The Descent

The uniforms were gone.

By the time the troops reached the mouth of the underground passage, they had shed their armor and helmets, stowing them in sealed cases marked with old insignia no one used anymore. In their place, they pulled hooded robes over their bodies—dark, ash-colored cloth designed to absorb light and distort silhouettes. Down here, authority didn’t march in formation. It blended.

The transition was ritualistic. Efficient. Practiced.

They moved single file into the darkness, boots replaced with soft-soled wraps, rifles broken down and concealed beneath the folds of their robes. Only the faint red glow of ocular implants betrayed them, flickering briefly before dimming to near invisibility.

The tracks were still fresh.

Barely visible scuffs in the dust. A displaced pebble. The subtle drag of someone favoring one leg. The lead tracker—once a soldier, now something closer to a warden—knelt and traced the marks with two fingers.

“She passed through here,” he whispered. “Recently.”

The tunnel swallowed sound. Their voices barely carried beyond a few feet, as if the earth itself were listening.

They descended deeper.

The walls shifted from cracked concrete to raw stone, damp and veined with rusted cables that hummed faintly with residual power. Symbols had been etched into the rock over decades—some crude, some deliberate. Warnings. Coordinates. Names scratched by people who thought they might be the last to ever pass through.

The hooded figures ignored them all.

They followed the trail with quiet certainty, their movements no longer military but monastic, as though this hunt had become something sacred. Down here, the mission wasn’t capture—it was containment.

One of them paused, tilting his head.

“Do you feel that?” he murmured.

The hum was stronger now. Not loud—but pervasive. A vibration that slipped into the chest and lingered there, syncing with breath, with pulse. The same signal the rebels feared. The same one Maren had followed.

The lead figure raised a hand. The group stopped instantly.

Ahead, the tunnel widened into a cavern where the air shimmered faintly blue. Old conduits pulsed weakly along the ceiling like veins carrying a dying current. In the center of the chamber, footprints converged, overlapped—hesitation marks. Someone had stopped here.

“Subjects are close,” the leader said softly. “The anomaly is active.”

Another hooded figure shifted uneasily. “What if they cross again?”

The leader didn’t answer immediately.

When he did, his voice was colder.

“Then we make sure they don’t come back.”

They moved forward, robes whispering against stone, fading into the deeper dark where tunnels forked and the past lay buried beneath layers of forgotten infrastructure.

Far ahead, unseen by them, the hum spiked—just slightly.

As if something had noticed their approach.

And was deciding…
whether to let them continue.