The light behind them stops.

  Not suddenly.

  It just goes.

  Leo’s tablet dies in his hand. No warning. No error. No flicker.

  They keep walking.

  The tunnel narrows. Concrete presses in. Rust stains streak the walls. Pipes sweat overhead. The hum deepens into something rougher, electricity stripped of polish.

  Taylor snaps his fingers.

  Nothing.

  “Yeah,” Taylor says. “This place hates phones.”

  “No,” Leo says, then adjusts. “It doesn’t see them.”

  Their pace slows.

  Kam’s heat stays low and contained, a shimmer that bends the air around him — pure distortion.

  “What do you mean, doesn’t see them,” Maya says.

  Leo kneels, palm on the wall. Old conduit. Manual switches. Physical routing.

  “This is pre?overlay infrastructure,” he says. “No AR hooks. No wellness layer. No optimisation skin.”

  He looks up.

  “We’re under the city. Outside its systems.”

  Marcus exhales, long and relieved.

  “Finally,” he says. “Somewhere honest.”

  The tunnel widens into a maintenance bay. Crates stack against the wall. Warning signs have faded to ghosts.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  Kam stops.

  Fatigue isn’t the reason.

  Something releases.

  The pressure behind his eyes drops. His heat settles into a steady hum.

  He breathes out.

  A thin wisp of steam lifts from his shoulders and disappears.

  “That’s different,” Maya says.

  “Yeah,” Kam says.

  He presses his palm to the wall. The concrete is cold. Plain cold.

  “Whatever they were doing up there,” he says, “their reach ends here.”

  Leo rises slowly. His face sharpens.

  “We dropped out of the model,” he says.

  Taylor grins.

  “Say that again, but cooler.”

  Leo doesn’t.

  “I mean it literally,” he says. “They can’t predict what they can’t simulate.”

  He gestures around them.

  “This place produces nothing. No sensors. No metrics. No feedback.”

  “So we’re ghosts again,” Marcus says.

  “Ghosts still get tracked,” Leo says.

  He pauses.

  “We’re blank space.”

  Kam shifts his weight. The floor holds.

  Maya studies him.

  “How long can you stay like this,” she says.

  “I don’t know,” Kam says. “But it’s quieter in my head.”

  Farther down the bay, a door hangs half open. No branding. No keypad. Just a dented steel plate with a handwritten sign:

  NO UNAUTHORISED ACCESS.

  Marcus chuckles.

  “Love it when the city talks like a human.”

  Leo peers through the gap.

  “There’s power in there,” he says. “Old grid. Dirty current.”

  “Dirty’s our aesthetic,” Taylor says.

  They step through.

  The room beyond is cramped and loud. Transformers buzz. Cables snake across the floor. The air tastes of oil and ozone.

  Analog monitors flicker on one wall. Grainy feeds from forgotten corners — service roads, loading docks, empty platforms.

  Blind spots.

  Leo studies the screens.

  “This is dark data,” he says. “Unindexed. Useless to them.”

  Kam watches one feed: a group arguing over a pallet. A fox crossing a road. Rain on concrete.

  “Looks fine to me,” Kam says.

  “That’s the problem,” Leo says.

  “So what does that mean for us,” Maya says.

  Leo hesitates.

  “If we stay down here long enough,” he says, “the system has to choose.”

  “Choose what,” Taylor says.

  “Either admit there’s something it can’t see,” Leo says. “Or lie.”

  “They’ll lie,” Marcus says.

  “Yeah,” Leo says. “But lies need witnesses.”

  Kam watches the screens — ordinary moments, unimportant, unwatched.

  “So we don’t show up,” Kam says.

  “Exactly,” Leo says.

  “We don’t fight.”

  “No.”

  Kam turns to them. Steam curls faintly from his shoulders, contained.

  “We don’t give them anything to finish.”

  Silence.

  Then Maya:

  “If we’re not part of their story anymore,” she says, “what story are we in.”

  Kam looks back at the screens — the fox, the rain, the people no one is tracking.

  His heat hums, low and steady.

  “Ours,” he says.

  The transformers buzz once, louder.

  Then settle.