The first thing Aiden lost was the city's heartbeat.
One moment, his lenses were full of number traffic flows, patrol pings, Registry confidence metrics humming along the edges of the panel stream. The next, half the data flatlined.
"Channels just dropped," he muttered.
Beside him, Kael did not look away from the civic center.
Rain slicked the plaza, turning the barricades into dark ribs around the building. Orion had pulled a full ring while they were inside, boots and drones and a thin shimmer of shield hugging the civic stone.
"Is that you or them," Kael asked.
"Me, this time," Aiden said. "Internal tried to choke outgoing feeds. Lin gave me a backdoor. I used it."
He skated fingers over the control pad in his jacket pocket, rerouting packet streams before they hit Orion firewalls. The official broadcast of the panel sanitized, delayed still crawled across public channels.
Underneath it, his own layer rode like a second pulse.
Jesen under the arch.
The labs.
