The tunnel was a concrete throat, cold and damp, smelling of ancient dust and ozone. We walked for miles in a silence so thick it felt like a physical weight, the only sound the rhythmic scuff of our boots and Alexander’s shallow, pained breathing. Every few hundred yards, the overhead emergency lights would flicker—a rhythmic blink-blink-pulse—that told me the city’s search algorithms were still pinging the dark, looking for the heat signatures of two ghosts.
"Stop," Alexander rasped, his good hand gripping my shoulder. He leaned against the soot-stained wall, his face the color of the concrete. His shattered wrist was strapped to his chest with a makeshift sling torn from my tech-wear coat, but the pain was radiating through him in visible waves.
"We’re almost to the maintenance hatch,
