The hidden passage was tight and smelled of old dust and damp secrets.
It led them not outside, but into the adjacent apartment, a space even more derelict than their sniper's nest.
Jinx navigated the rubble-strewn floor with a familiar ease, stopping in front of what looked like a large, forgotten metal wardrobe.
It was dented and covered in rust, looking like it had been through a war.
Which, Michael guessed, it probably had.
She didn't try to open the doors.
Instead, she knelt and ran her fingers along the bottom edge, finding a nearly invisible seam. With a sharp tug, she pulled the false bottom of the wardrobe away, revealing a hidden compartment beneath.
It was her workshop.
Her sanctuary.
Her tomb.
It was a treasure trove of scavenged, modified, and lovingly maintained technology.
Neatly arranged in foam cutouts were dozens of strange gadgets.
There were sonic grenades designed to disorient monsters with sensitive hearing.
There were EMP traps like the one she'd used in the tunnels.
There were climbing pitons that could be fired from a pistol, and a spool of high-tensile wire thin enough to be invisible in the dark.
And in the center of it all, nestled on a bed of worn, gray cloth, was her rifle.
It was a heavy, ugly-looking weapon, a DGC-issue energy rifle that had been stripped down and rebuilt with a patchwork of custom parts. It was a Frankenstein's monster of a gun, but it hummed with a quiet, dangerous power that Michael could feel even from a few feet away.
"This," Jinx said, her voice softer than Michael had ever heard it, full of a strange, sad reverence, "is all that's left."
"The Rust Dogs' dowry."
She gently lifted the rifle, her movements as tender as if she were holding a child.
On the stock, almost worn away, was a faded, stenciled logo: a stylized dog's skull made from crossed wrenches.
"We weren't just scrappers," she said quietly, her eyes lost in a memory. "We were builders. Tinkerers. We believed you could solve any problem with enough ingenuity and a bit of scavenged tech."
She gestured to the gadgets in the compartment.
"Jax – he was our tech wiz. Built these sonic grenades. Said they were perfect for scattering Gutterfang packs without bringing the whole tunnel down."
"Sarah – she designed the climbing gear. Could scale a skyscraper in under a minute with it."
Her voice was a low, aching whisper, a eulogy for ghosts only she could see.
"And this," she said, running a finger along the rifle's modified barrel. "This was my project."
She reached into a separate, lead-lined box in the compartment and pulled out a single, beautiful, and terrifying rifle round.
It wasn't a normal energy cell.
The casing was a clear, crystalline material, and inside, a swirling vortex of unstable, silver-blue energy pulsed like a captured star.
"Phase-Disruptor rounds," she breathed, holding it up to the dim light.
"My masterpiece."
"I spent years trying to figure out how to fight something you can't touch. The answer wasn't to hit it harder. The answer was to unmake the rules it plays by."
"That energy matrix," she explained, her voice regaining some of its technical sharpness, "is tuned to the exact frequency of a DGC Ghost's phasing tech. When it hits, it doesn't explode. It… unravels them. It forces a hard reboot of their entire energy system. For a few seconds, they're stunned. Vulnerable."
"Solid."
Michael stared at the round. It was their trump card. Their magic bullet.
"Why don't we just use these to take them all out?" he asked.
Jinx's face fell, the brief flicker of pride replaced by a familiar, bitter cynicism.
"Because the energy matrix is held together with spit and a prayer, kid," she said, carefully placing the round back in its box.
"It's wildly unstable. I never perfected it."
She gestured to the box. Inside were only four other rounds.
"I only ever managed to make five that didn't blow up in my face."
"Five shots," she said, her voice grim. "That's all we have. Five chances to make a ghost solid. We can't afford to miss."
As she spoke, her gaze drifted to a small, tarnished silver locket hanging from a hook inside the compartment lid.
She reached out and touched it gently.
A fresh wave of grief washed over her face, so raw and powerful that Michael felt like an intruder for witnessing it.
It was in that moment of her profound vulnerability that the thought came to him.
It slid into his mind, cold and sharp and logical, a whisper from the piece of the Cable Hound that was now a part of him.
She's compromised.
Her grief makes her a liability.
The mission is all that matters. If she hesitates, if she freezes, we fail. My father dies. My mother's legacy is lost.
We could use her as the distraction. A bigger one than me. Her death would guarantee my success.
The thought was so clear, so precise, so utterly ruthless, that it took his breath away.
He recoiled from it as if he'd been physically struck, a wave of nausea and self-loathing crashing over him.
What was wrong with him?
"Kid? You okay?"
Jinx's voice cut through the fog. She had turned back to him, her moment of grief over, her eyes narrowed with suspicion.
She had seen the look on his face. The flicker of cold, predatory calculation.
"You looked… a million miles away," she said, her hand drifting unconsciously closer to the pistol on her hip.
"I'm fine," Michael lied, his voice hoarse. "Just… tired."
The Warden's voice echoed in his mind, a grave, somber bell.
"The hunger of the Void is not just for power, child."
"It is for efficiency."
"It strips away sentiment, empathy, grief. It sees only the optimal path to a goal."
"Be careful," the Warden warned. "Or soon, all that will be left of you is the mission."
Michael pushed the thought away, burying it deep, ashamed and terrified of the monster that was growing inside him.
He had to focus.
"We need a plan for those rounds," he said, forcing his voice to be steady, to be tactical. "We can't just fire them randomly."
Jinx studied him for a second longer, the suspicion in her eyes slowly receding, replaced by a grudging agreement.
He was right.
They spent the next hour gearing up.
Jinx loaded her rifle, her movements economical and precise. She gave Michael a set of encrypted, short-range comms, a pair of night-vision goggles, and three of the sonic grenades.
"For emergencies," she said.
He clipped them to his belt, the unfamiliar weight a strange comfort.
When they were done, they looked like soldiers. Not the clean, polished soldiers of the DGC, but scrappy, desperate insurgents, armed with junk and hope.
They returned to the sniper's nest, the city's orange glow painting stripes across the dusty floor.
They synchronized their watches.
Jinx took up her position by the window, the monstrous rifle resting on the sill, its scope trained on the quiet facility across the street.
"Midnight shift change is in ten minutes," she whispered, her voice a low hum in his comm unit. "That's our window. Ninety seconds of chaos where their command structure is at its weakest."
Michael took a deep breath, his heart a slow, heavy drum.
He stood in the shadows, a lure waiting to be cast.
He thought of the cold, ruthless thought he'd had. He thought of the 1.2% corruption tainting his soul.
He looked at Jinx, a lone warrior preparing to fight for the memory of her dead friends.
He looked out at the cage built by his mother's murderer.
He was walking a razor's edge, fighting not just the enemies in front of him, but the one that was growing inside him.
"You ready, kid?" Jinx's voice crackled in his ear.
He was the bait.
He was the key.
He was a monster hunting monsters.
"Ready," he replied, his own voice sounding distant and cold to his ears.
The countdown had begun.