The deck plates screamed. It was a high, metallic keen that vibrated up through the soles of his boots and into his teeth, the sound of a ship’s frame being torn apart by forces it was never meant to endure. Emergency lights painted the corridor in strobing pulses of crimson, turning the gray walls into a slaughterhouse canvas. The engineered silence of the holding cell was a forgotten memory, replaced by the percussive thunder of impacts and the shriek of escaping atmosphere somewhere deep in the corvette’s guts.
Two Yama-Mitsui guards, their faces invisible behind the flat black of their tactical helmets, hauled Kaelen down the passage. Their movements, once a display of synchronized, corporate precision, were now hurried and clumsy. They were reacting, not controlling. One of them shouted something into his helmet comms, the words lost in a burst of static and the groan of buckling metal. An explosion, closer this time, threw them against the opposite wall.
For a single, suspended moment, gravity felt optional. Kaelen hit the bulkhead hard, the impact driving the air from his lungs. The guards sprawled, their pulse carbines clattering against the floor. In the flickering red chaos, Kaelen saw it. A maintenance cart, overturned by the blast, had spilled its contents. Amidst the debris of wiring, ration packs, and discarded sanitation tools was a faint, crystalline glint. The original Mnemonic Spool. The cracked, worthless piece of junk from the Ceres stall, the one Julian had overlooked in his surgical arrogance.
He had a choice. A clean path to an emergency airlock, or a dive back into the chaos for a shard of a dead man’s memory. The price was time, maybe his life. He didn’t think. He lunged.
His fingers closed around the spool’s sharp, irregular edges just as a guard recovered, raising his weapon. Kaelen scrambled away, ducking into the black maw of an open cargo container as a volley of pulse rounds stitched incandescent holes in the metal where he had been. The heavy container door slid shut, plunging him into absolute darkness and the muffled, distant thunder of a battle he was no longer part of. He was alone.
He slid down the corrugated wall of the container, landing on a floor gritty with dust and some kind of industrial powder. The darkness was total, the air thick with the smell of cold metal and lubricant. The sounds of the attack were a dull, rhythmic booming, the heartbeat of someone else’s war. He was safe, for now. Hidden. Erased from the immediate fight.
He opened his hand. He couldn’t see the Mnemonic Spool, but he could feel it. It was a knot of sharp edges and cold, dead crystal. It was all that was left. He thought of the glittering dust on the floor of the holding cell, the crushed silver of the Ganymede pocket watch. Julian had been so thorough, so contemptuous in his destruction. A record is not a soul. The Eraser had quoted the Keeper creed as he’d crushed the last hope under his boot.
And he had been right. The records were gone. The physical anchors were destroyed. The ghost of Aris Volkov, the quiet hum that had become the background radiation of his life, was gone. The silence in his head was a wound. The Ghost-Eater Shunt on his neck was a useless weight of cold metal, its phantom ache finally gone, leaving only a profound and terrifying emptiness. He had failed. He had carried the fragments across the system only to deliver them to their executioner.
Physical things break. Data-wafers shatter. Spools turn to dust. That was the lesson. Erasure was the fundamental force of the universe, the default state. Order was just a temporary dam holding back an ocean of oblivion. He had tried to build a monument to a dead man out of breakable things, and Julian had simply kicked it over. The despair was a physical weight, pressing him down in the cold, dark container.
A living mind is harder to kill.
The thought did not arrive like his own. It was a clean, cold piece of logic, a line of code executing in the ruins of his despair. Julian had erased Volkov, but the mind had fought back. It had shattered, not vanished. It had anchored itself to the universe, clinging to objects with the desperate strength of a memory that refused to be forgotten. A record could be deleted. A witness had to be killed.
He had been a tool of erasure. His training in the Yama-Mitsui Concordance was all about severance, surgically cutting a mind from the whole to leave a clean, sterile void. He was an expert in the art of making things gone. The thought was a bitter poison.
He ran a hand over the back of his neck, his fingers tracing the scar tissue around the cold, dead plate of the Ghost-Eater Shunt. They taught him how to cut. A clean slice. A perfect erasure. What if he did the opposite?
The idea was an electric shock in the darkness. Not to sever, but to graft. Not to erase, but to integrate. The price of that choice was his own identity. To become a vault, he would have to hollow himself out, make room for the ghost to live inside him. He would have to take the last fragment of Aris Volkov and weave it into his own consciousness, not as a passenger, but as a permanent part of his own code. He would become the living anchor.
The despair did not vanish. It was burned away by a cold, clean fire. The hollowness in his skull was no longer a void; it was an empty space waiting to be filled. The mission had not failed. It had changed. The objective was no longer to carry the record.
I will become the record.
The statement was a silent vow in the darkness, a new core directive written in the programming of his soul. The axis of his world flipped. He was no longer running from erasure. He was forging himself into a weapon against it.
The heavy door of the container hissed and slid open, flooding the space with the dim, pulsing red of the corridor’s emergency lights. Zaina Petrova stood silhouetted against the chaos, a pulse carbine held at a low ready. Her face was smudged with grime, a fresh cut bleeding over her scarred eyebrow.
— We have to move, — she said, her voice tight. — Now.
Kaelen stood up, the single, cracked Mnemonic Spool clutched in his fist. The fight wasn’t over. It had just begun.
The air smelled of ozone and victory. The distant stars held their position, cold and silent.
He had to find the last piece of the ghost
