CASSIAN
The car stopped in a graveyard of rebar and skeletal gray pillars. It was an XUM development site, one of my father's projects, stalled by a permit dispute that I'd personally engineered months ago to keep the floors empty.
It didn't exist on any active patrol route. It was a hollowed-out legal non-entity, a shell of concrete that hadn't decided what it was meant to be yet.
Perfect for the work I had left to do.
We descended into the sub-basement. The air down here was thick with the smell of damp lime and cold, uncirculated oxygen.
My men had already secured the lieutenant to a steel chair, the kind that was bolted directly into the foundation. His wrists and ankles were bound with professional-grade restraints, tight enough to hold a desperate animal, but not punitive. Not yet.
I didn't go in right away.
