The floor under Orinvalde Crowncity's war room still remembered the click of Door Thirteen. It hadn't opened again, yet the building behaved as if it might—every corridor mouth staffed, every badge reader watched, every screen treated like a mouth that could speak lies in a calm voice.
President Corvin Alderhart stood at the long table with his sleeves rolled to the forearm, a paper ledger opened flat in front of him, and a metal ruler pinning the page so it could not curl under HVAC pressure. Vice President Elowen Brinewatch kept three devices in a straight line: an offline verifier, a sealed phone that only took whitelisted calls, and a worn mechanical watch she used as the final timing anchor when digital clocks drifted. Their staff moved without chatter. Radios stayed on low volume. Nobody said "we're fine." They said what they were doing.
Outside, Westonglappa's sky carried the distant percussion of naval-aerial bombardment like weather. Far offshore, something heavy and metal shifted on the horizon. In Auttumotto, Sashax, and Leblaela, Darkened patrol mass kept corridors tense and permissions expensive. In the war room, the fight was quieter: procurement, custody, proof.
Sunaegis arrived through the rear service corridor at 04:12, escorted by two Solar perimeter runners who kept their orange radiance tight to the body. He wore field gear with no banner and carried a narrow hard case in one hand and a coil of thermal tape in the other. His hair and eyes held the Solar glow, but his posture was built for maintenance bays, not parades.
He did not greet the room with ceremony. He placed his case on the table, slid it open, and laid out three items in a neat line: heat-imprint seals, a set of thin thermal plates, and a small torch head that burned clean and quiet.
Corvin looked up. "Status."
Sunaegis replied in short operational phrases. "Door Thirteen surface is being targeted by workflow. Not explosives. Not brute force. They want the room to authorize its own bypass."
Elowen's eyes narrowed. "Operator-tier prompt pressure."
"Yes," Sunaegis said. "They are hunting hands."
The war room screens showed a live map of Westonglappa with red zones pulsing over Auttumotto, Leblaela, and Sashax. But the screens were not the center. The center was the table: paper tokens, tamper sleeves, and the procurement ledger where legitimacy was written into existence.
A procurement lead entered from the side door with a tray of request envelopes. The lead's face was pale with fatigue, but the hands were steady.
"Emergency requests," she said. "Thirty-seven in the last hour. Fifteen flagged as near-perfect duplicates. Three are life-critical."
Elowen didn't ask which were fake. She asked which were survivable.
"Life-critical first," she said. "Quarantine the rest."
The procurement lead hesitated. "The duplicates have correct seals."
Sunaegis stepped closer and held out his hand. "Show me."
The lead placed one envelope on the table. The seal looked correct—crest placement, ink density, serial string. Sunaegis didn't stare at the crest. He stared at the edges. The seal's micro-scratch pattern was too uniform, as if created by a machine rather than a hand under pressure.
He lifted the envelope and slid a thermal plate beneath it. Then he tapped the seal with the torch head once, brief enough to warm the resin without burning paper. The resin softened and revealed a hidden layer of microfilm that a normal seal would not carry.
"Overlay," Sunaegis said.
Elowen leaned in and saw the faint text: CONTINUITY OVERRIDE CLAUSE — EXPEDITE CONFIRM AUTHORITY.
Corvin's jaw tightened. "They're weaponizing our speed."
Sunaegis nodded once. "They want a freeze that looks like prudence and functions like paralysis."
Elowen's voice stayed calm. "We do not freeze life."
She turned to the procurement lead. "Separate the three life-critical requests. Bring them here. No screen approvals. Two-hand approval with heat imprint. Start now."
The procurement lead swallowed. "Understood."
Sunaegis opened his case and pulled out a strip of thermal tape. He walked to Door Thirteen itself, a reinforced door that looked like any other until you noticed the double hinges and the sensor cluster above the frame. He ran the thermal tape along the door seam, then pressed thermal plates onto the floor in a staggered pattern leading to the door.
"Heat lane," he said to the nearest guard. "Anyone approaches without escort, we see it. Anyone touches the frame, we read it."
The guard nodded, gripping the rifle tighter, and shifted his stance into a braced geometry that covered the hall without blocking staff movement.
Sunaegis returned to the table and placed a small hard-light projector down—Star equipment, borrowed, compact. The Star verification runner in the room activated it and painted two lane boxes on the floor: one for clerks, one for decision authority. People would stand inside the boxes when they handled custody. It was physical discipline made visible.
"Hands in box," the runner said. "Scan. Confirm. Move."
A comms aide entered with a headset half on, eyes tight. "Press wants an update. They're hearing 'freeze' rumors."
Elowen didn't sigh. She nodded toward the far wall where a press podium stood ready, flanked by two cameras and a simple backdrop.
"We go live," she said. "Now. Short cadence."
Corvin closed the ledger with a ruler still pinning it, carried it to the podium himself, and set it down in frame. Not as theater. As proof. A leader bringing paper into a screen war was a statement: we are not governed by prompts.
Elowen stepped beside him and faced the cameras. Her voice did not rise. It did not plead. It gave instructions that created behavior.
"Orinvalde Crowncity," she said, "and all Westonglappa continuity nodes: shelter supplies are moving. Procurement is active. We are quarantining suspicious requests and processing life-critical requests under two-step verification. Do not follow screen reroutes. Follow physical signage and escorts."
Corvin added, "If you are presented an 'operator-tier' confirm prompt, do not press green. Stop in the marked box. Await verified instruction. You will not be penalized for waiting."
That last line mattered. It gave citizens permission to refuse urgency theater.
Sunaegis stayed just off camera, eyes on the war room screens, not because he trusted them, because he wanted to see how they would blink. His thermal plates near Door Thirteen showed no footsteps yet. Good. The attack, he suspected, would come from the softer door: a "helpful" workflow change.
The procurement lead returned with three envelopes in a tamper tray.
"Blood plasma refrigeration packs," she said. "Shelter generator coil set. Neonatal med module."
Elowen gestured toward the lane box. "Box."
The lead stepped in. The Star runner scanned the envelope seals with an offline device. Sunaegis added his own confirmation by heat: he pressed the torch head to each seal for a controlled breath and watched the resin behavior. Real seals softened unevenly because human hands press unevenly. These three behaved like human work. No hidden microfilm.
"Clear," Sunaegis said.
Elowen placed two fingers on each envelope and then looked at Corvin. "Two-hand."
Corvin pressed his thumb to each envelope's tamper line. Elowen pressed hers immediately after. Sunaegis heat-imprinted both prints into the resin, capturing the geometry of their contact. The envelopes now contained not only approval but evidence of who approved them and how.
"Move to disbursement," Elowen said.
A comms aide leaned in. "Incoming."
"Who?" Corvin asked.
"'Continuity Authority Override Desk,'" the aide replied, glancing at the caller ID. "It's labeled internal."
Elowen's eyes did not soften. "No internal override desk exists."
Sunaegis stepped forward. "Let it ring. Log the number. Photograph the ID."
The aide did exactly that, hands shaking slightly. The number looked local. That was what made it dangerous. BRD had learned how to make lies look like they belonged.
The phone stopped ringing. For two seconds, the room held still.
Then the wall screens blinked.
Not a blackout. A refresh. The map of Westonglappa vanished and was replaced by a clean interface panel that looked like a maintenance tool. At the top, a crest appeared—almost Orinvalde's, but slightly wrong in the curvature of the inner circle.
PRIORITY ROUTING — CONTINUITY OVERRIDE
OPERATOR TIER — IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED
CONFIRM AUTHORITY
A green button pulsed beneath it, bright and patient, as if the system wanted to help.
Sunaegis felt the urge in the room like a gravity shift. A screen had just claimed urgency, and urgency makes competent people want to solve.
A junior analyst took a step toward the console. "If we don't confirm, we lose the map—"
"Stop," Elowen said. One word, and the room froze. "Hands visible."
Sunaegis moved in front of the console without touching it. He held up one of the approved envelopes so the cameras still rolling on the podium could see it. He did not address the screen. He addressed the room.
"This is what they want," he said. "A click that turns legitimacy into their property."
Corvin's voice stayed steady. "Nobody touches green. We do not fix the screen. We fix the workflow."
Sunaegis turned toward Door Thirteen. His thermal plates near the door lit with faint footprints—two sets, approaching fast, then stopping short of the seam. Someone was in the corridor, just outside the war room's skin, testing whether the prompt would pull authority toward a different decision lane.
The Star verification runner snapped her wrist and threw hard-light lane boxes around the console area, forcing a physical boundary between human hands and the green button.
"Box holds," she said. "No reach."
Outside, the distant bombardment cadence shifted, as if a timer had ticked. The building lights flickered once—barely. Enough to make the green button feel brighter. Enough to make fatigue feel heavier.
Elowen stepped back to the podium and spoke directly to the cameras again, not to reassure, to weaponize clarity.
"To all Westonglappa nodes," she said, "we are experiencing an operator-tier spoof attempt. This is expected. Do not press confirm on any unexpected prompt. Default to physical tokens and escort guidance. Waiting is compliance."
Corvin leaned in beside her. "We will issue an auditable update through verified channels in five minutes. Until then, no reroutes. No exceptions."
Sunaegis watched the green button pulse on the wall display behind them, visible on live camera now, framed like an accusation.
The prompt refreshed again. A new line appeared, sharper, more coercive.
CONTINUITY AUTHORITY TARGETED — DOOR THIRTEEN SURFACE ACTIVE
The green button pulsed like a heartbeat demanding to be obeyed.
Sunaegis tightened his grip on the approved envelope and felt the resin warm under his thumbprint, the physical proof of lawful action. He kept his body between the screen and the nearest set of hands while the war room held to discipline.
The half-hour window had begun inside the most important room in Westonglappa, and the civic backbone blink was no longer aimed at cities. It was aimed at authority itself, reaching for the one tired mistake that would make the war room authorize its own capture.
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