Ilien Marrow arrived just after noon. The tower was still smoking. Grey metal had bent in the middle, and a burnt antenna slouched toward the road. Yellow tape surrounded the area but flapped loosely in the wind. The local responders had not secured the perimeter properly.
Trinhold's relay station had gone dark four hours ago. Surveillance had blacked out without warning. There had been no emergency beacon and no distress ping. Headquarters had sent a sweep drone, but it never reported back. Now Ilien was here.
She stepped over the cordon. Nobody stopped her. Her coat bore the shield of the Hero Investigation Division. Her authority overrode local command. When she arrived, people stepped aside.
The relay housing had been split open at the base. The damage was too precise for an explosion. It had been sliced with a sharp instrument. A straight incision ran through the hardened casing, wires, and insulation foam. She crouched beside the cut and examined the copper inside. The wires were cleanly severed. There was no charring on the edges.
"This was not sabotage," she said.
A responder nearby heard her. "We think it might be the Hollow Sun. They sometimes use charged filament. Could be a precision tool."
Ilien stood. "Hollow Sun does not perform surgical strikes. They destroy infrastructure completely. Whoever did this wanted the signal gone, not the tower."
The access panel showed no sign of force. She opened it and found the tamper chip had been fried using a small pulse tool. The burn pattern was sharp and isolated. This was Hero-grade field tech, not something available to civilians.
She connected her pad to the terminal. The comms log showed normal transmission until 09:44. At that time, the stream cut off suddenly. There was no static or system taper. The footage simply ended. The final minute of feed had been deleted manually.
Ilien tapped into the system requests. The last command came from inside the tower. Someone had used internal credentials to wipe the record.
"Who filed the site report?" she asked.
"Squad A-6," the responder said.
She paused. "A-6 was disbanded after Veilmark. That squad no longer exists."
He double-checked his wristpad. "That's the ID on the report."
"Someone is using dead tags. This is a ghost squad."
Ilien moved around the tower. A ventilation pipe had been bent outward. A narrow scorch line traced up the wall. It appeared that a concentrated burst of energy had been discharged through the vent.
Something white was caught on the edge. She pulled it free. It was a strip of fabric, stained with smoke. It had been tied in a field knot. Inside, three letters were written in faded ink:
LCV
Leonardo C. Veyne.
She folded the cloth and slipped it into her coat. The name had not been spoken in years.
The cut marks on the casing, the isolated burn, the erased logs — it all pointed to someone with knowledge and time. Whoever had done this had the access, the tools, and the purpose.
"He is alive," Ilien said.
Ilien did not return to headquarters. Instead, she went to an abandoned HeroNet relay on the edge of Sector 12. The old data pools there still operated under outdated security protocols. She connected her access pad and bypassed the firewall.
She searched manually.
Veyne, Leonardo.
No matches. There was no service record. There were no medals, no discharge documents, no death report, and no blacklisting. There was not even a redacted tag. It was as if he had never existed in the system.
She moved to archived southern-sector records from the Rift War. She compared the official commander list from Veilmark against a mirrored archive kept in an off-grid server.
The official list showed 112 names. The backup version had 113. Leonardo C. Veyne was listed as the squad lead for Unit B-5.
She pulled up B-5's final log. Their last known position had been along the Trinhold evacuation corridor. The last message was timestamped at 04:12. It read:
"Civilians are still moving. We'll hold another twenty. Don't wait."
There was no recorded response. The message had been intercepted and never reached command. It had been archived and flagged for deletion.
Ilien leaned back. Veyne had gone against orders. He stayed to protect stragglers during the retreat. When the last transport left, he and his squad remained behind. Everyone assumed they had died. But no death was ever recorded.
She opened his training file. He had not been among the top-ranked heroes. His combat performance had been above average, but not exceptional. Yet every instructor noted his unusual focus on civilian protection and autonomous decision-making. He had a pattern of prioritizing others over directives.
Three members of his squad were also listed as missing. Not confirmed dead, not listed as deserters. Just missing. Their records were sealed after the war.
Ilien checked the deletion logs for Veyne's data. The process had been deliberate. His identification code, clearance tags, hazard ratings, and deployment history had been erased from eight different systems. That required executive clearance.
She traced the order. It came from Veska Headquarters. The tag on the deletion command read: SV-000.
Sereth Vale. The commander of Hero Corps during the Rift War.
Ilien closed her pad and sat in silence.
Leonardo Veyne had not vanished. He had been erased.
Ilien returned to her temporary station at the Trinhold outskirts. The wind outside was picking up. Dust curled around the wheels of a parked supply vehicle. She shut the door behind her and activated the wall screen.
She keyed into the field personnel database. Her clearance level was enough to see all active and decommissioned squads. She searched for Squad A-6 again.
Nothing.
There was no listing for A-6 in the present or the archives. She checked the Veilmark withdrawal logs. The last squad to leave the southern corridor was B-5, Veyne's unit. A-6 did not appear in any Rift War campaign records.
She expanded her search to equipment tags. The comms report from the sabotage site had come from "A-6 Lead." Whoever filed it had used a functioning ID. That meant someone had activated a HeroNet badge.
She followed the ID trail. The signal originated near Trinhold but not from the command tower. It had been pinged through a portable terminal routed through an old access line — one that had been abandoned after the southern pullout.
Ilien checked the hardware stamp on the ID. The equipment it came from had last been assigned to Rim Task Division, South Wing, seventeen years ago.
She stared at the screen. That unit had vanished during the Rift retreat. There had been no official disbandment. No casualties were logged. The division was simply removed from the structure.
She retrieved the ping's last known location. The signal came from a nearby sector — a concrete hold called Sector 19-A, sealed since the Rift War.
She closed the console and packed her equipment. There were no patrols scheduled in Sector 19-A. No drones flew overhead. Whatever she found there, she would be finding alone.
---
Ilien returned to her safehouse just after dusk. She removed her coat and placed it on the back of the chair. The wind outside had stopped. The windows buzzed faintly from the power line interference.
On the table, a box sat that she hadn't left there.
She drew her sidearm and approached it. The box was small, plain, and old. Its corners were frayed. There was no sender ID. Just a worn-out address tag printed with her name and the letters HID below it.
She opened it carefully.
Inside was a metal badge, dented on the left edge. The name on it read: Gura Coil. Hero Class B.
There was a folded note beneath the badge. It had been handwritten in black ink, the letters slightly smudged.
"She stayed. They didn't. She didn't make the list."
There was no signature.
Ilien recognized the name. Gura Coil had been listed as missing during the final Rift surge at Veilmark. Her name had been buried in a supplemental report that never made it to the public archive. No official death notice was ever released. Her squad had been part of the south evacuation — the same operation Veyne had refused to leave.
She held the badge in her hand. The dent on the edge matched a field report she had read once. Coil had been hit with shrapnel from a detonation while shielding two civilians. The report had been sealed and marked as incomplete.
Ilien picked up the note again.
"She didn't make the list."
That list had been curated. Someone had chosen which names appeared on the wall and which didn't. Coil had been erased, just like Veyne.
Ilien sat down. She stared at the badge.
Someone was leaving her a trail. They wanted her to know. They wanted her to see who had been cut out of the story.
She pulled out her pad and updated her list.
Leonardo C. Veyne
Gura Coil
Unit B-5 (partial)
Rim Task Division, South Wing
Signal source: Sector 19-A
She didn't know what she would find in that sealed hold. But she knew this wasn't sabotage anymore. It wasn't a terrorist hit. This was something deeper — something rotting from within.
And someone out there had remembered.