deeper meant more sealed doors, more blocked routes, more men converging on the same narrowing options.

Officers shouted contradictory instructions.

Static swallowed requests for clarification.

A medic shoved gauze into a lieutenant’s bleeding scalp while still trying to key a dead radio.

Someone kept yelling that the retaliatory launch order would come any second.

No order came.

Arman found Leila near a cracked support column, checking the deformation with a trembling hand.

She looked at him once and said, The seals are wrong.

What seals?

The internal blast doors.

Some of them closed before those corridors collapsed.

He stared at her, not understanding.

She pointed toward an auxiliary route leading to the lower galleries.

The manual indicator showed locked from central command.

That is a command action, she said.

Not impact.

Someone sealed sections from inside the network.

Before Arman could answer, another explosion punched hot air down the passage.

The lights failed completely.

In the darkness, people began calling names that were no longer being answered.

Hours blurred after that.

The tunnel city, built to protect missiles and men, became a machine for trapping both.

More than eight major entrances were crushed or buried.

Support buildings above were flattened.

Power became sporadic and precious.

Smoke gathered in the ceilings, then dropped lower.

One by one, sectors disappeared from the internal map.

The deeper ammunition rooms burned with a violence that turned walls into ovens.

At one checkpoint, Arman and a cluster of survivors met a trembling conscript named Reza carrying an empty water canister and a stack of access tags.

He had been assigned to logistics outside a restricted storage section known only by a code designation: Chamber Seven.

I delivered crates there yesterday, he said.

Under armed watch.

I thought they were missile components.

Some were too light.

Leila looked at Arman.

Too light for what they were labeled to be, she said.

Around them, the tunnel thudded with distant blasts.

A wounded communications sergeant whispered that the Tabriz complex in East Azerbaijan had gone dark too, that the retaliatory missile reservoirs there were burning just like Imam Ali.

No one could confirm it, but the rumor spread because it fit the terror people were already feeling.

If both mountains were dying, then the underground shield was not a shield at all.

It was a grave with wiring.

Near dawn, a pulse of reserve power rippled through one section of the network.

A strip of emergency lights flickered on down a side corridor.

The survivors followed it because there was nothing else left to follow.

The passage led to a hardened command annex behind a reinforced steel door.

On the floor outside lay a dead signals officer, his headset still around his neck.

Inside, a recorder light blinked red.

There was movement deeper in the room.

Arman entered first, pistol drawn though he barely knew what use a pistol could be in a collapsing mountain.

Colonel Vaziri was inside.

He was slumped beside a console, one arm bloody, face gray with dust and exhaustion.

A service key hung from a lanyard on his chest.

The emergency override key.

For one long second, nobody spoke.

Then Leila saw the key and said, You locked them.

Vaziri looked at the door, then at the men standing there with soot on