Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The highway is burning.

You don’t remember when the job slipped from routine to massacre, only that the night erupted and now the road itself feels like it wants to kill you. Smoke pours from an overturned hauler, its fuel tank bleeding fire that climbs high enough to lick the rain-smeared neon spilling from Night City’s skyline. Every inhale tastes of copper, asphalt, and scorched rubber.

Your legs pump, the hydraulics in your joints whining under the strain as you sprint down the broken stretch of interstate. Each step slaps through water pooling in the cracks, every splash throwing cold needles against your shins. Your braid clings to your back, purple fading into blue, soaked and dragging against your neck.

Maelstrom are behind you. You can feel them before you hear them, the way the air changes when chrome-amped psychos descend. Then the sound comes: their guttural roars, mechanical and human blended into something feral, and the shriek of bikes tearing across wet concrete. The rhythm of the engines chokes the air.

A bullet ricochets off the barrier just ahead, the sparks spraying across your cheek. You duck low, breath sharp and ribs screaming against the pressure in your chest. Adrenaline spikes, burning hotter than the fire at your back as you vault over a door torn from its car, boots slipping on the metal edge, but momentum carries you over.

You land hard. Ankles aching, knees hissing with the strain of tired hydraulics catching your weight. But you don’t stop. Stopping means dying.

Another explosion rattles the highway behind you, heat biting at your spine. You keep your eyes forward: calculating, scanning, filing. Every overturned wreck, every chunk of rebar jutting from the road is either cover or a coffin and you have to choose right.

Then you see him.

Not a Maelstrom grunt and not dressed in their signature feral patchwork of meat and chrome. Moving parallel to you through the chaos, cutting through the firelight in sharp bursts is a figure with weight in his stride and a chrome arm that kicks like thunder with every muzzle flash. You can’t see his face through the sheets of rain, just a silhouette and the cold efficiency in how it moves. Not an ally. Not an enemy. Just another pawn on the board that hasn’t tried to kill you yet.

Your instincts snarl for silence: don’t call out and definitely don’t break pace. One glance is enough. The kind of glance half-second mercs use when the world is collapsing: a silent calculation. Ally or dead weight? And tonight, when Maelstrom are chewing up the asphalt behind you, anything that isn’t dead weight is worth keeping pace with.

Engines scream closer, tires skid, bullets cut through the rain. Your body is already raw with strain, lungs clawing for air that tastes of smoke and blood, but you push harder. One leap, two, to get you over the jagged ribcage of a wrecked sedan. Palms slap metal, knees absorb shock, and you’re moving again. Survival means momentum. Stop and you’re a corpse.

Another bike flashes past in your periphery, a chrome skull mask glaring in the dark. The rider swings wide with a mantis blade arcing silver through the rain and you duck, the edge missing you by a breath but close enough to slice air cold against your scalp. Instinct drags the pistol up from your hip and you squeeze the trigger. The shot cracks through the storm, the bike jerks, and the rider spins out in a smear of sparks and flesh across the asphalt.

Your ears ring but you don’t look back. There is no looking back.

The storm drowns out most sound, but Maelstrom doesn’t need quiet. Their approach is felt before it’s heard—vibrations running up through your boots, the angry pulse of engines hunting for you like bloodhounds. The firelight behind you paints the road in flickers of orange and black, your shadow stretching and shrinking before you as you run.

The chrome-armed stranger keeps to your periphery. He doesn’t look at you, doesn’t break his stride, but he doesn’t pull ahead either. Every time you vault, he vaults. Every time you juke left, he mirrors the shift just enough to stay parallel. Not choreography—just the rhythm of survival.

Another roar. Closer this time. Two bikes split from the pack, their tires hissing over the wet concrete; the first swings wide, trying to flank while the second comes straight down the center, blade raised high in a spray of sparks. You don’t think—your body moves faster than your mind. You drop your weight low, one boot skidding across the slick asphalt, and feel the blade whip just overhead, the wind of it slicing through the damp air.

You shove off the pavement with a burst of hydraulics, momentum flinging you into a leap that just barely clears the barrier of a shredded guardrail. Your boots slam against the slick hood of an overturned sedan and the impact rattles your bones, reverberates through every wire and plate laced into your body. You grind your teeth and push through it, vaulting again before the bike can turn.

The second rider charges the stranger instead, mantis blades snapping open with a mechanical hiss. You don’t stop moving, but you catch flashes: the stranger pivoting into the charge, chrome arm locking the blade in a shower of sparks, pistol barking once, then twice, until the rider crumples under the weight of momentum and steel.

Rain slicks everything. Your lungs are filled with razors. The air is thick with gunpowder and burning fuel. You don’t spare him more than a glance but when your eyes cut his way you catch the unmistakable flicker of calculation in his gaze. Not thanks, not camaraderie; just the cold math of survival.

Behind you, the rest of the pack isn’t slowing. More engines. More headlights cutting through the sheets of rain. And you’re running out of road, out of cover, out of seconds.

You desire nothing more than a reprieve to catch your breath, to rest the groaning metal of hot hydraulic joints. But you don’t stop. Can’t stop. You curse under your breath, sharp and raw. You push on, eyes blazing for a miracle amongst the hellscape—a lapse in the opposition’s judgment, a blanket of momentary cover. Anything is welcome. 

Your eyes are screaming, burning with the gaseous smoke of the flames licking the air and that when your sight cuts through the haze like a lifeline. An armored husk sits at an angle across the lane, half-collapsed under the weight of crumpled concrete, its paint scorched to primer and its tires eaten by fire. But the mounted turret—boxy, mean, built for suppression—still juts skyward like a fist. Its angles scream Militech Hellhound, stripped but not gutted.

It’s a gamble though. The circuits could be fried. The ammo could be dry. The console could be locked to a ghosted driver and long since picked clean. But merc instinct tells you it hasn’t been scavved yet—too recent a wreck, too fresh a flame.

The stranger clocks your gaze without needing words. His eye tracks from you to the turret, then back, the sharp flick of recognition passing like static across his face. He doesn’t argue. Doesn’t call it suicide. He just shifts his path to match yours, cutting toward the wreck as another Maelstrom bike spits rounds past your boots. Sparks blossom where bullets chew the asphalt, kicking up chips that sting your calves and imbed in the delicate skin. 

You push harder, the heat in your legs screaming as hydraulics overclock and whine. Every step is a negotiation; a balance between flesh and chrome, willpower and machinery. The smoke and rain blur your vision but the turret holds steady in your sights, the only landmark in a world that wants to consume you.

The bike behind howls closer, engine revving up your spine; you don’t need to look back to know the rider’s lined up for another pass. The stranger twists his torso mid-stride, chrome arm snapping up in a flash. Gunfire flares; the rhythm is tight, professional, surgical. One rider peels off in a spray of sparks, his machine skidding broadside across the wet pavement until it flips end-over-end and bursts into flame. But another takes his place, closer, faster, angrier.

Your boots slam onto the broken median. The vehicle looms closer now, its hatch half-shut and console barely visible through a slit of shattered glass. The rain hammers on its scorched hide like a thousand impatient fists. Every instinct in you screams that this is either your salvation or your end.

The stranger’s sudden voice cuts through the roar, low and firm: “If it’s live, take it. If not—” He doesn’t finish. He doesn’t need to. You know the math. If it’s dead, you fight tooth and nail with what you’ve got left.

The choice is seconds away. The Maelstrom engines are seconds closer.

You bite hard on your tongue, tasting iron and swallowing it down; you act on instinct and make a dive for the truck. The impact rattles through your body like hitting the edge of a cliff. Metal slams your shoulder as you throw yourself into the wreck, glass crunching under your palms, the stink of burnt rubber and melted circuitry flooding your lungs. The hatch lip bites your ribs, but momentum carries you inside to a dark, oil-slick coffin of a cabin.

It’s utter chaos in here. The console’s half-fried, its lights are dead but the skeleton of its systems still whisper in faint pulses through the port behind your ear. You can feel the ghost of it like a half-remembered song playing through static. The smell of charred plastic lingers sharp as ammonia, wires dangling like veins torn open. A cracked helmet lies in the footwell, visor starred with chunks of blood. 

You slam your palm to the dash and force the port in your skull into a handshake. The hum in your spine responds, the familiar shiver of a connection taking. It’s sluggish (old firmware, damaged circuitry) but it’s there. The system grinds like a dying dog, reluctant to open. Your lips shape words again, a rasp through clenched teeth, “Please… fucking please.”

Blue pulses flare in your vision, your stuttering HUD flickering with error codes. Access denied. Subsystems offline. Ammo depleted. But you dig deeper, pushing past the lockouts with brute force, overriding failsafes until… there. A pulse. A hiss of readiness. The turret above stirs, servo motors whining like a beast waking and hungry.

Outside, the stranger’s gun keeps barking. You hear the snarl of engines circling, rounds chewing metal. A biker’s shadow streaks past the broken windshield, his headlights carving twin scars through the rain. The merc’s return fire answers with hard punctuation but he can’t cover every angle forever.

The console spits a final prompt across your HUD: Manual override — turret active. Limited rounds. Fire control unlocked.

You can almost taste the ozone crackle as the weapon charges, a throaty hum that vibrates through the wreck’s bones. Above you, the barrel tracks, sluggish but alive—a predator pulling a sharp breath.

The bikes close in. One veers straight for the wreck, chain-whip sparking against the road, while another arcs wide to flank. The shooter shifts his position, braced against the wreck’s side, his chrome arm glinting in the strobe of muzzle flashes as he keeps one rider pinned.

The turret awaits your command.

Your hands tremble with adrenaline, or nerves, possibly excitement. “Alright,” you tell yourself, voice tight but wired, like a private order that grounds the chaos. “Let’s light these fuckers up!” You let the pep talk cut through the tremors enough to focus. Fingers find the manual controls like muscle memory reclaiming territory; your palm rests on the cold grip, thumb toggling the firing mode. The HUD confirms—limited rounds, heat threshold 0.78—a little red bar crawling toward amber. You don’t slow; there’s no time to be careful.

The turret answers like a beast roused: a low mechanical growl, a shudder up your arms and through your chest as the mount’s motors spool. Through the shattered lens above, rain flashes into a thousand silver knives and the world narrows to muzzle, barrel, and the smear of Maelstrom steel angling in. You swing the gun toward the closest pack, the ones pressing the stranger from behind, and let loose.

The first salvo sings out pure and bright. Rounds bloom in the rain, tracer tails hissing like angry snakes as they bite into tire, leather, and chrome. The closest rider takes two rounds through a shoulder plate and jerks, his bike yawing sideways in a violent, bright arc. He cartwheels off the highway, a glittering comet of sparks, and disappears under a spill of twisted metal. The smell of burnt flesh and oil hits you so hard your stomach rebels.

But you don’t pause. The second and third volleys tear through engines and frames; a bike explodes in a ragged starburst that throws water and fire up into the night, orange blossoms against the downpour. Steel shears and hydraulic lines go, and riders spill like marionettes whose strings have been cut. You watch, breath throttled, as the nearest threat becomes a smear of smoke and collapsing debris.

The shooter moves with you in the choreography of survival: while you hammer the middle, he slams a follow-up on a flanker, stepping into a gap your fire created and making it impossible for the gang to ride a clean circle. His chrome hand glows wet with rain; he fires with the calm of someone who rarely wastes a bullet. You catch his profile for a beat, jaw set, eyes like shuttered lenses, and there’s no gratitude there: only acknowledgement that you did what needed doing. That’s enough for the moment.

Rounds eat into the magazine with an unforgiving rhythm. The turret kicks back through your shoulders, metal biting into bone with each kick. Every burst sends a shiver up through your arms; your implanted hydraulics protest, whining as they dampen the recoil, but they hold. Heat climbs in the mount, the gauge nudging amber. 0.82, a warning. You feel the tiny, inevitable calculus of limited ammo and rising temp: push too hard and you cook the barrel; shoot too little and you get run down.

A bike tries a desperate feint under your arc, driving close to the sedan’s flank in hopes to blindside. Your hand snaps, tracking, and the gun finds him. He goes down in a spray of sparks and a ragged human sound that makes your stomach flip. For a second the world is nothing but the staccato of your breath and the raw percussion of collapsing bodies.

Someone shouts behind you, a Maelstrom voice that sounds ludicrously up-close now that several of their pack have folded. They are not done. Far from it. They regroup on the run, lips peeled back in fury that smells of cheap synthstims and bad wiring. You swing the turret to cover the lane and lay down overlapping arcs so any who try to pass will meet a wall of lead. It’s ugly, efficient, and very, very effective.

By the time you slot the barrel back into a safe sweep, the highway has changed. The closest half-dozen attackers are down in various states of ruin: smoking, broken, or sliding toward unconsciousness. The roar of the pack has fractured into sporadic yells and the weak revving of survivors pulling back to find different prey. The rain hisses on spent casings and a fine stench of burnt gunpowder hangs like ash that refuses to fall.

You check the turret’s readouts with a thumb. Ammo: lower than you hoped. Heat: nudging the danger zone. The controls feel slippery in your palms; your hands tremble, not from fear so much as from the raw, animal exertion of it all. You taste copper when you breathe. You have bought yourselves a corridor of minutes—not a rescue, but a window.

The other merc moves to the forward lip of the wreck and peeks, scanning for movement, the mechanical eye in his arm whirring softly as it takes thermal sweeps. His silhouette is tight and efficient. He meets your eyes for a heartbeat, and there’s no softness, only a flat, precise question written in the angle of his head: Now what?

You’re breathing hard, chest slamming, the worn hydraulics still rasping at your knees. The world around you is a gallery of broken metal and smaller tragedies: a flung helmet, a child’s doll tangled in a mangled strap, oil slicking toward a gutter. You could run, sprint the last safe stretch and try to slip under a collapsed overpass, but the Maelstrom pack still roars beyond the wrecks and the city’s lights are too exposed. You’ve got a vanishing number of bullets, a turret that will overheat if you push it past the amber, and a stranger whose presence is an uneasy white line on your mental ledger.

In the stall, he maps a space with a clipped motion of his fingers, a maintenance corridor and its spits of service tunnels that lead back toward the city without giving pursuers an easy chase. You feel the weight of the choice like a stone in your gut: push for a brutal, lethal stop here and try to root the attackers out while the mount holds, or use the kill window you’ve opened to slip away into a narrow, riskier escape route. 

You have maybe thirty seconds of clean advantage before the pack recalibrates. The turret’s hum under your palms is a throat you can silence or unleash. The rain drums on the roof of the wreckage like a metronome while your heart hammers like a drum in time with it.

The merc keeps his arm ready, the chrome a low, clinical glint. He doesn’t tell you what to do. He doesn’t need to. The choice is yours. 

You don’t spare thought for the math of it, there isn’t time. Instinct is a long, honed muscle and you flex it now. You launch yourself from the vehicle with the brittle, elastic motion of someone who’s made leaps like this before and your knees fold to absorb the impact. The world around you is a wet smear of firelight and jagged metal, and your breath comes as a hot, sharp thing in your throat.

The stranger catches your eye for the briefest instant—no names, no nods, just that same flat, pragmatic read that says he sees the plan and will bend himself to it. You flick your gaze to where he pointed, to the slit of the service corridor, and he answers with a clipped half-step forward, already moving to cover your flank. His chrome hand flexes; muzzle flashes punctuate the rain as he squeezes off short, precise rounds that bite at any head that tries to lift too high. His fire isn’t showy, it’s surgical; it makes space.

You pivot on your heel and drive toward the corridor entrance, hips coiling and legs thudding. Hydraulics hiss and whine under your skin, metal and flesh responding in the same rhythm, every joint is a tuned instrument. Your lungs burn and your ribs feel like they might split with the next inhale, but your feet eat the distance. Water sprays from the road with each step, slicking your boots; shards of scorched glass cut through the leather but the pain is a background hum. Your hands curl around the butt of your pistol like something sacred.

Behind you the turret coughs its last protest, a thin scream of overheating metal, before it falls into a fitful glitch. You don’t look back to watch it die; you don’t have the luxury to mourn a tool. But you hear the hollow thud of it spooling down and the way the pack’s engines now hesitate, tasting the change in the air. It’s a small victory you bought with a few hundred rounds and a hot barrel.

Maelstrom reorganize brutal and fast. A new rider tries to loop through the gap you carved, tipping the bike sideways to bait a shot and force you out in the open. The stranger meets them, metal and human moving as one, and the impact is a punctuation mark. The rider goes down hard, body folding around the machine like discarded paper. A flurry of curses and synthetic rage rings out, but the pack begins to splinter, uncertainty seeping in where before there had been only blind hunting.

You hit the corridor’s mouth and duck low, shoulder knocking against corrugated metal as you slide into shadow. The air inside hits different: cooler, oil-scented, threaded with the metallic tang of old wiring. Sickly fluorescents buzz overhead, half of them are dead but the lights that survive cast long, jaundiced pools that make everything look two degrees more dangerous. The corridor is a wound in the city: pipes overhead, steam hissing from a ruptured valve and a slick of oil making the first few strides treacherous.

The stranger is there an instant after you, boots thudding beside yours, chest rising in the same maddened tempo. He doesn’t waste breath on pleasantries. “Left,” he says, voice low and dry, indicating a ladder down into maintenance. The words are useful and nothing more.

You follow, breath ragged, fingers already working at a frayed patch of your jacket as  your tongue flicks against your lip ring. The gold filigree on your cheek is slick with rain; it glints when the light hits it just right and for a second you almost catch the ghost of Dom’s laugh—-a stab of tenderness you fold away like paper into pocketed steel. There’s no room for that now.

As you drop down the ladder’s rungs they vibrate under your weight. Your forearm stings where the old shrapnel caught earlier and you glad-hand the pain into the clockwork of survival. Around you, the maintenance tunnels are a maze of service conduits and abandoned catwalks; places Maelstrom bikes can’t follow without slowing down into predictable lines. That’s what you bank on: narrowness equals control.

You can feel the stranger’s presence, a constant at your shoulder. His steps are measured, the chrome on his arm whispering with each motion, an unending metronome. He glances back only once, briefly, to index the retreat path you’re carving together. No warmth in his look, only the clear-sighted merc’s appraisal: this move gives you distance and buys time. This is how two strangers trade lives for the night.

At the far side of a kink in the tunnel you pause, pressed into a recessed alcove where old cable spools cast deep black arcs of shadow. The humidity clings to your skin and the heater vents spit out a thin, mechanical hiss. You lean your back to the cool wall and let a withheld breath hang in your chest like a secret. Your hands are sooty and slick, the skin between your fingers is nicked from the run, and when you slide the pistol back into its holster your fingers tremble just enough for you to notice.

The stranger remains standing in the shadow of the tunnel’s mouth, a blocking shape between you and the world that chased you. He doesn’t ask how you’re wired or who you run for. He doesn’t offer a name. He waits the merc’s way: with licensed patience and a readiness that doesn’t need words.

In the hush you hear the city beyond: distant horns, water slapping on metal roofs, a siren that might be another night’s problem or might not. Here, in the tunnel, there are smaller sounds to track: the creak of a cable, the drip of condensation, the hum of an old transformer. Your heartbeat fits into that rhythm now, no longer the wild drum of the highway but a taut wire you can tune.

You’ve bought a narrow, fragile margin of safety, for now. The exchange at the turret cost you ammo and heat and a fresh weight of adrenaline that thins your focus to a knife’s-edge. But you have distance and a tunnel between you and the pack, and the stranger, for whatever reason of his own, moves with you instead of past you.

“Name?” he asks finally, low enough that it won’t carry beyond the alcove.

You let the question sit where it is, a simple request in an otherwise complicated world. You could lie. You could keep the slate empty. You could hand him a call-sign that means nothing and tuck away your truth. But, for the first time in the night, your voice doesn’t have to be a rifle shot.

“El.” The word slides out of you like a blade pulled from leather, clean, practiced, and worth more than the truth. Your breath hitches in the vacuum of the tunnel, chest still riding the high tide of sprint and gunfire. Your shirt has become a rag of red down one side, the fabric torn where the lip of the military truck’s hatch kissed you on entry. A thin line of heat crawls from beneath your shirt where flesh had met metal, but you don’t let the wound be a story. You keep it a fact you carry, quiet and small.

He listens without surprise. There’s the smallest twitch at the corner of his mouth, not a smile and nothing soft, just the almost imperceptible acknowledgment that you gave him a currency he can work with. The tunnel light catches the chrome of his arm and throws a line of silver across the concrete. For a merc-second he studies you, like someone reading a blueprint for stress points: breathing, gait, the way your left shoulder drifts a fraction with every heartbeat. He’s cataloguing what can be used and what must be held.

“Caleb,” he answers, finally. It’s not a flourish. It’s a name dropped like a pin on a map. He says it as if it were both a business card and a warning. His voice is flat and low, the sort of register that doesn’t buffet the ear so much as lodge itself in the chest. He doesn’t follow the name with ranks or credits or favors owed; he offers it and then folds it back into the silence like a tool being put away.

He steps a fraction closer, the space between you shrinking by a centimeter so you can measure him better. His presence is a shape you can trust to do what it needs to—no more, no less. He catches the torn edge of your shirt with gloved fingers and tilts his head down, eyes scanning the wound without touching. “Shrapnel grazed?” he queries, clinical. “Or a full take?” He speaks as if he knows what instruments to reach for. He’s seen the kinds of wounds that don’t forgive hesitation.

You let him look. You show no theatrics; you nod once. “Clean slice. Hurts like a mother if I move funny, but it’s shallow.” The lie is half-true; the jagged cut will sting more once the adrenaline bleeds out. You can feel the aftershock coiling beneath your skin; tiredness, acid burn, the slow slide of a tremor somewhere near your ribs. You don’t reach for pity; you don’t allow it. Not here.

Caleb’s hand pulls back and he produces a small kit from the pack at his hip. Not showy, just efficient: a syringe of local, adhesive strips, saline, a thin blade, and a length of gauze the color of old linen. He doesn’t ask for permission. He unwraps a sterile pad the way someone who keeps these motions stitched into muscle memory does, careful, methodical, precise. The tunnel light washes the instruments in a sterile blue. Even in this city-scab of a place they look like tiny reliquaries of mercy.

“You’ll let me stitch you up,” he says, not a question. The tone is practical; his offer is a transaction dressed in the shape of an aid. “I don’t stitch soft hands. I stitch to keep you moving.” He’s telling you what kind of help he gives: not around the heart and sentiment, but around the harness of survival.

You swallow. The thought of being vulnerable under someone else’s needle is a small, sharp thing. You weigh his face again: the jaw that lines to a machine of thought, the eye that doesn’t look away, the quiet steadiness that doesn’t flirt with softness. In the corridor between the wreck and the pack, the kindness of a stitch is as lethal a currency as a magazine. You nod.

He crouches beside you, sleeves rolled where the leather will not meet the skin. The scent of oil and dried blood mixes in the immediate air, the tunnel’s own perfume, and his gloved fingers are warm when they touch the wound’s edge. He cleans the flesh with a saline pad while his other hand keeps pressure. It stings, a white-hot bite that makes your breath hitch, but the bite is finite and the sting means the job of closing begins.

While he works, Caleb’s eyes move over you like a scan, tactical and unfussy. He doesn’t ask about your past. He dissects you in the present. “You run with anyone?” he asks quietly, voice low enough that it won’t carry. It’s a question that is not about alliances but liabilities. Who left you to get ambushed? Who burned the job? Where does the thread lead?

You choose your words the way you choose a blade. “Independent cuts. Fixers know a name, not a face.” That’s the truth you offer: you have a reputation, not a pack. It’s a good shield. It’s enough to tell him you aren’t dragging a crew into this mess and that your ledger is light on entanglements, a merc’s version of a clean slate. You don’t mention Dom and you don’t hand him the tremor that sits under your ribs.

When the stitches go in, they’re quick and quiet: tight knots cinched by practiced fingers. Caleb’s movements are efficient, no wasted torque, no theatrics meant to comfort. The needle slides through skin and you feel the exactitude of it: pain as measurement, then the internal comforting of closure. The bandage is wrapped snug and taped down with a strip of polymer that feels like a second skin. He peels his gloves off and folds them into the kit like he’s closing a chapter.

Once he’s finished, he doesn’t linger in the glow of a saved life. He straightens and pulls a small grease-dark token from a pocket. Nothing ornate, just a rounded chip of metal with serrated edges and a numerical scrawl. He palms it and holds it out to you, “If you need resources or a fence, this gets you a favor at a place called Lark’s. Don’t use it for dirty politics. One favor. You owe me nothing more than a sign you’re still breathing later.” His voice is dry; the token is currency, and that’s how he talks generosity: as a burn count.

You take it. The metal is warm from where it was stored, almost smooth at the edges, and it sits in your palm like a promise you didn’t want to need. You don’t accept favors lightly, but tonight you take it because you do the math: it’s leverage, and leverage keeps you breathing.

“Why help me?” you ask before you can stop yourself, because questions like that are honest in a way most mercs’ aren’t. It’s less of a demand and more of a need to map the motive.

Caleb shrugs, the motion small. “I don’t like waste,” he says plainly. “People who die on the asphalt don’t usually get to pay their debts. I like debts I can collect on.” There’s a pause, and then something like a softer edge appears for a hair, not sentiment, not exactly, but a plain fact. “Also, you moved like you knew what you were doing on the jump. That’s not just rare. It’s valuable.”

You let that hang. It’s not a confession; it’s not an attraction. It’s a calculus you can accept: respect for competence. In Night City, that’s often as binding as blood.

He nods toward your pack and the wreck. “We need movement,” he says, voice curt. “Staying here is a roll of the dice and you don’t win twice. There’s a depot not far; a place under a closed transit skeleton. Locked, low profile. I can move you there; I’ve got two spare spots,” he contemplates for a split second. “Maelstrom came in hot—you gotta be pushing serious heat. They want it. Still got it?” 

You shift. Your skin prickles, a hand instinctively finds your pocket. “Yeah. I’ve got it. It’s a chip.” 

His head drops a curt nod, he hums an acknowledgement, “Good. We patch you better. We pull the chip’s data. We see what they’re hunting for.” He mentions the chip like it’s already settled business, like his interest in whatever started the ambush is as practical as his stitches.

The chip—the thing you were hired to run—is the only place where this spiral started. If anyone traces that breadcrumb, both of you become lines in someone’s archive. You weigh his words, the risk in his mouth. A depot is just another temporary shelter, but it’s also a place with tools and anonymity in equal measure.

You look at him properly for the first time — not as a shape with chrome, but as a person who just might keep you breathing for another day. Something in his posture says he’s offering a score: help now, see what the slates say later. His face, when he watches you, doesn’t ask for a yes; it waits for one.

You finger the token in your pocket for a second, then tuck it back closer to your chest. “Depot,” you say finally. Your voice is rough but decisive. “We go to the depot. We patch, we check what the chip carries, and then we decide if we hunt what burnt us or vanish.”

Caleb inclines his head, an agreement without flourish. “Two pieces of advice,” he says as he shoulders his pack. “No comms. Dead drops only. And if we find corporate ink on that chip, we don’t play heroes. We cash out or we burn the trace. Either way, no glory.” It’s not a warning; it’s a guideline.

You move with him through the tunnels, boots silent on wet concrete, each step measured as if you’re folding distance like a map. The city outside hums with a million lives and indifferent lights. In the quiet close to the depot, your breath settles into a slower rhythm; the adrenaline drains out in a slow trickle, leaving a hard, steady ache behind.

You don’t know this man well. You know the name he gave you. You know he has stitches that don’t waste time. You know the token in your pocket will one day mean a favor called in. You know the night still wants more.

And for now, that’s enough.

Chapter Text

You test the stitches with a practiced, casual motion: a roll of the shoulders, a flex at the waist. The seam holds. It gives you a quiet, private nod: sewn tight, not pretty, but it will do. Your palm stays loose on the pistol at your hip, fingers curled around the familiar polymer as if the weight alone could remind your limbs how to react. Preparedness is a religion and paranoia is its prayer. You bow to both.

Caleb moves like someone who’s learned to keep his patience in a pocket. He takes point through the service corridors, head slightly lowered, the chrome of his arm tracing faint patterns in the synthetic light as he scans. He steps deliberately over puddles, avoids the worst of the oil-slicks, and chooses the shadows nearest the wall, not for stealth but to reduce the angles that could cut him. The walk is quiet. The only sounds are the scuff of boots, the whisper of your breath, and the distant city noise that bleeds through the concrete like a far-off tide.

The tunnel opens into a sequence of access shafts and service elevators that smell of old grease and hot bearings. You pass a graffiti-covered locker jammed against a wall; the paint reads like a map of other people’s scars. A pair of dead flood-lamps overhead hum in protests and give off a thin, chemical warmth. Water beads on the rim of a conduit and drops rhythmically, each plink a tiny clock that measures the distance from danger.

“Depot’s not fancy,” Caleb says finally, the sentence low and more a fact than a conversation. His voice fits into the corridor like another shadow. “It’s under an old transit skeleton. No net, no lights unless someone wants them. I keep a dead-drop there for tools and a safe slot for favors.” 

You let the words settle. The depot is the kind of place that eats names and spits out numbers. It’s the hollow under a city that devours bodies and sometimes gives them back if you pay careful attention. It’ll do.

You fall into the rhythm of travel: small checks, practiced glances, the soft click of your boot against the ladder rungs as you descend into a broader service bay. Here the air is cooler and the hiss of the town is muffled further. It feels marginally safer, like a pause on a carousel that hasn’t yet started again. 

At an abandoned loading bay the two of you pause. A shutter hangs halfway closed, its teeth ground and rusted; beyond it, the dark widens into the depot’s belly. An old transit car lies on its side, windows like black eyes, and beyond that a bank of crates are stacked like mute buildings. In the half-light, the depot looks less like a base and more like a sleeping animal that could wake at any moment and choke you with its jaws.

Caleb moves to the shutter and presses his ear to the metal for a count. The motion isn’t theatrics: it’s procedure. He then reaches into a pocket and produces a small device: a cheap Faraday ping muffler, the kind of tool you can’t buy on racks without the right shade of contacts. He sets it against the plating and the sounds you hear from the outer world hollows as if someone closed a heavy door. Confined silence is safer than bright noise.

“Keep your comm pocketed,” he says without looking at you. “No burners, no pings. We ghost until we know the stitch of the chip you’re carrying.” His words land like caution tape, clear and necessary. It’s not a lecture, it’s a rule, and in Night City, rules save lives when followed.

Your fingers flip the token he gave you inside the inner fold of your jacket, close to the heart. It’s a small, private thing: an insurance policy that might buy you both a sliver of leverage later. You press your thumb to the metal for a second, feeling the cool relief of having something else in the world that recognizes you. Then you let it go; practicality demands you spend all your attention on movement.

Caleb shifts a crate so the shutter can be eased at an angle and together you slide through the gap like smoke. The depot’s interior swallows you—dark, cavernous, the private kind of quiet that keeps secrets for decades. Your eyes adjust and the shapes resolve: makeshift bunks, tool rigs welded from salvage, a board with names and small clippings pinned like old retribution. Somewhere in the half-shadow a kettle sits at the ready on a coil, well used and charred with remnants of old synth-tea. The place reeks of lived-in utility.

A lean oil-lamp sits on a low crate near a pallet of wrapped machine parts. Caleb lifts it like he’s making a small concession to comfort and sets it down between the two of you. The light flickers across your face and makes your stitches look like a line of railway track. The glow is weak but it offers warmth, and warmth in the city feels like an improvised kindness.

You watch him as he sets a small checklist on the crate: inventory, a crudely drawn map, a smear of names, and a single circled note where someone’s handwriting reads in hurried strokes. The board is handwriting and rumor; the depot is tidy chaos. Caleb rests his back against a metal pillar and unfolds his arm slightly, taking a breath that looks like release. He hasn’t peeled his gaze from the tunnel entrance, though. His watch never really disengages.

“How deep did you pry before you took the contract?” he asks eventually, voice flat. He wants the data because data spins the world; it tells him if this is a small-time gutter flame or a handed-down contract with corporate teeth.

You answer in the same crisp measurements you used when you described the choke to him: “It’s an implant, I know that much.” Your fingers breach your pockets, latching onto the thin box and offering it to the atmosphere with an upturned palm. “Payout was enough to not pry.”

The case isn’t pretty. It fits perfectly against your palm, hardened plastic with the kind of matte finish that picks up years of scratches. It has one clean gouge across its lid and a strip of duct tape is slapped over a snapped hinge and wound down to the butt of the case. The rounded edges are reinforced with cheap metal, dinged and dented as though it’s been dropped too many times to remember. 

Caleb clocks the weight in your grip as you flick it open. The inside begins to tell a different story: copper mesh lining with a foam cutout that hugs the chip snug against it. His eyes narrow a degree: copper lining means someone cared enough to block scans, which means whatever’s on this chip is important.

Important enough to pay for protection. And important enough to kill over. 

The chip itself is no bigger than a thumbnail and thinner than a coin, its surface a dark brushed alloy that catches the light like wet stone. Across it are hairline veins etched in iridescent oil-slick blues and violets that shift against the light and the edges are beveled, sharp and precise. Too precise for street metal, it screams corpo lab. 

“I don’t know the buyer. But I was told to run it to the old fuel depot past Juice’s Junkyard.” The truth hangs between you—partial, practical. 

Caleb makes a small sound, not of surprise but of recognition; of pieces falling into place. He taps the crate where the map folds and traces a finger around three separate areas, each circled in thick ink. “Corpos like to use these decommissioned depots for temporary stages,” he says, voice sharp with eyes angled even sharper. “Means bigger hands were moving this. That complicates things.” He folds his hand into his lap and watches you with an expert’s patience.

“Right…” you trail, eyeing the kettle that’s begun to steam now, a low hiss filling the silence between you. Caleb stands and reaches for it, one hand braced on a knee, and pours into two tarnished metal mugs. Wordlessly, he slides one across the crate to you and sets his own beside the upturned bin he’d been sitting on. 

You sip the synth-tea, it warms your fingers and steadies a part of you that’s always on high alert. Your mind hums with the gravity of the next few hours: check the chip’s data, see if it links to any registered stamps, then decide if you can monetize that info or if you have to burn it. Every option drips risk. Every choice draws lines that will be hard to hide from.

The depot’s comforts are crude at best: a rollaway with a blanked tarp, a small medkit with more supplies than you had in the truck, and a battered console that Caleb slides into place and powers with a hand-crank generator. He places the chip in its case onto the cold metal and covers it with a damp rag. There’s no ceremony to his actions, only the cold calculus of not prematurely waking it with the console’s static. 

You watch him work the generator, and there’s a familiarity in his hands, tools become language after a while, and that steadies you like a line thrown across water. When it finally hums and the console ticks alive, Caleb gives it a slow nod, removing the rag and plucking the implant from the foam. The chip shows off its tiny plated contacts after removal and begins to hum with an internal glow as its proximity to the console lessens. 

“We sweep. We don’t broadcast. We see who touched it, who owned it last, and who had the manifest flagged. If there’s corporate ink, it won’t be clean. But there’s usually a trail. The trick is to follow without pissing anyone off until you know whether you can sell what you find or you have to burn it.” He leans forward and sets the console feed to local—isolated and clamped down—and then slides the chip into the reader like a priest laying an offering. 

You settle in beside him, the world reduced to the low buzz of the generator, the slap of rain still distant on the depot’s roof, and the thin glow of the console. Your fingers are steady around your mug, eyes locked to the readouts. This is the part you always liked best: the net’s low whir, the soft mechanical heartbeat of a system that will tell you a story if you can coax it out. He starts the scan and you watch the ghost trails rewrite across the mainframe. 

Outside the depot, Night City stretches like a bruise waiting to be opened. But inside, for a narrow hour, you have a machine that can give you answers and a man beside you who has offered a stitch without price and a token with strings attached. Between you is a ledger of potential: data, danger, and the thin tie of two mercs who chose to survive the night together.

The console’s glow paints your face in a sickly neon wash, and every flicker of data across the readout feels like a pulse under your skin. Lines of code spool out in tight columns, their ghost signatures tracing handshakes and failed encryptions like breadcrumbs on a black road. Your eyes track the threads, but your mind spirals wider: scenarios, permutations, dead ends that smell like smoke.

Best-case? The chip is small-time laundering: some fixer laundering a street-level implant like a patchplate or a snap-reflex node. Then you burn it, sell the ghost trace for pocket cash, and move clean.

Worse-case? It’s stamped with a corporate backer. A real one, not just some low-level shell. If it ties to Arasaka or Kang-Tao or Militech, then you’re a corpse waiting for a body bag unless you ghost the data fast enough. You imagine your name sliding off the books like static—erased, as if you’d never been more than smoke in an alley.

The current in your veins thrums steady, a constant undertone like a song you can’t shake. Every twitch of the numbers on the screen drags at your nerves, threatening to snap the thread you’ve been walking since the chase began.

Caleb sits close, his weight steady at your side, his chrome arm braced against the crate as if to ground the entire scene. He doesn’t glance at you; his one good eye stays locked on the feed. You catch the faint, mechanical buzz of his optics adjusting as the data streams, clicking faintly when they hit on anomalies. The man is a statue with an extra heartbeat; a constant reminder that someone else is running the math with you.

The depot holds its breath. The lamp flickers once. A drop of water falls from the corrugated ceiling and smacks the console casing, sizzling as it vaporizes against the hot plastic. You don’t flinch, but your ribs ache where the bandage pulls. Your breathing stays measured, sharp and slow, but the anxiety refuses to leave your bloodstream.

The lines on the screen finally crawl into a pattern you recognize: 

> INITIATE SCAN [SOFT-LINK MODE]  

> DEVICE INTERFACE: NX-47 NEURAL MODULE  

> STATUS: ACTIVE / ENCRYPTED  

[SCAN RESULTS — PARTIAL]

┌── ORIGIN TRACE

│   • Source: BIOTECHNICA // R&D Registry (flagged)  

│   • Branch ID: 7F-AZKA (prob. scrubbed)  

│   • Confidence: 72%  

└──────────────────────────────

Caleb’s jaw flexes once, silent; your breath halts in your throat. 

┌── FIRMWARE

│   • Build: v0.9.12 — UNSIGNED  

│   • Status: INCOMPLETE / TEST ONLY  

│   • Integrity: CORRUPT SECTORS (3)  

└──────────────────────────────

┌── DATA PAYLOAD

│   • Size: 2.41 GB compressed / 9.07 GB est. uncompressed  

│   • Encryption: Triple ICE // low-mid tier  

│   • Anomalies: Header mismatch / ghost edits detected  

└──────────────────────────────

┌── NET ACTIVITY

│   • Last Handshake: ARASAKA Subnet (relay node 44-KZ)  

│   • Timestamp: [HARDLOCKED — 04:22:16 / 12.09.XX]  

│   • Note: Hardlock cannot be spoofed. Trace genuine.  

└──────────────────────────────

[SCAN END]  

> RECOMMEND: DEEP-PEEL (OFFSITE // SPECIALIST) 

Your hand brushes back dust thickened, still damp strands of hair, shoulders stiff; Biotechnica, Arasaka, Hardlocked—all strings you had zero desire to see tonight. This isn’t at all courier heat; with two corps involved it’s execution-level fire if they decide to chase. 

The silence is dense and heavy between you before Caleb breaks it, “Biotechnica stamp’s still baked in, but it’s dirty. Someone tried to scrub it and left ghost marks. Firmware’s prototype-class but unfinished; not field-ready.” His eyes flick to the line that seems like it glows brighter than the rest: HARDLOCKED. “And, the fun part: last ping went through a ‘saka subnet; timestamp is real. Can’t fake that without leaving a scorch. At least two corps handled this before it hit your fixer’s hands.” 

He lets the weight of the facts hang heavy in the air then exhales once through his nose, like a sharp punctuation. “Dense payload. Nine gigs uncompressed; not really enough to scream black project. ICE is mid.” He shakes his head as his eyes scan the lines repeatedly, “Could spend hours peeling this, but we don’t have that kinda time and I’d rather keep my brain uncharred.”

Your stomach is in knots, grinding in a slow twist that feels worse than your wounds; this isn’t freelance slop—it’s funded, directed, purposeful. The outcome curls its fingers around your chest and squeezes. “Okay, bottom line then… Definitely not street; definitely corpo laundry. And now we’re left in the crossfire. Great.”

You taste copper in the back of your mouth, realize you’ve bitten down on the edge of your lip ring without noticing. The tang of iron and nerves mingles with the smell of ozone, and the combination locks you more firmly in place than any strap or harness could.

Caleb exhales once, heavy with calculation. His voice is flat but low, the weight of certainty in it. “Maelstrom was hired to make noise and drag heat back into the city. This puts us on a board we didn’t choose to play.” 

The depot creaks as if to punctuate him, a groan of old metal, the rain outside slowing to a steady hiss. You shift your weight, ribs tugging at the dressing, jacket pressing warm against the wound. Your pistol’s weight at your hip feels heavier than it should, a reminder that steel is sometimes the only language Night City respects. The anxiety still twists in your veins, but underneath it a harder edge starts to form: the clarity that comes when you know exactly how deep the hole is, even if you haven’t seen the bottom yet.

Caleb’s eye flicks toward you at last, sharp, clinical, like he’s taking a measure of how much fight you’ve got left in you. “Question now is,” he says, voice as steady as the hum of the console, “do we cut that leash, or do we strangle whoever’s holding it?”

You pause, the options and their underlying consequences rolling through your brain like marbles. “We do both. We cut the leash then we go in for the kill; I don’t like loose ends.” Your voice is cut with confidence, a bravado you don’t feel in your bones but kind that Night City eats for breakfast. 

Caleb’s jaw tightens the barest fraction, a small approval you wear like armor. He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t need to. The plan is a thing of teeth; you can feel it settling into the room like a line drawn in grease.

“All right,” he says, voice low and even. “We do it in three moves. One: we confirm who the buyer is and how deep the ledger goes. Two: we make it useless to them—either we own it or we burn it. Three: we take payment for the trouble. Preferably in a form that can be cashed clean.” He counts the steps off like he’s stacking magazines: mechanical, reliable. “No stunts. No hero shit. No leaving fingerprints or giving the corpos an excuse to send a cleaning crew with more than knives.”

Heat from the lamp pools in the depot and paints his chrome in dull highlights as he shifts, reaching into a pocket and laying out a folded map on the crate. The paper is soft with wear, ink bleeding where it’s been handled a thousand times. He taps a few key points with a grease-speckled finger: a ripper in Kabuki who owes him a soft favor, a fence in Little China who takes clean slates and pays upfront, and an off-grid maintenance corridor by the transit skeleton that can act as a blind route into the city. Each dot is a lever. Each lever is a decision.

He leaves the map open long enough for you to memorize it, then folds it with a sharp crease and slips it back into his jacket. “Doesn’t matter which road we take,” he says, voice steady, “we don’t do it tonight. Not in this state. We ghost until daylight, ride the noise Maelstrom kicked up while it’s still hot. By morning, they’ll scatter back into their cracks, and the corpos will still be counting bodies before they count routes.”

You nod and roll your shoulders against the bandage, testing the seam again. The stitches tug like wire drawn too tight, each breath catching on the thread. Caleb’s gaze flicks once toward your ribs, clinical, then back to the console without comment.

He reaches forward and kills the generator. The low whine fades, the console’s glow collapsing into the thin circle of lamplight. He slips the chip back into his foam housing and clamps the lid down. “No more scans,” he mutters. “Even soft-link leaves a scent. Let it sleep until we’re ready to peel deeper.”

The depot exhales into silence, heavier than the highway’s roar. Your mug sits cooling on the crate, your hand reluctant to release its fading warmth. A tremor catches in your wrist, the aftershock of adrenaline draining, and you curl your fingers into a fist to bury it.

Caleb rises, the chrome of his arm cutting through lamplight in jagged shards. He nods toward a stack of pallets covered with tarp. “There. Catch what rest you can. I’ll hold watch.” The words are matter-of-fact, not generous. In this city, that’s the only kindness that survives.

The chip lies veiled in its bed, humming faintly in the dark like a secret neither of you can yet afford to touch. The hush surrounding you deepens, the only sounds the puttering of rain on metal and the whir of servos with each movement of Caleb’s arm. You take the moment’s temporary relief to strip the worn leather jacket off, still damp and smelling of old flame and burnt oil, and hang it on a strip of rebar slotted in the corner beside the makeshift bunk. 

You ease down onto the pallet, tarp crackling under your weight, the smell of old dust seeping into your flannel—you don’t lie down, not just yet—but you ease your weight back against the cold concrete wall. Your eyelids drag, muscles surrendering piece by piece as the depot’s atmosphere wraps around you. Across the room Caleb settles into a vigil at the shutter’s gap, pistol balanced in his grip, posture drawn tight like a coiled spring.

You try not to fidget and instead distract yourself with observations, eyes scanning from one end of the room to the other. On a shelf tucked behind a stack of cardboard you note the endless amount of rust-covered tools; previously well used and now laid to rest in their own graveyard. Beside that stands a strip of lockers; two of them are wide open and contain a set of burner comms, spare optics, some chrome plating, weapon mods. While the other two lockers are padlocked tight with biometric strips to further secure them. You follow the line to the scraps of paper and maps plastered to the walls: scribbled handwriting scrawls over most of them, some bits legible others not, dark circles outlining names, factions, areas. There’s a space dedicated to a personal arsenal: worn ammo boxes laying on their sides and stacked one on the other beneath a rack of neatly arranged pistols, blades, and a single Militech grade assault rifle. 

Your eyes continue to drift and soak in the containments but stop to linger on the merc positioned in the entryway; by now he’s also gotten more comfortable, his own patchy coat tossed to the side and joining a pile of broken machine parts. Your eyebrows curl inward as you focus on the ridges in his back from the way he carries himself: shoulders wound tight and stiff from years of being at a neverending edge of caution, but flexing with thick muscles as he field-strips his pistol on a tall storage bin. His chrome arm seems less pristine the longer you stare at it; there are multiple gouges cut through the chrome, and obvious places where repairs have been meticulously implanted and plated. Your gaze flickers down as he micro-adjusts the torque of his forearm, bbrrt-zzk the sound blending into the others that shift into the depot from the bustling city above. You can’t help but notice that the other arm is not unlike his cyberware, it also carries its own scars and gouges. There’s also a pale seam that cuts even across his jaw speaking less of violence and more of survival—he’s certainly a man that’s seen the worst the world has to offer. 

Without missing a beat his voice cuts through the dank silence of the room, “Ask.” It’s sharp and curt but not unwelcoming. Your eyes snap from the cut on his jaw to his steeled expression. The word sits there between you, heavy and daring and you almost bite back but he saves you the trouble.

”You favor your left side when you breathe,” he says without glancing up from the stripped pistol. His tone is all mechanics, just a man reading diagnostics. “Rib’s not just skin.”

The observation cuts sharper than a question and you shift against the wall, testing the ache beneath the bandage. “You catalogue everyone like that?” You ask, voice steady but with a thread of challenge. 

“Scars are ledgers,” Caleb answers, slotting the magazine with a clean click. “They tell me who survives because they learn, and who just limps until the next cut finishes the job.” His eyes flick to you, cold calculation softened by the faintest edge of respect. “You’re still breathing. That’s a page worth reading.”

Your lip ring clicks against your teeth when you smirk. “Yeah? What about you? Ledger looks plenty heavy from here. Chrome doesn’t hide old wounds.”

He doesn’t take the bait, just finishes reassembling the pistol and checks the chamber with efficient, almost ritualistic, movements. “Charity burns fast,” he says, finally, as if his mind had been circling back to something else entirely. He drops the pistol down to his knee, gaze sharpening. “Ledgers hold. Favors, debts, scars…it’s all the same math. What you give, what you take. Only thing that keeps the city honest.”

The air around you feels tighter, like it’s closing in, as if the walls themselves are holding a breath for your answer. You let a breath drag out slowly, smirk not fading. “Honest? That’s rich.” You huff out a breath of a scoff, “Ledgers just change the name of the con. At the end of the day it’s still somebody paying blood to balance somebody else’s math.”

Your fingers find a rip in your jeans and tug at the fraying edges, twisting and pulling as thoughts ride through you in a hot pursuit. “I’ve paid plenty. Bled plenty. Doesn’t mean I’ve seen the city get any more honest for it.”

The oil lamp flickers from the crate parallel from you, shadows stretching sharp across his chrome. Caleb’s expression doesn’t shift, but his silence is its own kind of acknowledgement—like he’s weighing your words instead of cutting them down. 

Your words are left hanging in the air, the only reply is the gutter of the oil lamp and the hiss of its flame. The silence drones on accompanied by the occasional drip of water droplets plummeting from leaking pipes like a metronome keeping time. You instinctively gaze down at your fingers, smeared with soot and flecks of blood, and flex them once, twice, nearly a third time until your ears perk at an almost imperceptible scuff in the distance past Caleb’s silhouette. 

Your body goes rigid, posture immediately erect, elbows meeting knees, palm draped over a pistol butt. The man ahead of you stiffens, broad shoulders pulled taut as a steel wire, but otherwise unmoving.

You hold air hostage in your lungs, teeth sinking into your tongue deep enough to taste iron. A shadow slides across the slit of the open shutter. Then: a thump, as soft as dust falling from an old ceiling fan, directly in front of the shutter. Caleb’s hand flexes and pulls the pistol from his holster, safety automatically flipped to the off position; he aims toward the shadow, finger hovering at a ready over the trigger. 

The silence spikes, sharp enough that you swear you can hear the beat of your pulse in your jaw. Caleb doesn’t move for a full breath, doesn’t blink, just tracks the shadow like a predator waiting for the slip.

Then, with a scrape no louder than paper on concrete, something slides under the shutter. A slim case—black, edges scuffed, marked with a sigil you don’t recognize but Caleb clearly does. His jaw ticks once, a sharp flex beneath the scar.

“Lark,” he mutters, the word clipped, like it tastes bad in his mouth.

The case hums faintly, a vein of blue light pulsing along its seam before it dims to nothing. No footsteps retreat. No sound beyond the water dripping through the pipes. Whoever dropped it is already gone.

You flick a glance at Caleb, but his expression stays locked: unreadable and controlled. He crouches slowly, two fingers dragging the case back into the lamplight like it’s live ordnance. He doesn’t open it. Just studies it, chrome arm flexing once at the elbow.

The lamp gutters again. Shadows ripple across the depot walls. The case sits between you, humming faintly, a promise and a threat in one breath.

Outside, the rain hasn’t eased. The city presses in on all sides, waiting.

Chapter Text

The hum lingers long after the shadow’s gone. It threads through the depot’s air vents and concrete bones, faint but steady, a pulse that feels too measured to be random. You can taste the static on your tongue, metallic and wrong.

Caleb hasn’t lowered his pistol. He watches the case like it might twitch, maybe explode. Every second stretches thin like a filament pulled too tight. The lamp before you sputters, throwing hard lines against the walls, and for a breath the light catches the blue seam of the case. It’s still pulsing, faint and rhythmic, like a heartbeat pressed under glass.

Neither of you breaks the silence. The city above fills it with ghost noises: water running through the veins of dead pipes, faraway turbines sighing through rust. The depot feels smaller suddenly, the air closer, thicker.

When Caleb finally moves it’s deliberate, a crouch, slow and soundless. Chrome fingers hover over the case, testing the air, gauging for heat. Nothing. He drags it an inch closer across the concrete and the vibration deepens. You feel it in your feet and behind your ribs before you hear it.

He looks at you once, unreadable. You give a single, curt nod.

Caleb kneels fully now, free hand brushing along the casing’s edge. The surface is cool, damp with condensation. He turns it in the lamplight just enough for the mark to show: a bird mid-flight, stylized wings fractured by a crack in the plating.

A shadow crosses his jaw. “...Lark.”

The name lands soft, but the way he says it makes it sound like a curse.

“Lark?” you repeat, quieter, almost testing the name.

He exhales through his nose, “Didn’t think I’d hear that one again.”

Your eyes flick from his tightening jaw to the case, and back to him again. You lean forward, elbows on your knees. “He a fixer?”

“Courier. If you coulda called him that.” Caleb’s eyes slide up, a sliver of pale focus running through the shadow of violet optics. “Used to run ghost drops for Biotech’s black channel. Didn’t stick to one side long enough to make friends but his work: clean. Precise.”

You nod toward the case, “Looks like he’s still alive.”

His head twitches to the side, “Maybe.” He says, voice thin, cold. “Or someone’s using his ghosts.”

The hum spikes once, quick as a heartbeat. Both of you simultaneously glance down; the light along the seam flashes blue, then dies again–almost like it took a breath. Caleb grimaces and finally slides the case onto the crate, careful as if setting down a bomb.

You shift closer, the smell of ozone and metal thick in the air. “Gonna open it?”

Caleb shakes his head once, “Not ‘til I know what it wants.”

The hum deepens. The air thickens.

Then the case answers for him–a soft click, almost delicate, and the seam splits on its own.

The case opens like it's exhaling. A hiss of stale air spills out, tinged with static and something faintly antiseptic–cleaner than anything that belongs down here. Inside, there’s no tech glitter, no flashy corpo tag, just three items resting in tight symmetry against a foam lining. A wafer drive: no label, no data stamp, thin as a blade, with edges beveled to a mirror shine. It looks fragile enough to snap, but you know better; drives like this could hold a lifetime of ghosts. Tucked with it is a folded sheet of synth-paper, edges frayed and handwriting bleeding faintly through; and a coin-sized transponder—dormant, with a pale crack webbing its casing like old glass.

Caleb doesn’t touch anything at first. His eyes move between each piece, mapping invisible geometry and tracing meaning in their arrangement. You see another shift in his jaw, eyes sharpening. A clear tell that he’s already working through half a dozen bad outcomes.

He reaches for the paper first, sliding it free with two fingers. Ink–actual ink–dark and uneven, written in a hand that presses much too hard. He unfolds it slowly.

Two things are written: a string of coordinates, and a single line etched across the bottom margin:

        ‘You want answers. Bring the ghost.’

Caleb’s thumb smears a bit of the ink before he catches himself; he reads it twice, then folds it back with the kind of precision that looks close to denial.

“That all it says?” Your voice comes out quieter than you intended, like a breath that’s stuck in your lungs.

“It’s enough,” he says, gruff, expressionless.

“And the coordinates?” you ask, and he taps the numbers with a chrome finger.

“Badlands sector, east ridge. What’s left of Biotechnica’s old dry-lab network.”

“Great. Because those always go well…” You sigh under your breath, fingers flexing into a fist on your thighs.

You reach forward and pick up the transponder next–it’s light, too light. No power cell, no signal pulse, but still, your skin prickles when you hold it. The cracked surface catches the lamplight and throws it back in tiny shards.

You hand it over and Caleb runs a reader across it. “Dead. But there’s a serial fragment.” He squints at the display. “L-O-R-5… last two digits burned out.”

You purse your lips for a moment, “L for Lark?”

“Maybe. Or maybe he’s just leaving breadcrumbs again.” He sets it down and that faint hum you’d almost forgotten returns. Low, resonant, synced perfectly to the pulse of the Biotechnica chip still sealed in its foam.

You both notice at once.

Caleb’s head tilts, eyes narrowing. “That wasn’t doing that before.”

You glance at the case you’d sheltered during the Maelstrom firefight then back to him, voice quiet. “Maybe it missed its twin.”

He doesn’t smile, doesn’t even twitch, just drops the lid of case down, slow and deliberate, like that could seal the hum out. “We’re done playing with ghosts tonight.”

Caleb seals the case fully, palm pressing against the lid until the latch clicks home. The hum cuts off. The depot exhales with it, leaving only the drip of the ceiling and the faint thrum of city power running somewhere far above.

A bead of quiet passes between the two of you before he finally speaks, voice flat enough to pass for calm. “Could be a setup.” His pistol stays on the crate, but the hand resting on it twitches.

You rest your forearms on your knees, eyes fixed on the closed case. “Could be the only breadcrumb we got.”

He snorts, short and humorless. “Lark never leaves breadcrumbs unless he wants you chasing them.”

“Then we see where it goes,” you say, no hesitation, just weight.

Caleb looks at you for a long beat, head tilting slightly, eyes tracing every tell your body gives away. “You’re bleeding through your bandage and talking about running into a corpo snare.”

You glance down; he’s not wrong. The blood has seeped through the wrap, a slow, dark bloom under the edge of your flannel. You shrug, jaw tight, nails biting into your palms. “Yeah, well. Standing still’s gotten plenty of people killed too.”

Something in his posture eases–not much, just enough to shift the atmosphere. The lines around his mouth soften and the tension bleeds out of his shoulders like static discharge. He holsters the pistol in one quick movement, the click echoing against concrete.

“Fine,” he says, low and even. “We move at daylight.”

He steps forward, the chrome of his arm catching a shard of the lamplight before he kills the flame entirely. The lamp sputters once before it dies, darkness swallowing the room whole. You blink against it, but it’s thicker than you expect: dense, complete, almost physical. The kind of dark that doesn’t just hide things, it muffles them.

You listen.
To the rain, to your own breath, to the faint thrum of the city’s distant machinery grinding through layers upon layers of concrete. Every sound feels far away now, as if the world outside decided to hold its breath too.

You shift back against the wall, the cold bleeding through your flannel and into the thin fabric beneath. The wound under your ribs pulses in time with your heartbeat: slow, steady; a reminder that you’re still here. Barely.

You can’t see him but you can feel him. Caleb’s presence sits heavy across the room, the weight of a man who doesn’t sleep easily. Chrome sometimes clicks when he moves, but it doesn’t tonight. He’s still, also listening.

You let your eyes fall shut. You shouldn’t–you know better. But the dark has a way of making exhaustion sound like mercy.

Somewhere across the floor, the chip hums again. A single, soft pulse, gone before you can tell if you imagined it or not.

You open your eyes, staring into the black until shapes start to form out of nothing: the outline of crates, the faint line of the shutter, the ghost of where the lamp once glowed. You think about the case. About Lark. About the way Caleb said his name, half memory, half threat.

Could be a setup.
Could be the only breadcrumb we got.

The argument replays in your head, stripped of words now–just rhythm, just tone. He’s not wrong. But neither are you.

You draw in a breath, slow and quiet. The air tastes like rust and sleep deprivation. You let your head rest back against the wall, eyes still wide open, watching the dark breathe with you. Waiting for another static hum.

The dark doesn’t sleep, it just changes texture.

You stay still long after your body starts begging to collapse. Every small sound takes on weight: the creak of settling metal, the faint tap of water bleeding from the pipes above, the pulse behind your ribs that won’t match the rhythm of either. You close your eyes once, just to rest them, and the aftermirage of fire sits there on the inside of your eyelids, red and endless.

You shift a little against the wall, the concrete biting through thin layers of clothes and the motion waking the sting under your ribs. The stitches tug like fishline, precise and unforgiving. You swallow the small sound it pulls from you and let your hand drift to your sidearm, not for use, just to remind yourself it’s still there. To ground you, even.

Across the room, Caleb is a darker shadow among shadows. No movement, no tell. You know he’s awake anyway–some people never fully turn off. And he’s certainly one of them.

Something in the far corner of the depot hisses as the temperature drops: a vent, maybe, or an old coolant line sighing through its death throes. The sound snakes through the dark and is gone just as quickly. You count the seconds after it fades; old habit. Measure, map, breathe.

You let your head tip back and stare into the nothing. You can almost trace the outline of the ceiling by memory now: the beams that cross like bones, the weak spot above the shutter where the rain slips through. You wonder how many people have died in places like this, cold and nameless under a city that doesn’t even notice.

Something metallic shifts. Your eyes flick toward it.  Caleb’s chrome catches the faintest trace of light bleeding through a crack in the vent, a glint that moves just enough to prove he’s still human under all that steel. His voice comes low, flat, unhurried. “You should sleep while you can.”

You almost laugh, “That advice ever work for you?”

A pause. “Didn’t say I follow it.”

The silence that follows isn’t uncomfortable, nor is it sharp either. It’s just there. Like static under your skin. You breathe through your nose and the air smells of wet iron and burnt circuitry–the kind that the city leaves behind after the world stops running.

Something hums. Not loud, not for long. Just enough to make the hair on your arms lift. You glance toward the crate where the case sits, but the hum is gone before you can fix your eyes on it. Maybe it’s in the walls. Or maybe it’s in your head.

Caleb moves again, just barely. You hear the faint click of his pistol’s safety reset, the low grind of his shoulder servo adjusting. No words. Just motion. He’s probably clocked the sound too, cataloging it somewhere behind his unreadable expression.

You try not to think about the chip you carried here. The weight of it, the blood it’s already cost, the way it seemed to hum like a heartbeat when the world went to hell on that highway. You think about what might be inside it. Who it might belong to. You think about Biotechnica and the mess their fingerprints always drag behind. You think about how Caleb said ‘Lark’ like it was half a curse.

And then you think about the way he stitched you up without asking why. That’s what sits with you the longest–the efficiency of it. No sympathy. No words. Just the work of someone who’s done it too often.

The dark keeps shifting, softer now. Neon lights casting lines of faded light through cracks in the walls. The rain dulls to a whisper against the steel bones above. The city seems to exhale.

You tell yourself you’ll keep watch a few more minutes and then rest your eyes. Just for a second. But seconds stretch long in the dark. The hum doesn’t come back, though you swear you can still feel it. A ghost frequency under your skin. Something alive and waiting for its moment to speak.

You let your eyes fall closed, thinking maybe Caleb’s right. Maybe rest will find you if you don’t chase it.

You don’t realize you’ve drifted until your own voice wakes you. Soft. Muffled. One word.
You blink the sleep away, throat dry, eyes focusing on the dark.

Caleb hasn’t moved, a blackened silhouette in the darkness, but his tone is different when he decides to speak. “Who’s Dom?”

The question lands without weight, clinical as a field note. You drag a hand down your face, half to wake yourself, half to hide it. “That a test or small talk?”

“Observation.”

You let out a sound that’s somewhere between a sigh and a laugh. “Forget it. Ghost name. Doesn’t matter.”

He doesn’t press, just makes a quiet, neutral sound. The kind that says noted, not judged. Metal shifts again, maybe his arm, maybe the pistol. “Ghosts matter,” he says eventually. “Just depends who’s still chasing ‘em.”

You tilt your head toward the voice, though you can’t see one another to make out expressions. “You?”

“Always,” his response comes quick and final.

You don’t answer. The quiet folds back in like a blanket, heavy but familiar. You stare into the dark until it stops feeling like a wall and starts feeling like a tide.

The hum returns, softer than before, almost gentle. It almost feels like an insatiable itch under your skin. Mute but there nonetheless.

The itch doesn’t fade with the light. It just hides under it.

When morning comes, it doesn’t feel like relief–it feels like exposure. The first trickle of daylight forces its way through the shutter of slats, slicing the depot into narrow bands of gray and gold. Dust hangs in the air like fallout. You blink against it, and for a moment the room looks like a photo left too long in solution: half-developed, all edges and shadows.

Your shoulder protests as you move, every muscle stiffened in the cold, aches turned dull and heavy. You press a palm to your side and feel the pull of thread, the warmth of blood gone tacky under the bandage. The hum is gone now–or maybe just buried under the new noise of the waking city above. Either way, your skin remembers it.

Caleb’s still where he was, crouched near the shutter. The glow seeping through paints the edges of his frame in faint light: the slope of his shoulder, the chrome tracing sharp along his arm, the faint scar where steel meets flesh. He’s motionless enough that you wonder if he ever slept at all.

You push yourself upright, joints popping, and the sound earns you a glance. Not sharp, not soft, just aware. He watches long enough to confirm you’re upright and functional before reaching for the kettle perched on the coil burner.

The silence feels routine now; it fills the gaps between you like it belongs there. When he speaks, it’s with the same steady pragmatism that’s starting to sound almost like comfort. “Rain’s easing. We move soon.”

You nod, rubbing a thumb across your jaw to wake the stiffness. “Any chance Lark left a return address?”

Caleb’s mouth twitches, not quite a smile. “Lark doesn’t leave addresses. He leaves trails and waits to see who’s dumb enough to follow ‘em.”

You tilt your head toward the case resting on the crate, “Guess we’re the dumb ones.”

He doesn’t disagree, just pours the boiling water into two dented mugs and slides one your way. “Sure you can move on that side?”

“I’ve been worse,” you take the mug, the heat biting into your fingers. “You patch clean. I’ll manage.”

He gives you a small nod–acknowledgement, maybe even approval–and sets his own mug down beside the case. For a moment, the two sit in the same pool of pale light, steam twisting between them like something alive. You watch him start to pack, movements precise and methodical. Each motion says he’s done this too many times: strip down, reload, vanish. The kind of muscle memory that keeps people breathing in a city like this.

When he reaches for the chip’s case, he hesitates. The pause is brief but real enough for you to catch. “Still cold,” he murmurs, half to himself. Then, quieter: “Almost too cold.”

You watch his expression flatten, but the line of his shoulders tightens. He slides the case into a padded pouch, tucks it deep into his jacket, and snaps the clasp shut. “Whatever this thing’s tied to, it’s not done with us yet.”

You finish the last of the tea, bitter and metallic on your tongue. “You mean Lark’s not done with us yet.”

Caleb shakes his head, hand instinctively reaching down to press against his pocket. “Lark’s just the messenger. This feels bigger.”

The sound of the city grows louder now: traffic hums like blood through arteries, the soft percussion of water drips from higher levels. The depot feels smaller with every second, like the walls are remembering what it’s like to be empty. You welcome it for a brief moment before you stand, snatching up your jacket and sliding your arms through the cold leather. “Then let’s find out how big.”

He looks at you, searching for something. Not doubt, not trust–just measure. After a beat he nods, shoulders his pack and holsters his pistol. “Light’s clean for now,’ he says. “We take the south tunnel. No chatter. No trail.”

You nod and grab your own pack from the floor with a grimace, swallowing it down as you pull the straps onto your shoulders. The hum’s gone, but it still feels like something’s waiting just outside the edges of sound. You try not to think about it as you step toward the shutter, Caleb’s hand already finding the crank.

When the metal rolls up, daylight cuts across the floor like a blade. You squint against it. For the first time since the firefight, you can see the sky: gray, raw, and heavy with residue. You step out into it anyway.

The air outside the depot tastes cleaner, but only because it hasn’t decided what kind of poison to be yet. The rain’s stopped, leaving behind the metallic smell of wet concrete and exhaust. You and Caleb move fast, heads low, steps deliberate. The tunnels under the old transit line stretch out like arteries–half flooded, half collapsed.

The first few blocks are silent except for your footfalls and the occasional drop echoing off the steel ribs above. The quiet feels wrong. Too still for morning. Too careful.

Caleb notices it first. His head tilts slightly, the movement subtle, practiced. “Hear that?”

You stop. Listen. Nothing at first. Then, faint, something mechanical, pitched high and buried under the hum of distant turbines. Whine that doesn’t belong to the city’s breathing.

“Drone,” you murmur.

He nods once, already moving, one hand ghosting toward his sidearm. “Recon model. Probably sniffin’ for metal signatures.”

You slip into the shadows beneath a collapsed catwalk, ribs protesting the motion. The ache flares hot, sharp, but you grit through it. Above, a thin line of light slides across the tunnel mouth.

The drone passes slow. Sleek, oval, its underside bristling with sensors. No corpo markings, no faction tags. That’s worse.

Caleb watches the way it moves, steady and deliberate. “Private op. Not Maelstrom. Maybe Lark’s people. Maybe someone tracking the case.”

You glance toward the pouch in his jacket, the one holding the chip, “They’d have to know we’re alive for that.” Caleb doesn’t answer and the drone hum fades into the distance, but the silence it leaves behind feels heavier than before.

You exhale slow and swallow. “You think it’s a coincidence?”

“Nothing’s a coincidence down here.” His eyes flick to you, then to the tunnel ahead. “We move. Before it circles back.”

You push off the wall, boots splashing through shallow puddles, the echo of your steps chasing you down the corridor. The city above might’ve forgotten about this place, but someone certainly hadn’t.

A few meters ahead, Caleb stops short, crouches. You follow his gaze; and there, half submerged in the runoff, lies something small. A strip of polymer, waterproof and faintly luminescent, stamped with a symbol you’ve already seen once: the fractured wings of a bird.

You kneel beside him, heart starting to climb. “Another drop?”

Caleb’s jaw tightens, “Or a warning.” He plucks it from the water, wipes it clean on his sleeve. Embedded in the surface is a single line of code, burned faintly into the plastic.

| // ECHO: 01-INIT
| // TRACE NOT FOUND

You stare at it, then him. The air between you hums again, low and distant, like the sound of a circuit waking.

Caleb turns the strip over once more. The code still faintly glows, thin veins of light threading through the polymer before they die out, leaving only the outline of that fractured-wing emblem. “That’s not Lark’s usual signature,” he says finally. “He marks his drops clean–never coded.”

“Maybe he’s improvising,” you offer, but it sounds weak even to your own ears.

He grunts, eyes narrowing. “Lark doesn’t improvise.”

You look down the tunnel, where the light from the surface leaks through a vent in fractured blades. The rain’s stopped but the air still drips. “Then someone wants us thinking he did.”

Before Caleb can answer, the hum deepens. A static pulse runs up your spine like a misfired neural ping. You catch the faintest whir echoing through the corridor, mechanical and deliberate. Caleb hears it too. He’s already holstering the strip and drawing his sidearm.

“Move,” he mutters, and you don’t argue.

The two of you slide behind a line of derelict conduit piping as the first drone glides past the tunnel’s mouth. It’s smaller than the recon model from earlier, but it moves with intent, sensors sweeping in rhythmic arcs. Then another joins it. Two, then three, fanning out in a silent formation. Not scouting anymore–searching.

Caleb’s jaw ticks, “They tagged the drop. We’re late.”

A thin red laser skims across the wall just above your shoulder. You drop instinctively, breath catching, ribs screaming. Caleb’s already moving, his shadow cutting through the lamplight, pistol raised. One shot. The crack ricochets down the tunnel, deafening in the confined space. The lead drone spasms midair, its sensor array popping like a burst vein before it craters against the wall in a burst of blue sparks.

The others scatter, their rotors screaming a pitch that scrapes at your teeth. Three of them. Four maybe–you can’t really tell, they’re fast and flickering, silhouettes slicing through the dark. Red dots strobe across the walls in patterns that don’t make sense, too deliberate to be random, too chaotic to be clean code.

“Down!” Caleb barks, voice sharp enough to cut through the noise.

You hit the ground behind a half-crushed crate, heart hammering against the back of your ribcage. A round snaps past, close enough you feel its heat skim your temple. Metal screams against metal as Caleb fires again; controlled bursts, two-round rhythm, each one punctuated by the dry mechanical click of his chrome arm reloading on reflex.

You pivot around the crate’s edge and fire blind. The recoil jerks your injured side; pain tears through your ribs but you don’t stop. The muzzle flash floods the tunnel in white for an instant–just long enough to see one drone banking low, a disc of steel and glass spinning toward you like a thrown blade.

You duck. It grazes your shoulder, sparks peeling off the concrete behind you. The smell of ozone and burning dust fills the air, electric and sour.

Caleb moves like a system running perfect code: precise, violent, economical. He pivots, seizes one drone mid-dive, chrome fingers punching straight through its core. The machine screams, sparks pouring out of its ruined shell as he flings it into the wall. Another comes for him from the side; he spins, drops to one knee, fires. The drone shatters, fragments raining across the wet floor like broken glass.

You reload, hands slick and heart hammering in triple time. “They’re moving in sync!” you shout over the din. “Adaptive swarm–learning pattern!”

“Adaptive AI,” he grunts back, eyes locked on the movement above. “Not street tech. Biotech fingerprints all over this.”

You fire again, your round clipping a sensor node. The drone stumbles in midair, spasms, then detonates in a burst of silver sparks that rain across the tunnel. For half a breath there’s silence. Then a sharp chirp–high pitched, deliberate.

A signal.

The last drone shoots upward, lights flickering erratic red, and emits a pulse that rattles your teeth. Caleb curses, lunges forward, and empties his magazine into it. The machine jerks once and falls limp, smoke twisting from the ruin of its chassis. The echo of the last shot bleeds out slow, swallowed by the damp air.

You stay crouched, breathing hard. The silence that follows feels wrong; stretched too thin, like the world’s holding its breath.

Caleb lowers his pistol but doesn’t holster. “That wasn’t random,” he mutters, scanning the debris, the back of one hand wiping the sweat trailing down his temple. “They weren’t looking for us. They were delivering something.”

You both stay frozen for a full breath, waiting for movement that doesn’t come. The silence after the gunfire feels louder than the shots themselves: like the world’s  still ringing from the echo of chaos. You can smell the air burning; melted plastic, scorched wiring, the faint acid tang of discharged batteries. The tunnel is a bruise of smoke and ozone.

You move first, slow and careful, the soles of your boots grinding on fragments of drone casing. The sound feels too sharp, too alive. Caleb follows, pistol still raised, eyes slicing through the dark. His chrome arm hums faintly, overclocked from the fight.

One of the drones lies half-buried, its rotors still twitching in their death throes. Caleb crouches beside it, grabs it by the frame, and flips it over with one efficient motion. The casing splits open with a crack. Inside, instead of a standard processor block, a wafer drive glows soft blue–same shape, same make as the courier’s case. He pries it free with the edge of his knife and turns it over in his hand. “Same signature,” he mutters. His voice sounds rough, layered with static from the fight. “Fractured wing.  Lark’s mark… Or something wearing it.”

You crouch down beside him, rubbing your thumb across the cold, damp floor. The dust comes away black and oily, “Think he’s watching us?”

Caleb doesn’t look up, “He’s testing us.” He pockets the wafer then stands, body tense, head angling toward the far end of the tunnel. “Or someone’s using his dead drops to fish for whatever we’re carrying.”

Your jaw tightens, “Then they found us.”

“Not yet,” he says, checking his pistol's chamber with a sharp, mechanical click. “If they had, we’d already be smoke.”

You almost laugh but it catches halfway in your throat; the humor tastes bitter. “That’s comforting.”

He moves toward the tunnel mouth, scanning the walls for motion. “We can’t stay here. They’ll loop back on the signal.”

You glance around at the carnage–the shattered drone casings, the spent cartridges, the streaks of blackened oil across the concrete. “They’ll see this mess from orbit.”

He nods once, “Then we move.”

You quickly fall into step behind Caleb, ribs aching, the low hum in your skull refusing to quiet. The air grows colder the deeper you go; the tunnel narrows until the water dripping through the vents above sounds like slow applause. He kills his flashlight and moves by instinct, silent and exact, while you trail close enough to see the faint ghost of his outline in the dark.

When you pass a crate with an old console, something flickers in your periphery. You stop. “Wait.”

Caleb turns, one hand already on his pistol again, “What?”

The console–dead, dust-caked, untouched–shudders. Static crawls across its black screen like frost blooming in reverse. For a second, the air feels charged again, that same metallic taste sparking across your tongue, that tingle of an itch vibrating under your skin. Then, in pale white text, it types itself into existence:

| // RUNNING:
| ECHO://
| 01-INITIATE > TRACE_NOT_FOUND

The words blink once, twice, then vanish.

You stand there, heartbeat loud in your ears, pulse thrumming against your ribs. The console’s dead again. No light. No hum. Just you, the dark, and the smell of gunpowder.

Caleb watches you, eyes narrowing. “What?”

“Nothing,” you say too fast, shaking your head. “Static.”

He studies you a second longer but doesn’t push, just nods toward the tunnel. “Let’s move. East exit.”

You follow, silent, the image of those words still burned into the back of your eyelids. You don’t mention it again.

Some ghosts speak better when they think no one’s listening.

Chapter Text

The city looks cleaner in the morning only because the dark can’t hold all the lies at once. Steam lifts off the tunnel mouths in thin, bruised ribbons; rainwater hisses where it finds hot metal. You and Caleb move through it like you were cut for these angles: low, quiet, already shedding the night’s smoke but not the weight of it. The hum isn’t gone. It just learned your footsteps.

Caleb breaks the silence, clearing his throat, “You should rewrap.” he says, less a suggestion and more an observation, as he points a finger at your stomach. You drop your head and stare at the wound; the bandage is painted wet with crimson.

You nod once, “Right.” Your fingers deftly peel back the adhesive, wincing at the sting of synthetic fibers tugging at the string of stitches.

Crouched, Caleb throws a glance up and just as quickly returns to looking through his pack, shoveling until he pulls out a battered medbox. “Ripped one open. Should be fine, though” he mutters, pulling out a roll of bandage, unfurling it and slicing a strip off.

You brace an elbow against the wall to keep from flexing and he tears open an alcohol pad with his teeth, spits the wrapper into his palm, and offers it without commentary. You take it, cleaning around the stitches, teeth clamping down on your lip in focus. This type of sting clears your head better than coffee.

“Lift,” he says, and you do. He winds the bandage quick and flat, like surgeon’s knots without flourish. The wrap is snug, not gentle. He tests the tension with a thumb, then seals it with a strip of adhesive that looks like it’s been cut off a larger roll a hundred times before.

“Won’t hold if you sprint,” he says.

“Good thing I don’t run,” you deadpan. That earns you a ghost of a huff, not humor, agreement.

You move again. The echo of the city above fades with every step, traded for the low ache of pressure in your ears. The tunnels tighten into a ribcage of steel and poured stone, old signage half-swallowed by lime scale and rust. Every third step sends a ripple through thin water and every ripple returns as a whisper from somewhere you can’t see. Caleb walks ten paces ahead, the kind of lead that reads as protection or bait, depending on who’s watching.

The map in your head keeps pace: south tunnel, service spur, ladder well. He’d sketched it with a finger in the dirt back at the depot; you can still see the shape of it. What you can’t see is the part that's worrying him: the link between Lark’s drop and Biotechnica’s bones. That’s the vein he’s chasing, whether he admits it or not.

You find the hatch by smell first; old coolant and stale air baked behind thick metal. The panel sits chest-high where the corridor kinks: Biotechnica gray, flecked with corrosion, serial plate almost eaten clean. A keypad blinks a dead green that somehow still manages to look expensive. Caleb scans the seam with two fingers, then a small mirror. No tripwire, no fiber whiskers. He angles his head. “Power’s trickling. Someone nursed it recently.”

You kneel and pop the service notch with the thin pry you keep tucked in your boot. The faceplate doesn’t fight you–whoever loved this panel did it with maintenance, not malice. Behind it, a grid of wires and a dust-furred relay board stare back like a museum piece.

“No sparks,” Caleb murmurs.

“I’ll manage,” you say, but keep your hands slow anyway. You work with the tools you can admit to: a shorting pick, a jumper lead, and a narrow driver with a chipped ceramic tip. No neural handshake, no pretty interface; just metal and patience. You bridge a corroded contact, thumb a dormant reset, and breathe with the heartbeat you can feel in your ribs.

The keypad winks, brighter, a single diode climbs from sallow to clean green. “Door’s married to a relay,” you say. “If Lark opened it, he didn’t do it from here.”

Caleb watches your hands, not your face. “He’s fond of side doors.”

“Then let’s see his favorite.” You shove the faceplate a little deeper, hunt behind the loom, and find the thing you were hoping for: a manual override tongue hidden under a lip of casing, marked with a dot of faded blue paint. You pull it with the flat of your driver and the hatch gives a reluctant shudder then unseals with a hiss like an old man standing.

Inside, a short crawlspace leads to a square of shadow, the kind of maintenance vestibule corpos build between liability and conscience. A ladder drops away into a black space that smells faintly of desiccant and old rubber. You slide in first because you’re smaller, Caleb follows, closing the hatch with a careful palm until the outside world becomes a line.

Your flashlight works better as an idea than a beam–thin, white, and honest about its batteries. The vestibule holds a relay cabinet big enough to hide a person and empty enough to make that feel like a joke. Its door hangs open; the dust halo around it is disturbed in a clean rectangle, fresh footprints just at the edge and then nothing–as if they were brushed away by gloved hands.

“Heat shadow,” Caleb says quietly, tapping the metal with a knuckle. “Still warm. Someone loved it last night.”

You sweep the beam across the cabinet interior; racks stripped to rails, fibers pulled and coiled by someone who cared about keeping it tidy.  On the back panel, where dust should be, there’s a wiped patch, and in the middle of that: a wafer shard taped crooked, a fractured wing stamped on its matte face. A red grease pencil line scrawled right across the metal beneath it reads: FOLLOW THE VEIN.

The phrase sits wrong in your head, too biological for tech, too deliberate for chance. You look at Caleb, he looks at the shard. “Breadcrumb,” you say with a shrug.

“Hook,” he counters.

“Both can be true.”

He grunts and you peel the shard free, feeling the tack of tape and the chill of composite through your glove. It’s inert. No light, no hum. But your skin prickles anyway–the phantom of last night’s itch.

“Pocket?” you ask. He opens a small pouch without reaching for it; you drop the shard in. The pouch vanishes back into his jacket like it’s been there all his life.

You widen your sweep now. There are other marks, faint and hurried: arrows sketched in that same red, slashing toward the far wall where a conduit disappears behind a false panel. Caleb prowls to it, palms the edges, finds the flex, and pulls. The panel pops with a sigh; behind it, a backbone of pipe and cable, runs true north-south–thicker than the others, welded more recently and labeled in tiny, hateful corporate script: BIO-SUPPLY MAIN / RESIDUAL.

“Vein,” you say, because sometimes the city hands you the poetry itself.

Caleb touches the metal, he doesn't flinch at the cold. “This spine runs under the east ridge. Old dry-labs would’ve tapped here.” He follows it with his eyes, measuring. “Two klicks if we cut under the transit. Longer if we keep walkable.”

You don’t look at him, “Walkable keeps us breathing.”

“Breathing is the plan,” he answers, and there’s no sarcasm in it.

Something thumps far above, distant, heavy, the kind of sound that turns into rumor by the time it reaches where you are. Both of you go still and you cut your light. The dark folds back around the ladder as well, thick as cloth. You count to twenty; nothing repeats. When you breathe freely again, it's through your teeth.

You click the light back on and aim low. There’s a maintenance stencil near the floor, half-scrubbed, the letters ghosting through: S-TRK / SPINE ACCESS. Someone lined a finger through the grime and drew a short dash underneath, the same red wax caught in the grit. Lark’s handwriting from the synth-paper flickers in your mind: hard-pressed, utilitarian. This mark leans that same way.

“He’s close,” you say before you can stop the thought from escaping.

“Or someone wants us to think he is.” Caleb angles the panel back until it almost latches but leaves it open by a centimeter–enough to look shut, not enough to trap. He tracks the conduit path with a forefinger, counting silent, then points at a narrow service crawl hugging the spine. “We take that. Low profile, single file. If our ghost wants company, he can leave something brighter.”

You nod. Your ribs complain when you drop a knee, but the wrap holds. You slot into the crawl, shoulder brushing cool metal, the smell of machine dust and old rubber filling your mouth until your tongue goes numb. The hum doesn’t return, not loud enough to call out, but it keeps a place for itself under your skin like a name you won’t say.

Behind you, Caleb’s movements are geometry–no scrape, no wasted angle. He kills the vestibule light with a thumb and the world collapses into the white circle of your beam and the sound of two people choosing the narrowest road.

After ten meters, the crawl widens to a grated catwalk that overlooks a deeper trench. Your light catches a smear on the rail: red grease again, a short line then a circle. Not a symbol you know. Caleb studies it anyway.

“Marker,” he huffs. “Not gang. Not maintenance.”

“Lark’s shorthand?” you offer.

“Maybe. Or his habit of speaking in half-sentences.”

You breathe once, slow. “Then we finish them.”

Caleb’s mouth twitches at the edge: approval, or just the relief of a plan that’s only forward. “Follow the vein,” he says, and this time it sounds less like a lure and more like a route.

You move, the catwalk ratcheting under your weight, the spine humming. Cool grit sticks to your palms, damp and metallic, as if the whole place is breathing through dust. Somewhere ahead, air current shifts cooler, cleaner, the kind of temperature drop that screams large space: junction, hub, or something a corpo meant to hide and couldn’t erase completely.

The catwalk eventually empties into a vertical shaft where the air shifts again: less metal, more dirt and decay. Above, you can see a faint sliver of daylight bleeding through a mesh grate. Caleb stops at the base, glancing up; the light catches in his optics, washing them briefly pale.

“Ventilation shaft,” he says. “Leads topside.”

You rest your hands on your knees, breathing through the pulse in your ribs. “And here I thought the day couldn’t get brighter.”

He doesn’t bite, just checks the grip of his pistol, holsters it, and starts climbing. You follow, slower, careful of the wrap around your middle. The ladder’s slick from condensation and every rung squeals like it hasn’t been touched since the city was young.

Halfway up, the sound changes: less of an echo, more a vibration. You can feel it in your teeth before you hear it clearly; the grind of machinery, the distant churn of traffic, a low industrial heartbeat that only the surface can make.

When Caleb finally pushes the grate open, it gives with a soft screech and a puff of warm air, heavy with exhaust. The light that floods through isn’t gentle. It burns away every secret you thought the dark might keep. You climb out into what used to be a metro vestibule, stripped of its color and its purpose. The tiles underfoot are cracked in river patterns, hollowed by time and looters. A half-collapsed escalator leads to the street, where dust turns the morning light into smoke.

Caleb scans the area in slow, controlled arcs. His movements are quiet but not cautious, more like ritual. “Clear enough,” he says.

You stretch, feeling your muscles protest. “Remind me why anyone still lives up here?”

He almost smirks, “Habit. Denial. Same thing that keeps everyone breathing.”

You fall into step beside him as he moves through the wreckage, boots crunching over broken glass. For the first time in hours, you hear real life aboveground: muffled shouts from vendors, the sputter of an old engine, a synthbeat leaking from somewhere half a block away. It’s dissonant, like normalcy in a place that doesn't deserve it.

Caleb pauses near what used to be an info kiosk. The screen’s dead, but the casing’s intact; good enough for cover. He kneels to check the ground, fingers brushing a smear of black oil. “Someone dragged equipment through here,” he says. “Recent.”

You crouch beside him, tracing faint boot marks overlapping in the dust. “Lark?”

“Could be. Could be cleanup crew. Hard to tell–half this city walks like ghosts now.”

You glance up, following the slant of light through shattered skylights. “So what’s the plan? Keep following the vein?”

He studies you a beat longer than necessary, maybe weighing your tone. “Yeah,” he says finally. “Until it runs dry or kills us.”

“Optimistic.”

“That’s me.”

You lean back against the kiosk, rubbing a thumb over a patch of soot. The hum has gone quiet again, but the silence it leaves feels too deliberate, like it’s only pretending to sleep. The light catches something in the distance: a shimmer against glass, a faint movement just beyond the threshold of the vestibule.

Caleb notices it too. His hand goes to the pistol again, slow, instinctive. “Stay low,” he murmurs.

A silhouette crosses the far end of the street. Not corpo armor, civilian build, hooded. Moving with the kind of precision that says trained. A courier’s gait.

You don’t say the name, but it’s there between you like static: Lark.

The figure vanishes before you can decide whether to follow or not. Caleb exhales through his nose, low, and mutters, “Breadcrumbs. Always breadcrumbs.”

You glance at him, “You think he’s watching?”

He doesn’t answer right away. His eyes stay fixed on the direction the shadow disappeared. “He’s leading.”

The word lands heavy. Not hope, not fear–just certainty.

You don’t follow the shadow. Not yet. Caleb’s already moving the other way, toward a slanted archway that opens into the upper concourse. You fall in line behind him, the hum of the city leaking through every crack in the ceiling. The air up here tastes of concrete dust and burnt circuitry, the kind that never really leaves your throat. You pass a toppled vending machine spilling glass beads and melted synth-wraps. Caleb ghosts by it without pause, boots placing sound where sound used to live.

Then the sound changes again–sharp and deliberate. Footsteps. Not the uneven rhythm of civilians picking through ruins, but cadence. Trained.

Caleb freezes mid-step, hand flashing up in a signal that means down. You drop behind a broken pillar. The light spilling through fractured skylights fades as a cloud drifts over, leaving the station in a wash of gray. Two figures cross the far end of the vestibule, shapes blurred behind veils of dust. Tactical harnesses, light armor, no insignia. Their visors flicker faint green as they scan the space, voices barely audible under the rasp of respirators.

“Corpo?” you whisper.

Caleb’s head tilts. “Too light. Contracted maybe.”

You inch to the side, eyes tracking the rhythm of their sweep. The nearer one stops by the info kiosk where you stood minutes ago, running a scanner along its edge. It chirps, faint and insectile. You feel your pulse in your teeth. Caleb shifts his weight to the balls of his feet, ready. You shake your head–no. He hesitates, jaw flexing, but nods once.

The scanner tone changes–low, uncertain–and the patrolman taps his companion’s shoulder. They exchange a glance you can’t read through the helmets, then they move on; slow and cautious, heading toward the opposite stairwell. You wait until their boots fade into the distance before breathing again. The silence left behind feels louder for their absence.

Caleb straightens first, eyes still fixed on the stairwell. “They’re running sweeps.”

“Looking for Lark?”

“Or whoever’s following him.” He shoulders his pack, voice flat. “Either way, we’re ghosts ‘til we hit the ridge.”

You nod, but the thought sticks: if Lark’s leaving crumbs, someone's sweeping to erase them.

As you move out, the light returns, thin and brittle through the skylights, painting the floor in fractured shapes. Each one looks like a map that doesn’t want to be read. You pass through what used to be a security gate. Its sensor array hangs loose, wires like veins. Caleb pauses long enough to pull a scrap of polymer wedged in the frame: a corner of a transit pass, stamped with that same fractured-wing sigil. He turns it over, then slips it into his jacket.

“Another trail,” you murmur.

He shakes his head, “No. This one’s bait. Too easy.” Still, he pockets it, because even bait tells you where the hook was cast.

You keep moving. The corridor curves down toward a broken stairwell where rainwater drips through cracked concrete, each drop echoing like a slow clock. The air’s colder here, threaded with the burnt-copper tang of old circuitry. The light from above dulls to a gray smear. You follow Caleb down the incline, steps deliberate, ears tuned for anything mechanical. The deeper you go, the more the world narrows–sound dies first, then color, until only the hum of old power fills the gaps between your thoughts.

Caleb halts near a turn, one hand raised. You stop, crouch low, let your pulse steady. He peers around the corner, then gestures you forward. The tunnel ahead opens into a long, hollow platform: a forgotten interchange, its walls plastered with propaganda so sun-bleached that the slogans have bled into abstraction. The rail lines below are dry, littered with the husks of service drones gone skeletal with rust.

You exhale slow, “Looks dead…”

Caleb scans the length of the platform, optics flickering as they adjust. “Dead things hum differently.”

And he’s right. The hum’s here again; so faint it’s almost a vibration underfoot, threading up through the old steel bones. You can taste it, that same metallic static from the courier’s case. Caleb moves toward an old console at the end of the platform and crouches beside it. Its screen is black but the casing’s been pried open and resealed, the edges still sharp from fresh handling. He brushes a thumb across the seam, then freezes.

There, scratched faint into the surface: a wing, fractured through the middle. The mark repeats itself like a heartbeat in the dust. “Lark,” you whisper.

“Or someone who wants his ghost to keep walking.” He doesn’t pocket the panel this time, just studies it, jaw tight. The light from the tunnel mouth ripples faintly over his chrome. You see him shift, the smallest tell, uneasy and calculating.

A faint whine rises in the distance. Not human. Rotors, maybe. You both turn toward the sound. “Drones again?” you ask.

Caleb grunts, “Too far to tell.” His voice is already low and controlled, the kind of tone people use when they know the answer.

You scan the ceiling. The light flickers and for a moment, one of the fixtures overhead hums louder than the rest. You realize it’s not the light at all, it’s circuitry warming. Then the air thickens with static. “Something’s booting up,” you mutter.

Caleb takes a step back, hand near his pistol. “Lark’s not leading us anymore.”

The console at the end of the platform ticks once, then again. Static crawls across its black surface like frost reversing itself. The hum resolves into a single, hard pulse that syncs with your heartbeat. You both stare at the screen as it flares white and types itself alive:

|// RUNNING:

| ECHO://

| 01-INITIATE > TRACE_NOT_FOUND

| // RETURNING SIGNAL...

Then the light dies, leaving only the afterburn behind your eyes.

The dark settles again, quiet but not empty. The air tastes like static, like something just rewired itself and left you behind to catch the hum’s echo. You drag your sleeve across your face and exhale, watching the condensation bloom in the faint blue spill from the console’s dead glass.

“Could’ve been a relay,” Caleb says, low. “Autonomous ping. No message, just maintenance code trying to wake itself.”

You shake your head, “No. Maintenance code doesn’t talk in loops like that. The structure–those slashes, the recursion–it’s not output. It’s a call and response.”

He glances at you, expression unreadable. “Meaning?”

You approach and crouch closer, fingers hovering above the keys but not touching. “Meaning… something’s talking to itself. Testing for reflection. You saw that header, yeah? ECHO:// isn’t a tag, it’s a mirror.”

Caleb’s voice flattens, “You sound sure.”

You shrug, pretending to study the casing. “Lucky guess.”

He grunts, “Lucky guesses don’t use terms like ‘recursion.’” His tone isn’t sharp, just measured. The way he says it feels like cataloguing again, the same way he once listed your scars.

You keep your eyes on the console, “Maybe I used to work for someone who liked puzzles.”

He huffs through his nose, not disbelief but not belief either, “Maybe.”

You shift back to sit against the cold conduit, the aftermirage still pulsing at the edge of your vision. “Whatever that was, it’s not random. It saw something when it tripped. The ‘trace not found’ line means it was looking for an identifier.”

“Us?”

“Maybe. Or something we’re carrying.” You tap your side without meaning to, the chip’s weight feels heavier for it.

Caleb’s gaze follows the motion but he doesn’t comment on it. “If it was a call, did it get an answer?”

You hesitate, listening. The hum in the metal seems to deepen for half a second, like a breath drawn and swallowed. “Feels like it did.”

He studies you, eyes narrowing, violet light reflecting off the steel ribs around you. “You think it’s alive?”

You shake your head once, “Not alive. Aware.”

The word hangs there, thin and cold. Neither of you move. The console stays dark, but somewhere behind it you swear you hear the circuitry click–just once, like a shutter closing. Caleb breaks that silence, “Let’s hope awareness doesn’t mean curiosity.”

You don’t answer. The hum crawls back under your skin, patient and familiar. The afterburn fades but the echo stays.

You move. He moves. The sound of your boots in shallow water is the only thing the city allows. The tunnel ahead ripples with faint reflections from leaking coolant lines; the light breathes cold across steel ribs, then dies before it can reach the next bend.

Neither of you speak. The quiet feels deliberate, like the air itself is waiting for something to admit it’s real. Caleb’s silhouette cuts forward through the half-dark, the faint pulse of his optics catching on every twist of pipe. He keeps a hand close to his weapon, but not because he expects trouble, it’s pure habit. You can tell by the way his fingers flex, tiny, idle calculations in motion.

You step over a tangle of cable and pause to listen. There’s still a faint vibration in the walls, a pulse that isn’t machinery. Maybe the city’s breathing. Maybe it’s just you again, feeling the hum where no one else would.

Caleb slows his pace near a junction and glances back once, eyes lit faint violet in the gloom. “You hear that?”

You tilt your head, listening: only the hiss of steam. “Hear what?”

“Exactly,” he starts walking again, slower now. “Noise drops off too clean down here. Not natural.”

You study the back of his shoulders, the way he moves is like the space around him is a problem to solve. The silence stretches again, long enough that the words he says next sound like they’ve been building for miles.

“You read that code fast,” he says, finally.

You blink at his back once, then twice, caught off-guard by the softness of it. “What?”

He doesn’t stop walking and doesn’t look back, “Back there. Console. You read it like it was written for you.”

You exhale slowly, the echo of his words lingers just like the hum. “Told ya’, lucky guess.”

He hums low in his throat. Not disbelief but assessment. “You don’t guess. Not like that.”

You can almost hear him thinking now, the click of some internal logic tightening its loops. He doesn’t push further, though, not yet. Just keeps moving, the rhythm of his boots syncing with yours.

The corridor narrows the deeper you go; pipes sweat condensation, the air tastes stale and copper-bitten. Every sound folds back on itself until even your breath sounds wrong. Caleb keeps to the left wall, the chrome of his arm brushing the damp surface in brief, whispering taps, mapping distance the old way: by feel.

A junction opens further ahead, marked by a fractured hazard strobe still pulsing once every few seconds. You duck through it, stepping over the carcass of an old maintenance drone whose lenses stare blankly at the ceiling. The water here runs shallow, trickling through a grate that glows faint orange from the heat below. Caleb halts at a corner where the tunnel ribs into a collapsed bulkhead. He runs a scan with a small handheld, the kind that hums instead of beeps, and the readout flickers a dull green. “Dead zone,” he murmurs. “No net, no ping. We hole up here for a minute.”

You nod, lowering yourself onto a cracked length of conduit. The metal is cold through your clothes but it beats standing. Caleb kneels beside an old filtration fan and checks the vent output: still warm, but barely. He sets his pack down, unclipping a canteen and taking a long drink before passing it over.

You take a swallow; the water tastes slightly of metal and plastic, but it cuts the dryness in your throat. “Not the worst room I’ve slept in,” you say.  

He makes a sound in response, half grunt half acknowledgement, and eases down opposite you. The fan’s slow exhale turns the air between you into a whispering pulse. The silence that follows isn’t the strained kind; it’s heavy, lived-in. The kind that lets thoughts spool out until they find words.

And Caleb’s do. You can tell by the way his jaw flexes, how his eyes keep flicking between you and the direction of the dead console far down the tunnel. He’s thinking, turning something over. You wait, because that’s the only thing you can do when someone like him decides whether or not to speak.

When he finally speaks his voice is low enough that it barely rides the fan’s hum. “Back there,” he says. “When the console lit.”

You look up slowly, “Yeah?”

“You didn’t flinch,” he leans forward slightly, forearms resting on his knees. “Most people freeze when a dead system wakes itself.”

“Maybe I don’t scare easy.”

Caleb studies you like he’s running diagnostics: steady, patient, looking for cracks. “You don’t scare right,” he says after a moment. “That code hit the screen clean and you started reading before I even saw the full prompt.”

You shift, feigning a shrug that feels heavier than it should. “Just symbols. Anyone with half a brain can read fragments.”

He gives a quiet, humorless huff. “Sure. If they’ve spent time buried in archived firmware logs.”

That makes your jaw tighten, just slightly. “You think I spend my nights decrypting museum scraps?”

“I think you knew what you were looking at.” His tone isn’t accusatory, just steady, factual. “You tracked version syntax, caught the system call before it finished printing. That wasn’t guesswork.”

You stare at the ground between you, tracing a line in the dust with your boot. “Maybe I got lucky,” you repeat.

Caleb doesn’t answer right away. He watches the dust scuff under your heel, then says quietly, “Luck doesn’t make people count packets under their breath.”

You freeze for half a second before catching yourself. “You were listening to me breathe now?”

“Listening to rhythm,” he says. “You were parsing the code like you were timing it. One-one-zero cadence. Old netrunner habit.”

You meet his eyes for the first time since he started probing, “You sure you’re not just seeing ghosts?”

“Maybe,” he says with a shrug, and the word carries more truth than defense. “But ghosts don’t open Biotech hatches with boot tools and patience.”

You exhale through your nose, quiet but sharp. “You want to call me something, Caleb, go ahead.”

He shakes his head slow, “Not calling you anything. Just trying to figure out what kind of math I’m walking beside.”

The fan coughs, sending a pulse of cool air across the space. Neither of you move for a long beat. Then, finally, he adds, quieter. “You handled that system like it was speaking a language you forgot you knew.”

That one lands harder than it should. You can feel the back of your neck tighten. “Maybe I’ve got a good ear.”

“Or a buried line,” he murmurs under his breath.

You lift your head again, tone even but firm. “You gonna keep guessing, or you gonna let me work?”

That draws the faintest trace of something close to a smirk, gone as fast as it comes. “Work’s fine,” he says. “Long as it doesn’t get us killed.”

You lean back against the wall, eyelids heavy. “You’ll know when it does.”

He huffs a low sound, not approval and not amusement, but something in between, and stands. “Rest’s over.”

You push to your feet too, the ache in your ribs blooming at the motion. As you shoulder your pack, you catch him glancing at you again–not suspicion anymore, just quiet calculation tempered with curiosity.

Whatever question he wanted to ask next, he swallows it.

For now.

Chapter Text

The spine runs deeper than the maps promised. Each corridor folds into another, concrete veins slick with condensation, cables sagging like wet roots. The air smells of rust and coolant, of things once sterile that learned decay. Every sound you make comes back wrong; muted, warped by the geometry of the place until it feels like the tunnels are whispering your own footsteps back at you.

That hum still trails you; not loud, not steady, just a presence hiding under the weight of silence. It threads through the metal the way blood moves through a bruise: slow, unseen, inevitable.

Caleb moves ahead, posture low, pistol down but not relaxed. His steps are measured, a practiced rhythm over nerves. You follow the ghost of his light, watching the narrow beam brush along conduit labels and hazard tape so faded they read like scars. The further you go, the more the air thickens, tasting of copper and antifreeze–like the place has been exhaling for decades without ever remembering to inhale.

For a moment, the motion settles and you both pause at a junction where the ceiling bows low and water pools ankle-deep. Your breath fogs the air. The city’s heartbeat feels far away up there, somewhere above the tons of concrete. Down here, though, there’s only the pulse under your skin.

Then the ground gives a single, short shudder. Not enough to knock you off your balance, just enough to make the water tremble and the metal groan.

Caleb’s head tilts, eyes narrowed. “That’s not runoff.”

You freeze, every sense narrowing. The silence that follows isn’t empty; it’s waiting.

Somewhere ahead, a low vibration rolls through the steel, slow at first, like a machine finally remembering how to breathe. The hum crawls under your skin again, subtle at first, then sharper. You catch a faint rhythm, a pulse, steady and artificial, like it’s syncing itself to the one already pounding behind your ribs.

“Power reroute?” you whisper.

Caleb shakes his head, eyes narrowing toward the panel. “No. That’s movement.”

You both fall silent.

Then, one by one, the old maintenance lights lining the ceiling flicker to life. Not bright, just enough to throw ghosts against the walls. Each one clicks on a heartbeat apart, crawling toward you like a countdown.

“That’s definitely not power rerouting,” he says again, quieter this time.

The last light pops, bathing the corridor in the kind of half-glow that makes everything look submerged. Caleb glances back once–quick, sharp, unreadable–then gestures forward: move.

The water underfoot ripples in concentric rings as you follow and somewhere behind that sound, something heavier stirs. A deep mechanical groan that doesn’t belong just to some rust. Caleb doesn’t run yet but his pace changes; faster, clipped, and more efficient. Every few steps he glances up toward the overhead vents, calculating exit strategies. You follow his rhythm, the two of you slipping through the half-light like shadows taught to mimic human movement. You’re moving fast but the noise still grows louder: a grind of steel treading over wet concrete. It’s coming from behind, closer now, the vibration matching the beat of the lights overhead. The hum inside you answers in kind, alive again and much too aware.

Your voice comes out low, clipped, “They’re flushing the tunnels.”

Caleb’s reply is a single word, spoken between breaths, “Run.”

The word is still leaving his mouth when the floor shudders. A low-frequency groan rolls through the steel, deeper than sound, closer to a heartbeat. Lights overhead flicker, one by one, chasing the corridor in blue-white bursts that make everything look sharper than real.

You run.

Boots splash through standing water, every step echoing back too fast, like something’s chasing that same beat. Steam jets out from a cracked pipe beside your shoulder and burns the air. The tunnel narrows; the hum doesn’t–it crawls up your spine and sits behind your eyes, pulsing.

Behind you, the machinery wakes with whirring motors, servos clicking in perfect rhythm. It isn’t random, it's patterned.

“Left split,” Caleb snaps, already turning.

You pivot with him, boots sliding through slick runoff. Your shoulder slams the wall and pain lances through the stitches. You taste the iron before you smell it. Doesn’t matter, though. You keep moving.

The air’s hotter now, pushed ahead of something large. The kind of pressure wave that belongs to mass, not atmosphere. You risk a glance back: shadows bloom in the steam, rounded and mechanical, each with red optics that pulse like eyes. Three, maybe four, all moving in a staggered line.

“Maintenance bots?” you choke out.

“Modified,” Caleb grinds back. “Too clean.”

Another tremor hits, closer this time, causing water to jump in the puddles. The hum spikes again–higher, thinner–and it feels like the inside of your skull is vibrating.

The light catches on his chrome arm as he looks over his shoulder. “Up ahead!”

You follow the direction of his hand and catch the glint of steel: stairs, half-collapsed, rising toward a grated service level. Flooded up to the knees, maybe even waist deep. But that doesn’t matter, it’s a way out.

You break into a sprint. The tunnel behind you fills with light; white this time, cutting through the steam like the sweep of a god’s searchlight. The air pressure drops, then surges again. Engines. Jet assist.

“Not drones,” Caleb mutters, voice low and certain. “Haulers. Reinforced.”

You can feel it in the air–the weight of them.

The first impact hits a second later: metal slamming metal, the corridor shaking like a throat swallowing. Bolts rain from the ceiling and you throw yourself forward as one of the haulers bursts through the mist, its massive profile scraping both walls at once, floodlights strobing.

“Go!” Caleb’s hand hits your back, pushing you ahead of him. You hit the water running, cold shock tearing the air from your lungs. He’s right behind you, a shadow of motion and metal.

Another impact. A second hauler grinds into view, its armored hull tearing sparks from the tunnel’s  ceiling. The noise is a physical thing, hammering against your ribs. You grab the rail and wrench yourself upward; the metal is slick, biting through your gloves.

The stitches scream and you scream with them.

Caleb’s below you, one hand on the ladder, pistol in the other. “Go! Climb!”

The hauler’s beam sweeps up. You see your own shadow distort across the wall, cut apart by the grid. The machine groans; a turret deploys from its chassis. You catch the click before the flash.

The round hits just under your boot, vaporizing a rung in a spray of molten metal. Heat sears your calf and you yank yourself higher. Caleb fires back, short, precise bursts that sound impossibly calm in all this noise. Two shots. Three. The turret goes dark.

You don’t look down again.

Halfway up, the whole structure trembles. Something’s breaching the water below; one of the haulers forcing its way through, the tunnel too narrow to stop it. The metal ladder shivers, joints shrieking. Caleb shoves something small into your hand: a flash-charge, the pin already half-pulled. “Drop it when I say!”

“What if–”

He cuts you off, “You’ll know!”

You keep climbing. The hum in your bones has synced to your pulse now; you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. Above, you see faint light. Below, a heap of metal rage.

“Now!”

You let go of the charge. It falls in slow motion, the sound of the pin spinning feels louder than everything else. The light blooms before the impact: white, immediate, and mean. The air implodes. Heat roars up the shaft. You feel it wrap around your ankles like a hand before it’s gone. The concussion hits next, slamming the ladder into the wall. You lose your grip, drop half a meter, elbow cracking against steel. In an instant, Caleb’s hand snaps around your forearm before you fall further. The grip is bruising but alive.

He hauls you up the last few rungs and pushes you through the hatch above. You tumble onto your back, lungs clawing for air that tastes like dust and ion burn. Caleb rolls through a breath later, slamming the hatch shut with his boot. The clang echos like thunder.

Silence. Then the soft rain of debris settling.

You’re still staring up at the ceiling when you realize the hum hasn’t stopped–it’s just changed tone. It’s lower. Inside your teeth now.

Caleb crouches beside you, chest rising slow, calm in a way that pisses you off. His voice, when it comes, is low and gravelly. “Bought us seconds. Not much more.”

You force a laugh, half air, half defiance. “That your way of saying we’re alive?”

“Mostly.”

You sit up, ribs protesting. The tunnel ahead glows faintly; the pale, sterile white of emergency lighting, too consistent to be random power bleed. There’s motion in it, something flickering at the edge of depth.

Caleb reloads, mag sliding home with a click that sounds almost reverent. “We keep moving.”

You nod, swallow the metallic taste, and rise to your feet. The hauler’s echo lingers behind you like thunder remembering its shape.

But no calm follows. The air carries static now, alive and predatory. Somewhere behind, metal screams on metal, too clean to be just the settling of debris. Caleb’s already turning his head, one eye catching the tunnel’s pallid light.

“Move!”

You run before you think, boots punching through shallow water that glows faintly with runoff chem. The tunnel breathes around you, the walls flexing with pressure changes that are nowhere near natural. Every step feeds the hum–your hum–until it’s crawling under your ribs in perfect counter-rhythm to your heartbeat. The light ahead dies then flares white. A pulse, almost like the corridor’s veins are syncing to yours.

Caleb swears under his breath, “We tripped something.”

From the dark behind, a sound answers: high-frequency, insectile. A vibration you don’t hear so much as taste.The hum inside you leans toward it, like recognition.

“Keep left,” he says, pistol drawn. His voice is steady but the metal in it cuts.

You bank hard around a corroded pipe junction. A thin laser licks past your shoulder, heat kissing your arm through your jacket. You hit the wall, slide, push off again; the air’s smelling of hot copper now.

Three drones peel from the ceiling like bats. Sleek, jointed things, no louder than the oscillating click of their rotors. Their lights blink in patterns that make your teeth ache: red-red-pause-blue. You know that code. You shouldn’t, but you certainly do.

Then they see you.

Caleb drops the first in two bursts; the rounds punch through its sensor crown and it detonates in a burst of liquid metal that spatters off the ceiling like mercury rain. Sparks arc off the concrete and splatter into the runoff, hissing blue flame that stinks of scorched coolant.

The recoil in your pistol stutters your grip; pain forks up through your ribs, but you push into it. The next drone banks toward you, rotor wash dragging grit and heat across your face. You fire. The muzzle flash floods the tunnel white for half a heartbeat. Your bullet clips a stabilizer fin and the drone jerks sideways, blade gouging the wall. It slams into a pipe, crumples, and cartwheels into the water; one rotor keeps spinning, screaming like a circular saw until it finally seizes.

The last one splits its chassis open mid-air, panels unfolding like metallic petals. It fires a rapid burst of flechettes that chew through the wall where your head was just a blink ago. Shards of concrete rain down your back; one cuts through your sleeve and another skids off the fresh wrap under your ribs.

Caleb’s return shot is surgical: his chrome fingers tighten, his elbow locks, and the pistol coughs twice. The first round punches a hole clean through the drone’s optics, the second finds the power core. The explosion isn’t fire, it's light, a blue-white surge that snaps the air out of your lungs and leaves after-images burned into the back of your skull. The blast wave hits like a shove. You stumble, boot skidding on wet steel. The hum inside your head jumps, spikes, and for a split second everything turns crystalline: every water droplet suspended, every fracture line in the wall etched sharp. You see data in the chaos, a lattice of moving light–the drones’ signatures, their fail-safes, their death throes converting into raw code before your eyes.

Then it’s gone and sound slams back into you.

“Eyes up,” Caleb snaps.

You drag a breath through your teeth. Another drone emerges from a vent: small, fast, almost silent. It spits a razor-thin cable that misses your neck by inches, slicing sparks across the railing. You duck, roll, and fire upward. The bullet connects with the drone’s underside but the round doesn’t pierce, instead it ricochets inside, pinging between plates until the pressure builds and the drone bursts with a muffled thunk, guts of wires and coolant splattering across your forearm in a spray of blue vapor that burns cold.

The rest begin to adapt. Their lights sync–red-blue-blue-pause–and the hum under your skin matches them. It’s not echoing anymore, now it’s answering.

You drop behind a beam, breathing smoke and grit. Caleb slides in beside you, jaw tight, eyes sharp in the half-light. “You hearing that?” You nod but the word that comes out isn’t yes, it’s a sound, low and unintentional, pulled from somewhere deeper than thought.

The hum spikes again. The drones freeze mid-flight, their lights flickering in sequence like they’re listening to something unseen. Caleb’s gaze cuts to you; you know he feels it too now, the air vibrating with a low-frequency signal like it’s crawling through the concrete.

You don’t mean to move, but your fingers twitch toward your ribs, right where the chip rides, buried and humming. The air around you bends like a signal distortion, the drone lights pulsing in time with your pulse.

“Don’t,” Caleb says, half command, half warning.

Too late. The pulse of the hum burns against your ribs through the fabric. You feel its rhythm lock to yours, a feedback loop of code and blood. The hum roars inside you–so loud you forget to breathe–and then everything collapses into white.

The world fractures.

You can’t tell if you’re falling or floating; gravity feels optional, memory unreliable. The air thickens into static, cold and electric. Sound doesn’t travel anymore–it punches through you, every vibration a physical bruise. Shapes warp at the edges of your vision: drone silhouettes unspooling into lines of raw data, tunnels folding into wireframe geometry.

And through it all–the hum. It’s not external anymore; it’s under your skin, in your teeth, vibrating along the curve of your skull. You can feel it mapping you: pulse, breath, fear. Like it’s cataloguing every weakness it finds. You try to move, to shake it loose, but your body’s not yours. Muscles fire in ghost patterns, each twitch trailing a blue of light in your periphery. You reach for something–Caleb’s voice, a word, anything–but when you open your mouth, no sound comes out. Only static.

Something in the dark moves with you; not the drones, they’re disintegrating, flaring in slow motion. One tears itself apart mid-air, its chassis peeling like a blooming flower, rotors scattering sparks in spirals. Another jerks upward, frozen in place, its sensors flickering between red and dead. Each explosion unfolds in perfect silence; just white bloom, motion, collapse.

A pulse goes off in your chest: not a heartbeat, too deep and alien for that. It travels up your throat, behind your eyes, the kind of pressure that burns more than it hurts. For a heartbeat, you see what the drones saw: an ocean of signals, each one alive and screaming in binary. A web that stretches across the city, veins of light feeding something vast and unseen.

Your own reflection flickers in one of the drone’s cracked optics, but the eyes staring back aren’t yours. Too bright. Too static. You claw at the wall but find no surface; there’s nothing to hold onto. Your thoughts scatter, words breaking apart mid-formation: stop stop stop–but the hum keeps answering itself through you. It likes you. You can feel that, too.

Then–hands. Real. Hard. Caleb’s voice cuts through the static like a blade through ice. “El!”

A shock of air slams into your lungs. You’re on your knees, half in the runoff and gasping. The tunnel’s alive with noise again: metal settling, water sizzling where the drone fire cooked the floor, Caleb’s rough breath above you. The drones are gone and what’s left of them drips from the ceiling, slag and carbon smoke. Your ears ring like you’ve been underwater too long.

Caleb kneels beside you, hand on your shoulder. His chrome arm hums faintly from residual charge and he’s saying something. You catch only pieces: you–glitched–waveform–bleed–

You drag your gaze up to him, throat raw and words shredded. “It–was–inside–”

He tightens his grip on you, voice lower now. “I know.”

You shake your head, water, maybe sweat, flicking from your hair. “No. Not the shard,” you touch your sternum with trembling fingers. “Me.”

For a moment there's only that drip of coolant and the faint creak of metal cooling as Caleb studies you like a man trying to disarm a bomb with his bare hands. “Then we’re in deeper than I thought,” he mutters finally.

You wipe your face with a shaking hand: blood. Not much, but it’s there, a fine trickle from your nose and you don’t even remember when it started. The hum has gone quiet now, but its echo stays, pressed into your skull like an afterimage. And underneath it, something else. A whisper, faint but clear: a data string looping in your head, burning itself into memory.

| // ECHO: 02-LINKED

The tunnel lights flicker once, twice, then steady again, like nothing happened. You can still taste the static in the air. Then it settles into silence, if you can call it that; wires still cooling, the stink of ozone hanging low and sweet like burned sugar. You follow Caleb down a side passage, both of you half-limping on instinct until the corridor widens into an old freight office.

It’s a box of glassless windows and warped desks, the kind of room that remembers when the city still had clerks. Paper scraps cling to the walls like molten skin, debris litters the floor. Caleb sweeps the room once with his pistol raised, then again with a slower turn of the wrist before nodding you inside.

You drop onto a rusted filing cabinet, boots scraping concrete, pulse still drumming behind your teeth. Caleb stays standing, shoulders outlined by the faint white glow bleeding through the doorframe. He’s calm again, the kind of calm that means his brain’s running hot beneath.

“Sitrep,” he says.

“Alive,” you answer, too quickly.

He shoots you a look, not anger, just measure. “What the hell was that back there?”

You let out a slow breath through your nose. “Feedback. Maybe interference off their signal net.”

“Bullshit.” He holsters, then starts pacing, each boot-step deliberate. “I’ve seen EMPs, pulse charges, scramblers. None of them make air bend like that.”

You shift, spine pressing into the cold metal behind you. “Guess you haven’t seen everything.”

He stops halfway between you and the doorway, the light catching along his jaw, silvering the scar there. “Don’t get clever. Those drones didn’t just die–they folded. Like something chewed their code from the inside.”

You meet his stare and for a second neither of you blink. “You think I did that on purpose?”

“I think it started near you,” he says flatly. “And I think whatever’s riding that chip doesn’t care who’s holding it.”

Your hand moves unconsciously toward your ribs, where the heat of the implant seems to radiate from your pocket. “You’re saying it jumped?”

“I’m saying I’ve seen linked code before, and I’ve never seen it hunt.”

The silence stretches long and brittle. The hum’s back again, soft, subtle, and hiding under the groan of old metal. You can tell it isn’t in the walls anymore, it’s in you.

Caleb exhales and rubs at the bridge of his nose. “Whatever that was, it fried half your neural rhythm. You bleed out or you burn out, same result. Next time, you keep your head out of its frequency range.”

“You giving me orders now?”

“Someone has to.”

The hum spikes once then, barely audible, but it makes both of you look toward the same dark corner of the room. A broken monitor there flickers alive for half a heartbeat, pale green text scrolling across its fractured glass.

| // ECHO: 03-ADAPT
| // HOST FOUND

The screen pops then dies, smoke curling from the seams.

Neither of you move.

Caleb’s voice drops, quiet and steady. “Guess that answers one question.”

You swallow, throat dry. “Yeah?”

“Which one of us they’re following.”

His gaze drops, not at you exactly, but at the small shape beneath your jacket, the hard edge of the implant’s case. “If that thing’s broadcasting, we’re already ghosts,” he mutters. “And if it’s listening–”

“It is,” you cut in before you can stop yourself. His eyes flick to you, sharp.

“What do you mean, it is?”

You stare at the case. “It’s not a feed. It’s a bridge. Whatever Lark wanted us to find–it’s not dormant. It’s learning.”

He stares at you for a beat too long. “And how the hell would you know that?”

You look away, jaw tightening. “Because it knows me.” The hum answers like a pulse against your teeth, faint but real.

Caleb drags a hand down his face, exhaling hard. “You’re gonna tell me what that means before it decides to eat through another wall.”

You shake your head, voice low. “Not here. It’s still tracking. Every word we say in range is noise it can learn from.”

He watches you, reading posture, tone and micromovements, like you’re another system he’s trying to debug. “Fine. We move topside. Somewhere it can’t listen.”

You push off the cabinet, legs trembling once before they find rhythm again. The freight office door moans open under his hand, the hallway beyond lit only by the pulse of a dying red emergency light.

“Lead or follow?” he asks.

You smirk faintly despite the tremor in your fingers. “You’re better at getting shot first.”

He huffs through his nose–almost a laugh, almost not–and gestures forward. The hum follows you out, faint as a breath but constant. Somewhere behind, the dead monitor crackles once more, a single string of text flashing unseen before it fades:

| // ADAPTIVE LINK: STABLE
| // OBSERVE //

Chapter Text

The hallway beyond the freight office feels too wide after the crush of the tunnels, a long ribs-and-concrete artery that stretches out in both directions like it’s waiting for something to fill it. The emergency lights hum at a steady pitch: flat, mechanical, and almost polite. The air has that charged stillness you get after a detonation, when the world hasn’t decided how to put itself back together yet.

Caleb moves first, silent, scanning each recessed doorway; you follow a half-step behind, every sound too sharp in your ears, as if the corridor itself is amplifying your pulse. Nothing flickers. Nothing shifts. And somehow that feels worse. Like the place is holding its breath, listening to see what you’ll do next.

The echo of your footsteps fold strangely around the space, soft at first, then sharper as you move deeper in. Like the acoustics can’t decide whether this place is meant to swallow sound or sharpen it. The floor slopes barely downward, almost imperceptible, just enough that the distribution of weight in your boots feels wrong. Not dangerous. Just misaligned. The kind of detail you wouldn’t notice if your nerves weren’t already blown open.

Caleb pauses at the first cross-corridor, not because he hears anything but because the layout doesn’t match what he expected. His head tilts a fraction, eyes narrowing at the angle of the walls, the spacing of the light panels overhead. His hand brushes a conduit label, smearing a line through dust thick as powder. He doesn’t speak, but the small crease between his brows says enough: the map in his memory and the hall in front of him aren’t lining up quite right.

You breathe in slow, shallow pulls through your nose. The air is cooler here than in the tunnels below, tinged with old refrigerant and the faint ghost of something floral. Something synthetic, processed, maybe remnants of whatever scent-control system Biotechnica once used to make its employees believe they weren’t working three floors above industrial runoff. It’s a smell meant to comfort, but after everything below, it just stings.

A light panel buzzes softly behind you, then stills. You don’t look back. You tell yourself it’s settling metal, nothing more.

Caleb shifts forward, one measured step at a time, scanning the corridor’s branching paths with the same posture he uses before breaching a door. You don’t need to see his face to know the tension in his jaw, it radiates from his shoulders, from the way he keeps glancing upward at the overhead catwalks like he expects movement there. Or hopes for it. At least movement would be honest.

You adjust your grip on the strap of your pack, the leather warm beneath your fingers. Human warm. Real. It grounds you more than it should. The hum isn’t back, not fully, but there’s a faint pressure behind your right ear–like a headache still thinking about forming, a thought that hasn’t committed yet. It sits there, a ghost weight, patient.

“Which way?” you murmur, voice barely above the breath you exhale with it.

Caleb doesn’t answer right away. He’s crouched near the junction box embedded in the wall, a rusted square, half-coated in peeling hazard paint, its old biometric lock dead and gaping. He brushes a gloved thumb along the corner, wiping away grime until a sliver of a decal shows through: the faded remnants of Biotechnica’s leafy emblem.

His voice is low when he finally replies. “Forward. Left branches into a coolant shaft. Right loops back toward the injector line.” He glances down the right corridor as he says it, and you follow his gaze–long, empty, and perfectly straight, disappearing into darkness too uniform to be natural. “We don’t need a loop.”

Forward feels heavier than it should. But you don’t question him. Not out loud.

You both move again. Slow. Careful. The corridor narrows by degrees, the walls drawing closer, just a handspan at a time. Enough that your peripheral vision catches the shift but your rational mind insists it hasn’t changed. Pipes overhead hum with the quiet thrum of residual power; steady, mechanical, reassuring in a way that makes your skin crawl. Systems down here shouldn’t be stable.

A ventilation fan above clinks once, then begins a soft rotation, stirring the air into a lazy spiral. You don’t feel a breeze on your face, but the tension in your shoulders shifts anyway, instinct readying itself for a temperature change that never comes.

Caleb stops again, slow and deliberate, and raises two fingers in the silent signal for hold. You freeze behind him. Not out of fear. Out of habit.

He listens. You listen too.

Nothing. No footsteps. No servos. No shifting metal. Just that impossibly even hum of electric life in walls that should be decades dead.

Then— A soft pop.

A single overhead bulb, thirty feet ahead, flickers once. Twice. Then steadies.

Caleb’s head doesn’t turn, but you see the minute shift in his spine, the way every muscle calibrates at once, pulling tight as wire. He doesn’t raise his pistol. Not yet. That would be too hopeful; something to point at, something physical enough to shoot.

You swallow once, your throat dry. “…Caleb.” You don’t know what you meant to say after his name, but the corridor steals the rest of it from your mouth.

“I saw it,” he murmurs back.

The next bulb flickers too. Not stuttering. Not random. A soft, deliberate pulse. One beat. Pause. One beat. Like a tap on a shoulder from far away.

Your pulse jumps. Not hard. Just enough that you feel it in your fingertips.

“That pattern,” you start, voice barely audible.

Caleb cuts you off, not unkindly. “Don’t go there yet. We keep it simple. We keep moving.”

You nod even though he can’t see it. You take another step. The corridor feels longer with each footfall, as if something behind you is stretching the distance between where you were and where you are. You don’t turn around. You’re not sure if that’s strength or fear.

Caleb reaches the next intersection and angles his head, scanning the shadows, tension simmering under his skin like a storm trapped behind bone.

“We’ll take the north ramp,” he says quietly. “Higher levels mean less interference. Maybe a signal dead zone.”

Maybe. Or maybe the silence is deeper up there.

You don’t argue. You don’t answer. You just follow. And as you step under the light that flickered, it hums again. Just a whisper, a tiny shift in pitch, so subtle you wouldn’t have noticed before. But now you do. Because now you’re listening.

The ramp isn’t steep, but your legs feel the incline anyway, tired in a way that goes past muscle and into the bone, like gravity itself has grown opinionated. Caleb stays a few steps ahead, checking corners with clinical precision, never quite trusting the silence even when it behaves.

As you climb, the architecture shifts. The ribbed concrete gives way to smoother walls, less industrial, more corporate—Biotechnica’s brand of sterile efficiency. The air clears, too. Less coolant, more filtered dryness, like the ghosts of recycled HVAC systems are still doing laps through ducts three stories above you.

At the top of the ramp, the hallway widens into a small lobby-like space. Three old vending machines stand against one wall, their displays long dead, their plastic warped by heat or time. A row of benches sits beneath a broken safety poster about hydration protocols; someone once scrawled something across it in black marker, but the letters have faded into ghost strokes.

Caleb sweeps the room with his pistol out of habit more than concern. When he lowers it, you can see the fatigue dragging at the corners of his eyes. Not weakness, just the kind of exhaustion that makes expressions slower, heavier, harder to read.

“This’ll do,” he says quietly.

He doesn’t mean rest. He means pause. A moment to gather whatever’s left before moving on.

You step farther into the space, boots echoing softer now on the smoother floor. The air feels contained. Not safe, but less immediate. Like the room has been sealed off from the worst of the tunnels below. A pressure-door without the door. A pocket of quiet carved out by accident or design.

Caleb checks the corners again then settles near one of the benches, back to the wall. He doesn’t sit. You don’t either. Neither of you are that trusting of stillness.

You let your hand brush one of the vending machines as you pass, not thinking about it. The casing is warm. Not warm from machinery, warm like it’s been touched recently. You pull your hand back almost instantly.

Caleb notices. Of course he does. His eyes narrow, tracking your fingers, then the machine.

“Heat bleed?” he asks.

You shake your head. “No power in this level. Or there shouldn’t be.”

A beat of silence.

Then the faintest hum rolls through the machine’s frame. A tiny vibration, almost imperceptible. You might have missed it entirely if you weren’t listening so hard.

Caleb doesn’t hear it. You can tell by the absence of reaction. You swallow. Slow.

“It’s nothing,” you say. A lie meant more for you than for him.

He studies you for a long moment. Not suspicious but evaluating. Noticing the things you don’t want to say out loud. His gaze flickers to your ribs, where the implant sits hidden behind bone and muscle and the last threads of pain from earlier.

You look away first. He lets it go. For now.

He turns his attention to the far wall, examining an old directory panel half-hanging from its mount. A faint schematic beneath cracked plastic shows the freight level’s layout: storage bays, maintenance platforms, personnel access routes, break rooms, stairwells up to administrative floors.

“North stairwell should be thirty meters ahead,” he murmurs. “If it hasn’t collapsed.”

You nod, but the words don’t land cleanly. Something else tugs at the edge of your awareness, a soft static at the base of your skull, more pressure than sound, like an idea forming in a language you don’t speak. You blink and it fades, leaving a hollow quiet behind.

Caleb moves toward the directory, tapping a bit of broken casing aside with his boot. The sound echoes too sharply in the space, rebounding off the walls like the room’s acoustics have memory of something louder.

You breathe once, steadying yourself against the sensation of the air thinning then thickening again, barely noticeable shifts that might’ve meant nothing yesterday but mean too much now.

The vending machine hum raises by a hair, a vibration so faint you could almost convince yourself you imagined it. Almost.  You step back from it. Caleb glances at you again, one brow twitching up in that half-question he doesn’t voice. You offer nothing in return. The silence stretches, taut as wire.

After a moment, he looks away first. “Let’s move,” he says. “Stairwell should take us to a quieter band.”

Quieter band. He means less interference. Less pressure from whatever old infrastructure is still breathing on this level. But something in you doubts it. Doubts that distance or elevation or thick walls will change anything now. Still, you nod and follow.

As the two of you leave the lobby, stepping back into the corridor, the vending machine’s display, dark for decades, flickers once. Not bright enough to cast light. Just bright enough to try. And then it goes still.

The corridor narrows as you follow it, walls slowly rising into higher, smoother arching curves, the design less industrial and more administrative; Biotechnica’s attempt at making underground travel feel corporate instead of claustrophobic. If you didn’t know better, you’d think you were approaching a lobby instead of climbing toward whatever’s left of the surface.

The stairwell door is unmarked except for the faint outline where a “B-3” designation once clung to the metal. Caleb presses two fingers to the seam, testing resistance, then leans his shoulder in and pushes. The hinges groan softly, not loud but long, like something waking reluctantly.

The air behind the door is different: drier, still. A stale quiet that feels less like abandonment and more like expectation.

The stairwell spirals upward beyond the reach of the emergency lights. The lower flights are illuminated in the same steady white as the freight level, but the light dies out three floors above, swallowed by black.

Caleb takes the first step cautiously, testing the grating. It holds so he motions you forward and you follow, hand brushing the cool rail. The metal vibrates under your palm, not mechanical, not rhythmic, just a faint inconsistent tremor. You pull your hand away, telling yourself it’s residue from the hauler detonations below.

Halfway up the first flight, Caleb pauses again and you stop behind him, breath soft.

“What is it?” you murmur.

He doesn’t answer right away. He’s staring at the landing above, where the next set of lights meet the shadow line. His head tilts a fraction. Listening. “There’s… something different,” he says quietly.

You hear nothing but the faint buzz of emergency strips. But he’s right, something in the air has changed. Not a sound; a weight. The atmosphere feels denser, like the stairwell is compressing everything inside it. You take a breath and the inhale feels heavy, like gravity clung to it.

Caleb shifts his grip on the rail. His knuckles don’t whiten, but the subtle tension speaks for him. You climb the next steps together. Slow and deliberate. The silence stretches around every footfall, absorbing it instead of echoing.

By the time you reach the second landing, a faint static prickle kisses the back of your neck. Not painful. Not even uncomfortable. Just present. A reminder that something’s aware of you in a way walls shouldn’t be.

Caleb stops again, one hand lifted, not a command, just a request for quiet.

The stairwell is dead still. Too still.

You exhale slowly through your nose. “Do you feel that?”

He doesn’t look at you, but he nods, barely perceptible. “Pressure shift. Could be ventilation.”

You both know it’s not. Air doesn’t think. Air doesn’t watch.

You take another step. The stair under your foot hums faintly. Not enough to hear, but enough that your bones register it. Caleb glances back at you at exactly the moment you look at him, and there’s a shared understanding there: neither of you is imagining this. Still, he doesn’t panic, doesn’t accelerate. Just keeps moving at that measured, tactical cadence, like fear is a variable that can be managed by pacing.

At the third landing, you reach the edge of the light. The shadows above press down like a lid. Caleb pulls a small penlight from his belt, clicks it once. The beam cuts upward, sharp and clean, revealing dust motes drifting in lazy spirals as if caught in a breath the stairwell hasn’t finished exhaling.

“Once we’re up two more levels,” he says, voice low, “we hit the administrative tier. Better chance of a side corridor. Less chance of a dead end.” He says it so evenly you almost believe it. Almost.

You take another step and mething faint shifts behind you; not a sound, not movement, just the subtlest difference in the air pressure, like a door opening in a room miles away. You turn your head slightly, but Caleb’s already looking past you, eyes narrowing.

“Don’t,” he murmurs. He doesn’t mean don’t turn around. He means don’t think about it.

You face forward again. The stair beneath you vibrates once: soft, a pulse, like a quiet second heartbeat beneath your boot. Caleb hears it. You see the slight twitch in his jaw but neither of you speak. And because neither of you acknowledge it, the stairwell settles back into its oppressive silence, as if satisfied.

The dark softens by degrees as you climb, shadows thinning into a dim gray haze. Another turn, another landing, and the air shifts again, not warmer, not colder, just different. Cleaner. Filtered. Like whatever’s above this level is holding its breath.

Caleb reaches the top first. He tests the door with the same quiet caution he used downstairs, but this one opens easier, hinges giving only the faintest protest, like they’ve been waiting for someone to use them again.

A thin strip of emergency lighting spills out across his boots, pale gold instead of the freight level’s fluorescent white. You catch up as he steps through, and the space beyond reveals itself in layers as your eyes adjust.

An office. Or the skeleton of one. Rows of glass-walled cubicles line the left wall, most of the panes shattered or missing. The right wall is lined with lockers, half-rusted, doors sprung open like they’d been yanked in a hurry. Paper is everywhere: forms curled with moisture, rosters pinned beneath fallen chairs, a poster peeling away from its mount in slow, tired curls. The air feels still in that heavy, padded way old places do. As if every molecule came to a stop years ago and never bothered to start again.

Caleb sweeps the perimeter, methodical, checking corners, doorways, ceiling mounts. He moves like a man resetting his internal equilibrium; slowing his breath, anchoring his balance. It’s the closest he gets to relaxing.

You drift a few steps inside, boots brushing over scattered paper. The sound is too loud in the quiet. Every footfall feels like a disturbance. There’s a desk near the back of the room, chair on its side, a cracked mug still on the surface. A little blue flower decal on the side–Biotechnica pretending at humanity. You touch the mug lightly with two fingers.

It’s cold. But not as cold as it should be.

Your fingers retreat on instinct.

Caleb notices the motion, the subtle tension in your shoulders. His gaze flicks to your hand, then to the mug, then to your ribs where the implant hums, quiet now, but present.

“You good?” he asks softly.

You nod, even though you aren’t sure. “Yeah. Just… tired.”

He studies your face for a second too long. Not prying. Not accusing. Just reading you again, recalibrating for whatever you’re not saying.

He looks away first. “We’ll sit for five,” he murmurs. “Check our bearings. Then figure the next move.”

Five minutes feels too generous, but you don’t argue. You sit on the edge of a desk that hasn’t fully collapsed yet, the metal warm through your pants. Caleb keeps to the wall, posture relaxed enough to look casual but upright enough to move at a breath’s notice.

The silence folds around you like insulation.

Somewhere in the room, a loose paper flutters without wind. Just lifts at one corner, hesitates, and lays flat again. You try not to watch it.

Caleb crouches near a fallen cabinet, sifting through a few scattered items: a dead ID card, a cracked holotab, a modular badge with a faded first-name initial. His hands move with the careful efficiency of someone used to finding answers in ruins. He picks up a small metal clipboard, turns it over, then freezes, not in fear, but in recognition.

“Lark?” you ask quietly.

“No,” he says, but he doesn’t sound convinced. He sets the clipboard down slowly, staring at the dented metal like it’s a clue he can’t place yet. “Just… familiar.”

You almost ask. But the quiet in the room is so thick it feels like it’s listening, and the question stays in your throat. You shift your weight, hands braced on the desk’s edge. The metal vibrates faintly under your palms. Not steady, not rhythmic; just a breath. A twitch. You hold still, waiting to feel it again. Nothing.

Caleb rises from his crouch. “We should check for a terminal. Maybe get a layout.”

“Right,” you say, but your voice sounds different to your ears, deeper in the quiet, like it dropped into a well.

There’s a single terminal at the far end of the room. Screen spiderwebbed with cracks, keyboard half-missing, casing warped slightly from heat or pressure. Caleb approaches it with measured steps, shoulders angled, eyes scanning.

You stay where you are.

He touches the side of the screen, brushing dust away. The monitor stays dark and you let your breath out. Then, for the smallest fraction of a second—less than a blink—the monitor flashes. Not white. Not blue. Just a thin line of green across dead glass, so fast you can’t be sure it wasn’t your eyes. So faint Caleb doesn’t see it.

You sit perfectly still, pulse stuttering once against your ribs. The monitor stays dark.

Caleb exhales, “Dead. Figures.”

You swallow, the motion thick in your throat. “Yeah.” But your gaze stays on the monitor longer than it should. Longer than you mean to allow.

Caleb doesn’t look your way. He’s already shifting to the next objective, already organizing the next five minutes in his head. It’s his rhythm. His stability.

Yours feels like it’s slipping a little, the edges softening as the silence presses in.

Then the air grows still again. And somewhere deep in the walls, or maybe only in your bones, something hums once. Soft. Inquisitive. Almost polite. Then quiet, as if waiting.

Caleb stands at the terminal a moment longer than he needs to. His fingers rest on the warped casing like he’s trying to sense something through metal, some leftover warmth or echo that would tell him why he feels so off-balance. You watch the set of his shoulders, the slight tension held between breath and restraint. He’s not rattled, he never is, but something in him is bracing.

He turns toward you. “You’re pale,” he says quietly. “More than you were downstairs.”

You offer a faint huff, not quite a laugh. “Thanks.”

He doesn’t smile. “When did it start?”

You blink, caught off-guard by the clarity of the question. “When did what start?”

Both of you know exactly what he means.

Caleb angles his head slightly, studying you in that way he always seems to: reading posture, eye dilation, the way you hold breath between ribs. “You don’t have to describe it,” he adds, soft, almost gentle. “Just tell me when.”

You look down at your hands. They’re steady, but the steadiness feels counterfeit, like the muscles are performing calm instead of experiencing it.

“A few minutes ago,” you say. “In the stairwell. Felt like the air thickened.”

He nods once. No surprise. No sharp fear. Just quiet confirmation of what he already suspected. “Pressure shift,” he murmurs. “Could be structural.”

“Could be,” you echo.

You both let the lie sit quietly between you.

Caleb moves toward one of the benches, lowering himself until he’s leaning back against the wall, one boot braced against the floor, the other angled for leverage. Not relaxed, but stopped. And that’s as close as he gets.

His voice drops lower. “You said before that it wasn’t the shard. That whatever happened… came from you.”

Your breath catches. The words from earlier echo back: “Me.”

You hadn’t planned to say it. Hadn’t meant to. But the truth had split out of you like static.

You look anywhere but at him; at the crushed paper beneath your boot, at the wall map peeling in the corner.

“I didn’t say it right,” you murmur. “It wasn’t me. Not—” You gesture vaguely at your chest, at ribs still tender from strain and recoil. “Not like that.”

“But it came from inside you,” he finishes.

A beat. Two.

“Yeah,” you whisper.

Caleb looks at you for a long time, eyes steady, unreadable but not unkind. He doesn’t accuse. Doesn’t push. Just lets the weight settle. That’s worse, somehow. Easier to fight anger than understanding.

Then he asks the question you’ve been bracing for without admitting it:

“…Is it happening now?”

Your heartbeat drags. You almost say no, almost give him the answer that feels safest for you, for him, for the fragile quiet holding the two of you upright. But the room hums faintly again, not loud, not obvious. Just a reminder. A breath against the walls.

So you tell the truth. “Not fully,” you murmur. “But something’s… there.”

Caleb’s jaw flexes once. Not fear. Not anger. Something else. Like calculation cut with a thin blade of worry.

“How much control do you have?” he asks.

You hesitate. The silence in the room sharpens. “…Enough,” you say.

He doesn’t believe that. You don’t, either. But you both accept it because it’s the only answer that doesn’t splinter the fragile stability between you.

Caleb draws in a slow breath, eyes flicking once around the room before returning to you. “We stay sharp. Stay ahead of it.”

You nod. “Yeah.”

Another pulse of quiet settles. Not heavy. Just dense. Like the air wants to thicken around unspoken things.

Caleb shifts his stance, gaze softening just slightly, the kind of softness that slips through only when he’s not trying to project anything.

“We’ll manage it,” he says. “Together.”

Your throat tightens. Not sentiment. Just the bare, clean truth that you don’t have to carry this entirely alone. You’re about to answer, something simple, something level, when a soft tick breaks the silence.

Both of you go still. Not fear. Not danger. Just attention tightening like wire.

A piece of paper on the far desk flutters. Once. Twice. Then lies flat.

No breeze. No vent. No motion in the room.

Caleb rises slowly, weight shifting forward. His hand doesn’t reach for his pistol. He doesn’t need to. Not for this. You both stand in silence, watching the stillness settle again.

After a long moment, Caleb exhales a slow, grounded sound.

“We move in two,” he says quietly. “Check the next hall. Find a corridor that isn’t… thinking.”

You nod, pulse tapping gently at your ribs.

The room stays quiet.

But the quiet feels like it’s waiting.

And it stretches, thin as glass. Caleb’s already counting down the two minutes in his head—you can see it in the set of his shoulders, the way he draws one steady breath, then another, grounding himself before the next move. You mirror him without meaning to, anchoring your weight on your heels, feeling the strain in your ribs settle into a dull, manageable ache.

The room doesn’t move. It doesn’t breathe nor shift.

But your nerves stay coiled, waiting for something you can’t name.

Caleb adjusts the strap of his pack and steps toward the doorway. His boots barely whisper across the floor, but even that tiny sound feels too loud in the stillness, as if the walls are listening instead of echoing.

You push off the desk, taking one last look across the office: the half-curled papers, the broken cubicles, the cooling mug. The space feels unchanged, untouched, and yet something about it feels altered now, like the quiet has learned you.

You follow Caleb out, slipping into the corridor behind him. But just before you cross the threshold, something pricks at the edge of your awareness. Not a sound, not a movement. Just… a pull. A gentle, curious tug behind your sternum, like the air in the room is reaching for you and you pause.

Caleb notices instantly; he turns back, one brow raised in a silent question but you shake your head. “Nothing.”

It isn’t nothing but you can’t explain it, so you take the final step into the hall. And behind you—so soft it could be imagination—the last loose sheet of paper on the desk lifts.

Not a flutter.
Not a stir.
Just rises a fraction of an inch.
Suspended. Held. Like a breath drawn in but not released.

But before Caleb can see it and before you can second-guess it, the paper settles again: flat and still, exactly as he left it.

Caleb closes the office door with a quiet, controlled push. The latch clicks into place with a sound that echoes just a little too long down the corridor.

You don’t look back.

The quiet behind the door feels tighter now–contained, folded inward, waiting for whoever opens it next.

Caleb nods once, confirming forward. “Let’s move.”

You fall in step beside him, the ache in your ribs syncing to the rhythm of your footsteps. And deep beneath that–buried quiet, almost gentle–you feel the faintest hum.

Not from the building. Not from the lights. Not from the world outside. But from inside you. A low, patient awareness.

Listening.
Learning.
Following.

You exhale, steady and slow, and you walk with it.

Into the corridor.
Into the waiting dark.
Into whatever comes next.