The practice room smelled of rosin and silence. Leo knelt by the hole. He didn’t touch it. He just watched the way the dust motes avoided it, curling around the perimeter like water around a hot stone.

K smiled. It was a rare, thin thing, like a crack in granite. “The Veloxi didn’t send a scout. They sent a collector. Elara’s not missing. She’s a bargaining chip.”

He flicked the Neuralyzer on. A soft, hypnotic hum.

The lobby was blinding white, humming with the low thrum of a billion terabytes. Aliens of every conceivable morphology shuffled, slithered, and floated between chrome turnstiles. A creature made of crystallized methane argued with a customs drone about the legality of its emotional-support parasite. A cephalopod in a business suit was using three of its arms to fill out a Form 88-BZR: Declaration of Non-Terrifying Appendages .

He pulled it out. Clicked the frequency dial to the Veloxi’s mandible-clatter. And cranked the gain.

K handed Leo a pair of thick-rimmed black glasses. “We’re doing this old-school. No tech. Just eyes and a gut.”

“No,” D said, and for the first time, something like warmth flickered behind his stone eyes. “That’s the difference .”

The mission went sideways in a Flushing basement that wasn’t on any map. Leo and K found Elara suspended in a column of amber light, her eyes wide but unseeing. The Veloxi—a seven-foot mantis-thing with too many joints—stood over her, its mandibles clicking in a frequency that made Leo’s teeth ache.

“The hole is too perfect for an accident. And the dust—it’s not disturbed by air pressure. It’s repelled . That’s not kinetic. That’s intentional. Someone wanted her alive.”