Qwin pressed her palm against the cold tunnel wall and felt the hum before she heard it. The federal power grid wasn't supposed to reach this far into the abandoned zone. She'd mapped every decommissioned facility in Sector 7, chased down every gene-splicer operation through corridors like these. But this tunnel still had power. She rounded the corner and stopped. A massive sphere of yellow electricity crackled in the center of the passage, suspended between floor and ceiling like a caged sun. The light carved shadows into every crack and crevice. Her scanner read active federal frequencies—recent ones, not the fifteen-year-old signal decay she expected. Someone was here. Recently. She found the chest tucked behind a collapsed support beam, its metal surface clean of the dust that coated everything else. Inside: fresh coils, gloves with supple leather, computer chips still in their protective cases. Equipment staged for retrieval, not storage. Her pulse kicked up. This wasn't a forgotten facility. It was operational. The watch on her wrist buzzed with an incoming transmission. Unknown sender. Federal encryption. The message blinked across the tiny screen: "You shouldn't be here." Qwin's jaw tightened as she photographed everything with her scanner. Chief Harken wanted proof she could build networks and run intelligence operations. She'd just found someone running one in their own abandoned infrastructure—and now they knew she was coming.

Qwin returned to the equipment cache before dawn, her scanner tucked in her jacket pocket. She needed another look at what she'd missed in the dark. The chest sat where she'd left it, metal gleaming under her headlamp. She moved past it to the back wall, where purple lightning danced inside transparent cubes stacked in metal boxes. The electrical charge was wrong—too organic, pulsing like a heartbeat. Her scanner registered biological tissue inside each cube. She pulled one free and tilted it under her light. A tentacle segment floated in suspended animation, fresh enough that the suckers still contracted when the electricity spiked. Her breath caught. Every gene-splicer lab she'd busted over seven years had yielded samples like this, always traced back to classified federal sources she couldn't touch. But those operations ran in the outer zones, far from headquarters. This cache was in Sector 7—ten blocks from Chief Harken's office. She found the ornate container beneath the cubes, its crystal surface carved with kraken designs that matched the federal seal. Inside, dated collection logs showed samples harvested three days ago. Qwin photographed everything and backed toward the exit, then stopped. A monument stood in the corner she'd missed before—a crystal kraken trapped in stone, its base stamped with coordinates for six other locations across Krakenring. The classified connection she'd been tracking wasn't distant anymore. It was operating in her own city, under federal protection, and someone had just shown her the entire network. She had exactly what Chief Harken needed to see—and exactly what would make her the biggest threat to whoever sent that warning.

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.