Cain crawled out of the pipe tunnel like something the city coughed up.
Sludge clung to his sleeves. His boots squelched with every step. But no one looked twice as he stepped through the back access of Guttercrew's lower quarters. The walls still dripped. Lights flickered. Somewhere down the hall, someone argued over rations, and steam hissed through a cracked valve.
Home.
He passed under the mesh gate, nodded once at the enforcer guarding the corridor, and made for the mission locker.
The air changed slightly as he stepped inside. Cooler. Denser. Metal shelves lined the walls, half-bent from weight, and the floor vibrated faintly with the hum of a generator buried somewhere under the foundation.
Vicel sat at the far end, hunched over a flickering datapad. One eye was real, bloodshot. The other flicked with static—a prosthetic too old to care about.
"Ghost Rat." Vicel didn't look up. "Thought you'd taken a bonus nap in the Bastion filth."
Cain didn't answer. He reached into his coat, pulled out a scorched burner shard, and placed it on the desk. Vicel dragged it over with a greasy finger. Plugged it into the reader. The screen pulsed.
Verification Code Received – Tier-E Contract: Complete
Vicel grunted. "Job's clean. Credit goes through at the cycle mark." Cain turned to leave.
"You want another?" Vicel asked. His tone was casual, but his fingers hovered over a file marker. "Fresh off the queue. Tier-E again. Soft latch. Could move you quicker."
Cain paused.
"After wash-up," he said.
Vicel smirked. "Suit yourself. Slot'll still be warm when you crawl back."
Cain exited without a word.
He moved past the bunk tunnels, down the narrow central hall that led to the barrack's lowest pit. Pipes hung low. Someone had spilled synthetic grease across the steps. The stink of old meals and burnt fabric coated everything.
Cain reached his cot. Pulled the curtain closed behind him.
He sat on the edge, elbows on knees, breathing steady. Then he pulled out the burner from earlier—the one from the vault that shouldn't exist. Still matte black. Still warm to the touch.
He held it for a moment. Then flipped the panel open.
The screen blinked.
Alive.
Message Received: Confirmation acknowledged. Queue active. Protocol: Ghost Mark.
Cain's jaw tightened. That message hadn't been there before. Not when he'd first cracked the casing. He scrolled. A sixth target now sat at the bottom of the list.
No name. Just a countdown: 72:00:00
Three days.
[System Status: Passive – No Interaction Registered]
The System hadn't noticed. Or it didn't care.
Cain scanned the metadata embedded in the mission tag. Encryption pattern—old. Familiar. One he'd used before. In another life. His style but he hadn't written this one. He backed out of the mission file. Checked the burner's root access.
There was a second file locked behind a subroutine layer.
Ghost Mark//Initiator: Null
Whoever queued it didn't use a name, no crew tag, no client code. Cain stared at the screen. Then closed the burner. He placed it flat on the metal cot frame. Looked at it like it might shift, Nothing did but the weight in the air had changed. Someone out there was using his methods.
His old kill language.
His encryption and they were sending messages to burners buried in ghost zones he wasn't supposed to find. Cain stood, he hadn't said a word since he entered.
Eli broke the silence, voice low in the back of his mind.
"You think this one's about you?"
Cain didn't reply. He just pulled his coat back on and checked the clock embedded in the wall panel.
72 hours.
Whatever was coming—he wasn't waiting to be surprised.
Cain moved fast.
Out of the pit. Through the back corridor past the steam vent cluster. Up a maintenance shaft sealed off three years ago—until he cracked it open with a spike from a dead man's kit.
He surfaced two levels above crew territory, deep in Ashgate's transport spine. This zone used to carry steel freights and water rations. Now it barely carried air.
He passed old rails eaten through by time. Thick cables hung from the ceiling like dead vines. His boots echoed. Every step was calculated, weight spread evenly.
The comms node wasn't on any map. But Eli remembered it.
"I used to run boost calls through here. When the street decks were too hot. Back before the Reclaimers started watching for packet spikes."
Cain didn't speak. He found the service door—half-shut, rusted at the hinges—and wedged it open with his elbow.
Inside, the world turned quiet.
The walls were layered in insulation foam and carbon mesh. Perfect for rerouting data. Better for hiding transmissions. The kind of place you buried a signal so deep, no one ever found it again.
Cain knelt and pulled the burner from his coat. Slotted it into a dead relay's bypass cradle.
The lights flickered once. Then again.
[Signal Link Detected – Ghost Protocol Active]
[Accessing Queue ID: Null]
Cain didn't touch anything but the burner ran itself. The screen shifted.
First, a static image. Then a flicker. Then a file.
He opened it.
Video feed. Distorted. Shaky. A street-level capture. Low angle. Filmed from behind cover.
The view focused on a man in a long coat talking to a masked courier. Cain recognized the coat. Not the face but he knew the stance.
That was a Tier-A mover. One of the city's silent distributors. The kind who paid others to do the thinking—and never asked questions twice.
The masked courier handed something off.
Frame skipped.
The same man now walked away alone. No courier. No camera shift. No timestamp.
[Target Sync: Queued – Estimated Location Trace Embedded]
Cain scrubbed the playback, paused on a frame he tried to zoom in. The object passed between them—it was a burner.
A red-striped model, same as the one in his hand. He checked the embedded trace.
Latitude ping: near Sector Twelve but no timestamp. That meant the footage was recent but not official.
[System Status: Passive – Non-networked activity unregistered]
The System didn't know this file existed. Which made it real and dangerous.
Cain unplugged the burner, slid it back into his coat. The lights in the comm room stayed on for two seconds longer than they should've. Someone else was watching the playback remotely. He didn't panic, didn't run.
He just walked out quietly. Stepped into the tunnel and froze. A new spiral had been scratched into the far wall—fresh. Deep, still flaking.
Beneath it, three words in thin white chalk:
"Don't Miss Again."