Torin Branigan

The reinforced concrete walls of Sub-4 bled cold condensation. Rain beat against the street grates sixty feet above, a muffled, relentless thrumming that made the air smell like wet iron & stale coffee. Torin sat at the central terminal, his posture rigid despite the dark rings beneath his eyes. He tossed Matthew’s confiscated phone onto the steel table. The screen flickered once with an encrypted grid coordinate before going black. "Matthew stays in Isolation B," Torin said, his voice flat, stripped of sleep. "He doesn't get water until I see the raw key logs." Behind the glass partition, the surviving breach team stood under the buzz of emergency halogen lamps. Five left. Arlene leaned against the server rack, her arms crossed tight over her chest. Her eyes never left Torin. Every time he spoke, her jaw tightened, hung on his words with an intense, desperate focus that felt entirely out of place in a steel vault. "The signal didn't route through Matthew's clearance," Bram muttered, wiping grease from his knuckles. "He was a decoy." "Or a messenger," Torin replied. He didn't look up from his screen. He pointed at me with a pen. "You. You were brought into this unit three weeks ago on Arlene's recommendation. Your signal parsing scores were barely average. Why are you in this room?" The air went thin. Arlene took a step forward, her voice sharp. "I vetted her myself, Torin. She's clean." "I am not asking you, Arlene," Torin said without raising his voice. The absolute coldness in his tone made her freeze in place. He looked directly at me, his blue eyes bloodshot, calculating. "Explain your function here." "I organize the secondary frequency dumps," I said. "The stuff the automated scripts miss." Torin stared at me for three silent seconds, measuring the pulse in my throat. "Irina," he said quietly, shifting his gaze. "Lock the secondary vault doors. Nobody leaves this floor until the broadcast array goes dead."