard, sitting among workers carrying lunch tins and paper folders—analog clutter that still mattered because BRD had taught everyone to distrust screens. Tram announcements repeated the same AES cadence: verify your corridor pass; follow posted escort routes; do not accept reroutes from unofficial screens. Discipline as public health.
At Solis Royale, the atriums were brighter, the kiosks cleaner, the guards more confident. Official lived here because it had to.
A civic routing desk sat behind tempered glass. The desk managed escort tickets, emergency lane overrides, and continuity movement. If BRD could make that desk lie for thirty minutes, entire cities would move into wrong lanes under the illusion of authorization.
The clerk behind the desk looked up. Badge clipped high. Eyes sharp. Her hand hovered near an alert pedal.
"Purpose?" she asked.
Deathnazar placed a sealed envelope on the counter—white, stamped with a fabricated crest. Inside: nothing important. The envelope existed to anchor her attention on the wrong artifact while his real work happened under the counter.
She scanned the seal. The kiosk hesitated—one extra second.
Clock-tax had arrived.
Her jaw tightened. "Your escort code—"
"Neu ausstellen," Deathnazar said quietly. Re-issue. His German landed like a bureaucratic stamp rather than a threat. "Zeitgebunden." Time-bound.
Two guards shifted their weight. Not aggressive. Curious. The clerk's thumb grazed the alert pedal.
Deathnazar leaned forward just enough to feel like a professional transaction. Under the counter, his left hand pressed a small disc onto the underside of the desk: a mirror mite. Passive. Silent. It did not enter the network; it watched the screen the way a witness watches a crime, so he could replicate the posture later.
He withdrew his hand with the same calm he arrived with.
The clerk's screen flickered once—barely perceptible. An "official" tooltip appeared, styled correctly, offering a faster workflow for time-bound continuity re-issuance: PRIORITY ROUTING CLASS / OPERATOR TIER / IMMEDIATE CONFIRM. It was the kind of helpful prompt every security brief warns about. It was also the kind of prompt a rushed human clicks when their scanner stalls and their line grows.
The clock-tax had done its job. It made the shortcut feel like relief.
The clerk clicked.
A green confirmation box appeared. The guards relaxed by a fraction, because green is a sedative.
Deathnazar did not speak again. He simply nodded once, as if he had been granted what he was entitled to. He pivoted away, walking toward the rooftop med-tilt pad with the composure of someone who belongs in high-trust lanes.
On the roof, a tilt-rotor sat with orange medical markings. Two med techs loaded a sealed cooler labeled VACCINE / COLD CHAIN / DO NOT DELAY. They were already moving with urgency, which meant they were already vulnerable to the wrong kind of help.
Deathnazar approached with a badge that now scanned as a continuity liaison.
"Ich begleite," he said. I escort.
One tech frowned. "We weren't told—"
"Uhr driftet," Deathnazar replied. Clock drift. He gave them a reason to comply without humiliation. "Jetzt." Now.
They boarded. The aircraft lifted low over sea lanes, hugging shipping corridors that looked civilian enough to hide intent. In the cockpit, an AES banner blinked: VERIFY FLIGHT ORIGIN. CONFIRM AUTHORITY. REPORT ANOMALIES. That banner was AES refusing panic governance in code form.
Deathnazar pressed two fingers to the cockpit bulkhead. Violet-gray seeped through paneling in a thin veil—Death Regime chemistry fused with occult discipline—dulling the banner's urgency while leaving it visible. The warning remained. The friction to ignore it got smaller.
The confirmation button became easier to press.
They descended into Westonglappa at Thistledown Port, where cranes and warehouses made a coastline look busy enough to camouflage a war. The air tasted like salt and policy pressure. The port signage repeated the same corridor instructions in plain language. The difference here was that Westonglappa had already learned what happens when you trust the first screen you see. The guards were tighter. Their eyes moved more. Their radios stayed closer to their mouths.
A van waited at the edge of a container yard. Inside sat a Shadow Regime operative—silent, face half-hidden, posture composed like a ritual. Shadow doctrine did not waste words. It spoke with hands, angles, and deliberate stillness.
Deathnazar climbed in and, for the first time that night, allowed a small smile to crease his face—not warmth, not joy, a controlled expression used as a tool. He made eye contact with the Shadow operative and lifted his hands.
Two quick signs: HOLD LINE. WATCH THE GREEN.
The Shadow operative answered with a mirrored gesture: CONFIRM TWICE. THEN MOVE. A slight tilt of the head toward the harbor suggested extraction timing. No words. No wasted air.
A Blackened courier leaned in through the van door and took the vaccine cooler without looking at it. Custody transfer was clean—no argument, no signature in a place cameras could see. The courier disappeared into the marina maze.
The van rolled into the corridor network toward Seaglass Haven. Lane markings were bright. Checkpoints were frequent. Signs repeated their discipline: VERIFY. DO NOT ACCEPT OFF-SCREEN ROUTING. ESCORT PLACEMENT MATTERS. In the distance, patrol lights swept like metronomes.
At the first checkpoint, an AES officer stepped up, scanner held steady, posture trained to be calm under disinformation pressure. He scanned the van's corridor ticket. The device stalled—one extra second.
Clock-tax again.
The officer frowned, then forced the frown away, resetting his stance to neutral. He re-scanned. Green.
His discipline was visible. So was the fatigue BRD was manufacturing.
As the van passed, the Shadow operative's fingers tapped a silent cadence on the seat frame—one, one, two—timing confirmation. Not celebration. The gesture meant: the system is holding, so the window must cut deeper.
Deathnazar nodded once. His smile vanished. Tool away.
At Seaglass Haven, dusk laid a gray-blue sheet across the water. Ordinary boats bobbed in slips that could become warcraft with one paid captain and one forged dispatch. A fast-cutter approached without lights, hull slicing water like a scalpel. Offshore, beyond the horizon, BRD's colossal ship waited like a floating headquarters that refused mapping.
Deathnazar boarded the cutter. The engine rose to a clean, controlled whine—fast, not frantic. The Shadow operative stood at the stern, posture rigid, one hand lifted in a final signal: EXECUTE WINDOW.
Deathnazar opened his palm. A shard of mirrored glass lay dormant there—paired to the mirror mite under the Solis Royale desk. It did not "hack" by force. It created a blink, a brief coherence slip where the system's authority posture could be redirected into the wrong lane.
He spoke to the wind in German, as if issuing a procedural instruction to the ocean.
"Beginnen," he said. Begin. "Bestätigen. Ausführen." Confirm. Execute.
The shard warmed. The cutter's wake flattened behind them, swallowed by the sea.
Across Westonglappa and beyond, the first symptom would be small enough to deny: a routing screen that looked official; a tooltip that sounded helpful; an operator-tier prompt that asked for one tap to "restore continuity." The first green light would arrive like reassurance. The second verification prompt would feel like delay.
The cutter's clock rolled to 00:00.
The half-hour window opened.
On Deathnazar's lens, a priority reroute request resolved into focus—operator/continuity authority targeting, tagged for immediate confirm. A name began to populate behind the blur, just as the civic backbone stuttered once, long enough for the wrong route to feel like the only route.
Deathnazar kept his hands still, shoulders squared, eyes lit with cross-shaped calm.
He let the system reach for the button.
Deathnazar's escalation, the Death Regime principle, and the overrun
00:04 into the window, the first lie did not scream. It obeyed formatting rules.
In Westonglappa, a routing screen in a small municipal dispatch room presented a calm banner: CONTINUITY PRIORITY / VACCINE COLD-CHAIN / AUTHORITY CONFIRMED. The font matched. The seal matched. The checksum prompt appeared, but it appeared second, after the green confirmation had already sedated the operator's instinct. The operator's finger hovered over "Confirm," because in a crisis the human mind wants one clean permission to be true.
Seaglass Haven's harbor road split into three marked lanes, and Deathnazar made the city choose the wrong one without ever showing his face. He sat in the belly of a fast-cutter's cabin, the mirror-shard warm in his palm, his cross-lit pupils tracking a mirrored feed from the mite under Solis Royale's desk. He watched the workflow like a cardiogram: one second of latency, two seconds of impatience, then the click. Clock-tax wasn't a weapon. It was a posture imposed on time.
He raised two fingers and angled them toward the Shadow operative in the cabin's corner. The Shadow figure remained silent, answering with posture instead of sound—chin lowered, shoulders squared, hands loose: READY TO SHAPE SPACE.
Deathnazar smiled, small and controlled, because this was not improvisation. This was doctrine executed clean.
The first objective became a lab, not a city block.
A coastal biomedical facility outside Waverune had stayed operational through the earlier disinformation waves by doing everything AES demanded: offline backups, escort-only deliveries, badge quarantine, dual-scan entry. Deathnazar had read their discipline and planned around it. He did not attack their wall; he attacked their rhythm. A false "cold-chain emergency" reroute pulled two technicians out of position, placing them at the wrong door at the wrong minute. A forged procurement ticket shifted a security patrol to a loading bay that would remain empty. Lane geometry, inverted.
His team did not kick doors. They arrived wearing the lab's own procedural costume: carts, sealed coolers, clipboards, headlamps. Blackened looters stayed outside the perimeter line, waiting for a hand signal that meant "take" rather than "fight." Shadow reshaped the environment in thin, nearly invisible ways—door closers that hesitated, light sensors that misread occupancy, a hallway that felt one meter longer than it was, just enough to make a guard arrive late.
Deathnazar entered through the service airlock with two Death Regime attendants carrying reagent cases. He moved like someone who belonged there—slow, exact, hands kept high in view, eyes taking inventory without turning his head.
A lab supervisor stepped forward. "Credential confirmation."
Deathnazar held out the badge he had manufactured from the earlier desk click. The scanner stalled one second, clock-tax pressing its thumb onto the moment. The supervisor's gaze flicked to the line forming behind Deathnazar—technicians, carts, the weight of "we're falling behind."
The scanner went green.
Deathnazar's left hand closed on the supervisor's wrist, not hard, just firm enough to freeze him. His right hand tapped the supervisor's throat with two fingers, a chemical hush blooming again—sound and breath reduced, panic prevented from becoming an alarm. He guided the man down behind a counter, laid him on his side, and placed a custody tag on the lab coat pocket like a receipt.
He did not smash equipment. He captured it.
He took culture racks, assay cartridges, and labeled vials with the calm of a clerk pulling files. He snapped each item into a sealed Death Regime case with foam cutouts, each slot numbered. Every case lid closed with a soft click that sounded like compliance. Then he "inflected" the lab—not with gore, not with spectacle, but with contamination fear. A violet-gray mist passed through the intake vents in micro-doses, designed to trip sensors and force clean-room shutdown protocols. The lab's own safety system became a choke point. Staff began to quarantine themselves, lock doors, and stop moving.
That was the Death Regime principle: anticipate the human response and weaponize the procedure.
He stepped to the lab's internal console and left one deliberate false truth: a maintenance note, time-stamped, signed with an "official" credential. It read like routine: HVAC FILTER ANOMALY / SAFE-MODE CYCLE / EXPECTED RESOLUTION 00:47. It gave staff a reason to wait instead of fight.
Outside, he lifted his hand—two fingers, then a closed fist.
The Blackened crew received the signal and started looting peripheral stores: generators, portable radios, fuel canisters, spare batteries. Not random theft—capability theft. Mayhem built from missing ordinary things.
Phase 1 coin (HEADS) held the response at local level. Patrol units tightened corridors. Sirens stayed minimal. The lab went quiet under the weight of its own safety rules. Deathnazar left the facility the way he entered it, carts rolling, heads down, lanes obeyed.
He escalated anyway, because fatigue operations only work if the defender never gets a clean breath.
The second hit came in Thistledown Port, where a materials testing lab verified structural components for rail bridges and convoy corridors. If you can poison trust in infrastructure, you do not need to destroy the bridge; you make everyone doubt it, then you make them reroute into your kill geometry. Deathnazar arrived on a different vector this time—vehicle corridor—because he knew AES would expect another maritime trick.
At the port lab, a guard insisted on a dual-scan. Deathnazar gave him the first scan clean. For the second, he offered a laminated continuity form and a voice that sounded bored.
"Zweiter Schritt," he said. Second step. "Wir sind spät." We're late.
The guard's scanner paused again—clock-tax. The guard frowned, then adjusted his stance, trying to keep discipline visible. Deathnazar rewarded that professionalism with a trap. He let the guard pass the second scan, and only when the guard leaned to log the entry did Deathnazar's Death Regime filament slip over the man's radio antenna, muting transmission without breaking the device. The guard believed he could speak. The system would never hear him.
Inside, Deathnazar targeted the lab's certification output. He captured stamp modules, template files, and the physical embossing tool used to mark "Verified." The tool was not valuable as metal; it was valuable as authority. He swapped it with a perfect duplicate that would fail under a deeper audit, but pass under emergency speed.
He left behind one more procedural lie: a "priority revalidation" queue that would demand extra checks from the very technicians who could least afford delay. That delay would later spill into bridge approvals, convoy timetables, and shelter resupply.
Then he signaled again—open hand, palm down, a slow press toward the floor.
Shadow reshaped the building's interior light and sound so evacuation felt natural. People flowed out of the lab into marked exits like water in a channel. Once the lab emptied, Blackened looters moved in and stripped the facility of portable equipment with fast discipline, van doors closing like punctuation.
Phase 2 coin (TAILS) triggered the alert. Not a broadcast. A layered escalation packet.
AES Supreme Commanders did not "panic deploy." They received verified incident geometry: three cities, two lab classes, one signature—clock-tax plus credential inversion. They saw the pattern and did what BRD hated most: they refused to be rushed into the wrong lane.
Corridors tightened around Waverune and Seaglass Haven. Star hard-light verification geometry began to appear at checkpoint gates: luminous lane boxes that forced vehicles to align, stop, and re-verify in controlled sequence. Lunar night security units began rotating shelter cycles and medical continuity routes so staff could move with escorts rather than alone. Solar perimeter doctrine hardened the edges—bridge approaches, power relay yards, fuel depots—turning infrastructure into defended terrain.
Deathnazar anticipated that too.
The third strike was not another lab. It was the interface between lab and leadership—the continuity authority surface that decided what counted as "official reroute."
He chose a civic operations annex tucked behind a hospital district, the kind of place with glass walls and calm signage, where staff believed "we do not do heroics here; we do accuracy." Deathnazar's team approached with a forged ambulance dispatch. The vehicle carried no patients—only a sealed "biohazard cooler" and paperwork that screamed, politely, for immediate access.
At the annex entrance, a Star Elite cordon was already in place, because Supreme Commanders had lifted the threat to the right tier. The air shimmered with hard-light grid lines, forming a corridor cage: enter here, stop here, present here, wait here. No improvisation allowed.
Deathnazar stepped out of the ambulance and paused at the first luminous line. The Star Elite guarding the entry raised a hand.
"Hold. Re-verify."
Deathnazar smiled again, wider this time, because the system had finally brought him what he needed: a competent opponent. He raised both hands slowly—palms visible—and signed toward the Shadow operative behind him.
Two signs, precise: DISTRACT LEFT. OPEN EXIT VECTOR.
The Shadow operative answered with a single posture shift—weight moved to the back foot, shoulders angled: ENVIRONMENT READY.
Deathnazar looked at the Star Elite and spoke as if he were confirming a form.
"Sehr gut," he said. Very good. "Genau so." Exactly so.
Then he moved.
He did not rush forward. He went sideways, because the hard-light geometry was built to stop a charge. A violet-gray pulse rolled off his sleeve and washed across the nearest hard-light line, not breaking it, but dulling its edge so the line's "stop sensation" became "hesitation." It was enough to create a half-step of uncertainty.
The Star Elite corrected immediately—professional, fast—reasserting the line. Two more Star Rangers rotated in to close the angle, their devices projecting a second verification box like a moving wall.
Deathnazar pivoted into the gap that existed for only a breath. His filament snapped out and wrapped a ranger's forearm, not to injure, but to pull the handheld verifier out of alignment. The ranger's device clattered once. That sound mattered; it was evidence.
The cordon tightened.
A Lunar escort unit arrived from the hospital lane, blue-white radiance forming a cold barrier that forced the ambulance to stop, tires freezing to asphalt in a controlled lock. Solar perimeter units appeared at the far end of the street, orange heat shimmering over pavement, closing the corridor's mouth.
Deathnazar's team had planned for one opposing stack, not three converging in clean sequence.
That is what overrun looks like in a competent city: not chaos, but geometry.
He lifted his hand for Blackened looters—abort signal—but the looters were already being cut off by Star grid walls. Shadow tried to stretch space behind the ambulance, creating the sense of a longer alley, a softer exit. Galaxy coherence pressure pressed back without showing a face: timing windows snapping shut, minor probabilities refusing to cooperate.
A Star Supreme Commander arrived on the scene with no speech and no flourish—only a correction.
"Bracket him," the commander said, voice flat. "No hero lanes. Two-step custody."
Two Star constructs moved like tools: one hard-light wedge to pin the ambulance doors, one lattice to cut filament trajectories. Deathnazar's filaments hit the lattice and went slack, as if their intent had been audited and denied.
He inhaled once. The chemical hush tried to bloom.
A Lunar counterfield neutralized it—cold clarity, air restored, radios breathing again. The street filled with the sound BRD hates: verified comms, clean commands, no shouting.
"Confirm target identity."
"Confirm containment ring."
"Confirm exit denial."
Deathnazar chose violence as procedure, not anger. He reached into his coat and snapped a reagent capsule against his palm. Violet-gray flared around his body, a Death Regime shroud designed to make him hard to read, hard to predict.
The Star Supreme Commander did not debate prediction. He eliminated it.
A hard-light lance formed—clean, geometric, not "magic" but policy made weapon—and drove through Deathnazar's shroud with a straight-line certainty. It struck center mass, not exploding, not burning, simply pinning him to the ground in a custody posture. The lance carried a verification field that refused regeneration for long enough to make pain meaningful.
Deathnazar's smile broke. His cross-lit pupils flared brighter, as if angry at being corrected by reality.
He could have died there. He would have, if he stayed.
He signed with one trembling hand toward the Shadow operative—three quick motions: SMOKE. COVER. DRAG.
Shadow obeyed in silence. The air behind Deathnazar folded into a darker seam, light bending as if ashamed to enter. Blackened hands grabbed him under the arms and pulled, boots scraping asphalt, leaving a thin smear of violet-gray reagent rather than blood—enough to trigger cleanup protocols and delay pursuit, not enough to violate the mission's discipline.
The Star Supreme Commander advanced, step by step, closing lanes without sprinting.
"Do not chase into unverified space," he ordered. "Lock the corridor. Sweep the perimeter. Audit every green light."
Deathnazar was hauled into the shadow seam. The hard-light lance tore free with a crack, leaving him mortally wounded in the way elites fear: not instantly dead, but compromised, systems failing, regeneration denied by the field's residue. He clenched his jaw and forced his body to obey, because the Death Regime does not collapse theatrically. It retreats like a lab sample being returned to storage.
They dragged him into a service tunnel and out to a waiting skiff, engines already running. Overhead, drones traced grids across the harbor. Patrols moved with escort geometry, sealing exits in patient rectangles. The city was not panicking. It was processing.
Deathnazar lay on the skiff deck, coat soaked in sea spray, cross-lit pupils dimming and brightening like a failing instrument panel. He turned his head toward the Shadow operative and smiled again, faint, a weaponized calm returning even as his body broke.
He signed one last instruction, slow enough to be understood through shaking fingers:
NEXT WINDOW. OPERATOR SURFACE. DO NOT STOP.
The Shadow operative answered with a single nod—no reassurance, just acceptance.
Behind them, Westonglappa's corridors held. Ahead of them, the sea opened into darkness where colossal ships could hide. The half-hour window they had started was closing, but the civic backbone blink they planted had already taught one lesson to every exhausted operator staring at a green confirmation box.
Green could be forged.
And the next window would not chase labs. It would chase the hand that signs the rescue.
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