The day broke acid-pale, bleeding through the penthouse's holographic blinds like a surgical lamp in a morgue. No one in UMBRA really slept, but Owen Dagger was always the first to breach the perimeter of unconsciousness. He ran point even in dreams. He padded across heated composite floors, ghost-silent, trailing the scent of ionized ozone and skin-oil from a night spent cycling threat models. The kitchen—more a glass-walled command post than a place for eating—stood at parade rest. Owen punched the espresso machine, calibrated the grind by muscle memory, then checked the security feeds stitched into the north wall.
Mana-forged glass refracted the city's dawn, splitting each sunbeam into spectral lines—infrared, ultraviolet, runic. Owen's left hand hovered over the terminal, fingers tapping out diagnostic commands in a staccato cadence. No pings on the outer wards. No magnetic displacement in the service shaft. A single glitch on the tertiary fire escape, but the building's own logs showed only a misfired cleaning drone.
He logged it, double-encrypted, then poured two shots into a cup the color of old bruises.
Across the open expanse of the penthouse, Ellen Lee's door slid aside with the smooth inevitability of a guillotine. She emerged in compression gear, every muscle cabled and ready, hair coiled tight, face cold as lunar stone. She neither acknowledged Owen nor the coffee; her first step was a forward roll, into a shoulder vault, into a smooth three-punch-kick sequence that would have snapped the neck of anything living if it hadn't been air. Every motion, silent. She exhaled, once, then reset—again, and again, a loop of violence compressed to its purest form.
Hazel sat cross-legged in the living room's sunken conversation pit, surrounded by a ring of cracked tablets and battered, rune-burnt diagnostic cubes. Her glasses were slipshod on her nose, her hands a blur across virtual surfaces. On every screen: rotating overlays of the Crystal District, mana-flow simulations, packet captures of drone comms in Sombra, the tail end of a port scandal replaying from seventy-seven unique perspectives. Hazel didn't look up. She didn't need to.
"Nothing on the sixth-hour scan," Owen said, voice barely above the low drone of the kitchen. "But I want everyone to run thermal again. We had a ghost on the fire escape at oh-five."
Ellen finished her sequence, sweatless. "Cleaner drone?"
Owen nodded. "So they say."
"Bullshit," Ellen replied, rolling her shoulders. "They don't run that script on weekends. Especially not with the port at yellow alert."
Hazel flicked two fingers, merged three data streams, and spoke without looking. "Confirmed. The drone was a Zeiss 3200, patched from a Sombra subvendor. Last update: three months ago. No active contract in the Crystal."
Ellen circled to the window, peered through the reinforced glass at the city below. Nueva Arcadia sprawled in every direction, its towers and channels and ducts stitched together with the logic of a tumor. In the distance, she watched a formation of police AVs trace a perimeter around the Financial District, the lights flickering red-blue-white in the haze.
Owen set the coffee on the table in front of Hazel, a silent peace offering. She took it without looking, sipped, then set it down with the precision of a detonator. "Someone's pulling old drones from the junk pools. Could be scavengers, could be contract prelude. Or just someone wanting us to see them."
Jane Navarro made her entrance the way sunlight does in a prison: late, merciless, and full of judgment. She wore a robe over tailored pants, eyes ringed with the kind of darkness you get from a decade of bad sleep and worse decisions. Her hair, gold-orange and untamable, was pulled into a loose knot, but her hands were steady as she poured herself a triple neat from the bar cart. It was not yet seven.
She surveyed her crew with a look that said "I remember when you were all children, and I was already twice your age and meaner than hell." Then she leaned against the wall, sipped, and waited for someone to break.
No one spoke about the Taira job. That was the rule: no contract talk before noon, unless the job already went sideways. But the weight of it hung in the air, sour and dense as the coffee. Every movement had the inflection of an argument about to start.
Hazel's fingers flashed over a keyboard, the gestures twitchy, almost involuntary. "I've got three new log-ins on the Lancaster servers, all traced to the same two subnets. One's a honeypot, the other is live. Could be staging for the Bridge transfer."
Ellen turned, face unmoving. "What's the gap in their guard schedule?"
Hazel shrugged. "Too perfect. They're cycling every five hours, always with one wildcard slot. Classic lure."
Jane drained her glass, then let it clink against the steel counter. "They want us inside. They want us to believe we can win."
Owen's attention drifted back to the security feeds, the edge of his vision flickering with afterimages from the night before. He replayed the moment when Shiori Taira had signed the blood contract, the way her hands had trembled, the way she'd looked at him like he might be her executioner or her only hope.
He didn't like either option.
Ellen reset her stance, then stalked into the kitchen, poured herself a glass of water, and drank it all in one drag. "We have twenty-two hours to plan," she said. "And they expect us to fail."
Jane straightened, rolled her neck, and regarded the skyline with predator's interest. "Then let's make it interesting."
For a while, nobody said anything. The coffee cooled, the screens flickered, and the city kept spinning, hungry for new disasters.
Hazel finally broke the silence. "If we pull this off, what do we do with the Bridge?"
Jane answered instantly. "We use it. Or we break it."
Owen nodded, but inside he felt the old, familiar ache—the knowledge that every job changed the team, that every win was another layer of debt they would never pay off.
He walked to the window, set his forehead against the cold glass, and watched the world below, thinking of all the ways it could end.
Somewhere in the Crystal District, a child was already running, already setting the next disaster in motion.
Owen finished his coffee, then set the cup down with a sound like a gunshot.
It was morning, and UMBRA was awake.
The war table wasn't actually a table, though it was flat and woodlike and wide enough to seat six mercenaries plus one handler. It ran down the length of the penthouse's central room, and right now every centimeter of it was occupied—by tablets, data sheets, weapon manifests, blueprints that glowed faintly with anti-surveillance runes. From above, it looked like a digital morgue: every square, every line, a map of where someone could and would die.
Jane sat at the head, hands folded, eyes distant. She let the others spread out the materials, content to watch for the first seven minutes while her mind worked the angles. When she finally spoke, the table hushed without a word.
"Hazel," she said. "Walk us through it."
Hazel nodded, glasses reflecting nothing but blue light, and tapped a sequence that projected the Lancaster megaplant onto the surface in high-res, layer by layer. The facility was a monster: six sub-basements, seventeen above-ground floors, three hundred and twelve staff on the books, another fifty-three not listed on any official schedule. Every door was triple-warded. Every corridor had a camera—except for the ones that didn't.
"The main vault is here," Hazel said, magnifying a hollow near the center of the schematic. "They move the Bridge through this corridor at twenty-three hundred. Security cycle is every five hours, but there's always a two-minute window when the shift changes. The weird thing is—" She hesitated, eyes flicking to Owen, then Jane. "The pattern is too regular. Every time we rerun the sim, the window gets wider."
Ellen leaned forward, one hand bracing the edge of the table as she drew three parallel lines across the map. "They want us to take it. Or they want someone else to." She moved to a secondary overlay, where escape routes spidered out from the vault to three possible exfil points. "These two are traps," she said, voice flat. "This one might not be." She circled it, but her eyes stayed on the other two.
Owen examined the shifting guard logs, lips pressed thin. "Who's behind the last-minute personnel changes? None of these guys have local records, but they're running point on the most sensitive corridors."
Hazel tapped her screen. "They're all imports. Sombra, mostly. But two are flagged in the WMO contract database as 'non-compliant,' which means they're either too expensive or too dangerous for public jobs."
Jane grunted. "Ghosts, then. Or ghosts-in-training."
Hazel's hands danced across the interface, flipping from security overlays to employee profiles and back. "There are motion sensors with dead zones here, here, and here." She marked them in blood-red. "But those zones are only off during the pre-transfer sweep. The rest of the time, they're saturated with micro-runes. I think they're hoping to catch a mage or a null running silent."
"Or they want to catch us on the way out," Owen added. "It's too neat."
Jane drew a stylus from behind her ear, circled the three blind spots, and muttered, "Too convenient." She connected the dots, then drew a line straight to the main access shaft. "We're being herded. If we take the easy route, we die."
Ellen was already marking the walls with potential breach points. "I can open a door here," she said, stabbing the map with a fingertip, "but it will burn out the circuit for the entire floor. We'd have two minutes before backup hits from above and below."
Hazel bit her lip, then scrolled through another set of logs. "Someone in their IT ran a diagnostic three times this week, always at 3:17 AM. Never at any other time. If we're lucky, it's an inside job. If we're not, it's a bot checking for tampering."
Owen steepled his fingers. "Has anyone checked Taira's end of the contract? I mean, really checked it? Shiori said her father had no idea, but I don't buy it. Not with the resources they're throwing around."
Jane gave him a long look, then tapped a private terminal set into the table. A second later, the full text of Shiori's contract scrolled into view—page after page of legalese, counter-signed in blood and mana, the Taira crest stamped at the bottom.
"Compare it to the old jobs," Jane said. "You'll see what I saw."
Hazel ran the signature, then did a recursive search through the Taira contract archives. After a moment, she let out a low whistle. "It's legit—almost. The glyphs match."
Owen frowned. "So this is a US contract."
Jane nodded, gaze hardening. "Taira USA is beginning to climb really big steps "
They left the table as one, minds working ahead to breach and exfil, every variable accounted for but one: what happens when you finish the job, and the only enemy left is the one who hired you?
They'd find out soon enough.