They moved through the back alleys of the lower sectors, a pair of ghosts fleeing their own funeral. The goal had been another Curator node, a deeper hole to crawl into, but the city was shrinking around them. Rain fell in a steady, acidic hiss, washing the neon bleed from the walls into the gutters where it mixed with overflowing refuse. The air was thick with the smell of wet ozone and decay. Eva walked a half-step ahead, her movements economical, her gaze sweeping every shadow and doorway. Kaito followed, the data-slate containing Anya’s soul a cold, heavy weight inside his coat.
The new mandate had descended like a shroud. OmniCore security teams, now acting with the full, legal authority of the System, were a virus in the city’s arteries. They moved in squads of four, clad in matte-black armor that absorbed the ambient light, their faces hidden behind polarized visors. They were a physical manifestation of the Cognitive Security Mandate, a dragnet of flesh and ferro-ceramic pulling tight across the sector.
They saw the first new checkpoint at an intersection that had been clear an hour ago. It wasn't the usual slap-dash police barrier. This was corporate. Two armored guards stood beside a sleek, pole-mounted device Kaito had never seen before. It was a Veracity Scanner, a new and ugly piece of hardware. A multi-faceted lens at its top swept a soft blue light over the faces of the shuffling crowd, its hum a low, predatory thrum. Their planned route was gone. The price of Stroud’s new power was the loss of every map they had.
— We need another way, — Eva’s voice was a low rasp, barely audible over the rain and the distant sirens.
Kaito pulled her back into the mouth of a side alley, the rough brick scraping against his coat. From the shadows, they watched the scanner work. It was a tool of pure performance enforcement. The blue light washed over each person, and for most, it remained blue. They were allowed to pass. But then the beam touched a man in a worn synth-cloth jacket, a dockworker by the look of him. His Veracity Coil was a dull, anxious yellow.
The scanner’s light instantly shifted to a hard, accusatory crimson. The hum pitched higher. The man froze, his face a mask of panic. He hadn’t done anything. He hadn’t run. His only crime was a failing score, an insufficient performance of civic value. Two guards moved in, their motions fluid and devoid of malice. They took the man by the arms. He didn't struggle. There was no point. He was a rounding error being corrected.
As they led the man away, Kaito felt a familiar, sharp shriek behind his eyes. The Severance Tone. His Crosstalk Weave, the ghost in his own spine, was reacting to the sheer, oppressive weight of the System’s will, the raw data of a life being nullified just fifty meters away. The pain was a spike of ice, a forced empathy his hardware tried to reject. He gritted his teeth, the ache a bitter confirmation. This was what Anya had fled. Not a malfunction, but this. This quiet, orderly violence.
— Kaito. — Eva’s voice cut through the pain. She was looking at her private comms unit, a flicker of grim light illuminating her face. — That was the node we were going to. It just went dark.
The alert was a single, brutal word. COMPROMISED. Another asset lost. They had nowhere to go. They retreated, melting back into the undocumented veins of the city, the labyrinth of alleys that didn’t appear on any official grid. Their world had shrunk to the space between one overflowing dumpster and the next. The rain was relentless.
He thought of the data-slate, of Anya’s words. I have learned the shape of lonely. He was learning it too. It was the shape of a city that had turned its back on him.
Another alert chimed from Eva’s device, weaker this time, the signal struggling. She cursed under her breath.
— Another one. The Curators’ network is being dismantled. Their integrity is down to 40%. Stroud isn't just hunting us. He's purging the entire fringe.
They were being funneled. Kaito pulled up a bootleg schematic of the district on his own slate, the map flickering. The checkpoints weren't random. They were a net, and every move they made, every alley they took to avoid one, pushed them deeper into the mesh. Their freedom of movement was down to maybe 15%, a handful of city blocks that were rapidly becoming a cage. He clutched the slate in his coat, the smooth polymer cool against his skin. The entire weight of this city-wide purge, the guards, the scanners, the fear—it was all for this one, small object. It was all for her.
— We’re trapped, — he said, the words tasting like rust. The map confirmed it. Checkpoints were blooming at every exit point. They had been herded into a kill box.
Eva didn’t look at her comms. Her eyes were scanning the physical world, the real one made of rust and crumbling concrete. Her gaze followed a line of stained ferrocrete up the side of a warehouse, to where a corroded service ladder was bolted into the wall. It descended into a dark, square opening at street level, a grating set over blackness. The air that rose from it smelled of industrial chemicals and stagnant water.
— Not trapped, — she corrected, her voice flat and certain. — There’s one way left.
The canal access ladder was their only escape route.
The darkness below smelled of a century of chemical sins. The only sound was the steady drip of rain echoing in the vast, unseen space.
