Page 9 of Big Bad Red Protector

Both governments are treating this as an attack by the other.

Neither of them is correct.

Nina is already in the security briefing room when I arrive. She has the data chip with her copied records, a station map marked with the ghost routing paths, and a look that says she has waited longer than necessary.

"Ovar," she says, before I finish entering. "Same routing window as Sareth. The transport corridor blind spots near junction seven?—"

"I know."

"And the Bridge transit sector is directly adjacent to the last confirmed position for both of them."

"I know that as well."

She looks at the map instead of at me. "So you agree the disappearances are connected to the erased records and the Bridge."

It is not a question. I answer it anyway, because refusing to acknowledge a correct pattern wastes time. "The routing connections are consistent. The Bridge adjacency may be coincidental."

"You don't believe that."

I don't. But I am not going to tell her that yet.

The hidden transport route runs beneath the station's residential tier through a series of industrial access shafts originally built for heavy cargo movement. Official station schematics show them as decommissioned. The security sweep I ran three months ago logged nothing. Whatever has been using these routes has learned to move without triggering the sensors I know to monitor.

Nina keeps pace without complaint through the narrower passages. She maps the route on her data tablet as we move, marking junction points and surveillance gaps. When I change direction at a junction without explanation, she follows the change and adjusts her notation without asking why. She is learning the station's logic.

I find that more irritating than incompetence would be.

The lift is industrial: wide enough for cargo, lit by two functioning panels out of six, smelling of coolant and old metal. We are descending toward the route's first confirmed access point when the power fluctuation hits the lower tier.

The lift stops. Emergency lighting drops to minimum. The ventilation cuts out.

I run the manual override. The panel readspower interrupted—restoration estimated.It offers no timeline.

The space is dark enough that I cannot see the far wall clearly. Nina is three feet to my left. I can hear her processing the situation—controlled breathing, no panic, assessing the same problem from a different angle.

"Maintenance fault or deliberate?" she asks.

"Unknown. Both remain possible."

A pause. Then: “You run your officers like you’re expecting them to fail. Every briefing, every deployment. You position fordisaster first. And you treat fear like weakness even when it is warning you something is wrong.”

"Anticipating failure prevents it."

"Or it means you've stopped believing anything else is possible." She shifts against the lift wall. "You said humans make you uneasy because we're unpredictable. But I think what actually bothers you is that you can't manage us the way you manage everything else."

The darkness makes the words land differently than they would in a lit room.

"Predictability keeps people alive," I say.

"Predictability keepsyoucomfortable." Her voice is not cruel. It is precise. "There's a difference."

The panel behind me flickers.

Then the lift moves.

The doors open onto the restricted corridor below, and the emergency lighting from the shaft casts enough illumination to show what is on the floor ten feet ahead of us.

A man. Station worker's jacket. Face down. The stillness that has no recovery in it.