Vera woke him at 0620 by setting two cans of canned coffee on the crate beside his head.
"Draw practice," she said. "Loading bay two. Ten minutes."
Caden sat up and discovered that sleeping on a cold floor for two hours was worse than not sleeping at all. His shoulder had stiffened while he wasn't paying attention. His forearm had that tight-bandage itch that meant Eun-ji's wrap had done its job.
He drank one can standing up and looked across the warehouse floor.
Hana was still on the cargo blanket, breathing steady. Yoon had fallen asleep in a folding chair three feet away, still in her coat, glasses on her face, one hand resting on the blanket's edge like she was anchoring it down. Kane sat at the far end of the conveyor with his phone in front of him. Min was beside him, head down over the evidence binders.
Na-young was still at her laptop. Hadn't moved. Her second coffee can was full and untouched and cold.
No answer from Kwon Min-sik yet. Caden could read that from Kane's postureâthe particular stillness of a man waiting on something he couldn't force.
He took the second coffee and went to find Vera.
---
Loading bay two was a narrow concrete corridor that ran along the facility's back wall, used for overflow before the place went bankrupt. Empty now, fifteen meters of clear space between two roll-up doors, fluorescent lights that buzzed at one end.
Vera was at the far end.
She'd set up a row of empty cans at varying heights on a bench, spaced two meters apart.
"Unholster," she said.
Caden reached.
She watched his right hand.
He drew, aimed, didn't fire. Three seconds, which was functionally forever.
"Again," she said.
He holstered. Drew again. Faster this time, about two seconds.
"Again."
Five more. She didn't comment. Just watched the hand.
After the eighth rep, she stepped forward and adjusted his wrist angle without warning, two fingers redirecting his grip rotation.
"There," she said. "Draw from there."
He tried it. The angle felt wrong at firstâtoo far from his old defaultâand then on the second rep it clicked into something marginally faster.
"[Quick Draw] was a crutch," Vera said. "You built your draw around it instead of building the draw and using the skill as acceleration. Same mistake every thief makes when they hold a skill too long."
"I had it for three months."
"That's long enough." She picked up one of the cans and tossed it to him. He caught it with his left hand. "You keep reaching with your right for things that don't need your right hand. Combat habit. Break it."
"Easy correction."
"Nothing about this is easy. Stop trying to make it sound like it is." She turned back to the bench. "Draw on each can, dry. Twelve reps. I'll watch angle."
He ran the twelve.
By the end his draw was still slow. But it was consistently slow, which was different from erratic. Consistent could be improved. Erratic was just dangerous.
Vera said, "Serviceable," which from her was probably a compliment.
On the way back, she walked beside him and said, without preliminary, "You told Kane his contact would listen better to someone with nothing to protect."
"Yes."
"That was true."
"I know."
"It was also a way to put yourself in the room for that conversation."
Caden glanced at her.
"Also true," he said.
"Make sure you actually let Kwon say no if he's going to say no," she said. "Don't push him so hard he says yes to stop the conversation and then pulls out when we're halfway in."
"I know how to read a tell."
"You know how to read a bluff. Someone who's afraid and genuinely undecided is different. They look like a bluff but they're not. Push a bluffer and they fold. Push someone undecided and they flip on you."
She went back to her bike, which she'd positioned near the main loading door where she could get on and move in under thirty seconds if she needed to.
Caden stood for a moment in the corridor.
He knew the difference. He did. He'd sat across tables from both kinds of person for enough years.
He went to check on Kane.
---
Kwon Min-sik called back at 0753.
Not a text. A call, which was either brave or panicked. The ringtone cut through warehouse quiet and everyone who was awake looked at Kane's phone.
Kane answered on the second ring.
"Mr. Kwon."
A pause. Then a voice, thin with controlled fear. "Director. I am glad you areâI mean to say, I saw the bulletin."
"I know you did."
"They are sayingâ" The voice dropped. "They are saying you cooperated with a thief. That you helped one escape custody."
"I cooperated with an individual whose cooperation I needed to investigate a Section 9 operation that has been running inside this department for at least three years without sanction." Kane's voice never changed register. "What they are saying and what happened are two different things. Evidence exists to demonstrate the difference."
Silence on the line.
Caden was standing five feet away, listening.
Kane caught his eye and tilted the phone slightlyânot full speaker, but enough to carry.
"Mr. Kwon," Kane said. "I have a specific request. I need forty minutes inside Sector 5's maintenance corridor, northeast wing, near the infrastructure relay rack."
The fear in the voice escalated to something higher-pitched. "Director, that is an active facility. I cannotâif anyone saw meâ"
"I understand the risk you would carry."
"They would assume I was involved. The bulletin lists your associates, it lists Shin So-raâI have worked with Shin So-ra, I signed her visitor logs twice last year, if someone pulled my recordsâ"
"Mr. Kwon."
The voice went quiet.
"I am asking this because Shin So-ra is in Section 9 custody under a falsified enemy combatant tag with sixty-one hours before she can be transferred to a black facility where no oversight will reach her." Kane paused. "I am also asking because you have worked in that building for nine years and you have never once filed a fraudulent form or looked away from a rule violation you could do something about. I know this because I checked your file when you first started processing my transfers."
Another silence.
The voice said, "Why did you check my file?"
"Because I check everyone's file who has access to my transfers. That is standard protocol." A beat. "You passed. In nine years nothing changed that assessment."
Caden didn't move.
"Northeast wing," Kwon said, finally. Not a question. "The relay rack is behind the fire suppression panel. Access requires maintenance supervisor badge."
"Can youâ"
"I am the duty administrator for the six-to-two shift." His voice had flattened, the fear still there but pressed down under something else. "I can be near the northeast wing at 0900 for a scheduled inspection. I am not supposed to be there, but inspections sometimes take one to the wrong corridor." A pause. "The person accompanying me cannot carry a weapon. They will pass through two biometric gates. If the system flags the biosign as unknown or flagged status, I cannot override."
"Understood," Kane said. "One person, no weapons, biosign clear."
Na-young, who had been listening from her laptop, was already typing.
Kane ended the call and looked at her.
"Forty-five minutes," she said. "I have a partial biosign blank on file. Male, age range matching Mercer's height-weight, no criminal record, nothing in Hunt's system."
"Clean enough for civilian-grade biometric?"
"Clean enough for the model they run at Sector 5. I've seen the gate specs. It's two generations old."
Kane turned to Caden.
"One person. No weapons. Forty minutes to get there."
Caden looked at his holster, thought about the draw practice he'd spent the last thirty minutes on, and took the holster off.
He handed it to Vera.
She took it without comment.
"Earpiece," he said to Na-young.
She slid one across the table.
Min added, "Sector 5 external has a jammer perimeter. The earpiece will cut out inside. You're on your own once you're past the gate."
"How long do I need to be near the relay rack?"
"Depends how long [Comm Spoof] takes to read traffic."
He didn't know. He'd never tried to do what he was planning. The skill's described function was injectionâpushing fake traffic into a stream. He'd been extrapolating that it could also read. It made logical sense. You couldn't convincingly inject into a conversation you hadn't heard.
Whether the skill worked that way in practice was something he was about to find out.
"Assume thirty minutes minimum," he said. "I'll work faster if I can."
Na-young printed a maintenance ID on a card and handed it over. Photo was generic. Name was Lee Joon-soo.
"If anyone asks why Lee Joon-soo isn't in the system," she said, "the answer is that the supplemental contractor database updates lag the physical badge by forty-eight hours. It's a known admin gap. Kwon will know this."
Caden looked at the card.
Lee Joon-soo had a slightly different nose and looked like he hadn't slept in two days, which was about right.
"This is a lot of trust to put in one administrator who's afraid," he said.
"Yes," Kane said.
"And your read on him."
"Yes."
Caden pocketed the card.
"All right. What do we do if my read on him is wrong and yours is right and the biosign still flags."
"Then you abort at gate one and exit the way you came," Kane said. "Do not go in if the gate flags. Come back and we build a different approach."
"And Shin's clock keeps running."
"Yes." Kane's voice didn't soften on that word. "Her clock keeps running. But you walking into a trap solves nothing."
Ryu, who had been cleaning his weapon at the far end of the conveyor, said without looking up, "You know what solves Shin's clock?"
"We're working on it," Caden said.
"Work faster."
---
Caden reached Sector 5 at 0858.
The facility sat between a parking structure and a municipal records annexâbuilt to be forgettable, three stories of gray administrative concrete with Hunt department seals on two doors and nothing else to distinguish it from the buildings on either side.
Kwon Min-sik was waiting near the northeast service entrance in a gray coat with a clipboard. He was exactly what Kane had described: mid-forties, careful eyes, clipboard held at an angle that blocked his face from the nearest camera. Not something you did consciously. Something you learned.
He saw Caden and his shoulders moved once, not quite a flinch.
Caden walked toward him at maintenance-worker speed. Unhurried. Purposeful. Just a man checking a schedule.
"Lee Joon-soo?" Kwon said, formally. For the camera.
"Yes sir. Northwest relay system, secondary grid." Caden held up the card. "Running a bit behind on the schedule."
"Follow me."
First gate was two floors down, at the junction of a service corridor and the main building infrastructure spine. Kwon badged through. Caden followed with the printed card.
Scanner beeped.
Green.
Na-young's blank had held.
Second gate was forty meters further, at a steel door marked INFRASTRUCTURE - AUTHORIZED ACCESS ONLY.
Kwon badged through again and held it.
Scanner on Caden.
Four-second pause. Longer than the first gate.
Then green.
The door opened.
Behind it, the relay rack was exactly where Marcus had said. Floor-to-ceiling server columns with one anomalous unit that didn't match the othersânewer housing, slightly different ventilation pattern. The ghost node.
Kwon said, quietly, "Twenty-five minutes. Then I have to be elsewhere."
"Understood."
Caden pulled on a pair of work gloves from his jacket pocket, crossed to the ghost node, and placed both palms flat against its side panel.
[Comm Spoof] lit up in a way he hadn't felt before.
Not injection mode. Something quieter. Passive. He'd never tried to use it this way and apparently it worked, because encrypted traffic started flowingâlayered, multiple command signatures, rotating intervals.
He started reading.
Not the content. He couldn't decrypt on contact, not yet. But the structureâthe rhythm of how traffic moved, which signatures authenticated to which handlers, how the key rotation correlated with time-of-day patternsâthat was readable.
He stood with both hands on the housing and catalogued what he heard.
Epsilon had a seven-node communication tree inside Hunt infrastructure. Three of those nodes rotated on a six-hour schedule. The authentication keys were derived from a master key he couldn't see yet, but the derivation pattern was consistent enough that if he had one key at a known time, he could extrapolate the others.
What he needed was one clean authenticated transmission.
He got it at the seventeen-minute mark.
Someone inside the network sent a priority update. Full signature, authenticated. Four hundred milliseconds of clean, unencrypted header before the payload locked.
Caden held it in the skill the way you hold a good hand before you look at the other players.
Then he let go of the housing and stepped back.
His palms were sweating inside the gloves.
Kwon was checking his watch at the door.
"Done," Caden said.
They exited through both gates, past the camera angles, back out into the gray morning and the noise of the parking structure.
Kwon stopped at the northeast entrance and looked at Caden with the expression of someone who'd just done something they couldn't undone.
"Was it enough?" he asked.
Caden thought about the authentication window, the key derivation pattern, the seven-node tree.
"It was a start," he said.
Kwon nodded once. Then, quieter: "Tell Director Kane that I checked my assignment records this morning. The two officers he vetted for Sector 5's command rotation. One transferred to a satellite unit eight weeks ago under emergency reassignment. The paperwork was signed by Kane himself." He met Caden's eyes. "Director Kane was in a different city that week. I verified it against his calendar entries before I called."
Caden went still.
"There's already a Section 9 insert inside this building," he said.
"Yes." Kwon's expression was flat and exact. "I do not know who. I thought you should know."
He turned and walked back inside before Caden could ask anything else.
Caden stood on the sidewalk with the maintenance ID in his pocket and the relay architecture burning in his memory and the new variable from Kwon landing somewhere cold in his chest.
One Epsilon insert, position unknown, inside the facility where he'd just been standing without a weapon for twenty-three minutes.
The earpiece crackled as he cleared the jammer perimeter.
Min's voice.
"You're out. Status?"
"I got what I needed," Caden said. "Plus something I didn't expect." He started walking. "And Shin's situation just got more complicated."
Min went quiet for half a second.
"I'll have everyone up when you arrive."
On the morning news cycle playing from a phone shop window as he passed, a bulletin banner scrolled across the bottom of the screen.
He slowed.
Read it twice.
`FUGITIVE SKILL THIEF ASSOCIATE SHIN SO-RA CONFIRMS TIES TO UNDERGROUND NETWORK IN RECORDED STATEMENT. FULL STATEMENT TO BROADCAST AT 1000 HOURS.`
Confirmed.
Forty-one hours earlier she'd been dragged through a maintenance door in a container yard.
They'd already built a statement.
Caden kept walking, faster now.
The thing about a fabricated confession was that once it was broadcast, every door they'd been trying to open through legal channels closed. Witnesses would reconsider. Judges would hesitate. Even Kane's clean contacts would wonder.
Section 9 didn't just think in permissions.
They thought in narratives.
And they'd just put theirs in front of the public before the team had anything to answer with.
