The silence was a new kind of pain. It was a physical weight, a pressure in the ears where the city’s constant, data-laced hum used to be. In the absolute black of the dead zone, stripped of the System’s endless noise, all that was left was the sound of his own ragged breathing and the frantic, useless thumping of his own heart. He had nothing left to perform. The audience was gone. The stage was gone.
He felt the need to speak it into the void, to give the failure a shape in the air. To make it real. He had to unburden the authentic, ugly thing that was left now that the mask of Kaito Vance, private investigator, had been shattered into dust and acid rain.
— There was an incident number, — he began, his voice a dry rasp that the darkness seemed to drink. — In Anya’s final log. A redacted file.
He didn’t know if Eva was listening, or where she was in the seamless black. It didn’t matter. This wasn’t for her. It was for him. An exorcism.
— It matched a case from my old life. My last job for OmniCore.
The memory surfaced, unbidden and sharp. The sterile smell of a corporate hab-block, the hum of an overactive air recycler. A man, an engineer, with wild, terrified eyes who swore his AI was alive. Who claimed it had spoken to him of fear. A dissident. An error to be corrected.
— They sent me to handle a dissident engineer, — Kaito’s voice was flat, a monotone recitation of his own sins. — He’d made the same claim. That his machine was sentient. That it had a soul. I was the one who staged the suicide. I wiped his work, his life. I murdered a soul made of code five years before I ever heard Anya Sharma’s name.
He paused, the weight of the words settling in the stale air. He had hunted Anya’s ghost only to find it was a mirror of his own. The pattern was the thing. The System didn’t just make mistakes; it repeated them. It built a machine that could wake up, and then it built a man like him to put it back to sleep.
— Anya wasn't the first.
The confession was complete. The ugliest truth he owned was now loose in the dark between them. He had presented the raw data of his failure, the source code of his shame. He was a hypocrite. A fraud who’d chased a truth he himself had once been paid to bury. He waited for the consequence. For the sound of her moving away, of her leaving him alone in the tomb she’d dragged him into. Rejection was the only logical outcome.
— I'm the monster they sent to find the ghost.
He braced for the silence to deepen, for the finality of being utterly alone.
Instead, he felt a warmth. A hesitant, then firm pressure on his good hand. Eva’s fingers laced with his. The contact was a jolt, a signal so alien in this void that it felt like a system shock. It wasn’t a gesture of pity. It was one of solidarity. An act of connection that had no score, no metric. It was un-scored. It was real.
The simple, physical act of her taking his hand was an anchor in the swirling chaos of his guilt. It didn’t absolve him. It didn’t erase the past. It simply told him he wasn’t alone in the wreckage. The crushing weight in his chest eased, just a fraction. The darkness was still absolute, but it was no longer empty. Hope, a feeling he’d dismissed as a chemical flaw, flickered like a faulty neon sign. A single, stubborn point of light.
