Dune xix's Arc

Chapter 4 of 7

Dune waited until dawn to move the woman away from the entrance. The vine on her wrist still pulsed green, steady as a heartbeat. Whatever was hunting her would follow that signal straight here. But the marketplace stayed quiet. No feds crashed through the sealed entrance. No tracker teams appeared. That bothered Dune more than an attack would have. They studied the kraken statue mechanism, fingers tracing the hidden grooves they'd found weeks ago. But this time they pressed deeper, searching for anything they'd missed. The stone shifted under their palm. A section of the statue's base cracked open, revealing a carved octopus door they'd never noticed before. The tentacles wrapped around empty space like they were holding something invisible. Dune pulled, and the door swung inward with a grinding sound. Behind it, stairs led down into darkness that smelled like salt water and old metal. Dune descended alone, leaving the woman under Scales' watch. The stairs ended at a massive underground space that made their marketplace look like a closet. A glowing blue river cut through the center, feeding into a circular pond surrounded by strange equipment. Glass tubes rose from the floor, filled with blue light and preserved octopus specimens suspended in liquid. Control panels lined the walls, half-buried in stone where the ceiling had collapsed years ago. This wasn't a temple basement. It was a laboratory. Federal issue, by the look of the serial numbers still visible on the machinery. Someone had been studying sea creatures down here, doing research important enough to hide beneath a temple. Important enough that the feds would still be looking for it. Dune pulled a corroded data slate from one of the intact consoles. The screen flickered to life, showing a network map of tunnels spreading under half of Krakenring. Their marketplace wasn't hidden by accident. It was built on top of an abandoned federal research site, one that connected to dozens of other forgotten facilities across the city. The feds weren't tracking the woman to Dune's door. They were tracking her to this place, probably hoping she'd lead them back to whatever research got buried here. Dune had stumbled into something that explained why the temple sat empty for so long—and why their supposedly secret marketplace had attracted federal attention so fast. They climbed back up with the data slate in hand, already planning how to use these tunnels. The feds wanted this network back. Dune was going to make it theirs instead.