BLOODCAPE
Chapter 112 – False Mirrors

Chapter 112: Chapter 112 – False Mirrors

Hero Tower’s Level 5 command deck was built like a warship bridge—open sightlines, tiered workstations, and translucent walls that glowed faintly with real-time uplink feeds. The panels breathed with data—red during alerts, blue for standard flow, green for live engagement. At dawn cycle, it buzzed like a hive trying to outrun collapse. Too many feeds. Too few eyes. Everyone running one step behind the next emergency.

Hernan stepped into the central tier just past 0800.

His field uniform was crisp—black-on-black, no cape, no hood. Just the flat collar of a Command Class operative and a rank badge polished sharp enough to draw a reflection. A quiet symbol of compliance. Or camouflage.

He spotted Commander Rael reviewing a surface-skimmer recon report at Station 3. Rael was old-tower DNA: thick forearms, gray buzzcut, a stare like a biometric scanner. He’d led strike teams in the Meiros Collapse and lost three squads in the process. Now he managed logistics. No one called it a demotion, but it tasted like one.

Hernan approached straight-on, no hesitation.

"Sir. I’ve flagged a potential signal breach in the Archive relay stack. Channel tier C-seventeen."

Rael blinked once, lifted his eyes. "Severity?"

"Low-pulse. Dormant. It’s nesting in legacy code—one of the tertiary subroutines retired after the last OS update. Might be drift. Might be a bleedover from foreign tech still in the tower."

Rael set his tablet down. His tone didn’t change, but his shoulders tensed the way all career soldiers did when the past tapped on the back of their neck.

"You think it’s external?"

"I think it’s old," Hernan said. "Maybe a ghost signal from a Vaskari incursion protocol. Maybe just a data molar that got left behind and started chewing through passive channels. Either way, it’s inside our shell now. And we don’t ignore infection."

Rael looked at him for three solid seconds, then gave a tight nod.

"Full sweep. Level five. You get twenty minutes before I flag system ops. That long enough to make it clean?"

"I only need ten."

Rael flicked approval into the comms with a retinal tap. "Then do it. Don’t wake the tower unless you have to."

Hernan nodded, turned, walked.

And smiled—just slightly.

This wasn’t about preventing a breach.It was about disguising one.

The sweep rolled out seven minutes later.

It came as a soft pulse through the walls—too subtle to trigger panic, but strong enough to send every system on the floor into diagnostic lockdown. Caches encrypted. Local comms bounced to closed-loop mode. Surveillance scrubbers blinked to life, searching for anomalies.

The air tasted sharper.

Hernan stood beside Nico in the data wing’s secondary lab, watching code crawl across three holo-screens in waveform cascades. Suppression nodes. Commlink echoes. Shadow-traffic simulations.

"You sure about this?" Nico asked, not looking up.

"I am," Hernan said.

"You’ve got the entire diagnostic ladder running self-checks. They’ll think we’re hunting a traitor."

"That’s the point."

Nico let out a low whistle. "You want me leading the crawler relays?"

"I do."

"You trust me that much?"

"I trust you that specifically."

Nico grinned, but there was a wrinkle in his brow now. He leaned in, fingers flying over the keys. "Alright then. Let’s go fishing."

As Nico began the sweep, Hernan moved to an auxiliary terminal at the room’s far end. It was dim, mostly dormant. No one noticed as he keyed in a borrowed override—maintenance-level access. Temporary. Burned the second he logged out.

From his inner sleeve, he drew a tiny matte-black disc—smaller than a coin, flat-edged, cool to the touch. It pulsed once when he activated it.

A burner node. Illegal even inside the Zodiac.

He slid the panel open beneath the desk, pressed the node to the circuit line, and snapped the seal closed. No ping. No record. No sound.

It would remain inert until a ghost ID entered the grid again.

Then it would listen.

Record.

Forward.

The sweep would cover his trail.

The node would uncover theirs.

Aya spotted him leaning against the logistics crate two corridors over. She tilted her head, squinted.

"Security sweep?" she said. Her tone was light, but her eyes weren’t.

"Routine," Hernan answered.

"You are many things, Hernan Vale," she said, hopping up to sit on the crate, "but ’routine’ isn’t on the list."

He didn’t respond.

"Is this fallout from the raid?" she asked. "Or did someone finally catch you snooping in the wrong closet?"

He gave her a practiced smirk. "Why would I tell you?"

"You wouldn’t. But you’re pacing like a guy running two plans behind and pretending he’s three ahead."

"You always this observant?"

"I’m always watching the ones who get quiet before storms."

She smiled again. But there was a thread of something else in it now. Caution. Concern.

"Don’t burn down the tower," she said. "I like the vending machines here."

"I’ll do my best."

"You always do," she said softly. "That’s the part that worries me."

Hours later, the tower fell into quiet.

Most lights dimmed. Door scans eased into passive mode. The hum of tech was gentler now, like a cat sleeping with one eye open.

Nico stayed behind.

He sat alone in the diagnostics bay, arms behind his head, eyes tracking the slow rotation of the suppression core schematic across the wall holo.

Something was still wrong.

He keyed into the back layer. Firmware-level diagnostics. The kind of shell no one accessed unless they were rebuilding a core from zero.

A folder surfaced:

\ARCHIVE_HZ//UNSYNCED_LOGS

Buried. Non-indexed.

One file.

Timestamp: Three months agoSource: Asset-ZKRN/PKRAKENOrigin: Tower Zero Internal Beacon

His stomach dropped.

Tower Zero was Zodiac’s version of hell.

No comms. No transparency. Only black research. He wasn’t even supposed to know it existed.

And here it was—pinging inside a field core taken from a Vaskari insurgent.

He opened the file.

PKRAKEN: Suppression firmware v.4.9 | SIGNAL INITIATED // TEST SUBJECT FAILED BIO-SYNC | OUTPUT DIVERTED // VIRGO AUTH CONFIRMED

Nico stared. Mouth dry.

This wasn’t scavenged gear.

This was a field test.

Virgo hadn’t lost the tech. He was still deploying it.

He printed the string on analog paper—no cloud, no trace.

Slipped it into a black folder. Tucked it away.

Then hovered his fingers over the search log.

Pause.

Delete?

Or leave it?

He deleted it.

Then killed the console manually—no voice commands, no digital prints.

He walked out of the bay and paused at the glass corridor. Across the gap, Hernan’s quarters stood dark.

Still.

No movement.

No light.

But Nico watched it anyway, file in hand, heart beating just a little too fast.

And didn’t move.