The wind hit like knives at this height.
Hernan stood beyond the rusted rooftop railing, visor dimd, signal relays humming like low whispers behind him. The remains of District 10 stretched outward like the ribs of a dead god — towers snapped in half, data pylons stuttering, and streets that no longer bothered pretending to serve traffic. Down there, the city pulsed with a slow, failing rhythm — lights flickering in uncoordinated patterns, civilians drifting like ghosts between market ruins and power grid shadows.
Up here, silence reigned.
The killbox feed flickered across his HUD — five floors ard, walls mapped like a throat waiting to close. Escape paths rendered in red. Floor 12: two heat signatures. One kneeling. One standing.
Renz. Aya.
The drone cam fixed its lens like an eye that never blinked. Hernan didn’t move. He just watched.
Aya’s private channel pinged him with the kind of force that ant it had been sent with teeth. He accepted.
"What is this?" she snapped. "This wasn’t recon. This wasn’t a loyalty test. This was an execution."
"You think I want him dead?" Hernan replied, voice too calm.
"I think you already decided."
Below, Renz knelt in the middle of an old server floor beneath a fractured skylight. Hands behind his head. Calm. Still.
That was the problem.
"I suspected a leak long before Renz joined the team," Hernan said, watching his feed with surgical focus. "Zodiac doesn’t send single operatives. They implant networks. Shadows inside shadows. If he’s a plant, he’s not alone."
"You think it’s Nico?" she asked.
"No. But I don’t know who’s listening through his relay loops. Or yours. Or mine."
A gust scraped past Hernan’s coat. Dust curled in a halo at his boots.
"Renz isn’t the answer, Aya. He’s the question."
Silence pulsed on the line. Then her voice, quieter: "He didn’t act like a traitor. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t even lie right."
Hernan nodded, unseen. "That’s because he doesn’t know."
He clicked open a feed log — the exact mont in the freight tunnel Renz had said the phrase: "Nightborn channel compromised. Shifting pattern."
"I ran voice analysis," Hernan said. "No hesitation. No pulse spike. No subconscious distress. Which ans..."
"He didn’t know what he said," Aya finished, her voice a little brittle now.
"Exactly. But soone else did."
He tapped the console again. "That phrase triggered two dormant systems. Not mine. Not ours. One in a buried Black Halo archive node. One in a Zodiac long-range listening net. Both of them activated the second he said it."
"That ans they’re listening to him."
"No," Hernan said. "It ans they’re listening through him. Like a key."
He looked down at the feed again. Aya, her weapon still not raised. Renz, still not blinking. The entire floor like a stage with no director.
"He’s a device," Hernan said. "A piece of tech that thinks it’s a man. And soone, sowhere, is waiting for him to reach critical."
"He might be a victim," Aya said. "You realize that?"
"I know," Hernan replied. "But being a victim doesn’t make him less of a weapon."
There was another long pause.
Then he turned from the wind and walked toward the elevator shaft. No hesitation. No drama. Just purpose.
"I’m done watching," he said, and stepped into the descent.
Floor 12 breathed like a wound.
Stale air hung heavy with electrostatic residue and the faint tang of scorched plastic. Old server racks cast warped shadows. Light from the fractured skylight split across the dust like prison bars.
Aya didn’t move.
Her grip on the weapon never loosened — but she hadn’t fired. Renz stayed where he was: kneeling, arms behind his head, like soone who had nothing to prove anymore. Or nothing left to hide.
"You know what’s strange?" Renz said, his voice steady. "I don’t rember how I got the scar on my shoulder."
Aya said nothing. The tension between them was a wire stretched to its last fiber.
"I can trace every other mark," he continued. "Backdraft during Saito. A drone fragnt in the Dorval riots. Even that fracture from when I hit that Vaskari asset with a knee too early. But this?"
He turned his neck slightly, just enough for her to see the faint surgical line beneath the collar.
"No record. No d report. Just... there."
His voice wasn’t desperate. Not even resigned. It was hollowed out, like soone describing a thing they used to own and had long since buried.
"I tracked my downti — thirteen months. Labeled as neural recalibration. Except rcury didn’t do those ops. Not then. They were already disbanded."
Aya’s jaw clenched. She didn’t lower her weapon, but she shifted her weight forward, listening more carefully now.
"I rember training I didn’t start," Renz went on. "Commands I shouldn’t know. Drill paths I don’t rember choosing. Like soone built from cut-up versions of other people’s lives."
He paused.
"My body knows things my brain doesn’t. I speak reflex phrases I never studied. When I walked into this room? I recognized the trap before I even saw it."
His voice dropped.
"And that’s when I knew I wasn’t just the subject of this killbox. I was part of its design."
Aya blinked — once. Sharp.
"I’m not asking for absolution," Renz said. "But you need to know what you’re standing in the middle of."
He slowly reached down — not toward a weapon, but toward his left boot. Drew out a folded synth-paper tag and held it between two fingers.
"No sudden moves."
She approached carefully, took the note. Scanned it.
One na: Calia Nyx.
"That na’s not on any blacklist," she said.
"No," he agreed. "Because she’s not Zodiac. Not anymore. She was part of a third-layer cutout program — experintal sleeper builds, pre-wired field agents. Half-machine in terms of behavior. No implants. Just... rewritten."
"And you think she wrote you?"
"I said that na in my sleep," Renz replied. "First ti I ca out of cryo. dtech thought it was a hallucination. I didn’t even know I rembered it until I saw it again on a stolen Zodiac flash-drive."
He raised his eyes now — directly to hers.
"If you kill , I get it. But at least ask Hernan who else he thinks she rewired."
Behind her, boots clicked on concrete.
Aya turned.
Hernan stepped into the room.
No sidearm drawn. No emotion on his face. Just silence.
Renz didn’t rise. Not yet. He glanced at him — a quiet acknowledgnt.
"You’ve already made your choice," he said to Hernan. "But before you pull the trigger, I want to know one thing."
He stood slowly, hands still empty.
"If they made without my knowledge... if I’m the asset they trained to forget being an asset..."
His voice dropped, cool as glass:
"...then which one of us is the real weapon?"
The silence held.
Then Hernan took one step forward.
And finally, finally, he spoke.
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