Zara was already moving toward the southern face of level four when the plan finished forming in her head.
"Kael. I need Sev and three fighters who can move in water."
Kael didn't ask why. She read the answer in Zara's trajectory, away from the perimeter, toward the structure's open southern edge, toward the flooded street below and the direction the reinforcements were coming from. Her jaw worked once. Twice.
"You're going out there."
"The reinforcements arrive in seven minutes. The broadcast is in fourteen. I need to close that gap."
"With five people."
"With five people and the flooded district."
Kael's eyes moved to the CSD soldiers holding the northern pillars, to the stairwell they controlled, to the twenty armed bodies that were waiting for the fresh troops to arrive before finishing the push. The lull, the tactical pause between waves, the CSD's patience as they waited for the numbers that would make the final assault a formality, was the only window.
"Take Sev. Take Pell and Doran from the southern position. Take Luka, he grew up in the flood zones, knows the subsurface access." Kael paused. One beat. "Come back, Commander."
"Hold this building."
"I said come back."
Zara didn't answer. She was already at the southern edge, looking down at the flooded street three levels below. The water was chest-deep on this side, darker than the northern approach, the shadow of the parking structure keeping the sun off the surface, the water carrying the particular darkness of urban flooding that had sat long enough to absorb the street's debris into its color. Pipes and conduit from the building's exterior ran down the southern face. Rusted. Corroded. Climbable.
Sev arrived. Pell and Doran behind her, two Cell Seven fighters, mid-twenties, compact builds, the physical profile of people who'd spent their lives in spaces where size was a disadvantage. Luka was last. Tall, thin, dark-skinned, with the particular ease around water that came from growing up in the flood zones' canal districts, where swimming was learned before walking and drowning was a fact of childhood rather than an abstraction.
"We're going down," Zara said. "Into the flood. South, then east. The reinforcement column is coming from the eastern boundary of the district. We're going to intercept them."
"Five of us against ten vehicles," Sev said. Not a question. An observation delivered with the flat precision of someone measuring a structural load.
"Five of us and whatever you can do with the district's infrastructure between here and there."
Sev's eyes changed. The engineer's mind engaging, processing the flooded district the way she'd processed the parking structure, reading the environment not as terrain but as material, as levers and pressure points and the particular vulnerabilities that every built environment contained for anyone who understood how things were assembled.
"The eastern approach has a utility corridor. Subsurface, runs parallel to the main street about three meters below the waterline. Old storm drainage, pre-flood construction. The corridor intersects the main approach at two points. If the corridor's structurally intact, it provides covered movement and access to the street infrastructure, power conduits, valve clusters, pipe junctions."
"Can you use any of that?"
"I can use all of it."
They went down. The exterior pipes held, barely, the rust flaking under their weight, the corroded steel bending but not breaking as five bodies descended from level four to the waterline. Zara hit the water first. The flood was cold, colder than she'd expected, the temperature difference between the humid air and the subsurface water sharp enough that her skin contracted and her muscles tightened and her cybernetic eye's thermal overlay shifted to compensate for the new baseline.
Chest-deep. The current was weak on the southern side, the transports' fans disturbed the water to the north, but the parking structure's mass broke the flow before it reached the south face. The footing was bad. The street surface beneath the water was covered in debris, collapsed signage, fallen cable, the organic accumulation of years of flooding depositing whatever the water carried into the spaces where the water slowed.
Luka moved like the water was air. His feet found the solid points on the submerged street with an instinct that owed nothing to augmentation and everything to a childhood spent navigating exactly this terrain. He led them south, then east, the five of them wading through the flooded street in a file that stayed below the sightlines of the CSD formation to the north.
Two blocks east. Three minutes of wading. Luka found the utility corridor access, a maintenance hatch in the street surface, submerged, the hatch cover rusted but intact. He pulled it open. The hinges screamed underwater, the sound conducted through the flood as a vibration that Zara's boots picked up before her ears registered the frequency.
The corridor was below the waterline but not fully flooded. Waist-deep. The ceiling was low, less than two meters, a concrete tube designed for maintenance access, not human transit. They moved through it in a crouch, weapons above the water, the darkness broken only by Zara's cybernetic eye's infrared overlay and the faint gray light that filtered down through grating panels in the corridor's ceiling.
"The intersection is ahead," Sev said. She had her hand on the corridor's wall, reading the infrastructure the way a doctor reads a pulse. "I can feel vibration in the conduit channels. Vehicle traffic. Heavy. The reinforcement column is on the main street above us."
Zara stopped. Listened. Through the concrete and the water, the vibration reached her, the deep, rhythmic pulse of multiple fan-driven hulls pushing through the flood, the sound conducted through the district's substrate like a heartbeat through bone.
"How far?"
"Three hundred meters east, moving west. Three minutes to the parking structure at their current speed." Sev's hand traced the conduit channel in the corridor's wall, a pipe running the length of the tunnel, connecting to the street's infrastructure above. "The main street has valve clusters at every intersection. Gas lines, pre-flood, still pressurized. The city never decommissioned the subsurface gas network because decommissioning required access that the flooding eliminated. The gas is still in the pipes."
"You want to blow a gas line."
"I want to open a gas line. Under the water surface. Gas rises. The gas pocket forms between the water surface and the transport hull, the hull sits on an air cushion, there's space between the bottom of the hull and the water surface. Gas fills the space. The transport's fan engines ignite the gas."
A bomb. A gas bomb, assembled from the district's forgotten infrastructure by an engineer who read the drowned city the way a musician read sheet music.
"Do it."
Sev moved. Forward through the corridor, her hands on the walls, feeling for the valve cluster that would give her access to the gas network. Luka went with her, the flood zone native guiding the engineer through the subsurface geography that his childhood had mapped.
Pell and Doran stayed with Zara. The two fighters were quiet, the particular silence of people who'd left a defended position to enter an undefended one and who were processing the tactical implications of being in a flooded corridor beneath a street that ten CSD vehicles were about to drive over.
The vibration grew. The column was closer. Two hundred meters. The fan noise penetrating the concrete, reaching the corridor as a thrum that tightened Zara's jaw and shortened her breathing.
"Valve's open," Sev said. She was twenty meters ahead, at a junction where the utility corridor met a cross-tunnel. Her hands were on a wheel, an industrial gas valve, corrosion-locked, which she'd broken free by hitting it with the butt of her rifle until the rust gave way. The gas was flowing. Zara could smell it, the faint sulfur that the utility companies added to natural gas as an olfactory warning, the smell reaching her through the corridor's damp air with the particular urgency of a substance that wanted to explode.
"How long to fill?"
"The gas needs to reach the street surface and accumulate under the lead vehicle's hull. Thirty seconds. Maybe forty-five. The water slows the rise." Sev's voice was steady. Technical. The engineer in her element, building a weapon from pipes and chemistry and the city's own forgotten bones. "When the transport passes over the gas pocket, the fan engines' exhaust will ignite it. The explosion will be under the hull, upward force, contained by the water pressure on all sides. It'll lift the transport off the surface and break the hull's integrity."
"One vehicle."
"One vehicle. The others will stop. They'll have to, the lead vehicle will be blocking the street, burning, the gas pocket potentially reigniting if the valve stays open. That's your delay."
Thirty seconds. The gas filling the water column, rising toward the surface, pooling under the surface tension at the point where the lead transport would pass. Thirty seconds of chemistry between Zara and the seven minutes she needed.
Pell touched Zara's shoulder. "They're close."
The vibration was a sound now, the fan engines distinct, the pitch of multiple vehicles in formation, the particular acoustic signature of a military column moving through water at operational speed. Above the corridor's ceiling. Close. Getting closer.
Sev was counting. Her hand on the valve, feeding gas into the pipe that connected to the street's subsurface network, the gas traveling through the corroded lines toward the vent that would release it into the water column beneath the street surface. Thirty seconds of flow. Forty. Forty-five.
"Now," Sev said. She closed the valve. Stepped back. "The pocket should be formed. When the lead vehicle crosses—"
The explosion came from above.
Not an explosion, an eruption. The gas pocket igniting under the transport's hull produced a sound that the corridor translated into pure pressure. The water in the corridor slammed forward, the shockwave traveling through the flood and hitting Zara's body like a wall. She went down. Under the water. Her head below the surface. The pressure squeezed her chest, her ears roared, her cybernetic eye flickered as the electromagnetic pulse from the ignition disrupted its circuitry for half a second.
She came up. Gasping. The corridor was chaos, the water surging, the ceiling cracking, debris falling from above. Sev was against the wall, her hands over her head, concrete dust covering her face. Pell was on his knees in the water, coughing. Doran was up, weapon raised, covering the corridor's eastern end.
From above: the sound of a vehicle dying. Metal screaming. The fan engine's pitch spiking and then cutting out, the mechanical death rattle of a transport whose hull had been split by an explosion that had lifted three tons of military hardware off the water surface and set it down wrong, twisted, burning, blocking the street.
"Move," Zara said. "To the access hatch. We hit them from the surface while they're stalled."
She pushed east through the corridor. The water was higher now, the explosion had displaced the flood, raising the level in the subsurface channels. Neck-deep in places. She held the rifle above her head and waded, the footing treacherous, the debris denser as they approached the explosion site.
Luka found the access hatch. Pushed it open. Gray light flooded the corridor, the street above, the smoke from the burning transport mixing with the humid air, the visibility dropping to thirty meters.
Zara climbed through the hatch. Into the flooded street. Into the smoke. Into the ambush.
---
The lead transport was finished.
The hull had split along its port side, the gas explosion lifting the vehicle, cracking the structural spine, setting the fuel system alight. The transport sat in the flooded street listing at twenty degrees, flames eating along the deck, the soldiers who'd been aboard scrambling into the water on the starboard side. Some were injured, burns, shrapnel from the hull breach, the particular damage that an enclosed explosion delivered to the bodies trapped inside the enclosure.
The nine remaining vehicles had stopped. The column's formation compressed, the vehicles bunching behind the burning lead, the street too narrow for the transports to pass the wreckage, the buildings on either side rising from the water like walls that converted the street into a channel.
Zara fired from behind a half-submerged traffic barrier. The range was close, forty meters to the nearest stopped transport, the soldiers on its deck visible through the smoke, their silhouettes moving against the fire's glow. She hit a soldier on the deck. Shoulder. The soldier fell behind the hull rail. She fired again. Another deck, another silhouette. Miss, the smoke shifting, the target disappearing into the gray.
Pell and Doran fired from a doorway to her left. An elevated position, a building entrance whose steps rose above the waterline, giving them a dry platform and a clear angle on the column's second and third vehicles. Their rounds hit the transports' hulls, the decks, the soldiers who were trying to orient toward a threat they hadn't expected from the south.
The ambush was working. For thirty seconds, it was working. The column was stalled, confused, the burning lead vehicle blocking the street, the Saints' fire coming from positions the column's escort hadn't scouted because the escort had assumed the route was clear.
Then the column's commander responded.
The response came from the fourth vehicle. Not panicked. Measured. The kind of tactical adjustment that came from someone who'd processed the ambush, identified the threat axis, and issued corrections with the institutional efficiency of a commander who'd trained for exactly this scenario.
Three things happened in rapid sequence.
First: the second transport's deck weapon opened fire. Not toward Zara's position, toward the building where Pell and Doran were shooting from. The weapon was heavy, automatic, the rounds punching through the building's facade and turning the doorway into a spray of masonry and dust that forced both fighters off the steps and into the water below.
Second: soldiers from the third and fourth transports went over the sides. Into the water. Not panicked, organized, squad formations, moving south toward the Saints' positions with weapons up and the coordinated purpose of troops executing an immediate action drill.
Third: a drone launched from the fifth transport. Small, fast, the matte-black shape climbing above the smoke and orienting its sensor array toward the south, toward the positions from which the ambush fire had originated.
The commander on the fourth transport was visible now. Standing at the bridge housing, one hand on the hull rail, the other holding a handset. Female. Tall. Her tactical gear was different from the standard CSD gray, darker, the insignia on her shoulder marking her as something other than regular Guardian force. Zara's cybernetic eye resolved the insignia at forty meters: a stylized bird of prey over crossed neural probes. Ghost program tactical command. The rank markers below: Lieutenant.
Damien's lieutenant. The person responsible for coordinating Ghost program field operations in the district, the officer who sat between Damien Ashford's strategic directives and the CSD soldiers who executed them.
The lieutenant's voice carried across the water. Amplified, a speaker system on the transport's hull, the words arriving at Zara's position with the clarity of someone who wanted to be heard.
"South-axis ambush. Four to six hostiles. Subsurface access, they used the utility corridor. Squads two and three, sweep south. Squad four, secure the corridor hatches. Drone, thermal sweep."
She'd mapped the ambush in thirty seconds. Identified the threat size, the entry method, the infrastructure they'd used. The lieutenant wasn't surprised. She was executing a response protocol that her experience had prepared for, the particular readiness of a commander who'd operated in contested districts long enough to expect ambushes and who'd built her tactical doctrine around the assumption that every approach route was potentially hostile.
The soldiers in the water were closing. Two squads, eight soldiers each, sixteen total, moving south through chest-deep flood in a formation that covered angles and maintained spacing and advanced with the trained rhythm of troops who'd fought in flooded urban terrain before.
"Sev, fall back!" Zara fired at the nearest squad. Hit the lead soldier's vest, the round absorbed by the armor, the impact staggering him but not dropping him. She fired again. His neck, above the vest collar. He went down in the water. The soldier behind him kept coming.
Sev emerged from the corridor hatch fifteen meters to Zara's left. She was moving fast, the engineer reading the tactical situation and processing it through the lens of someone who understood that engineering solutions took time and time was the thing they'd run out of. She fired her rifle from the hip, the shots unsighted, suppressive, buying seconds.
Luka was behind Sev. He moved through the water like something native to it, fast, low, using the current and the debris for concealment, his rifle held in one hand while the other found handholds on the submerged structures.
The drone found them.
Its thermal sweep cut through the smoke, the sensor array identifying body heat against the cooler water, marking the five Saints fighters as bright shapes in the drone's targeting display. The drone didn't fire. It relayed. The positions transmitted to the squads in the water, to the lieutenant on the transport, to the deck weapons that could now target through the smoke using coordinates rather than visual acquisition.
The second transport's deck weapon opened fire again. At Zara's position. The traffic barrier she was behind took three rounds, the concrete cracking, fragments spraying, the barrier degrading from cover to debris under the weapon's sustained fire. She rolled sideways. Into the water. Under the surface. The rounds tracked her movement, hitting the water where she'd been, the impacts sending columns of spray upward that the smoke swallowed.
She surfaced behind a submerged vehicle, a car, pre-flood, sitting on the street with its roof just above the waterline. The vehicle's mass absorbed the deck weapon's fire, the rounds punching through the car's body panels but losing velocity in the process. Temporary cover. The car was steel and glass, not concrete, and the deck weapon would chew through it in seconds.
"Pell!" Zara called.
Pell didn't answer.
She looked left. The building entrance where Pell and Doran had been. The facade was destroyed, the deck weapon's first burst had turned the masonry into a crater, the steps buried under rubble. In the water below the steps, Doran was pulling Pell toward cover. Pell wasn't moving under his own power. His left side was red, the rounds that had hit the facade had produced fragments that had hit him, the masonry shrapnel doing what the rounds themselves hadn't because shrapnel didn't care about armor and Pell's side wasn't armored.
"He's hit!" Doran shouted. "Bad!"
The CSD squads were thirty meters away. Closing. Their fire intensified, multiple weapons, coordinated, the volume of a force that outnumbered the ambush team three to one and knew it.
Sev grabbed Zara's arm. "We need to go. Back into the corridor. We've bought the time, the column is stopped."
"The column is stopped but the lieutenant will clear the corridor hatches. She already ordered it."
"Then we go deeper. Into the subsurface. There are connections to the Pipeline network from the utility corridors. Luka—"
Luka nodded. He'd already found the route, a secondary hatch, thirty meters south, partially hidden behind a collapsed awning. The hatch led deeper into the subsurface, below the utility corridor level, into the tunnel network that connected to the Pipeline system.
"Doran! Bring Pell! South, thirty meters, the hatch!"
Doran dragged Pell through the water. The Cell Seven fighter was conscious but fading, his face gray, his breathing shallow, the blood from his left side turning the water around him dark. Doran held him above the surface with one arm and moved with the desperate efficiency of someone carrying a friend who was becoming heavier with every second because the body was losing the strength to support itself.
The CSD squads fired. Rounds hit the water around Doran and Pell, close, the splashes spraying Doran's face, the shooters tracking the two figures in the water with the accuracy of soldiers who were close enough that accuracy was a matter of pointing rather than aiming.
Zara stood from behind the car. Exposed. Full profile to the CSD squads. She fired, not at the squads, at the lieutenant's transport. At the bridge housing where the commander stood directing the response. The rounds hit the housing's frame. Sparks. The lieutenant ducked. One second of ducking. One second where the command voice went silent and the squads' coordination stuttered.
Luka reached the hatch. Opened it. Sev went through first, into the darkness below, the deeper subsurface, the tunnel connections that might lead to the Pipeline or might lead to dead ends or collapsed sections or the particular darkness that the flooded district stored in its lowest levels.
Doran reached the hatch with Pell. Pushed Pell through. Pell's body went limp as it passed the hatch's edge, the transition from water to air releasing whatever tension the water's support had been providing, the fighter's weight becoming his own problem in a way that the water had been solving. Doran went through after him.
Zara fired three more rounds at the transport. Then she moved. Fast, the Specter conditioning driving her body through the water with the augmented speed that turned thirty meters into seconds. She reached the hatch. Dove through.
Into darkness. Into the subsurface. The hatch closing above her, the CSD soldiers' fire hitting the hatch cover a fraction of a second after it sealed, the rounds ringing off the steel like fists on a door that had been slammed shut.
---
Pell died in the tunnel.
The shrapnel had cut an artery in his abdomen. Sev found it with her hands in the darkness, the blood hot, pulsing, the particular rhythm of arterial bleeding that no field dressing could stop because the dressing couldn't reach the source and the source was inside the body cavity where hands without surgical training couldn't help.
He died on the tunnel floor with Doran holding his head above the water that pooled in the tunnel's lowest sections, and the dying took four minutes, and the four minutes were the longest period of time that Zara had experienced since the day she'd woken up in the Underground with no memory and a name that wasn't hers.
"We have to move," Zara said.
Doran looked up. His hands were covered in Pell's blood. His face held the particular blankness of a man who'd just watched his squad-mate bleed out in a tunnel and who was processing the event through whatever mechanism combat soldiers used to convert loss into something that didn't stop them from functioning.
"He was—"
"I know. We have to move."
Doran laid Pell's head on the tunnel floor. Gently. The gentleness of the living handling the dead with the care that the dead couldn't feel but that the living needed to provide because the providing was for them, not for the body.
They moved. Through the subsurface. Luka leading, his flood-zone instincts finding the tunnel connections, the passages that went deeper and then south, the labyrinth of pre-flood infrastructure that the city had abandoned to the water decades ago.
The vibration above told the story. The CSD column was not advancing. The burning transport still blocked the street. The squads were sweeping the subsurface access points, looking for the ambush team, clearing the utility corridors, executing the lieutenant's methodical response protocol. They weren't at the parking structure. Not yet.
The ambush had bought time. Not seven minutes, less. Five, maybe. But five minutes was five minutes, and five minutes closed the gap between the broadcast and the reinforcements from seven to two, and two minutes was the distance between impossible and possible, and possible was the only territory that mattered.
Sev's left arm was bleeding. A round had grazed her bicep during the retreat, a shallow cut, the bullet's path running along the muscle without penetrating, leaving a furrow that bled freely and hurt enough that she held the arm against her chest as she moved. Not disabling. Not surgical. The kind of wound that the body could absorb if the body's owner decided that absorption was preferable to stopping, and Sev had decided.
Nine minutes to broadcast. The column stalled. The parking structure holding. The gap narrowing.
They reached a junction. Luka stopped. His hand on the tunnel wall, reading the vibration.
"This connects to the Pipeline. The main trunk, Junction Six. One junction south of Viktor and Jin."
"Can we reach them?"
"Ten minutes through the Pipeline. But we don't need to reach them. We just need to reach the surface."
Eight minutes.
They pushed through the junction. Into the Pipeline, the larger tunnel, the Prophet's supply route, the subsurface network that threaded through the district's infrastructure. The water was shallower here, knee-deep, the Pipeline's drainage systems still partially functional, the ancient engineering holding against the flood that had overwhelmed everything above it.
Maret's voice crackled through the receiver on Zara's belt. The signal was stronger underground, the Pipeline's steel walls conducting the transmission, the subsurface acting as a waveguide that carried the signal without the interference that the surface air imposed.
"Commander. Kael reports CSD soldiers on level four have resumed pushing. The lull is over. They're not waiting for reinforcements, they're pushing now."
"How long can Kael hold?"
"She says five minutes. Maybe seven."
Seven minutes. The broadcast was in eight.
One minute. The gap between survival and the broadcast was one minute wide. One minute that the parking structure's defenders needed to hold against twenty CSD soldiers pushing inward while the reinforcement column cleared the burning transport and resumed its approach.
One minute.
"Jin," Zara said into the receiver. "Jin, are you on this frequency?"
Static. Then the voice, fast, breathless, the words running together like they always did when Jin's hands were busy and their mouth was trying to keep up with their brain.
"Commander, like, I'm here, the array is calibrated, the pipe network is live, the signal's loaded, I just need, right, I just need the authorization to transmit because Viktor said not to transmit without your go because the signal is one-shot, the power draw will burn out the control node's circuits after the broadcast, we get one transmission and then the array is dead, so it has to be now or—"
"Transmit."
"—are you sure because the calibration is at ninety-one percent and if I wait three more minutes I can get it to ninety-seven and the signal lock on the Ghost frequencies will be—"
"Jin. Now."
One second of silence. The kind of silence that happened when a teenager who'd lived in the walls of the Underground and who treated technology with the particular reverence of someone who believed in its perfectibility had to choose between the perfect signal and the signal that existed, between the calibration that ninety-seven percent represented and the lives that the six percent difference wasn't worth.
"Transmitting."
The Pipeline hummed.
Not the vibration of vehicle traffic or the resonance of fan engines through the substrate. A different frequency. Lower. Deeper. The steel pipes conducting a signal that originated at Junction Seven's control node and traveled outward through the network, through every pipe, every junction, every connection point, the signal radiating from the infrastructure the way heat radiated from a wire carrying more current than its design allowed.
The hum grew. The Pipeline's walls vibrated. The water on the tunnel floor rippled with a frequency that Zara's boots transmitted through her bones, reaching her skull, reaching the neural port behind her ear, reaching the augmented receiver that the Ghost program had installed as standard equipment in every operative it produced.
The data arrived.
It came through the port. Not as sound, not as text, not as visual, as information. Raw. The particular format that the Ghost program used for operational orders, the direct neural transmission that bypassed the senses and delivered content straight to the brain's processing centers. The format that every Ghost operative's augmentation recognized as legitimate, as authorized, as orders-from-command.
But the content wasn't orders.
The content was names. Addresses. Dates. Extraction quotas, the volume of memory harvested from each subject, measured in terabytes, tagged with operative identification numbers. The subjects' identities: birth records, employment histories, family connections. Not criminals. Not optimization targets. Not the population management euphemisms that the program used to convert human beings into resource allocations. People. Thousands of them. Names and faces and lives that had been consumed by the memory extraction process that the Ghost program administered on behalf of Ashford Industries.
The data kept coming. Operative by operative. Quota by quota. The complete harvesting record for the Ghost program's Sector Twelve operations, every extraction linked to the operative who performed it, every operative linked to the subjects they'd processed, every subject linked to the life they'd had before the processing turned them into raw material for Eleanor Ashford's immortality architecture.
Zara stood in the Pipeline. The data flooding through her neural port. The names scrolling through her augmented processing centers, each one a person, each one consumed. Her hands were shaking. Not from the data, from the receiver. From the port. From the place where the signal entered her skull and deposited its cargo in the part of her brain that the conditioning had built for receiving orders and that was now receiving something the conditioning had never anticipated.
The truth. Delivered on the program's own frequency, in the program's own format, using the program's own infrastructure. Undeniable. Unconfiscatable. Already inside the head of every Ghost operative within the Pipeline's broadcast range.
And above, on the surface, in the flooded streets, in the parking structure, on the CSD transports, every Ghost operative in the district was receiving the same data. The same names. The same quotas. The same truth, arriving through the neural ports that the program had installed as tools of control and that Jin had converted into tools of revelation.
The hum faded. The Pipeline's vibration died. The control node at Junction Seven burned out, Jin's one-shot broadcast exhausting the ancient equipment's circuits, the signal ending as abruptly as it had begun.
Silence in the tunnel. Water dripping from the ceiling. Zara's breathing. Doran's. Sev's.
And from Maret's receiver, carried through the Pipeline's steel walls on a frequency that didn't need convection windows or thermal alignment: Kael's voice.
"Commander. The Ghosts stopped. Both of them. The one on the eastern walkway and the one on the western. They just... stopped."
