Sabrina stepped off the shuttle onto Eden Prime with her jacket zipped tight against the humid air. The colony sprawled across rolling fields of engineered grain and orchards that fed half the sector. It looked peaceful, but intelligence flagged it as a soft underbelly for Purity sympathizers.
Not the bomb-throwers, but the influencers—artists, teachers, local councilors—who had grown tired of constant lattice upgrades and Threshold's aggressive recruitment drives.
Lira walked beside her. The Mirror Collective operative was tall, tattooed in shifting gray patterns that matched her shadow-adapted eyes. Her presence felt solid, professional. They had worked together twice before.
This time their orders were clear: identify the network, flip who they could, and cripple the rest without mass arrests.
