The air hit him first.
It was a physical blow, a chaotic mix of salt from the nearby water, the exhaust fumes of a passing truck, and the greasy, delicious smell of a distant food cart.
It was the smell of the living world.
After the profound, tomb-like silence of Conduit Zero, the city was a roaring, overwhelming beast.
Sirens wailed in the distance.
A ship's horn blared from the docks.
The rumble of traffic was a constant, low vibration that he felt in the soles of his shoes.
Michael squinted, his eyes aching as they adjusted to the harsh, orange glare of the streetlights.
He was a creature of the dark, blinking in a world that was too loud, too bright, too alive.
Jinx moved with a fluid, practiced motion, pushing the heavy iron grate back into place with a soft, metallic thud.
It settled into the concrete, looking like nothing more than another piece of urban decay.
"Okay, kid," she hissed, her voice a low, urgent whisper.
"Welcome back to the land of the living."
"Now forget everything you think you know about being alive."
She pulled the hood of her jacket low over her pink hair, her face becoming a mask of shadows.
"First lesson: stop looking around."
Michael, who had been gawking at the towering warehouses and the distant, glittering lights of Manhattan, immediately snapped his gaze forward.
"You're a tourist right now," Jinx criticized, her tone sharp as broken glass. "You're a target. You look like you don't belong here."
"You need to look like you belong nowhere."
"How?" Michael asked, his voice rough.
"You walk like you have a destination, but you don't look at it," she instructed, already moving down the deserted, cracked sidewalk. "You keep your eyes down, but not on your feet. You watch reflections. Store windows, car mirrors, puddles on the ground. They're your eyes in the back of your head."
They walked in silence for a block, the hulking shapes of Red Hook's warehouses looming over them like sleeping giants.
Michael tried to follow her instructions. He focused on a point a few feet ahead of him on the ground, letting his peripheral vision do the work.
He immediately felt a surge of overwhelming paranoia.
Every shadow seemed to hold a figure.
Every parked car seemed to be occupied.
"See that guy?" Jinx muttered, not breaking her stride. "Corner of the street. Leaning against the lamppost, talking on his phone."
Michael flicked his eyes up for a fraction of a second. He saw a man in a nondescript brown jacket, his face illuminated by the glow of his phone. He looked perfectly normal.
"He's a spotter," Jinx said flatly.
Michael's blood ran cold. "How do you know?"
"He's not really talking," she explained. "Watch his jaw. He's not forming words. He's just holding the phone to his ear. And he's been on that same corner for the last ten minutes. We passed him on our way into the tunnels."
"His shoes," she added.
"His shoes?"
"They're clean. Too clean for this neighborhood. They're standard DGC-issue tactical boots, just scuffed up to look civilian. It's sloppy."
Michael felt a fresh wave of fear. The enemy wasn't just a ghost in a tunnel anymore. They were everywhere. They looked like everyone.
The surface wasn't a sanctuary.
It was a different kind of kill box, one with a billion hiding places for the hunters.
"What do we do?" he whispered.
"Nothing," Jinx said. "We keep walking. He's low-level surveillance. He's just here to watch the general area. He's not looking for us specifically. If we react, if we run, then he'll know we're the ones we're looking for."
They passed the man. Michael could feel his gaze on his back, a cold, prickling sensation. He fought the urge to turn around, to use Shadow Step, to do anything other than just keep walking.
"Second lesson," Jinx continued, her voice a low anchor in his sea of paranoia. "Learn the rhythm of the city. Everything has a pattern. The flow of traffic. The timing of the streetlights. The way people walk."
"The DGC, especially the black-ops units, they move against that rhythm. They're too perfect. Too coordinated. They stand out if you know what to look for."
A black van with no markings turned the corner ahead of them, moving slowly, too slowly for the normal flow of traffic.
Michael's heart leaped into his throat.
"Is that…?"
"No," Jinx grunted. "That's just a regular creep. But good instinct. You're learning."
They walked for what felt like an eternity, a tense, silent journey through the industrial maze of Red Hook.
Michael started to see it.
He saw the way a group of sanitation workers moved with a little too much purpose, their eyes scanning the rooftops.
He saw the unnatural stillness of a window-washer's cradle on a nearby building, perfectly positioned to give a full view of the street.
The world he had known his entire life, the familiar, chaotic backdrop of New York City, was transforming before his very eyes into a web of threats and hidden enemies.
He thought of his mother's face, a hallucination born of spores and desperation, smiling at him from the moss.
The truth is a weapon, Michael. To wield it, you must first be strong enough to bear its weight.
He was beginning to understand what she meant.
The truth wasn't just a file on a data drive. It was a burden that made you a target. It was a lens that showed you the monsters hiding in plain sight.
Finally, Jinx stopped in front of a derelict, three-story brick building. The windows were boarded up, and the front door was chained shut.
"This is it," she said. "Vantage point."
She led him around to the back, to a rusted fire escape that looked like it would collapse if a strong wind blew. She tested it with her weight, then scrambled up with the ease of a creature born to navigate urban decay.
Michael followed, his own movements feeling clumsy and loud in comparison.
The apartment they entered through a broken window was a time capsule of neglect. Dust lay thick on everything, and the air was stale with the ghost of a life long-since departed.
But the front window offered a perfect, unobstructed view of their target across the street.
"Secure Self-Storage."
The sign was peeling, the red letters faded. The facility was a sprawling complex of identical, garage-like units surrounded by a high, chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.
It looked quiet.
It looked deserted.
"Looks clear," Michael said, a sliver of hope in his voice.
Jinx didn't answer.
She was already pulling a strange device from her backpack. It was a battered-looking tablet, scarred and modified with extra antennae and exposed wiring.
She powered it on.
The screen flickered to life, displaying a complex, swirling interface of green and black code.
She aimed the device at the storage facility.
She stared at the screen for a long, silent moment.
Her face, which had been a mask of grim, professional confidence, slowly went pale.
"Okay, kid," she whispered, her voice barely audible.
"We have a problem."
She turned the screen so he could see it.
He didn't understand the lines of code, the frantic, scrolling data.
But he understood the image that was slowly resolving in the center of the screen.
It was a map of the storage facility.
And overlaid on top of it, pulsing with a faint, menacing energy, was a shimmering, intricate, and absolutely inescapable spider's web.
"The DGC isn't laying siege to the place," Jinx said, her voice trembling with a fear he had never heard from her before.
"They're already inside."
"That's not a fence, Michael."
"It's a cage."