I wandered the vast transit station, awed by its towering, vaulted hall, artificial hanging biomes, and endless moving walkways ferrying autonomous freight containers and passengers directly to the platforms.

The main holographic departure board showed a high-speed Madrid train leaving in exactly twenty minutes. I headed for the ticket concourse, passing a prominent security camera—FADE-branded and tied directly to their regional surveillance grid. Their neural networks could match facial geometry to state watchlists in real time, even bypassing advanced reconstructive post-surgery. FADE specialized in total mass control algorithms.
A cold unease hit me.

I took a high-speed escalator up into the structural steel labyrinths, suspended a hundred meters above a massive crowd swarming around the automated ticketing kiosks. The escalator sped along its track, shuttling travelers up and down over a massive void of structural metal framework.
Then—a sharp flash of recognition. A familiar Arab woman’s face.
My body moved entirely on instinct. Time dilated, slowing to a crawl. Adrenaline flooded my brain as my neural implants surged.

Anais Hamell had spotted my biometric profile.

She was ascending the opposite escalator, an elite tactical weapon already unholstered. I dodged violently just as a silent, high-velocity dart hissed past my ear, striking an innocent passenger instead.
Total chaos erupted. Bodies tumbled down the moving steps. Screams rang out through the vaulted ceiling.

Two FADE operatives were already closing in on my escalator. I leaped over the moving handrail onto a meter-wide duralloy structural casing, sprinting recklessly along the narrow incline—my combat chips fueling my reflex arcs. One pursuer tried to mirror the move but lost his footing, plummeting into the metal void below with a fading scream. The other froze, clinging cautiously to the high-tension steel cables.

I tore twenty meters down the slick duralloy casing, dodging monitors, optical sensors, and structural cables in a mad, desperate dance with death. Near the bottom of the incline, I launched myself into the air—limbs splayed—crashing heavily onto the crowded passengers below. Their bodies cushioned my impact. I scrambled back to my feet amid a chorus of curses, evaded a traveler’s grabbing hand, and broke into a dead sprint.

My remaining pursuer was stuck ten meters up, still clinging to the exterior casing. I’d been thoroughly made. I had to ditch the station immediately…
I bolted for the subterranean metro entrance at the hall’s edge, vaulting over the digital ticket barriers amid stunned stares from the commuters. I melted instantly into the high-density crowd, desperately trying to erase my physical tracks.

A subway train’s low rumble echoed from the deep tunnels. I raced down the concrete stairs, slipping through the metro car’s closing pneumatic doors just in time. The train began to move, accelerating into the dark. A FADE camera loomed at the platform’s far end, its lens tracking the car. They might already know my current trajectory.
How the hell had Anais known I’d hit the Barcelona transit station?
Then I remembered the border zone’s red laser eyes—they weren’t just tactical weapon sights.

They were linked directly to FADE’s network of infrared scanners and predictive software. They’d mathematically anticipated my arrival. Probability mapping. Behavioral modeling.

The digital train display overhead flickered, reading: “Aeroport.”
A reckless idea sparked in my mind. I’d risk the gambit.

The metro surged into the terminal, breaking out directly into the sprawling, fluorescent glare of the International Flights hall. I hopped onto a high-speed moving walkway, a blur of neon and chrome cutting through endless transit corridors while automated shuttle runways and sleek sub-orbital jets loomed outside the massive glass walls.

I reached the Domestic Flights sector, housed under a massive, skeletal geodesic dome. The holographic schedule flickered: a Seville transport leaving in eight minutes; the Madrid flight ten minutes later. I pressed my wrist to the terminal scanner interface, engaging my biometric sub-dermal ID chip to secure a boarding pass. It left a clean digital footprint in the state surveillance log, but I was banking on pure speed now. FADE’s predictive models would calculate my trajectory based on my ultimate objective: Madrid. To break their mathematical trap, I had to feed the network a lie. I booked the Seville flight instead.

A twenty-minute sub-orbital burn in the upper atmosphere to the south might just throw the bloodhounds off my scent.
Onboard the Seville transport, I took a window seat, my eyes locked on the tarmac. FADE’s regional surveillance node was fast, but physics was faster. Movement caught my eye—a matte-black tactical rotorcraft dropped from the smoggy sky, landing hard on the perimeter asphalt. The side doors slid open. A woman and a massive augmented enforcer—Anais and her heavy goon—jumped straight into an idling tactical all-terrain vehicle, tearing across the tarmac.

They had been driving toward the Madrid flight until the network flashed them the correction. The vehicle swerved violently, tires screaming as they redirected toward my boarding gate. Too late.

Our hybrid engines roared into a high-pitched whine and my plane began to roll. We taxied past them close enough for me to look down through the reinforced plexiglass. I watched Anais step out of the vehicle, her face a raw, furious distortion through the kicked-up dust as the FADE telemetry data on her visor updated too late to catch me.
As the landing gear retracted heavily into the fuselage, the rapid climb in altitude finally let me regain some peace of mind.