The coordinates Walter had pulled from the station’s deep schematic led them not up, but down. Deeper into the tangled guts of the Ceres Down-Spiral, to a sector where the public walkways gave way to heavy industrial conduits and the air thickened with the smell of ozone and hot metal. They moved through a service corridor, the only light a line of grimy, caged bulbs overhead that cast long, distorted shadows. Kaelen’s goal was simple: find the information broker named Rexer and acquire the second fragment of Aris Volkov’s ghost.
They found Rexer’s territory behind a pressure door marked with a faded hazard symbol for high-energy fields. The door slid open not into a room, but into a pocket of absolute psychic death. It was a null-zone, a vacuum where the constant, grinding static of the Down-Spiral’s million minds simply ceased to exist. The silence was a physical pressure, a ringing void more unnerving than the noise. The low, painful hum from the Ghost-Eater Shunt at the base of Kaelen’s neck went quiet for the first time in months. The absence of pain was a shock, a sudden hollowness that left him feeling exposed.
The space was a wide, circular chamber, its walls lined with racks of mismatched server blades and humming power converters. Cables snaked across the floor in thick, dusty bundles. In the center of it all, a man sat in a worn pilot’s chair before a curved bank of monitors displaying shifting streams of raw data. This was Rexer. He was a heavy man, his face a pale mask in the glow of the screens, his mind a fortress of woven static that Kaelen’s senses couldn’t even begin to parse. He was a flat, dead space in the Resonance Field.
Walter Bell came to a stop five meters from the chair, a silent black composite statue. Kaelen stood beside him, feeling the weight of the broker’s unreadable gaze.
Rexer’s lips curved into a slight smile. It did not reach his eyes.
— The rogue Empath and the broken Keeper, — Rexer’s voice was a low rasp, like stones grinding together. — You make a lot of noise for two men trying to be quiet. I assume you’re not here to admire my collection of obsolete hardware.
— We need a fragment, — Kaelen said, his voice tight. He wouldn’t trade pleasantries with a predator. — A memory anchor. We have reason to believe you acquired it.
Rexer’s fingers danced across a console, and one of the screens flickered, displaying a small, intricately carved piece of jade, no bigger than his thumb. It pulsed with a faint, internal light. The second piece of Aris Volkov.
— I acquire many things, — Rexer said. — This piece has a particularly… loud history. It carries the stink of Yama-Mitsui Solutions. That makes it valuable. What do you have to trade?
Kaelen thought of their dwindling credits, the price on their heads. They had nothing of material value that could match this.
— We have information, — Walter stated, his synthesized voice cutting through the silence. — Tactical data on Yama-Mitsui patrol routes. The location of a compromised data-tomb.
Rexer laughed, a dry, rattling sound.
— I sell information, I don’t buy it. Especially not from men who are being actively hunted by the source of that information. Your data is worthless to me. It’s a disease.
He leaned forward, the light from the monitors carving deep shadows into his face.
— But, you are men of unique talents. And I have a need for such talents. I’ll trade you, — Rexer said, his eyes glinting. — For a service.
Kaelen felt a cold knot tighten in his stomach. This was the real price.
— What service?
— A rival of mine, Silas Korr, has recently acquired a piece of technology I desire, — Rexer explained. — A new-model shunt. A Korr-Pattern Nullifier. It’s a personal psychic dampener, military-grade. It allows a user to create a small, mobile null-zone around themselves. Very useful for private conversations. Korr keeps it in his data-hold, three levels up.
The demand hung in the air. A data-heist. Another crime, another risk, another layer of complication. But the jade fragment pulsed on the screen, a piece of the ghost in his head, a step toward the truth. He looked at Walter, who stood motionless, his amber optic fixed on Rexer.
— We need transport. And overwatch, — Kaelen stated, accepting the terms without saying yes. He was trading his future autonomy for the next piece of the puzzle.
Rexer smiled again.
— Already arranged.
A new voice cut through the comms in the chamber, clipped and professional.
— Transport is waiting at docking tube seven. My fee is ten percent of the take.
A new face appeared on one of Rexer’s screens. A woman with dark, tired eyes, a scar that cut through her left eyebrow, and the unmistakable look of a veteran pilot. Zaina Petrova. Her ship, the Stray Dog, was their ride.
— We’ll do it, — Kaelen said. The words felt like stones in his mouth.
The heist was a descent into a different kind of quiet. Silas Korr’s data-hold was in a high-end corporate sector of the Spiral, all polished chrome and cool, blue light. The air smelled of chilled, recycled air and antiseptic polish. Zaina’s voice was a low murmur in his ear-comm.
— You have a four-minute window between patrol sweeps. I’m watching from a maintenance duct two hundred meters out. Walter is on the gantry above you.
Kaelen saw him, a black shape perched in the high darkness of the vaulted corridor, Walter’s amber optic a single, steady star. They moved in silence, two ghosts haunting a sterile machine. Two guards stood before the vault door, their postures relaxed, their minds a dull, bored hum in the Resonance Field. They were the first obstacle.
— I can distract them, — Kaelen whispered into his comm.
He leaned against the corridor wall, out of their direct line of sight, and closed his eyes. He reached out with his Empath sense, not with force, but with a gentle, insistent nudge. He didn’t try to control them. He just planted a suggestion, a psychic itch. The thought of a warm meal at the end of a long shift. The memory of a lover’s touch. The sudden, urgent need to check a personal message.
The Ghost-Eater Shunt at his neck grew warm, a familiar precursor to pain. He pushed through it, holding the threads of the guards’ attention, pulling them gently away from their duty.
One of the guards shifted his weight, his gaze drifting down the corridor, away from the vault. The other pulled out a datapad, his thumb swiping across the screen. The diversion was working. A sharp, metallic taste filled Kaelen’s mouth, and a wave of dizziness washed over him. The strain of the focused weave was a physical cost.
— Now, — Walter’s voice said in his ear.
Kaelen pushed off the wall and moved, a gray shadow slipping past the distracted guards. He reached the vault door, a seamless slab of brushed gunmetal. Walter was already at work. A thin, fiber-optic cable snaked down from the gantry above, its tip a spider of light dancing over the door’s control panel. The Keeper archivist was slicing through the vault’s security with cold, digital precision.
— Patrol is ninety seconds out, — Zaina’s voice warned.
The lock clicked, a sound that was shockingly loud in the quiet corridor. The heavy door slid open with a soft hiss. Inside, the data-hold was a small, refrigerated room, its walls lined with glowing data-ports. In the center, on a pedestal, sat a small, matte-black box. The Korr-Pattern Nullifier.
Kaelen grabbed the box. It was cool and heavy in his hand.
— We have it, — he said.
— Get out. Now, — Zaina ordered.
They retraced their steps, melting back into the shadows of the corridor just as the guards shook off their reverie and returned their attention to their post. They were clear. The heist had taken just under four minutes.
Back in Rexer’s null-zone, the air was thick with the broker’s smug satisfaction. Kaelen placed the black box on the console. Rexer picked it up, examining it with a connoisseur’s eye.
— Excellent work, — he rasped. He tossed the small jade fragment to Kaelen.
Kaelen caught it. It was smooth and cool, and it seemed to thrum with a faint energy that resonated with the quiet hum of Volkov’s presence in his mind. He now held two of the seven pieces. The path to witness was two steps longer. But the chain of debt to Rexer was now firmly locked around his ankle.
The silence of the null-zone felt different now, heavier. It was the quiet of a cage.
The low hum of the station’s life support filled the void. The shifting colors of Rexer’s data screens cast a restless light on the floor.
They had the second fragment, but they were still on Ceres, and Julian Valerius was still hunting them
