Page 86 of Cold Ignition

Keanu, Rangi, and Alexios moved into the space, but they didn’t interrupt. Not this part. They’d learned quickly—when Luca went quiet like this, it meant something was forming.

Something that mattered.

Luca expanded one of the route maps, overlaying it with the new data from the staging site. The lines adjusted, shifted—what had looked like a contained network now stretched further, threading outward into something wider.

He isolated a segment. Zoomed in. Then froze it.

“...no,” he murmured.

That got Kael’s attention. “What?”

Luca’s eyes narrowed slightly, scanning, cross-referencing without needing to consciously think through the steps anymore.

“I’ve seen this before.”

Rangi leaned against the table. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“It is,” Luca said flatly.

Now he did turn. Just enough to meet Kael’s gaze. “Because it’s not Crucible.”

Alexios stepped forward slightly. “Explain that for those of us in the room without genius level IQ’s.”

Luca turned the screen toward them, pulling up two overlays side by side.

“Left is Crucible,” he said. “What we’ve been tracking.” He tapped the second. “Right is something older.”

Keanu frowned. “Older how?”

Luca’s jaw tightened slightly.

“Structured,” he said. “Refined. Not experimental.”

Rangi pushed off the table. “And?”

Luca zoomed both maps out. Then overlaid them. The room went very still because the alignment wasn’t perfect. But it wasn’t random either.

The Crucible routes—chaotic on the surface, aggressive, high-risk—fed into something else.

“It’s a feeder system,” Alexios said quietly.

Luca looked at him and nodded once. “Yes.”

Kael’s expression hardened. “Feeding what?”

Luca didn’t answer immediately.

Because he already knew.

He just didn’t like it.

He pulled up another layer—external movement signatures, flagged anomalies, things they’d been tracking separately but hadn’t connected yet.

Luca exhaled slowly. “Feeding directly into the Directorate.”

Keanu went still. “You’re sure?”

Luca’s gaze didn’t waver. “Yes.”