The wolf hadn’t vanished. It had just moved to a higher vantage point.

Kael’s fingers hovered over the keys. In the hacker circles of the Neo-Vegas underground, "3feetwolf" was a legend—a ghost who had vanished after the 2029 blackout, leaving behind only encrypted fragments of a world that shouldn’t exist. The suffix, NGFV8U , was a coordinate set for a sector of the lunar colonies that had been officially "decommissioned" ten years prior. He clicked "Extract."

The extraction finished. The folder contained a single image: a satellite view of a crater on the moon, glowing with a bioluminescent violet light. At the center of the crater sat a small, three-legged mechanical unit, its sensor eye looking directly up at the lens.