The teams reconvened at a safehouse on the east edge of Lockwood, where the city's light pollution was so bad it stained even the air inside. Owen and Jane arrived first, Owen already sweeping for bugs. Ellen and Hazel came in ten minutes later, Ellen flicking her wrist in a code gesture: all clear.
They traded notes, fast and precise, no wasted words.
"We're up against other team," Jane said. "Asher Defense, probably one of their black ops teams"
Hazel filled in the rest. "Lancaster's own staff is being kept out of the loop. They're running blind."
Owen summarized, fingers tracing patterns in the dust: "Which means the job is hotter than we thought."
Ellen's face didn't change, but there was a new energy to her stance. "We'll need a distraction."
Jane grinned, teeth showing. "That's what we do best."
For the next hour, they strategized, mapping every angle, every fake-out and fallback. Ellen and Owen worked the break-in; Jane and Hazel planned the digital blitz. Each step layered with paranoia, every route checked and rechecked.
When they finally called it, the city was already shifting, already folding in on itself in anticipation of the coming storm.
Owen stood at the window, watching the distant lights flicker in the direction of the megatower.
"Tomorrow," he said, "we steal the future."
He closed the blinds, locking out the night, but not the sense that somewhere—maybe everywhere—someone was watching back.
Twilight turned Nueva Arcadia's skyline into a backlit x-ray—every tower, every spire outlined in static and dirty flame. In the penthouse, the glass walls had gone opaque, shielding UMBRA's final briefing from any prying eyes.
The team gathered around the war table, its surface now a battlefield of overlapping maps, data feeds, and heatprint mug rings. Hazel's hands hovered over a set of tablets, each one humming with a different flavor of paranoia: security cameras, city traffic, backdoor police chatter. She conjured a 3D rendering of the Lancaster facility and spun it for all to see, pausing at each weak point she'd found.
Jane watched, silent, a glass of something brown and lethal balanced in her left hand. Ellen stood behind her chair, eyes locked on the hologram, her own hands gripping the edge so tight the wood creaked. Owen paced the far end of the room, face blank, but his knuckles were pale and flexing, just short of a tremor.
"Here," Hazel said, flicking a seam open on the projection. "Utility corridor. Guard rotation is light, and if we jam the local feeds for sixteen seconds, we're in."
Ellen grunted approval. "That's our primary entry. Owen, what's the fallback?"
Owen stopped pacing. "We pop a smoke cluster on the rooftop. It draws half the building's security up, gives us a two-minute window. But we'll have to deal with whatever private army Taira or Sombra throws at us."
Jane sipped her drink, gaze steady. "We've handled worse."
Hazel shook her head, not in disagreement, but in awe. "Not like this. All the other players are shadowing our every move. Even the air in that place will be watching."
Owen returned to the table, leaned in. "We're not just stealing a toy. We're starting a war. Our fixer says there are teams on retainer waiting to see who gets the Bridge, then either kill them or buy them."
Jane tapped the table with one short nail. "They'll have to kill us, then. We don't sell."
The four of them stared at the model, the silence thick enough to drag down the ceiling. Then, as if on cue, Ellen snapped out of it, began outlining the infiltration plan with the calm of a surgeon plotting her next incision.
"We move at midnight. Hazel locks out their alarms and loops the cameras. Owen disables the internal comms. I breach the vault. Jane secures exfil. Simple."
"Nothing's ever simple," Hazel said, but a hint of pride crept in.
Jane smiled, all teeth. "That's why we win."
They stood there, the four of them, reading the future off a tablet like augurs staring into a blood pool.
Then a sound cut through the room: a short, high-pitched ping, not any of the preset alerts. Jane's terminal flashed, the screen blooming with a subtle blue-white sigil. Taira logo—shorn of its usual bombast, just the old clan mark and nothing else. Below it, four words:
YOU ARE NOT ALONE
Hazel's lips parted, Owen's eyes narrowed, Ellen just stared.
Jane put her glass down, very carefully. "Well," she said, "that's a first."
The words blinked once, then again, and then vanished.
Hazel tried to trace the signal, but it was already gone—scrubbed from the system, the memory, even from her cache. "There's no source," she whispered. "It's not possible."
Owen said, "It's a warning."
Ellen said, "It's an offer."
Jane just stared at the space where the words had been, her knuckles white against the glass.
"It's both," she said. "And now we have to decide what side we're on."
The room stayed silent, but all four of them felt it: the city breathing, waiting to see who blinked first.
Dusk slid into darkness, and for a moment, Nueva Arcadia held its breath.
Tomorrow, they would steal the Bridge, or die trying.
Tonight, they learned what every survivor eventually knows:
In this city, no one is ever truly alone.