Mateo’s Move

The night draped itself over the city like velvet, smooth but suffocating. Inside the Navarro Tower, Mateo sat before a wall of monitors, each flickering with live data—branch reports, shipment logs, and security grids. Numbers rolled like tidewater, but what caught his eye was a single flagged location.

Branch One.

He leaned forward, fingers drumming lightly on the desk. The café had always been a minor footnote in the empire’s massive ledger, a quaint relic of the ...