Dune xix's Arc

Chapter 7 of 7

The crushed earpiece lay in Dune's palm, its metal fragments pressing into their skin. They opened their fist and let the pieces scatter across the cell floor. Somewhere above ground, a silent beacon was already pulsing its signal to federal recovery teams. Dune moved fast through the tunnels, their tentacles sensing vibrations in the stone. The feds would come quick—they always did when old facilities lit up. Above the abandoned temple, a cloud formation hung too still in the sky, its edges too sharp. Federal surveillance craft. They'd already positioned their perimeter watch, waiting to see who emerged. The octopus door sealed behind Dune with a hiss as they climbed back into the marketplace level. But the feds weren't just watching. Through a gap in the temple's cracked ceiling, Dune spotted movement near the waterfall at Sector 7's edge. A temporary structure had appeared, disguised as natural rock but humming with power. The recovery team's command base. They'd set up fast, which meant they'd been monitoring the site longer than Dune thought. Worse, near the marketplace's hidden entrance, something black and wet oozed from a dropped canister—a containment slime that pulsed with purple veins, designed to track and trap anyone cursed by the sea. The feds had already deployed their hunting tools. Dune grabbed the squid chip from their pocket and headed for the marketplace's back exit, the one that led to Sector 7's abandoned tunnels. The feds wanted someone to panic and run through the front door, straight into their trap. But Dune had mapped every weakness in this facility during their captivity, including the power grid the feds were using right now. If the recovery team thought they were hunting one escaped experiment, they'd learn different. Dune would cut their surveillance, collapse their perimeter, and make sure every cursed person in Krakenring knew exactly how federal hunters operated—and how to break them.