The industrial ring stretched like a scar along Westline’s eastern edge—miles of skeletal factories and dormant furnaces, all humming faintly with residual power from the collapse. Steam hissed through cracked pipes. Floodlights flickered on in strange intervals, as though the ruins themselves were trying to remember how to function.

Doran moved through it with deliberate precision, every step silent despite the crunch of glass and twisted rebar beneath her boots. Her visor scanned in ...