## **Chapter 24: Smoke Over Aegis Square**
The smoke rose early from Aegis Square, drifting into the dawn like the ghost of a fallen monument. The flare had ruptured more than infrastructure—it fractured what little certainty the Empire still clutched. The plaza, once a stage for official broadcasts and mandatory gatherings, now bore the scars of resistance. Cracked pillars. Burned flags. A twisted surveillance tower leaning like a snapped spine. No official report had named the cause. But the city already knew.
Inside the Ruined Haven, the tension was different from before. Not the dread of being hunted, but the strain of momentum. Everyone moved faster, more deliberate. Supply packs were stacked. New recruits trained in shadowed corners. Briefings ran on a loop, layered with scout updates and weathered schematics.
Kian stood at the center table, gazing at a projected scan of Aegis Square. The image flickered occasionally—interference from Empire jammers—but the damage was clear. "That flare wasn't ours," he said, jaw tight. "We didn't trigger the core beneath the plaza. Someone else did."
Serena leaned beside him, arms crossed, eyes sharp. "You think it's Elara's cell?"
Kian shook his head. "Too public. They avoid spectacle." He turned to Lina, who had just stepped in with an envelope tucked under one arm.
"This came through dropline three," she said, laying the contents on the table. Inside, a printed image of Aegis Square—taken from above—and two lines handwritten below it:
**We know the spine is hollow.
Now we'll cut the nerves.**
Rex raised an eyebrow. "Poetic."
"Strategic," Kian said, scanning the skyline beyond the rubble. "If they're planning to take down Empire comms, the next target's not symbolic. It's critical."
"Command Hub Delta," Maren said, stepping in with a flickering holopad. "Embedded beneath the Civic Archives in Sector Four. Lightly guarded, automated backups. Built for silence, not defense."
"Which makes it a weak point," Serena said.
"And a perfect fracture line," Kian added.
Within hours, the plan formed.
While outer cells staged soft strikes—blocking transit, disrupting signals—Kian's team would intercept Delta's relay port. The goal wasn't destruction. It was corruption. Feed false data, poison their own archives, confuse the system from inside. If successful, it would paralyze command lines without a single shot fired.
They moved after dark, cutting through collapsed metro tunnels and weaving past forgotten bunkers. Rain slicked the stone beneath their boots. Kian kept one hand to the walls as they moved, feeling for vibrations, sensing rhythms buried beneath centuries of engineered obedience.
At the Archives, the outer walls stood untouched—marble and gold-trimmed glass, untouched by fire. But inside, everything was wired. Electrostatic floors. Retina scan doors. And down below: the relay itself, hidden behind triple-encrypted gates and a biometric vault.
Serena disabled the first lock with a frequency spike, while Rex overrode the second with a mimicked Empire profile. Kian took the third. He closed his eyes, pressed his palms to the metal, and whispered under his breath. The energy came willingly now. Not volatile—precise. It surged from his core into the relay gate, crawling through the security threads, rewiring the acceptance code one layer at a time.
When the vault hissed open, he staggered slightly but smiled.
Inside, the core pulsed in blue and violet bands. Lines of data danced across mirrored surfaces. Kian approached slowly, hands shaking—not from fatigue, but awe. "This is it," he murmured. "This is their brain."
Maren uploaded the encoded falsifiers—a cascade of fake orders, reversed protocols, rewritten capture lists. Within seconds, the relay began to respond. Systems blinked. Dashboards conflicted.
Empire HQ would soon be looking at chaos.
"Signal embedded," Maren confirmed. "And it's not traceable."
Rex watched the relay shift through corrupted cycles. "They'll think someone on their side did it."
"They'll start turning inward," Serena said. "That buys us time."
And time was all they needed.
As they pulled out, Kian lingered. He knelt by the final terminal, reached out, and left one final gift: a tiny pulse encoded with a voice log—his voice.
"To anyone still listening in silence… you're not alone. Not anymore."
Then they vanished.
By morning, Aegis Square was full of smoke again. But this time, it wasn't coming from the rebels.
It was coming from within.
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