The stillness of the deep mountain was deceiving. Beneath the silent, snow-powdered peaks of the Carpathians, another kind of heartbeat was beginning to thrum. It was the low, vibrating drone of industry, less heard than sensed, a concealed pulse in the bedrock of the world.
The Haven was at capacity. The Level-4 lab, their pride and joy a short while before, was now a suffocating bottleneck. The workbenches were stacked with gear, the sterilized corridors cluttered with rolling server racks and boxes of supplies. Their mission's scale had inflated, and their sanctuary was choking them.
The solution was not to expand outward, but to excavate inward.
For generations, the pack had known about the old mining tunnels that undercut the mountain's belly—19th-century workings for gold and silv
