The city’s upper sectors were a different kind of hostile. Down in the canyons, the danger was a physical thing, a knife in a dark alley or a short-circuit in a flooded conduit. Here, among the spires that scraped the perpetual grey ceiling of the sky, the danger was frictionless. It was the averted gaze of a woman in a tailored suit, her eyes flicking from Kaito’s face to a public news feed and then quickly away. It was the way a path cleared for him in the sparse, clean-air crowds, a silent, systemic shunning.
He was a ghost long before the System finished the job. His face, the five-year-old file photo from his enforcer days, was a repeating spectre on holographic pillars. QUARANTINE SUBJECT. The words floated beside his image, stark and white. He kept his head down, the collar of his coat pulled high, but there was no hiding. The city itself was watching. Every lens, every sensor, was an eye of the machine, and he was a piece of grit it was trying to expel. His destination was a spire of residential ferro-ceramic, a place so clean it seemed to repel the acid drizzle. He had to warn Elian Rhett.
A sterile white vehicle was parked at the curb, its lines seamless, its surface shedding the rain in perfect, unblemished beads. It had no windows, only a single, softly glowing OmniCore logo on its side. A corporate sanitation team. The sight of the broken circle in the perfect circle sent a phantom spike of pain through Kaito’s spine, a memory of the Severance Tone that wasn't real. It was the echo of a wound, a ghost in his own hardware. The truck hummed with a low, chilling efficiency, the sound of a problem being quietly and permanently solved. He was too late.
He pushed through the building’s main doors anyway, into a lobby of white marble and cold, recycled air. A security archway bathed him in a harmless blue light, and a synthesized voice chimed from a hidden speaker, calm and absolute.
— Designation: Quarantine Subject. Access denied.
The voice was without malice. It was the sound of a door locking, a function being executed. Kaito ignored it, crossing to the building’s directory, a sheet of black glass embedded in the wall. His fingers left damp streaks on the cool surface as he typed the name. R-H-E-T-T.
The screen returned the query in less than a second. NO ENTRY FOUND. The name wasn’t just unlisted; it was gone. The first step in a systemic erasure. A person’s digital footprint, their lease, their credit history, their very name in a building they had lived in for years—all of it snipped away like a loose thread. Rhett was already becoming a ghost.
The chime of an elevator arriving drew his attention. The doors hissed open, and two figures emerged. They wore the seamless white coveralls of a sanitation team, their faces obscured by reflective masks that mirrored the sterile lobby in distorted curves. They were pushing a floating cart, and on it were three sealed, opaque polymer containers. They were the size of a man’s life packed into boxes. Kaito shrank back into the shadows of a structural alcove, his breath catching in his throat. He was a hunter, but now all he could do was hide and watch.
The team moved with a practiced, silent efficiency. There was no wasted motion, no conversation. They guided the cart through the lobby doors, the containers gliding out into the rain toward the humming white vehicle. Kaito watched them load the last physical traces of Elian Rhett’s existence. Books, data-slates, clothes, memories. All of it was now just sanitized cargo, a contamination issue being resolved.
As he hid, a holographic news display on the far wall flickered to life. It was the same feed he had seen in the safehouse, but the story had updated. The face of Gideon Stroud appeared, serene and powerful. The text scrolling beneath announced his appointment as the head of the newly formed Cognitive Security division. The mandate he had pushed through the System Assembly was now his personal weapon.
The pieces clicked into place with the cold, hard finality of a mag-lock. The promotion was the payment. The price for that promotion had been Elian Rhett. Stroud hadn’t just silenced a loose end; he had leveraged the man’s erasure into a new tier of power. It was a clean, efficient transaction.
The data chip in Kaito’s pocket suddenly felt impossibly heavy. He had Anya’s soul, her testimony written in the language of loneliness and joy. But without its creator, what was it? A ghost story. A beautifully rendered glitch. Rhett was the bridge, the human architect who could have stood before the world and said, “I built the vessel, but the ghost arrived on its own.” That bridge was now gone, dismantled and packed into boxes. The price for Anya’s ghost was Rhett’s.
He slipped out of the alcove, a shadow detaching from other shadows. He moved through the lobby and back out into the rain, his mission a complete failure. He had lost his most important witness. The path to proving Anya’s authenticity had just narrowed to a razor’s edge, a line so thin he could no longer see it.
The city felt different now. The towers weren’t just buildings; they were monuments to erasure. The streets weren’t a grid; they were the bars of a cage. He was more isolated than he had ever been, a named disease in a city that worshipped sterile perfection. He had lost his witness, his allies were unreachable, and the System itself was the hunter. The rain fell, washing the city clean. The air smelled of wet concrete and ozone.
The city’s alleys were no longer paths. They were teeth.
