07 — Strangers in the Backroom

April 18, 3:22 PM (D7, Service Corridor behind The Squid)

The back hall smelled like bleach and denial. A corridor built for erasure. Music leaked through the walls in pulses—bass like a hungry animal pressing its teeth against plaster. Every vibration told you the party was still alive out there, while this place existed to make sure no one remembered what went missing inside.

Leila crouched by a scarred chrome door, knees aching against tile slick with mop water that hadn’t been clean in years. From her sleeve, a fiber optic line slithered like a nerve. She slid it under the door, breath held, ears full of the muffled thump-thump of someone else’s heartbeat system.

K8 stood behind her—statue still, matte armor swallowing the corridor light, eyes scanning as if the building itself might eventually confess. She didn’t fidget. She didn’t even look human when she was in work mode.

“Manager’s node is six meters past this,” Leila whispered, her breath fogging the slate. “Private bookings.”

K8 handed her a scrambler no bigger than a thumbnail.

“Ninety seconds before the audit sniffs us. Don’t miss.”

Leila’s lips twitched.

“No pressure.”

The slate bloomed to life: a grid of session IDs, each one pulsing like a heartbeat. Most were anonymous strings. But at the bottom, bold and hungry:

TRITON ENTERTAINMENT (VIP PIPE) → S-ROOM / NO CAMS / HANDOFF

An icon pulsed beside it: a crowned squid, rendered in ultraviolet ink.

“Branding’s a leash,” Leila muttered.

“Leashes are maps,” K8 replied, razor-clean.

Leila froze the feed on a wrist close-up—last night’s scan. The ink burned purple under UV, unmistakable. A squid crowned not just with tentacles but with a trident. Triton’s crest. Corporate hubris masquerading as nightlife kitsch.

Her jaw set.

“They stamp girls like receipts.”

K8 didn’t answer. Soldiers don’t waste words on rage.

Leila pulled up the blueprint overlay. Corridors layered on corridors, stairwells disguised as supply rooms. Then—something off. A wall that wasn’t a wall. A seam in the floor where no seam should be.

“Hidden chute,” she murmured.

They moved. The service corridor narrowed, glass racks sweating stale liquor fumes. At the micro-stair, the air changed—too clean. Wrong-clean. Leila knelt, pressed two knuckles to the floor. The hollow echo answered back.

“Harvest chute.”

K8 crouched beside her, slid a slim tool from her belt—looked like a cigarette, behaved like religion. With a hiss, the seam cracked. The hatch lifted.

Below, white light. Surgical.

The tunnel yawned open like a throat cut into the bones of the building. Perfect steel edges, faint hum of weight sensors embedded in the grating. This wasn’t storage. It wasn’t even transport.

It was infrastructure.

Leila stared down, bile rising.

“They don’t even hide it.”

“They don’t think they need to,” K8 said.

They walked the length, careful. Each step made the floor hum, each hum logged somewhere in a ledger that didn’t admit to existing. The tunnel ended at a loading bay dressed up as ordinary. Clean trucks. Polite logistics. A door marked DELIVERIES ONLY.

Leila’s throat was tight. She killed the slate, shoved it into her pocket like it had burned her.

“We’ve got their spine.”

K8 checked the feeds, eyes like mirrors.

“We burn it later. We map it now.”

Leila looked back into the tunnel one last time, the light catching on steel like a scalpel. For a flicker she thought she saw shadows—girls walking in line, wrists stamped, eyes vacant. Then the light stuttered, and it was just an empty chute.

“Good,” K8 said. “Now let’s step on it.”