But Dom had a gut feeling: this mess was about to become very relevant.
His eyes flicked through the logs. Half of it was garbage. Botched timestamping, corrupted tags, crossed identifiers. A smuggler’s signature—messy by design. But even in the static, even in the fog, he could feel the shape of something bigger hiding beneath the noise.
He leaned back, exhaling. His thumb brushed the rough edge of his revolver holster out of habit.
The screen stuttered.
A sharp bzzt. A ripple of static.
The image twitched, warped. Text scrambled and reassembled.
Then it appeared.
CROWE.Bright. Red. Centered.
A heartbeat.One slow pulse.
Dom blinked. “...What?”
He leaned in. “That wasn’t—”
The screen flickered again.Gone.
Replaced by Nyx’s file. Her last known location… the address of the orphanage.
Dom stared. Unblinking. His pulse throbbed in his ears.
Console logs? Clean. No trace of tampering. No security alert. No edit markers.
It was like it never happened.
But it had.
“Crowe’s dead,” he whispered. “He has to be.”
The words rang hollow.
He stood. His coat swung over one shoulder, the weight of it strangely grounding. The past was calling—but not for reconciliation. For reckoning.
If Crowe lived—or worse, if someone was pretending—this wasn’t about smuggling anymore.
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This was war.
He slammed the door open, vanishing into the corridor.
Behind him, the holoscreen flickered one last time.
For just a breath, the liquid face of ALL shimmered through the static—smiling.
“Run, little Wolfe,” it cooed in a voice only the machine could hear.“Chase the scent. Let’s see how well you fare.”
The orphanage was dead.
But something else lived inside.
Its jagged roof slouched inward like a broken ribcage, weeping slow trails of rainwater through holes where glass once kissed sunlight. Mold clung to the walls like rot in a long-forgotten mouth. Moss spiraled down crumbled staircases and across rusted doors, many now sealed shut by time or design.
This wasn’t a home.
It was a grave.
A dumping ground for Nonkin runoff—Psy discharge, gene-therapy waste, chemical rot. A womb for failed experiments.
The government had shut it down, officially. But unofficially? Someone had repurposed the site. Illegally. Quietly. Industrial waste had replaced the screams. Now, it just hummed—that same low, vibrating drone that clung to Nyx’s spine like static.
Her boots squelched as she turned the corner, past a faded mural: children holding hands beneath a painted sun. The sun had peeled away long ago, eaten by mold.
Old cribs had become racks for black drums, each stamped with sigils that pulsed faintly in the dark. Vats of unknown liquid hissed softly in the corners. Breathing. Watching.
Nyx moved like a shadow between them.
A flickering holoscreen cracked to life at the far end of the corridor, casting twisted light across the decay.
“This facility will give displaced children the shelter they deserve. Clean beds. Warm meals. And a future.”
The message warped—voice skipping, then reversing into something deep and monstrous. A child's laughter echoed, cut off mid-note by static.
Nyx froze. The light flickered across her damp face.
She muttered to herself, voice thin and bitter:“Why that monster wanted something from here, I’ll never know.”
She didn’t trust the client. The job came in coded, the credits upfront, too smooth. And now, in this place? It stank of a setup.
But relics had value. And value meant leverage.
Her fingers brushed across a dusty timepiece relic resting on the head manager’s desk—its cool casing untouched for years.
A soft creak sounded from afar.
She perked up—then stopped cold.
Thud.
A second step behind her.
Thud. Thud.
Footsteps.Slow. Heavy. Familiar.
She didn’t need to turn around.
Dom Wolfe had arrived.
Dom stepped into the ruined office, boots squelching from the filth outside.
There she was—standing over a memory he’d buried long ago.
The place where he killed Crowe.
His breath caught. Just for a moment. The walls hadn’t changed. The desk. The stains.
He raised the revolver.
“Freeze!”
His voice echoed through the tattered mansion, rippling like stone across a broken pond.
And for the first time in a long while…
Nyx froze.
Thank you for reading Chapter 19: Echoes on the Grid ?
The relic hums. The gun is loaded. And the boy is watching.
Chapter 20: Aim Straight coming soon.