BLOODCAPE
Chapter 115 – Lines in the Sand

Chapter 115: Chapter 115 – Lines in the Sand

The door to Hernan’s quarters hissed open like a wound reluctantly parting.

He stepped inside without turning on the lights.

The room was clean, unnaturally so. Spartan in its arrangement: one cot, one steel desk, one wall-mounted interface panel, and nothing else. No decorations. No trophies. No past. It was a living space built by a man preparing not to be remembered.

He slid the lock behind him, waiting for the magnetic seal to catch with its usual second, quieter click. Then he moved toward the desk with a slow, deliberate pace, like someone rehearsing control. His muscles were tight from the Dorne briefing. His collar, despite the tailored fit, felt like it was slowly strangling him.

From beneath the desk, behind a false panel only he knew how to access, he retrieved a matte-black secure tablet — untagged, offline, unregistered. Not the Zodiac-issued dummy unit synced to tower surveillance. This was the real one. The one that told the truth.

He activated it, and blue light bloomed across the desk.

Access Logs: 48hr Window.

He wasn’t here to analyze. He was here to delete. The sweep command. The burner insertion. The override requests. All of it needed to disappear. Dorne wasn’t just circling anymore — she was preparing her teeth. And someone, somewhere, was sharpening the blade for his neck.

He keyed in the override.

Logs began to populate. Until—

He stopped.

Log Entry 44089–L: MISSINGLog Entry 44090–R: MISSINGLog Entry 44091–X: MISSING

Three entries in the center of the operational stack were gone.

Not corrupted. Not archived.

Erased.

Clean deletion, with the timestamps jumped like a frame-skip in a corrupted video. From 02:11:48 to 02:12:13 — a 25-second gap. One of the most important windows in his sweep timeline.

Not his doing.

Not Nico’s either. Nico always left a fingerprint, even when he didn’t mean to.

Hernan’s pulse spiked for a second.

He dropped deeper, navigating past the surface shell and into diagnostic residue. The ghost trail was faint — but there. A residual packet, anonymized, no metadata.

Origin: ZC//TWR-00Timestamp: 02:11:51

Tower Zero.

The place that didn’t exist. Not on public logs. Not even on restricted-access infrastructure maps.

Whoever had done this had access so high, so buried, even the gods in HeroNet wouldn’t be able to track the touch.

He tried a trick Nico had taught him — syncing cached echo scans with system-level command trails. It wouldn’t restore the lost data, but it could hint at what had been here.

A single audio file surfaced.

Filename: VGO//STATIC_EVT_03-ACorrupted. Likely fragmented. Still... he tapped it.

Static.

Then a voice. Abrupt. Half-swallowed by white noise:"—elocate—"

Then nothing.

The file imploded. Playback crashed. The terminal threw a parsing error. The audio had self-shredded. Someone had coded it to self-destruct on first contact.

His chest felt tight.

The lights were off, but the dark didn’t feel like peace anymore. It felt like erasure. Like the room didn’t belong to him. Like nothing did.

He turned off the terminal. Sat in the silence.

They weren’t watching him anymore.

They were preparing for his absence.

Erasing him before his body hit the ground.

He touched his collarbone, fingers brushing the faint bruise from crawling out of the comm vault two days ago. It hurt — still. But no log showed he was there. Not anymore.

He stood.

Not in panic. In clarity.

This wasn’t about hiding.

This was about staying real — before they rewrote the code of his existence.

And fate, or coincidence, had a clock ticking.

Because down in the Medbay corridor, someone was already waiting.

Tessa intercepted him near the elevator junction.

"Need you for a quick scan," she said. No preamble.

Hernan cocked his head. "I’m cleared. Rael signed off on post-mission vitals three days ago."

"New protocols," she said. "Clean baselines. MedOps wants it on record for everyone who was within five klicks of Sector 12."

Her voice was calm. Neutral.

But her eyes weren’t.

He hesitated.

Then nodded. "Lead the way."

They walked side by side in silence, down corridors with old combat posters and flickering overheads that hadn’t been updated in months. Tessa keyed open the private diagnostic chamber — Med C-7.

Inside: dim lighting, one vitals chair, a dormant scanner node, and Nico seated on a supply crate beside a locked console.

Hernan froze. Just for half a second.

Then the door sealed behind him.

The pulse-jammer kicked in with a low-frequency thrum — a cocoon of sound nullification. No cameras. No tracking.

Only intent.

Nico didn’t say a word. He reached beside him, pulled a capsule drive from a fabric sleeve, and slotted it in.

The interface woke.

Tessa didn’t speak. She stood near the door, arms folded.

And then the file opened.

PROJECT CROSSFIRESubject ID: H-VALE_01Echo Burn Protocol: ACTIVETrigger Sequence: Full Cellular Deterioration on Containment Failure

Hernan stared at it.

The lines. The schematics. The beacon trails.

The kill switch written into his DNA.

When he finally spoke, his voice was barely audible.

"How long?"

"A day," Nico said. "There was a second encryption layer. Hidden deep."

Tessa stepped closer. "I didn’t know how to say it."

"I didn’t know at all," Hernan said.

He tapped the schematic, watching the cascading shutdown — his own nervous system lighting up in red. Termination masked as protocol.

"They made me with this. Not as a failsafe. As an instruction set."

Nico nodded. "From Tower Zero. The tech specs don’t lie. This wasn’t a glitch. This was engineered."

Tessa’s voice was steel. "They didn’t just make you enhanced. They made you replaceable."

Still, Hernan didn’t panic.

He closed the file.

Looked up.

"Who else knows?"

Tessa didn’t hesitate. "Dorne might suspect. Aya noticed the burner ping. She hasn’t said anything... yet."

"The liaison teams?" he asked.

Nico shook his head. "They don’t know about the clause. The clause wasn’t even in the top-level project folder. This was deepblack, Hernan. The kind of protocol they use for assets they don’t intend to survive."

Silence again.

And then Hernan leaned back in the chair, letting the scanner arch glow behind him.

"This was never about enhancement," he said. "It was about obedience. Control."

"And now?" Tessa asked.

He looked up.

"Now we burn the script."

A breath passed.

Then he said it:

"Tower Zero. That’s where it started. That’s where it ends."

Nico’s eyes darkened. "If we breach that system, we don’t get to walk back. No more hiding."

"Then we draw our line," Hernan said.

Right now.

Right here.

Tessa gave the faintest nod. "Then let’s make sure they remember why they started chasing you in the first place."

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