Sunmeros arrived in Lunna with his hood up and his hands already working.
Lunamyth Port was running on learned discipline: painted shelter lanes that never drifted, taped "no-touch" rectangles around every public terminal, and Moon Guards posted where a tired person would most want permission to take a shortcut. The wind carried salt and container diesel across the rail apron. It also carried something harder to name—the quiet of a city that still moved, but only after it verified the movement twice. Sunmeros stepped off the inbound rail with a hard case riding his thigh, seal sleeves nested inside, a coil of solar-thread filament, and a palm-sized heat stamp that could mark proof without needing a screen to validate it.
A Moon Guard met him at the edge of the apron with a paper token held in two fingers like it was a weapon. No handshake. No casual greeting. The guard angled the token to the camera rig clipped to his own chest and made sure the lens saw both hands.
"Name."
"Sunmeros."
"Affiliation."
"Solar. AES."
The guard slid the token across the painted line without crossing it. Sunmeros picked it up with two fingers, held it flat to show there was no hidden adhesive, then pressed it against the heat stamp's ceramic face. The stamp bloomed a faint orange crescent on the token's corner—visible, non-destructive, and impossible to counterfeit without the same thermal profile. The guard nodded once.
"Proceed. Corridor B. No terminals."
"Confirmed," Sunmeros said.
Moonwisdom's briefing did not arrive as comfort. It arrived as a sequence: timestamps, custody requirements, and a map of pressure points that BRD had been leaning on since the hostage recovery. The hostage was already out. That had been the headline. The damage BRD wanted came after the headline—when the city tried to convert a rescue into policy and a tired official tried to keep everyone calm.
Lady Moonbeam's voice cut into the secure channel once, short and cold as a filed blade. "You are not here for applause. You are here to keep the chain unbroken."
Sunmeros answered in the same register. "Chain holds."
The first transition happened under discipline rather than speed. They staged through Lunamyth Port's service grid and boarded a night rail car set aside for continuity movements: no passenger manifest, no public screens, paper tickets only. A Star verifier joined the cell at the last moment, wrist strapped with an offline device and a lanyard of paper tokens that mattered more than any badge. A Lunar medic took the opposite bench, cold-pack kit staged open, blanket folded, pulse cuff pre-set—tools for shock and panic, not drama. A press lens rode with them on purpose, leashed to a single rule: film hands, seals, and sleeves; avoid faces unless needed for identity confirmation.
The rail ran inland toward Coldsteve, and the windows turned from port glare to forest belt darkness. Sunmeros used the time to build the next phase with physical proof. He laid three custody sleeves on the bench, pressed the heat stamp to each seam, and let the camera capture the crescent marks in a row. He spoke while he worked, not for the audience, for the operators who would later try to argue the chain had been tampered.
"Mark one. Mark two. Mark three."
The Star verifier photographed each crescent and wrote the timestamp by hand on paper, then folded the paper and tore it once, leaving a tear-code edge that would match later. The Lunar medic watched the procedure and said nothing. Her silence was its own confirmation.
Coldsteve's station apron was colder than the port and less forgiving. The road corridor beyond it bent through a forest curve that compressed escorts and tempted people into "safe access" detours. BRD liked these curves. They turned doctrine into friction. They made good teams hesitate in the wrong moment and forced civilians to reach for relief.
Moon Guards met them at the platform exit and routed them into vehicles that were already aligned to painted rectangles. Doors stayed open until the Star verifier confirmed paper tokens at each threshold. No one crossed a line without a visible hand. Sunmeros moved like a perimeter engineer, not a brawler—checking lane geometry, checking sightlines, checking where a BRD module could be planted to look like help.
"Route," he ordered.
The driver lifted a paper strip with hand-written nodes. "Coldsteve to Lunaria Bay. Pier transfer. Manifest custody."
"Copy," Sunmeros said.
They rolled out in a tight convoy, headlights trimmed, spacing consistent. The press lens filmed the spacing deliberately, not to show bravery, to show repeatability. The forest swallowed sound. The convoy's tires whispered over frost-dusted asphalt.
Sunmeros watched the roadside cabinets instead of the trees. Cabinets were where hands went when fear spiked—power controls, emergency intercoms, civic kiosks. BRD seeded cabinets with calm overlays that told people to press green for safety. He refused the script by making the cabinet physically irrelevant.
At the first curve, he marked the shoulder with heat. A thin orange line, scorched clean across the frost like a signature lane marker. He did it in segments, each segment aligned to where a vehicle should stop and where a person should stand when they spoke.
"Stop line," he said. "Hands line. No drift."
The Moon Ranger in the lead vehicle confirmed. "Line seen."
The Star verifier confirmed. "Line logged."
They hit Lunaria Bay as the sky began to pale. The pier was active: cranes, container stacks, and harbor crews using hand signals in high noise. This was a continuity hub disguised as routine work. Medical cold chain crates moved here. Shelter supplies moved here. Proof tools moved here. BRD did not need to hack a terminal if it could borrow the human signal chain for ten minutes.
Sunmeros stepped onto the dock face and did not touch a screen. He touched gloves.
He held up a small packet of paper squares—tear-coded to match the verifier's ledger edge—and pressed each square to a handler's glove back. The square warmed and left a faint heat dot that would fade in twenty minutes. Enough for a shift. Enough for an operation.
"Dot equals authorized," Sunmeros said. "No dot, no manifest touch."
A harbor foreman frowned. "We're late."
Sunmeros did not debate lateness. He showed the alternative. He pointed to the press lens and lifted both hands open. He pointed to the paper manifest sleeve and held it up so the camera saw the crescent seal from earlier.
"Late is cheaper than wrong," he said.
The foreman swallowed and signaled his crews. They complied because compliance was what kept ports alive.
A Shadow presence tried to slide into the signal chain anyway. Sunmeros saw it as a posture problem before he saw it as a person: someone standing exactly where a signalman should stand, hands lifting with slow confidence, giving a "continue" wave that would have moved two critical containers to the wrong ship.
Sunmeros did not chase the silhouette. He denied its leverage. He stepped into the lane the silhouette needed, held up his heat stamp, and pressed it hard to the pier's painted "no-touch" rectangle border. The stamp flared brighter than a dot; it left a crescent that said one thing to every trained eye: this lane is now under verified custody.
"Freeze," he ordered.
The harbor crews froze. Cranes stopped. Chains slackened. Nobody panicked, because the command was physical and visible.
The Shadow silhouette tilted its head. Its hands rose into sign language, slow enough to feel insulting: YOU WILL BREAK YOUR OWN FLOW.
Sunmeros did not answer with words. He lifted the foreman's glove and held it to the camera—heat dot visible. Then he lifted the silhouette's glove. No dot.
"Not in chain," the Star verifier said, voice flat, pen already moving. "No dot. No token. No custody."
The silhouette did not argue. It withdrew into the crowd like a thought leaving a room.
That was when the bait phase arrived, right on the half-hour seam, packaged as urgency.
A runner from the continuity annex in Lunlight City pushed through the dock lanes with a paper folder clutched tight, breathing hard. Moon Guards escorted him, weapons down, hands visible. The runner reached Sunmeros and held the folder up like a confession.
"Annex requests emergency standardization," he said. "New seal pattern. Immediate."
The Star verifier opened the folder without crossing the painted line, reading with eyes first. The paper looked official. The words were calm. The timing was too clean.
Sunmeros watched the runner's hands. He watched for micro-shake, for glue residue, for the wrong fold. He saw a faint smear near the bottom corner—tracer gel, the kind Death tech used to salt documents and later claim contamination.
He turned the folder to the camera, held it steady, and used controlled solar radiance across the smear—not enough to burn paper, enough to reveal the gel's sheen. The gel flared into a visible crescent arc and died, leaving proof of tampering in the place BRD wanted invisible.
"Salted," Sunmeros said.
The runner's eyes widened. "I didn't—"
"Copy. Stand down," Sunmeros ordered. "Hands open."
Moon Guards stepped in and guided the runner into a taped rectangle. The Lunar medic approached with calm posture and checked the runner's breathing, not his story.
Lady Moonbeam's secure channel opened for a single breath.
"Where is this annex request anchored?" she asked.
Sunmeros looked at the folder again, then at the harbor manifest sleeve, then at the tear-coded paper edge. The request tried to force the city to distrust yesterday's seals, to destabilize the continuity chain without firing a shot. It was aimed at the approval hands—the people who would certify new standards and make every old document suspect.
"It's a continuity strike," he said. "They want the approving layer to replace its own proof."
"Hold chain," Lady Moonbeam replied.
"Confirmed," Sunmeros said.
They transitioned fast. Vehicle off the pier. Short aircraft hop to avoid terminal-heavy intersections and public bottlenecks. The hostage case from earlier was not in their custody; the city's governance was. The press lens stayed on them, filming hands and seals as the rotor wash flattened their coats and the city blocks unfolded below in canal cuts and industrial grids.
Lunlight City's continuity annex sat near civic surfaces that BRD loved: kiosks, broadcast closets, and public routing boards. Sunmeros did not enter as a hero. He entered as a perimeter lock.
He boxed the threshold in heat. Two crescent marks on the floor seam. One crescent on the door frame. A visible geometry that said: this point is verified; any tamper becomes obvious. The Star verifier positioned left with paper tokens ready. Moon Guards formed a corridor with their bodies aligned to lane markers. The Lunar medic staged a shelter lane in the adjacent room—blanket, pulse cuff, fog ready—because when authority is targeted, panic behaves like a casualty.
"Entry," Sunmeros said.
The Moon Ranger breached with a compact tool that cut metal cleanly and left the frame intact. No blown locks. No narrative mess. They moved into the annex and found the real enemy waiting exactly where it always waited: a terminal lit with the calmest lie in the world.
SYNC VERIFICATION FOR SAFETY
OPERATOR TIER
CONFIRM AUTHORITY
Green pulsed.
Sunmeros did not let anyone get close enough to be tempted. He snapped a hard-light shutter over the screen from a distance—Solar tech adapted for denial, not spectacle—and the shutter sealed with a visible edge that the camera could capture. He held his hands open in frame to prove he never touched glass.
"Offline only," he ordered.
The Star verifier stepped forward and lifted a paper token, aligning it to the tear-code edge from earlier. The match was clean. The token was real. The annex staff watched, eyes searching for relief, hands twitching toward screens they had been trained to distrust but still wanted to believe.
A Shadow Elite appeared in the doorway with a posture that felt like inevitability. It did not speak. Its hands lifted into sign, slow and deliberate: PRESS AND YOU ARE SAFE.
Sunmeros kept his voice low and procedural. "Eyes on my hands."
The annex supervisor obeyed because it was physical. The supervisor's fingers stopped hovering over the desk edge and settled flat where the camera could see them.
The Shadow Elite tilted its head, hands shifting: YOU CAN'T HOLD THIS FOREVER.
Sunmeros did not promise forever. He offered sequence.
"Seal the folder," he said.
The Star verifier slid the salted annex request into a custody sleeve without crossing the painted line, pressed the sleeve seam shut, and held it up to the camera. Sunmeros marked the seam with his heat stamp. The crescent appeared. Proof locked into a shape people could trust.
Then the city blinked again.
Not a power blink. Not a transit blink. A governance blink—civic surfaces pulsing in synchronization, operator-tier overlays arriving half a beat early with official language that sounded like help and moved like a trap. Across Lunlight City, kiosks and boards and routing displays leaned toward the same calm instruction. In the annex, even behind the shutter, the green pulse brightened as if it had found a stronger signal.
Sunmeros felt the seam widen. The half-hour window was not closing. It was opening wider and crawling upward—toward the desks that approved shelter rotations, toward the offices that signed hospital diversions, toward the continuity hands that turned calm into policy.
He leaned into the secure channel without taking his eyes off the supervisor's hands.
"Window is live," Sunmeros said. "Backbone is blinking toward continuity authority."
Lady Moonbeam's reply came back immediate. "Hold discipline."
Sunmeros watched the annex supervisor inhale, watched their fingers tighten against the desk edge, watched the green pulse throb behind the shutter like a patient threat waiting for one tired click.
"Confirmed," Sunmeros said.
Outside, Lunlight City's civic surfaces kept blinking—calm, synchronized, predatory—pulling at the approval layer as the half-hour window widened and the next instruction line arrived half a beat early.
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