BLOODCAPE
Chapter 101 – Legacy Code

Chapter 101: Chapter 101 – Legacy Code

Tessa wasn’t sure how long they’d been walking.

There were no signs down here. No lights, either—just the dim pulse of Camilla’s resonance tracker casting a faint green hue across the corridor walls as they moved. The sound of their steps was swallowed whole. No echo. No trace.

The tunnel smelled of time.

Not decay. Just stale, recycled heat and the metal tang of disused airflow—a silence that hadn’t been broken in years, maybe longer. A silence that hadn’t been abandoned.

Just sealed.

Camilla moved like she’d never stopped coming here. One hand brushed the tunnel wall every twenty steps, like she was counting. Like she was making sure the world hadn’t shifted while no one was looking.

They’d entered through Maintenance Sector 9, behind a coolant stack that hadn’t cooled anything in at least a decade. The panel hadn’t opened with a badge or override.

Camilla had knocked.

Four. One. Two.

No rhythm. Just memory.

Now, with each step, Tessa felt the air thicken. Not with pressure. With history.

The world above—the halls, the schedules, the Zodiac—felt miles away. Made-up. This was the real Academy. Buried. Forgotten. Or left to fester.

Tessa glanced at the device in Camilla’s hand.

Not a datapad. Too old. Too analog. A curved dial glowed faintly green, flickering as they passed branches in the corridor.

"What is that?" she asked.

Camilla didn’t slow. "Resonance tracker."

"For what?"

"Neural imprinting. Old sync pulses. This place remembers how certain minds moved."

Tessa frowned. "That’s how you’re navigating?"

Camilla nodded once. "It’s not the walls I’m following."

They turned a final corner.

Ahead, an armored bulkhead blocked the corridor—scorched and sealed, no clearance panel, no visible lock. Just a solid slab of oxidized alloy with a hairline seam down the center.

Camilla reached into her belt.

Drew out a copper key.

Slid it into a slit Tessa hadn’t seen.

The door hissed open. Slow. Heavy.

Inside, the temperature dropped.

Tessa stepped through, boots landing on metal-grated flooring. The air was dense—coated in dust and static. Her breath felt too loud.

The chamber stretched out before them: wide, domed, hollow like a drained lung. The floor bore recessed circuit lines, long-dead. White scorch scars etched the walls in spirals. In the far corner, a broken sparring dummy lay in pieces.

And painted across the wall—half-obscured by time and water damage—was a mural.

The Solar Paragon crest.

Or what remained of it.

The ring was cracked. One quadrant missing. The wings asymmetrical. The sun behind it barely more than a smear.

Tessa moved closer. Each footstep echoed strangely, like the air hadn’t decided whether to hold the sound or let it fall.

"What is this place?" she whispered.

Camilla stood just inside the threshold. Her voice didn’t echo.

"The place they tested what they couldn’t define."

Tessa looked back at the mural.

"This was Solaris’s?"

Camilla didn’t answer.

"This was where the symmetry began," she said instead. "Before he had a name. Before they called him anything but a theory."

Tessa turned a slow circle.

No screens.

No cameras.

But something was watching.

"This place is still online," she said.

Camilla checked the tracker. "Not to Zodiac systems. It reports elsewhere."

"Where?"

Camilla didn’t respond.

And that was answer enough.

Tessa stepped forward, past the mural, past the faded spar lines burned into the floor. At the chamber’s center, a ring of metal inlay circled a wide target. Faint. Ghosted. As if waiting to be retraced.

She stepped inside it.

The lights above flickered.

Then again.

A soft whir rose from somewhere beneath her feet.

Lines—buried filament trails—lit up in a spiral around her, white arcs wrapping her in a pattern that felt too symmetrical to be random. Like a keyhole. Or a reticle.

She looked up.

Camilla didn’t move.

Only the grip on her tracker tightened.

Tessa’s breath caught.

This room hadn’t forgotten.

It had just been waiting.

For someone.

Maybe not for her.

But close enough to wake it.

—

Beneath the West Annex, Hernan moved like memory.

No HUD. No lights. Just a mental map of passageways never shown on any cadet schematic. He passed old cryo tanks, collapsed stairwells, bulkhead seals rusted into permanence.

Three lefts from the cryo overflow. Drop two levels. Right into the dead zone.

The walls here bore labels that hadn’t been used in years:

BRANCH INITIATE.

Only a handful of people still remembered what those words meant.

Hernan wasn’t one of them.

But he’d been built by them.

He reached a hatch sealed by pressure coils. The ring embedded in its frame pulsed dim red. Not for Academy hands. Not for Zodiac palms.

This was keyed to something older.

He pressed his hand to it.

The lock accepted him.

The hatch opened.

Inside: a chamber with no overhead lights, only pale strips of emergency glow along the floor. Shelves lined the walls—racks of defunct monitoring systems, pulse readers, biosignal gates.

And at the back:

A cylindrical pedestal unit. Half-covered in dust.

The signal converter node.

Legacy tech.

Purpose-built to ping Paragon prototypes who didn’t know they were prototypes.

He approached it slowly, wiped the dust off the screen.

Slid the back panel open.

Inserted the pulse key Camilla had once given him. Unlabeled. Silver. Unassuming.

The interface flickered to life.

LEGACY NETWORK ACCESS – BRANCH 04SIGNAL TYPE: INHERITOR // PARAGON SUBSECTORSTANDING: REACTIVESTATUS: IDLE

He keyed a command.

MANUAL PULSE INITIATED – SYNC TRACE AUTHORIZEDTARGET RANGE: OPENCODE LEVEL: 6TH-SHADOW SYMPATHYAUTHORIZATION: ROOK.V

The screen pulsed.

Once.

Twice.

Then held.

LEGACY NETWORK PINGED: BRANCH 04 / RECEIVING...

——

RESPONSE DETECTEDUNTAGGED ENTITYPARTIAL SYNC MATCHLOCATION: UNKNOWNSTATUS: APPROACHING

Hernan’s breath caught.

Untagged.

That ruled out Camilla.

It ruled out the Zodiac.

This wasn’t a handler.

This wasn’t a mentor.

This was someone else.

And partial sync—not genetic. Not a clean mirror.

A shadow.

Someone who moved like him. Or like Solaris.

He checked the network log.

No name. Just a burn-trail frequency, bouncing through a channel that hadn’t been on any server since Chamber Theta.

He tried tracing the source.

Failed.

But something was shifting now.

The system didn’t just acknowledge his signal.

It was noticing him.

As if the ghost he’d pinged wasn’t just a remnant.

It was coming closer.

He slid the pulse key back into his coat.

Stepped back.

One breath.

Then spoke.

Quiet. Even.

"Who’s been answering this signal," Hernan said, "without leaving a name?"