Deep beneath the trembling subway lines and the complex sewer grids of Manhattan sat an entire world that the human population above could never map. It was The Hidden Metropolis—a massive, high-tech subterranean network of abandoned pneumatic railway tunnels, prehistoric granite aqueducts, and deep-budget bunkers that the Orion Directorate had spent three centuries scrubbing from the public municipal blueprints. Now, funded by the infinite wealth of the vampire banks and built under the absolute kedaulatan of the Brooklyn crown, this dark underworld had been transformed into the sprawling, automated capital of the Sovereign Dawn.
The air inside the main subterranean cavern of Sector 3 was intensely crisp, vibrating with the continuous, industrial roar of automated liquid-nitrogen cooling
