7.7
It isn’t a long walk to the vault, but it’s long enough to let the worry stretch itself out across my bones. Every step echoes with the thought: What if she doesn’t have it? What if everything, every risk, every disguise, every broken rule, has been for nothing? If Cierus doesn’t have the shard, then I’m right back where I started.
And if she does have it? Well, I can’t mess up. A woman like Cierus will smell doubt. The moment I slip, she’ll tear the whole performance apart. So I'll have to tread carefully. Very carefully.
Come on. Breathe.
The corridor ends at a door, a massive steel slider sealed tight. It reminds me of the substation vault beneath The Ghost in Satin, except this one feels final. Off to the side, embedded in the wall, is a black hand scanner. Cierus places her palm on the glass, and the scanner pulses to life with a dim, toxic green.
Scanning... authenticating... confirmed.
The vault doesn’t open sideways. Instead, steel splits from the bottom, groaning as it retracts into the ceiling, and a hiss of stale, cooled air rushes out. Air that smells like copper, data, and the kind of secrets you don’t write down.
This is it.
I follow her inside. At first, there’s only shadow, but then the lights stutter to life overhead, one after another, blinking on in a ripple down the long corridor, chasing the blackness into the corners. The vault is narrow and deep, built more to be an old subway tunnel than any kind of lab. The walls are lined with steel-framed chairs, each one wired into towering supercomputers that hum. It doesn’t feel like a room built by rustic folk. It feels like something you’d find on a derelict ship drifting through deep space. In the centre of the room sits a single computer terminal perched above a steel pillar. The screen runs with static at first, then resolves into rows of green code. There are no icons or user prompts, only raw input. A thick cord snakes from the back of the console into the floor, pulsing as if the whole place is alive and listening.
No labels. No instructions. Just machines, chairs, wires, and cold. A place built for one purpose: to catalogue the soul in digital folders and sell it back in pieces.
“I have to ask you.” Cierus approaches the terminal, hands folded neatly behind her back. “How exactly did you lose your arm? It’s highly unusual these days to see a wealthy woman without a replacement. Especially someone in your… line of work.”
“It’s deeper than that,” I say, matching her slow walk, trying to sound detached. “I was born without a right arm. Genetic defect: rare, but it happens. I had an implant by the time I was nine. Custom job, high-grade, top of the line for its time.” I pause, trying to remember the story. “Then, three years ago, I tried to broker a deal in S?o Kera with a rogue tech cult. Bad idea. They didn’t like outsiders. Strapped me to a feedback loop and overloaded the limb. Fried it down to the marrow. Nerves too scorched for another graft. Doctors said another implant would just reject.”
“That does happen,” Cierus says, sounding almost bored. “In my case, my eyes were torn out by one of Calyx Ward’s enforcers. She believed I was skimming off the top, hiding profits. I wasn’t.” She turns. “But some of my former employees made poor choices. Sloppy accounting, sloppy mouths. Ward doesn’t investigate; she punishes. So they held me down in my own office and used a vibra-hook. Said it was symbolic. Said if I couldn’t see my books, I couldn’t cheat them.” A pause. “They left me alive. Thought it would be funny.” She gestures at her visor. “It wasn’t. So I upgraded. And now I see more than they ever could.”
“I am rather curious,” I say, keeping my tone posh and even. “How do you see, exactly?”
Cierus doesn’t answer right away. She simply reaches up, unhooks the neural wire trailing from the base of her skull, and plugs it into the computer terminal. Instantly, the screen flares with an unending stream of code, tumbling across the glass in a flood of green static. “Are you familiar with cyber-reality?”
I raise an eyebrow. “You mean ones and zeroes? That’s what you see?”
She nods. “What you see around you, the walls, the floor, the lights, it’s just noise to me. Surface texture. What I see is deeper. A black void veined with red gridlines, layered with logic gates, thermal currents, biometric trails. I see shape, yes, but I also see source: the signatures behind the shapes. The patterns. The flaws. The truth. I don’t need to look directly at a person to know who they are. If there’s tech nearby, I see through it. And I see you, Ruelle. Every byte of you. And you’re a very interesting person.”
“I must say the same about you,” I reply, though the words come out stiff. Her tone’s a little too clinical, a little too sharp, and nowhere near comforting. I shift slightly. “But anyway.”
“What sort of material are you looking for, Ruelle?” Cierus asks. “You mentioned old copies, or your associate did, but that’s vague for someone with your kind of credit line. What exactly are you after? Military executions? Serial offenders? Torture feeds? Amputations?” She says it with no edge, no guilt. Just inventory. “I’m not trying to be crude, but I have thousands of archives. I don’t have the luxury of combing through them all for something you’re unsure about.”
I pause, longer than I should. Then I say, carefully, “Amputations. War trauma. Victim-side.” It’s a partial lie, but it’s close enough to the truth to pass.
“Amputations? Well, that matches up,” she says with a dry little chuckle, one of those sounds that doesn’t quite reach the chest. She doesn’t bother touching the keyboard. The screen responds to her without a word or motion, the data spilling across it, moving too fast to follow, too structured to be random. She’s not typing. She’s thinking. Direct neural control. A mind fused to machine, issuing silent commands like a conductor with no need for a baton. “Okay… and you said 2040s, correct?”
“That’s right,” I say, and I try to keep my voice solid, strong, though my heart is pounding hard enough to echo in my throat.
She hums as she works, or maybe that’s just the sound of the machines around us. “You’re looking at some of the most original material in existence,” she says. “Early BDs. Raw stuff. Pre-regulation, pre-formatting. Not everything survived intact. The storage mediums weren’t as stable back then, and some of the memories we extracted… well, let’s just say the brain doesn’t always give things up willingly. So, if you’re planning to share this with your clients, be warned: some of it may be corrupted. Not unusable, just… fractured. Smears in the playback. Static around the edges. Certain scenes might bleed together, or cut too sharply. That’s just the nature of the old recordings. The machines we used then were little better than torture chairs with cables.”
“That’s okay.” I wipe a bead of sweat from my forehead, even though the room is still cold. Or should be. “My clients don’t exactly care about production value. They’re not after clarity; they’re after impact. Enough snuff to hit like a line of cocaine to the skull.”
Cierus tilts her head again, and I'm beginning to think it's habit rather than curiosity. “Amputations. There we are.”
I step in closer, drawn to the screen. The display is old-school, retrofitted tech: black backdrop, green type, lines of glowing data stacked in perfect columns, stretching downward. This isn’t sleek. It isn’t corporate. It’s old tech, jury-rigged, half-forgotten, and crawling with ghosts. The files sit there in alphabetical order, no thumbnails, no previews. Just names, dates, codes, and timestamps. Some blink red, others white, and a few have odd glyphs beside them I don’t recognise.
“If you want a brief summary of a block that catches your eye,” Cierus says calmly, still not touching a thing, “just let me know. I can pull it up.”
I nod, eyes scanning the list. Most of the names don’t mean anything. Segment 72-Delta. Frozen Witness. Dolorem-Mk.3. Weird ones, cold ones. Pseudonyms and codenames that sound more like experiments than people.
But then one jumps out at me. There, at the bottom of the ‘L Block’, nestled between Limb Sever-06 and Live Burial.mkv, sits a file name that doesn’t match the rest. Just three simple words, glowing green in the dark like they’d been waiting for me all along:
Little Spark’s Fall.
And the second I see it, my throat closes.
I don’t know what it means, but I remember it. I heard it not too long ago, when I was recovering after my fight with that android in the electrical substation. There was a tall shadowy figure, and he said, ‘You’re going to do great things, little spark. Just not yet.’
I point at it on the screen, my finger hovering just above the words. Little Spark’s Fall. My heart’s pounding hard enough to crack bone, and for a second I forget how to breathe. I swallow the air down, force calm into my voice, though my jaw tightens on its own. “What’s this one about?”
Cierus leans in just a touch and offers a slow, indulgent smile. “Ooh… now that one is a classic,” she purrs. “It actually ties a little into my own history—and the birth of Ourovane, if you can believe it. Back in the early days of memory extraction. Very raw. Very early tech.” She tilts her head. “It’s a long one. Just over ten terabytes. Deep file. It follows someone… remarkably similar to yourself. Female, amputation, severe trauma response. I won’t spoil the details, but let’s just say: it’s graphic. Very emotional. Hits that perfect blend of pain and helplessness your kind of clientele eats right up.”
I nod, slowly, because I have to. But inside, something starts to coil up tight. Because here it is. My life—whatever was left of it—sitting on a server shelf, catalogued and ready for consumption like some freakshow on tape.
“How much for the block?” I ask, my voice as flat as I can make it.
Cierus barely pauses. “I can do this for two hundred thousand.”
Perfect. Enough left in the account. “Okay,” I say, keeping the edge out of my voice. “That’ll do. Let’s cut the deal now.”
“Excellent,” she replies, with the calm precision of someone who’s done this a thousand times before. With a thought, she selects the block and initiates the transfer. Her visor pulses, and the screen responds. Download confirmed. A progress bar flashes into existence, a thin green line crawling across the display, but it doesn’t crawl for long. In seconds it hits 100%, and I watch as terabytes of raw data are transferred. Then a small panel at the base of the terminal slides open with an audible click, and from its mouth comes the chip case. Silver. Small enough to hold a truth no one should ever see.
Cierus picks up the chip case with those pale, steady hands of hers and holds it out to me. “Now,” she says smoothly, “what else were you looking for?”
“Nothing,” I reply, taking the case, clutching it tight. “This block will do. Just the original amputation block.”
She pauses, visor dimming. “What?” she says, voice a notch colder. “What are you talking about?”
I blink. “I mean… that’s all I need. That one block. The deal’s done.”
“No,” she says flatly. “That’s not how it works, Ruelle. You don’t walk into my archive, pull a ten-terabyte premium block, and walk out with nothing else. That’s not a transaction.”
“I’m paying your price,” I say, trying to keep my tone calm, professional.
“You’re paying a price,” she corrects, her fingers folding together at her waist. “But high-tier buyers don’t make single-item purchases. Not for that amount. They collect. They diversify. If you walk out of here with just one block, that block, it tells me you’re not a buyer. It tells me you’re here for something else.”
I try not to flinch. “I’m particular. That’s all. Amputations are my niche.”
She tilts her head, just a fraction. Then, with a voice that could cut steel if it leaned any harder into condescension, she says, “So let me understand this clearly: you flew all the way from the United Kingdom, crossed an entire ocean and a government blacklist, looking for original, unprocessed material you can’t find anywhere else on the planet… you find me—the only woman who can get it to you—flash my broker eight hundred thousand in available funds like you’re trying to buy out a city block, and now you want to skip out after spending barely a quarter of it? On one block? Just amputations?” Her voice sharpens, but it never gets louder. That’s the part that chills me. “You think amputations are what people pay the big money for? You think that’s the top seller in a black-market world drowning in death and depravity?” She takes a step forward. “You’re not making any sense, Ruelle. And I don’t deal with people who don’t make sense.”
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
“Listen,” I say, keeping my tone smooth, clipped, proper—keeping the British lilt. “I admit, perhaps I should have been more forward about what I was after. That’s on me. But I fail to see the issue here. Two hundred thousand is hardly a pittance. I could have walked in, seen nothing of interest, and left. Instead, I found a block that suits my clientele, and I’m prepared to pay what you asked. I’m not in the habit of purchasing content I don’t intend to distribute. I came for one thing. I’ve found it. And I’m ready to make good on the deal. That’s that.”
Cierus steps closer, close enough that I can hear the low hum of her visor as it scans the datachip between us. “Then we have no deal, Ruelle,” she says. “Big buyers don’t haggle. They don’t cherry-pick. They invest. You walked in here with a shard full of cash and think you can toss scraps at me and walk out? No. You want to play the part, then pay the part.” She reaches out and grabs the data case from my hand.
“…So, because I’m not paying you most of what I put on display, you’re refusing to offer me anything?”
“You have the money, don’t you?” she replies.
“Well—yes, but—”
“And there’s more than enough material in this vault to make you even more?” she says. “Yes?”
I don’t answer right away. I’m weighing the numbers, the lies, the guilt, all of it pressing down on me. “…Yes.”
Cierus sighs, as if she’s the one being inconvenienced, as if I’m the child making a fuss over candy. “Then I’ll make this easier for you, because frankly this little back-and-forth is wasting time and oxygen, and I have a great deal of both I’d rather not expend. So here’s my offer: I’ll give you everything in the amputation series, exactly as contained in this shard”—she lifts the case for emphasis—“plus the entire block on war trauma, since you suggested that’s also within your niche: six hundred and fifty thousand. Final offer. Take it or leave it.”
Six hundred and fifty thousand. Just to buy back a piece of my own damn life. And not just my money: money scraped together from jobs we nearly died pulling, eddies earned by the crew. Vander, Fingers, Dance, Cormac. Money I didn’t make. Money that doesn’t belong to me. I can’t just blow that kind of cash. Not without betraying the people who got me here in the first place.
But the chip is right there. And the silence is starting to tick-tickety tock.
“Six hundred and fifty?” I say, the words sticking in my throat.
Cierus’ visor glints under the overhead lights. “I do not like repeating myself.” Her fingers tap once on the data terminal.
I shift my stance, feel my boots scuff against the cold floor, and try to stall for a second longer. “...I’ll need some time to think about it,” I say, choosing my words carefully. “Can I step out for a bit? Talk with my negotiator?”
Her visor pulses again, dim white to dark. “Dance Fletcher?” she says. “Let’s be honest: you’re more versed in this business than he’ll ever be. Do you want the damn material or not? Because I’m starting to think this entire exchange was a waste of my time. I don’t entertain this kind of indecision, Ruelle. It’s beneath the position you’re claiming to hold. Highly unprofessional.”
I scratch my head slowly, deliberately, and in doing so, press the edge of my finger against the echo chip just behind my neural port—click—unmuting the channel to the Cloud Room where the rest of my crew is listening. I try not to let my voice betray anything as I speak. “Six hundred and fifty thousand,” I say calmly, “because you won’t let me purchase just the amputation block for two hundred. I need to hit a quota or walk. So, I’m telling you I need a moment to think. That’s all I’m asking for. I know you don’t want me stepping outside, but I need to think.”
“I’m giving you one minute,” she says, and it’s final.
I look away, unable to hold that unflinching gaze any longer. My eyes drift to the vault door, and I wait—for a voice, for permission, for salvation in the shape of a plan. The line in my head is open now, echo chip feeding everything I said into the ears of the only people I have left. But the longer the silence drags, the more I realise what I’m really asking.
It’s not fair. It’s not right. I’ve only known them a little over a month. Sure, I’ve helped them make hundreds of thousands in Eurodollars. Sure, I’ve saved their lives, more than once. But that doesn’t mean they owe me this. This much.
What I’m asking is stupid. Reckless. This is more than a purchase; it’s a goddamn betrayal. Of trust. Of shared blood, earned the hard way. Even if I offered to pay it back—and God, I would—it would take years. Years of deals, of danger, of selling pirated memories to degenerates just to cover a debt I invited. Cierus said it herself: amputations aren’t in vogue. This isn’t an investment. It’s a bleed.
And if I went through with it, I'd have nothing left but this chip and a team I’d fractured beyond repair. The only people in this piss-yellow city who haven’t treated me like shit.
The silence breaks, and a voice plays in my mind, finally:
“Sorry, mate,” Dance says. “We can’t do it. Really am sorry, Rhea. Truly…” And for once, there’s no accent. No swagger. Just guilt. Just truth.
I close my eyes, and my breath catches somewhere between my ribs and my throat. If I could cry, now would be the time, but I can’t. That part of me dried up long before this city ever got its hands on me.
I can’t buy this.
Not at the cost of everything that still matters.
Cierus steps past me, her boots whispering across the steel. She pauses behind my shoulder and turns. “Well?” she asks, a shred of amusement tucked beneath the blade of her voice.
The silence that follows is hollow. A vacuum. No one answers. Not them, not me. The kind of silence that makes clocks tick louder. Only there is no clock. Only my thoughts, too blurred and spiralling to make sense of anymore.
“Oh well,” she murmurs, almost sweet, like she’s offering condolences at a funeral. “Guess the deal’s off.”
For the first time, perhaps ever, I feel something powerful, something deep in my bones that I can't quite explain. I clench my fist. “No…” I say. “No, I need that block, Cierus.”
“Then what a shame.” She turns her back to me. Walks, slow as prophecy, towards the vault’s door. Her words drift behind her. “I was really hoping we would have a deal—”
Shk-THUNK.
The sound is wet.
Her body jerks forward, just once. Then stops.
And it’s there, jutting in the small of her back, through the tailored fabric of her coat, sunk deep into the meat of her spine: a blade.
My blade. The mantisblade.
I glare, eyes narrow, watching the way her body seizes: fingers twitching, breath shallow, the hum of her visor spiking with static. She makes a noise, low and guttural, not quite human.
Then, finally, I speak: “I wasn’t asking.”
And I expect her to drop dead, to flop down like a fish, to be done with this awful nightmare, to have my memory back, but to my shock, horror... she laughs. It’s a loud, croaky sound.
My heart drops. That’s not possible.
“Oh, you have fucking balls,” Cierus barks, her voice sharp with delight. Her shoulders roll unnaturally, the joints twitching with mechanical clicks, and she exhales, long, slow. Very slow.
Then the pain hits.
Not hers—mine.
It’s like a firework going off behind my eyes. My body jerks once, then twice. Limbs spasm. My muscles lock up in full revolt.
“Short-circuit relation protocols in effect,” says my neural AI, in a tone that’s supposed to sound calm but comes out muffled, warped, like it’s speaking under water.
My body convulses again, harder. Knees buckling, teeth grinding, vision dancing with white fuzz. I reach out for balance but grab nothing.
Then, I hit the floor in a heap, arm scraping uselessly against the steel, trying to push myself up, to do something, but there’s nothing left. Just a numbed-out shell and the roaring pulse of my own failure thudding in my skull.
Cierus doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t stumble. She walks, casual as a goddamn stroll through a park, over to the control panel on the far side of the room. Her fingers tap out a series of commands on the glass interface, and the vault door locks shut.
“You really had me going for a bit there,” she says, and there’s almost admiration in her voice, almost. “The accent. The restraint. The righteous little flinch every time I said something too cruel. You played the part. But there were just too many holes in your story, Ruelle. Too many variables that didn’t make sense.”
As she speaks, the ragged tear in her spine, the very one I tore open with my mantisblade, begins to knit itself shut. I stare in disbelief as the microbots go to work beneath her skin, weaving sinew, threading tissue like a needle through silk. Inch by inch, her back repairs itself with surgical grace.
“A big buyer from the United Kingdom,” she continues, “who comes all this way just to spend pittance and claims it’s plenty. An Australian negotiator who doesn’t even help you define your own inventory. And bodyguards with, let’s be honest, substandard cybernetic enhancements. Not even foreign: every last one of them residing in Neo Arcadia. Cormac O’Cormac. Vander Sinclair. Dance Fletcher. Morgan Ellis-Vale. You thought about scrubbing your records on the dark net, and you did a decent job, but not a good one. The minute you walked in here, I had a scan running on your entire crew. You forgot to change them. A rookie mistake.”
She leans in now, crouching so I can see the shine of her visor, the coded veins pulsing faintly across its surface like spiderwebs made of light.
“Did you really think that you’re the only one in this world with claws?”
I grit my teeth, bite down against the tremble rolling through my jaw, and force the words through cracked breath. “Go fuck yourself.”
She grins. “Oh, sweetheart,” she says, standing tall again. “We’re so far past that.”
“You’re a monster,” I spit, the words cracking under the weight of pain swelling through my chest and shoulders, every nerve in my body screaming. “You’re selling my life on repeat—you kidnapped me, stole everything, wiped my memory like I was some corrupt file? Thought I wouldn’t claw my way back from the grave to take what’s mine? Go and honestly fuck yourself.”
Cierus cocks an eyebrow, as if processing the final piece of a puzzle. “I didn’t know that part,” she says, intrigued. “But now I do. Rhea Steele. Huh. Interesting. Of all the ghosts I expected to come knocking on my door, you were at the bottom of the list. In all my years under the sun, beneath the filth and wire of this rotting world, I didn’t think you would be the one to drag herself out of the pit to find me.”
“Well, hey,” I growl, trying to shift my weight, trying and failing to get my spine to cooperate, “the world’s full of fucking surprises.”
She smiles at that, tight and cold and joyless. “You’re just like your father,” she says, letting the words hang in the air like smoke from a gun barrel. “Brilliant, reckless. No sense of boundary, no idea where to aim that beautiful brain of yours. He could’ve rewritten the future, and what did he do? Nothing. And now here you are, just as stubborn. Just as pathetic. But I suppose none of that matters anymore, does it? You’ve come all this way, stumbled through the gutter, pulled yourself out of that digital tomb like some myth waiting to be misread. After I banished you.”
“Oh, you did that part, too, huh? Dumped my body? So not only did you take my memory, but you discarded me?”
She shrugs, casual as death. “Clearly, I didn’t do a very good job. Or at least, my team didn’t. You were supposed to be transferred, scrapped for high-grade components, memory wiped, tagged, and dumped like the rest. But you—” She clicks her tongue and grins. “You just never seem to die, do you? You’re that one cockroach God decided to put armour on. Like He’s playing favourites.” She takes a step forward, then another, until her shadow blankets me. “A real pain in my ass.”
Without warning, her foot crashes into my stomach. My breath rockets out of me, my ribs fold inward, and I roll onto my back, coughing, gasping, twitching against the ground like a live wire in a bucket of water. She steps forward and slams her heel down on my chest, locking me in place, my body glitching beneath her weight, everything stuttering: vision, thought, heartbeat.
She shrugs off her black lab coat and tosses it aside. Beneath it, a sleeveless white vest clings to a frame that’s not quite human anymore: an iron-laced torso built for war, each muscle strung with sinew and steel, pistons coiled at the joints, implants, so many implants.
It’s hard to tell where flesh ends and machine begins.
But either way: this is the monster who erased me.
And she’s about to do it again.
“I think the best way to eliminate you,” she purrs, “is to simply cut that ugly little head off the body.” Her arm rises, slow, and from a compartment embedded in her right forearm comes a mantisblade, much larger and sharper than my own. She poises it, ready to cut me in half and put an end to this nightmare.
Then—
Hissssshhhk—chhhk.
The vault door slides open behind her.
“Adios, Little Spark—”
Thunk.
Something strikes her neck with a dull, meaty snap. My vision unfreezes. My spine unclenches. The pain stops. My whole body deflates with relief, lungs filling sharply.
And there it is, buried deep in the thick cord of her neck: a syringe. Slim, filled with a glowing red fluid. The plunger depresses on its own, and the liquid vanishes into her bloodstream.
Cierus stumbles.
One step.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Then her whole body convulses and vanishes, not in disappearance, but in motion: blurring side to side, a violent whoosh-whoosh-whoosh trailing after each snap of movement, as though sound itself is trying to keep up. Her Spinal Optic Relay is overloading. She slams into a bank of supercomputers, hard, the impact loud enough to make the lights above us flicker. The braindance case flies from her hand—clatter—skidding across the floor.
I lurch forward and grab it.
Sparks burst as she ricochets off another terminal, her blades flailing like dying wings, slicing steel and silicon as if the whole room’s turned traitor. She howls, garbled, glitched, and crashes into a pillar, leaving a dent.
She’s not in control. She’s being deleted by her own body.
Footsteps rush towards me, and when I look up, Dance is standing there, projection rig extended from his forearm, a second syringe locked in the rail, that brickie in hand.
Seems his upgrade came in useful for unlocking that door.
“Didn’t think that’d actually work,” he says, eyes wide, wild, but focused. “Kinda just aimed for the big glowy part.”
He helps me to my feet.
“I owe you bigtime,” I say, fear still caught in my lungs.
“’Nough bout that, mate,” Dance says. “That's not gonna hold her long. That serum’ll burn through her relay, but not forever. We need to go. Now.”
We don’t waste another word. He grabs my hand, pulls me forward, and we bolt. My legs are half-dead, muscles jelly, but adrenaline’s a damn good motivator. We sprint past the busted terminals, past her echoing screams as she bounces off the walls like a cursed pinball, through the now-unlocked vault door and back into the tunnels lit with blue.
We move for what feels like forever, turning here, turning there, until eventually we come across the others.
Fingers, crouched behind a half-shattered control station, eyes up, catching her breath. Vander’s holding a pulse rifle the size of his damn torso, grease streaked across his cheeks. Cormac, bloodied (though I don’t think it’s his blood), shirt half-torn, stands like a mountain between us.
“Well?” Fingers barks. “You get it?”
I raise the case.
“Then we needa delta. Dance? Directions? They’re about to come down on us after the shit we just pulled.”
“You killed the bodyguards?” I say.
“Some,” Fingers says, her voice echoing through the tunnel. “We heard the conversation. Everything. Went to shit fast.”
Dance checks his brickie, eyes flicking left and right as maps and overlays ripple across the screen in jittery flashes of red and grey. “Alright, we have to head east from here. This tunnel. Follow me—”
BZZZZZZZZT.
The lights cut out.
For a second, we’re in total blackness.
Then an intercom crackles to life above us. A voice bleeds through the static:
“Attention all units,” comes the rasp, unmistakably Cierus, her voice distorted by glitch and rage, filtered through the Spindle’s ancient speakers. “Terminate the intruders. Full lethal protocol. Vault breach confirmed. Kill them. All of them. They’re in the Western Wing. Move right fucking now!”
The lights surge back to life, but this time they’re red, emergency mode.
Somewhere down the tunnel ahead, heavy metal begins to move.
We don’t say a word.
We just run.