The fog hadn't moved.
It clung to the rooftop like a second skin, low and patient, as if it were breathing just under the gravel. A slow, viscous stillness — not natural weather, not chaos — but something deliberate. Something waiting.
Hernan stepped forward, boots crunching softly, his movements quieter than they should have been. Like the sound didn't carry here. Like the air absorbed it before it could finish. The collapsed comms mast loomed ahead, its frame sagged in a crooked arc, the dish long since caved in, dangling wires twitching slightly in the windless air.
Gemini kept pace just behind him, helmet off, pulse scanner in hand but powered down. There was no data left in the digital field that could be trusted. The deeper they moved into the rooftop zone, the more it felt like walking into someone else's memory — a perfect reconstruction, but one that never ended.
"This isn't all of it," Hernan said suddenly.
