BLOODCAPE
Chapter 111 – Echoes in the Wire

Chapter 111: Chapter 111 – Echoes in the Wire

The hallway lights of Tower Four were dimmed to their after-hours setting—soft blue glows under the floor trim, just enough to navigate by without triggering the motion sensors. Hernan moved like a whisper through the steel corridor, wearing civilian sweats and a gray hoodie stitched with "D6 Memorial Team." Just another off-duty hero burning midnight time.

But tucked beneath his arm was a matte-black utility tablet encased in signal-dampening foam—Nico’s stealth rig, jury-rigged for silent uplinks and hidden access.

He passed no one.

The lab was four levels below surface, marked Tactical Comms Archive A17, protected by a retinal scan, key code, and voice verification. Hernan bypassed all three with a chained override loop Nico had reluctantly coded months ago "for emergencies."

This qualified.

The door hissed open. Hernan stepped inside.

The room was a vault—walls lined with crystalline uplink pillars, their interior tech glowing faintly, as if dreaming. An inactive holotable rested in the center, surrounded by four cushioned observation chairs. No windows. No cameras. Just ghosts of digital records.

He moved quickly.

The rig’s tether latched into a hard port, and green text filled the air around him, refracted by light-glass. His eyes scanned the threads: timestamps, mission IDs, metadata tags, sender-receiver logs.

Then:Z-07 > Z-05 // PRIORITY LINK // CHANNEL CLOSEDTimestamp: Six weeks ago.

Hernan froze.

Zodiac #5 — Longshot — had died almost a year ago. Publicly. Spectacularly. Hernan remembered the funeral. Remembered the press. Remembered the body.

So why was someone using his tag?

He dove deeper. More messages. Four total. The language was clinical, transactional. Military shorthand layered in internal ciphers that only Zodiac ranks would understand.

Most ended in digital dead-ends — but one log had a voice payload attached.

Hernan swallowed, isolated the stream, and played it.

A voice crackled through the spatial comms:

"Supply drop complete. Retrieval delayed. Avoid local assets. Tessa Rye is tagged proximity-red. Recommend relocation within three cycles. Virgo out."

It wasn’t Longshot’s voice.

It was Virgo—issuing orders from a private channel supposedly linked to a dead man’s clearance.

Hernan leaned back, breath shallow.

This wasn’t rogue action. This was internal coordination. Someone had scrubbed Longshot’s ID and repurposed it as a ghost shell—untraceable, unquestioned.

The implications tore through him like wire.

He tapped the rig. Began copying the full string.

File after file blinked green, uploading into his cache. He would wipe the node after. Ghost his presence like he’d never been here.

Then—

Another terminal blinked to life across the room.

A soft chime.Unauthorized login.

Someone else was coming online.

A second user ID appeared in the corner feed. Hernan couldn’t trace it—not without pinging back. But they were entering the same node. Now.

The logs stuttered.The air felt thinner.He closed the rig and slid it back into its dampened sleeve.

No time to wipe.

Hernan moved to the far corner of the room, popped a maintenance panel open with a gloved fingertip, and crawled inside the narrow shaft just as the lab door hissed open behind him.

Footsteps.

Slow. Confident. Just one set.

He couldn’t see the intruder—only hear the rustle of fabric, the quiet chime of interface keys being touched.

Then came the sound he feared: the access log.

A pause. Long. Too long.

"...You’re not as quiet as you think, little snake," the voice murmured.

It wasn’t Nico.Wasn’t anyone Hernan recognized.Too smooth. Amused. Familiar in a Zodiac way.

He clenched his teeth, held his breath.

Something metal clinked—maybe a tracking node being placed on the holotable.

Then, silence.

After three long minutes, the lab lights dimmed again, the login node winked off, and the footsteps retreated into the corridor.

Hernan didn’t move until the door sealed shut. Didn’t exhale until a full minute passed in silence.

Then he slipped out, still low, and took the service route through the maintenance grid, crawling across chilled alloy panels, his skin damp with sweat despite the cold.

By the time he reached his own quarters, the data was secured and encrypted under five layers of dead-drop protocols.

He sat on the edge of his bed, still fully clothed, hands gripping the sides of the mattress.

Virgo was using dead men to pass orders.

He wasn’t just arming off-world threats—he was doing it with help. From the inside. From people Hernan hadn’t even started suspecting yet.

And someone in the Zodiac wanted Tessa flagged.

Hernan looked down at his palm. A thin line of blood from where the shaft’s rivet had cut him.

He didn’t feel it.

Not yet.

The med ward on Level 3 had a steady hum, like the inside of a working heart. Warm overhead panels kept the room soft-lit, no sharp corners, no clinical sting. Tessa liked it that way. Comfort mattered when people were bleeding.

A young Vaskari girl lay on the table, no older than eight. Her scales were a gentle green-gold, dulled now with pain. She’d taken shrapnel to the ribs during the Sector 12 raid. One of the lucky ones — if you could call a punctured lung and a fractured side lucky.

Tessa knelt beside her, fingers glowing faintly as her ability did its quiet, agonizing work.

"You’re doing great," she whispered, voice low and warm. "Just a little more. Almost there."

The girl winced, but stayed still. Brave.

Tessa’s healing wasn’t the flashy kind. It didn’t sparkle or explode or impress a crowd. It worked like growing something back from nothing — slow, cellular, deeply exhausting.

She pressed her palm gently against the child’s side, and inside the body, bones knit and skin reformed.

When it was done, she leaned back and let out a slow breath.

"Finished," she said softly.

The girl blinked up at her with luminous amber eyes. "You don’t look like a hero."

Tessa smiled. "That’s how you know I’m real."

The girl giggled once before dozing off. The sedatives were kicking in. Tessa stood, stretched her back, and tried to shake off the fatigue blooming behind her eyes.

She glanced at the clock.

2:16 a.m.

Where was Hernan?

He returned twelve minutes later.

Quiet. Clean. Too clean.

He stepped into the ward like a man avoiding his own shadow — hoodie damp at the edges, collar askew, face unreadable. His eyes met hers for only a second before looking away.

"You’re up late," he said, voice even.

"So are you."

She moved toward the sink, pretending to wash her hands again, even though she’d already scrubbed them raw earlier. Her gaze flicked up to the mirror.

He was sweating. Not battle sweat. Adrenaline sweat.

Her eyes dropped to the edge of his collar where the fabric had shifted. A faint red bruise peeked out from under the neckline, small but sharp. Definitely fresh.

Not from the field. Not from the last mission.

She didn’t mention it. Not yet.

"Was it a run?" she asked, drying her hands slowly.

Hernan didn’t flinch. "Couldn’t sleep."

"Hmm."

She stepped closer, voice lowering.

"You ever notice how you always come back tired, but your hands are clean? Not dirty. Not bruised. Just... quiet."

Hernan tilted his head. "I could say the same about you."

"Except I don’t lie about where I’ve been."

That landed. Lightly. But it landed.

He said nothing.

Tessa didn’t press. She watched him instead, let the silence fill the air like thickening smoke. Then, casually — too casually — she picked up a used med scanner and began checking vitals on the sleeping girl.

"I overheard something earlier," she said.

Hernan froze. A beat too long.

She kept her tone light. "Senior Hero from District 3. He was talking to one of the admins near the evac hall. Said Virgo’s been flagged for reassessment. Something about ghost clearances. Missing reports. A pattern no one’s naming out loud."

Her back was turned to him.

She let the silence stretch again.

Then:

"Didn’t know you two were close," she said.

When she looked up, his face was calm.

Too calm.

But his jaw had tightened — just slightly — and one of his fingers tapped against his thigh in a slow, rhythmic pattern. A tell she’d picked up a year ago and filed away.

Hernan said, "We’re not."

Then he added, almost too late, "We worked one op together. That’s all."

"Right," she said.

She set the scanner down and walked past him, close enough to feel the heat still clinging to his body — not the heat of a long night or a mission.

The heat of someone who’d just run from something they couldn’t afford to explain.

She stopped at the door.

"You’re not who they think you are," she said, not turning.

He didn’t answer.

She didn’t need him to.

Back in her own quarters, Tessa sat on the edge of her bunk, staring at the wall.

That look he gave her — brief, flickering, almost guilty — had cracked something open in her.

She didn’t know what it meant yet.

But she knew what it felt like:

Like something was about to break.

And he was standing exactly where it would fall.