The district looked abandoned, but Cain knew better. Sector 8X-9 wasn't on any transit routes. It used to be an industrial zone, then a holding block, then a ghost sector—fenced off after one of the coreline breaches warped the pipelines below. Now it sat quiet and sun-starved beneath the city grid, wrapped in rust and overgrown scaffold, its roads cracked open like veins with no pressure left inside.
Cain moved along a tight corridor of slanted support beams, every step slow, steady, silent. He passed hollow streetlamps and shuttered kiosks, their old trade boards peeled down to copper wiring. The air was heavy, not from smog but stillness. No echoes. No birds. Even the wind forgot to pass through here.
He reached the southbound exit—an old checkpoint bridge leading out into Ashgate's main loop—and scanned the entry plate. Offline. He reached for the secondary panel, pried it open, and tapped the manual relay. Nothing. He tried again, holding contact for a full second. Still nothing.
Cain exhaled through his nose and moved on. Across the bridge. Down another ramp. Through a forgotten vendor lot now used as shelter for scavvers and outliers. No one was home. At the north end, he found the second checkpoint—same dead lock. But this one wasn't broken. It was fresh-welded from the inside. Not system error. Intentional.
Cain stood still. Took in the fencing. The bolts. The security tag scrawled into the back panel.
Lock-In Protocol: L2-Shadow / Contained Zone: No External Exit
He didn't touch anything. He just stepped back and checked his burner. The silver device pulsed once. Not a ping. A low pulse, like a heartbeat syncing with something.
Cain scanned for nearby frequencies—none. Still, the message had been clear. Target accepted. Time reset. Two remain.
[System Status: Passive. No Network Activity. No External Triggers Detected.]
The System remained silent. This zone wasn't on its radar. Which made it perfect.
Cain crossed into a drainage pipe to his left, moved under a stairwell, and climbed through the spine of a decommissioned tram station. He emerged above the checkpoint, onto the top deck of the sector's old relay tower. From here, he could see the perimeter fencing that wrapped the district like a corroded cage. It stretched to the far south, where it disappeared into overgrowth and broken support walls. Ashgate's core routes blurred beyond it—alive and loud—but completely cut off.
Cain crouched and pulled the burner again. A map blinked open. The marker on the warehouse was now green. A new one blinked red. East quarter. Derelict mid-rise. Approximate time: 47 minutes. He memorized the street grid and pocketed the device. No trail. No guidance. Just time.
Cain climbed down the scaffolding, avoiding the rusted rungs, and entered the next stretch of alley running east. The pavement here cracked in long, shallow lines—too controlled to be natural. Someone had scanned the area. Tracked past movement. A faded tag showed on the wall: a utility sigil tied to burner contracts.
He kept walking. Ahead, two figures passed across an intersecting road. They didn't see him. One wore a patchy coat with a high collar, the other had a short gait and carried a folded baton. Neither moved like crew or sector agents. Freelancers.
He waited. They spoke in low voices, paused, then moved south. Cain moved north. He doubled back, crossed through a narrow rail trench, and pushed through a collapsed supply market full of torn insulation and blistered wall tags. From there, he climbed onto a truck frame left to rot behind the station wall. From that height, he saw the mid-rise. Seven stories. Top floor half-collapsed. Entry sealed with plastic mesh and reinforced barbed wiring.
He scoped the lower floors—no lights. But something flickered in the stairwell. He checked the burner. Still red. Forty-one minutes left.
He descended the truck and took the outer route, approaching from the blind side through a shattered greenhouse tunnel. When he reached the rear of the mid-rise, he found a loose panel at the foundation. Someone had pried it open. Cain slipped through and entered the base level. The hall smelled of damp copper and dust. Each step echoed slightly too loud. The wiring above him had long since rotted, and the exit lights blinked irregularly like a pulse losing rhythm.
He reached the stairwell. Climbed three levels. Found the room tagged on the burner map. Locked. He twisted the handle until it gave.
Inside: a mounted screen facing the wall. It blinked once and played. A voice, recorded and degraded:
"Eyes open. One of you won't leave."
Cain stepped back once and scanned the room. No cams. No mics. Just drywall and stripped furniture. Then he moved to the window.
Down below, someone stepped into the street. Dark coat. Masked face. They didn't look up. But they stood still. And waited.
The burner vibrated.
New Countdown: 02:00:00
Cain didn't flinch as the burner vibrated. He just turned the device over, read the countdown again, and let the numbers settle into his nerves. Two hours. Not a warning. A leash.
He closed the screen, pocketed the device, and stepped back to the window. The masked figure below hadn't moved, still standing where the road split into two faded lanes. No signal. No motion. Just presence.
Cain didn't wave. He didn't need to. Whoever that was, they'd seen the light flicker in the room when the burner activated. That was enough.
He moved back from the window, crossed the hollow space, and swept the far wall. No second screen. No camera ports. Just brittle paneling and a water-damaged floor that creaked under each shift of weight. The whole place felt like it had been prepared for a test but never cleaned up after the last one.
He exited the room without a sound and descended two flights, avoiding the center steps where dust had worn thin. At the base of the stairwell, he paused and leaned slightly to glimpse down the eastern hallway. Still empty. Still silent. But the presence outside had shifted.
Cain waited. Twenty seconds. Then thirty.
The figure didn't reappear.
He pushed through the side door of the mid-rise and walked the perimeter, sticking to the shadows. There was no one behind the building, no one circling to flank him, and no drones in the sky. This wasn't a surveillance op—it was something older. More methodical.
He reached a narrow alcove between two fractured retaining walls and pulled out both burners. The black one remained dormant. The silver one blinked steady blue beneath its shell. He connected the two with a stripped sync cable, not to transmit—just to read if the new device had piggybacked any data.
The answer was instant.
A small file, encrypted. Not by system keys. By a style Cain knew well. It was old-school. Burn-and-read protocol from his former days. No ID tag. Just a trigger string and a fallback time stamp.
He decrypted it.
"Next ping: Conditional."
"If confirmation is received at 1:45:00, location will shift."
"If not, door closes."
Cain didn't speak. He just disconnected the cable and watched the timer tick down past 1:56:12.
Whatever was waiting, it wasn't meant for both of them. The other person—whoever had also received a burner—was likely watching a similar countdown. The test wasn't to eliminate a target. It was to see who obeyed and who lingered.
He stood and moved again, heading toward an elevated sector entrance wrapped in failed neon. The shops there had all been gutted—an old pawn post, a crumbled eatery, a medscan outlet turned storage room. Cain entered the latter and barricaded the door behind him with a crushed service rack. Inside, he crouched by the wall and unfolded the paper coordinates from the previous burner.
He noticed something he hadn't before.
The handwriting was familiar. Not perfectly. But close. It wasn't his. But it was someone who'd once read his orders. Handed off his work. A handler maybe. Someone with enough proximity to fake tone and style but not precision.
He pressed a palm to the tile, then tapped once, twice, letting the echoes map out the hollow beneath the medscan floor. A pipe cavity ran under the building. Maybe an escape route. Maybe a trap. He wasn't ready to check yet.
The burner vibrated again.
A new prompt lit the screen.
"Confirm signal receipt within next 10 minutes to trigger next location."
He didn't respond. Not yet.
He scanned the room once more, moved toward the rear wall, and found a sealed fuse panel half-covered by old health posters. Inside, tucked behind the metal latch, was a tag—spiral over a circle. The same symbol that had started appearing after his first sanctioned kill in this body.
He stepped back and shut the panel.
Outside, a soft metallic click echoed across the block.
Cain crouched. Listened.
A door had opened two streets over.
Not by accident.
Not by wind.
He checked the burner. Countdown at 1:51:03.
Still time.
But someone else had made a move.
And now Cain had to decide if he'd be the one to follow—or the one already being led.