Qwin sues's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

Qwin was halfway back to her vehicle when the vine wrapped around her wrist. It pulsed green in the pre-dawn dark, alive and impossibly tight. She clawed at it with her free hand, but the tracker magic didn't budge. Someone inside the federal structure had just marked her for the hunt. She needed to know who fired it. Qwin traced the vine's angle back through the alley, her scanner sweeping for residual energy. The trail led to a massive tree in the courtyard behind the equipment cache—its trunk wrapped in pink tentacles that reached into the canopy like arteries. A surveillance rig sat wedged in the branches, pointed directly at the tunnel entrance. Someone had been watching her the entire time she'd photographed the evidence. The vine launcher hung from a lower branch, still warm. Qwin climbed. Her teal fingers gripped bark while the tracker vine pulsed faster, feeding her location to whoever was monitoring. She didn't care. The rig's memory chip was federal issue, encrypted with the same signature as the warning message. She pried it free and pocketed it, then spotted the source—a tracking station built into the mountainside three blocks north. Green vines crawled over gray rock, fed by equipment that hummed with the same organic frequency as the cubes in the cache. The station wasn't abandoned. It was active, maintained, and close enough to Chief Harken's headquarters that someone high up had to know. The chip in her pocket held proof of who tagged her. Qwin slid down the tree and headed for the station, the vine on her wrist pulsing like a countdown. If she could break into the tracking system before the hunter arrived, she'd have names—evidence that the conspiracy ran through federal command itself. Chief Harken needed to see this. But getting it meant walking straight into the trap, and whoever fired that vine knew exactly where she was going.