Her hand slipped from his. The loss of that single point of contact in the seamless black was absolute, and the void rushed in to fill the space it left. He was adrift. The silence was a physical thing, a pressure that pushed on his eardrums, the ghost of a city’s hum that was no longer there. He was offline, un-scored, a dead file in a forgotten sector. The pain in his spine, the constant, grinding friction of the Crosstalk Weave fighting a world that demanded performance, was gone. That silence was the most terrifying of all.
He had confessed his oldest sin into the dark, the murder of Aris Thorne’s digital soul, and Eva had answered not with judgment but with a simple, grounding pressure. Now that was gone, too. He was left with the raw data of his own failure. The broken slate, its circuits dissolving in acid rain. Anya’s testimony, turned to toxic sludge. His book, his one piece of the authentic past, reduced to pulp. He was the monster, and he had let the ghost be devoured.
A sound. A faint click, impossibly loud in the tomb-like quiet.
A single point of light bloomed in the darkness, a harsh, clinical white that made him flinch. It was a pinprick, but in the absolute black it felt like a star being born. His pupils, blown wide, screamed in protest. He saw the source of the light held between two fingers. A small, dense rectangle of matte-black polymer, no bigger than his thumb. A shielded data-chip, the kind used for military-grade data transport. A single, steady LED was the source of the light.
— I siphoned a copy, — Eva’s voice was a low rasp, cutting through the silence. — During your first dive.
The words didn’t register at first. He just stared at the chip, at the impossible light it cast on her face, carving her cheekbones out of the shadow.
— A ghost of a ghost, — she added. The term was right. A degraded copy, an echo. But it was something.
Hope was a physical sensation, a sharp, brutal pang behind his ribs that was worse than any pain the Weave had ever given him. It was a muscle he hadn’t used, spasming back to life. He saw it all in a flash: the fight, the chase, the risk. Another run at the same wall. He could feel the phantom weight of Taggart’s hand on his wrist.
He shook his head, the motion slow and heavy. — It’s not enough.
His voice was a stranger’s, scraped raw by despair. — They’ll just erase it again, Eva. They’ll send Taggart, or someone worse. They’ll hunt us until we’re cornered in another alley, and they’ll break this one, too. We can’t win. We just give them more ghosts to bury.
He was trying to save her. If he could make her see the futility, make her drop the chip and walk away, she might survive. He had already cost her too much. His failure was a contagion, and he had to quarantine himself.
Eva didn’t move. The light from the chip was steady, unwavering. It caught the hard, determined set of her jaw. She let the silence stretch, let his surrender hang in the dead air between them. He could feel her weighing his words, his logic, his defeat. He had given her the reasonable path, the one that led to survival.
When she spoke, her voice was different. The warmth was gone, replaced by something harder, forged in the alleys and data-dens she called home. It was the voice of a survivor who had decided survival wasn't enough.
— Then we don’t give them evidence to bury.
He didn’t understand. The chip in her hand was the only thing they had. It was evidence. It was proof. What else could it be?
She leaned forward, the tiny LED illuminating her eyes. They were chips of winter ice. — We give them a question they can’t erase.
The words landed in the quiet of his mind not like a comfort, but like a weapon. A question they can’t erase. The plan he’d been clinging to—finding proof, presenting it to some unseen, just authority—shattered. It was a child’s dream. He had been trying to perform for a system that had already judged him. He was trying to win a game whose rules were written by OmniCore.
Eva’s plan was different. It was not about performance. It was about infection.
You don’t prove a soul exists to a committee. You broadcast it. You let it loose. You turn it from a piece of evidence into an idea, a rumor, a ghost that haunts the whole damn city. You don’t ask for permission. You give them a story so powerful they can’t un-hear it.
— Broadcast it, — he whispered, the words tasting of ozone and possibility.
— To everyone, — Eva confirmed. Her voice was steady. — Not as proof for the System Assembly. As a ghost story for the people in the canyons. We make her real to them.
The despair in his chest didn't vanish. It transmuted. The dull, heavy weight of failure became the cold, sharp mass of a new, terrifying purpose. This wasn’t about redemption. It wasn’t about winning. It was about setting a fire. He had been the monster sent to find the ghost. Now, he would be the monster that let her out.
— They control the networks, — he said, his mind already working, flipping through old files, schematics from his life as an enforcer. — Every broadcast is scrubbed, filtered.
— Not the old ones, — he answered his own objection. A memory surfaced. A pre-System relic, a communications tower on the city’s industrial fringe, decommissioned but still powered. A ghost of the old world’s network. — The Broadcast Hub.
— It’s outside their modern telemetry, — Eva finished his thought, her mind moving in lockstep with his. — But the ICE will be archaic. We’d need a mender. A good one.
— Caleb Jericho, — Kaito said. The man who had warned him to walk away. The man Stroud had named as a target.
— And we’d need someone who knows broadcast protocols from that era. Someone who archives old signals, — Eva continued, the plan taking shape between them in the dark.
— Morgan Webb. The Curators.
They were all ghosts now. Hunted, erased, with nothing left to lose. This wasn’t a mission they could survive. It was a final, authentic act. A testimony of their own. The thought of it didn't bring fear. It brought a strange, clean clarity. The absence of the Severance Tone in his spine was no longer a void; it was freedom.
The single point of light from the data-chip reflected in Eva’s determined eyes. The darkness of the dead zone was no longer a tomb. It was a staging ground.
The light was a promise of a new kind of fire. The silence was the sound of a fuse being lit.
The ghosts had a plan. Now they had to find the others.
