Adventure of Selene Nyx 6

The underground arcade stutters beneath failing neon. Euran Cross kneels between dead cabinets, his oil-stained bomber jacket brushing dust as he coaxes a toy drone open.

His cheap prosthetic hand slips on a wire. The drone chirps, camera iris widening, and its cracked display floods the cabinet glass with a live feed.

The feed shows the street clinic under attack: shutters buckling, emergency lights pulsing, figures moving through smoke. A data tag marks the route hidden in the drone's memory.

At the arcade entrance, three armed collectors force through the chained doors. They are broad-shouldered adults in mismatched armor, mirrored visors, and rain-dark tactical coats.

Selene sits at her table, fingers moving across a dark terminal while the arcade’s failing neon flickers across its casing. She finds the collectors’ encrypted comm channel beneath the drone’s live feed.

Her intrusion folds into the channel as an authenticated priority order. Every collector’s receiver chirps, then displays the same directive: return to base immediately.

The three armed collectors lower their weapons and retreat through the chained entrance, their mirrored visors reflecting the clinic route before the feed collapses to static.

Euran keeps the drone cupped in his mismatched hands, staring at the empty entrance while the arcade settles back into its electrical hum.

Selene takes the drone from Euran's hands and opens its cracked shell with a narrow tool. The circuitry unfolds cleanly beneath the failing neon.

She bridges the memory core, bypasses its decoy partitions, and reads the compressed archive before the damaged camera firmware can overwrite anything.

The archive resolves into a tactical overlay: the attack was timed for seven minutes from now, and the dispatch trail points to a relay hidden beneath the old freight exchange.

The drone's tiny projector casts three routes across the cabinet glass, one marked by maintenance tunnels that bypass the street and the clinic's compromised entrance.

Selene rises too quickly, tucking the tool into her jumpsuit as the drone’s projector folds shut. The effort to hide her blush fails when the neon catches the heat in her face.

Euran steps aside to clear the route, close enough that his jacket brushes her sleeve. His crooked smile appears on the left side, wary but unmistakably amused.

He gathers the drone and follows her toward the dead prize machines. Behind them, the tactical overlay continues counting down, its red figures reflected in the dusty glass.

Selene lifts the prize counter’s false base and exposes a maintenance hatch. She slips the drone through first, then guides Euran down into the narrow service tunnel.

The hatch seals behind them with a soft magnetic click. Selene moves ahead through the dark, placing each step on the tunnel’s dry strips and avoiding the loose panels.

At the clinic’s service junction, Selene bypasses the lock and opens the access door. Cold emergency light spills across stacked filters and the clinic’s rear corridor.

She ushers Euran through, then turns back. A palm-sized relay unfolds from her terminal, copying their route with false maintenance traffic before wiping the tunnel’s access log.

Selene winks and continues through the rear corridor, following the blue maintenance strips toward triage. The clean exit marker resolves ahead, steady through the emergency haze.

Euran keeps pace behind her, the drone tucked against his jacket. His grey eyes catch the cold light whenever he glances forward, and Selene’s focus holds by deliberate effort.

The question costs Selene a brief hesitation. Her hand pauses over the exit panel long enough for Euran to notice, then she forces her attention back to the lock.

The panel accepts her bypass. The clean exit opens onto a sheltered service alley behind the clinic, where rain hisses on vents and the route out remains clear.

Selene exhales through her nose and plants both hands against the clinic entrance. The swollen door gives under her strength, scraping her palm raw as it swings inward.

The entrance opens into the clinic’s dim triage bay. Blue emergency strips flicker over overturned stools, sealed supply cabinets, and a floor still wet from tracked rain.

Euran slips in behind her, shielding the drone beneath his jacket. His prosthetic fingers whine as he checks the empty reception desk and the darkened treatment rooms.

A thin alarm tone pulses somewhere deeper in the clinic. Selene’s scraped palm stings, but the clean exit remains open behind them and the triage corridor lies ahead.

Selene connects her terminal to the triage panel. The alarm’s pulses resolve into a diagnostic handshake, and layered clinic permissions unfold beneath her intrusion.

She traces the alarm through the clinic network: it is not detecting an attack. An automated evacuation protocol is active because the main power grid has failed and life-support reserves are being tested.

Selene verifies the clean exit, triage monitors, treatment-room locks, refrigeration, and oxygen reserves. The clinic’s critical systems remain stable, but three treatment-room cameras are offline.

She finds no active breach in the network. The camera outage is older than the alarm, localized to a damaged junction near the rear treatment rooms, while the exit remains secure.

Selene confirms the evacuation protocol is safe to suppress and mutes the alarm without touching life support. The clinic settles into a low electrical hum as the system report stays open.

Selene redirects the terminal’s diagnostic bridge toward the rear junction. Beneath the access panel, three camera feeds hang from a damaged power coupler, their signal lines intact.

She isolates the coupler, reroutes reserve current through a maintenance channel, and patches the junction without touching life support or the evacuation safeguards.

One treatment-room feed returns, then the second and third. Grainy images settle across the panel: empty beds, sealed cabinets, and stable monitor lights.

The clinic’s network records the repair as authorized maintenance. Beyond the glass, the restored cameras sweep their rooms in silence while the clean exit remains secure.

Selene scrubs backward through the restored camera feeds, aligning their timestamps with the junction failure. The footage sharpens under her reconstruction, revealing the damage began before the clinic’s evacuation protocol activated.

Across the rear corridor feed, the collectors enter through the service access in rain-dark armor. One carries a compact signal tool while the others cover the empty hall, their faces hidden behind mirrored visors.

Selene advances frame by frame. The collectors stop beside the rear junction, sever the coupler’s external feed, and leave the internal signal lines untouched, preserving access to the cameras they thought they had disabled.

The footage catches their final detail: before leaving, the collectors attach a small locator tag beneath the junction housing. Its encrypted pulse matches the dispatch trail recovered from the drone.