The silence of the dead zone was a physical presence, a perfect, seamless black that pressed in on all sides. It was the first true quiet Kaito had known in years, the absence of the city’s data-hum leaving a void that his own thoughts rushed to fill. He and Eva had used a piece of pre-System hardware to send the call, a battered comms unit that bypassed the modern network entirely. It didn’t send words, only a coded data-burst, a single, repeating pulse that was more of a ghost story than a signal. A ghost calling to other ghosts. The price of the broadcast was their last shred of plausible deniability; anyone monitoring those dead frequencies would know something was stirring in the city’s forgotten guts.
They waited. Time became a meaningless concept in the un-scored dark, measured only by the slow cooling of their bodies and the shared, rhythmic sound of their breathing.
A section of the far wall slid aside with a low grind of stone on stone, a sound so loud in the absolute quiet that it felt like a physical blow. A figure was silhouetted against a dim, flickering green light from the tunnel beyond. The man was old, his frame a fragile stick-figure inside a patched thermal jacket. He wore thick, archaic spectacles, and a tangle of wires connected a port behind his ear to a custom wrist-rig. Morgan Webb, the master archivist for The Curators, stepped into the dead zone.
— The signal was… elegant, — Webb’s voice was a dry rustle, like old paper. — A frequency we have not seen active in a decade. You have our attention.
— We need more than your attention, — Kaito said, his voice still rough. — We need your help. The debt I owe you.
Webb raised a thin hand, dismissing the notion. — The debt is irrelevant. You brought us a sacred text, and OmniCore destroyed it. Now you propose to publish a surviving fragment. This is no longer a favor to you, Kaito Vance. This is the fulfillment of our purpose. The Curators are yours.
Before Kaito could process the weight of that, another sound echoed from a different tunnel. A rhythmic, metallic scrape. A second figure emerged, taller and more gaunt than Webb, his movements stiff. A single, prosthetic arm, its chrome scuffed and yellowed, hung at his side. Caleb Jericho, the data-mender, stepped into the faint green spill-light, his mechanical eye a dull point of red. He looked from Kaito to Eva, then to Webb, his expression a mask of pure, weary pragmatism.
— This had better be good, — Caleb’s voice was a low, synthetic rasp. — They’ve purged three of my best suppliers. The whole network is screaming.
Kaito looked at the three faces illuminated in the gloom: Eva, her jaw set with grim determination; Webb, his eyes alight with the fervor of a true believer; Caleb, his posture radiating a cynical reluctance that Kaito knew was just a shield for a deep-seated hatred of the System. These were his allies. A collection of broken, erased, and hunted ghosts.
— It’s not good, — Kaito said, his voice finding a new, steady register. — It’s final.
He laid out the plan, the words stark and simple in the oppressive silence. He spoke of the Broadcast Hub, the rusted skeleton of a pre-System tower on the industrial fringe, a place invisible to OmniCore’s modern network. He described how they would get there, using a smuggler’s barge to navigate the black, oily waters of the Canal Network, the city’s forgotten arteries.
— Once we’re inside, we have two jobs, — Kaito continued, his gaze fixed on the two men. — Caleb, the Hub’s security will be archaic. Legacy ICE. We need you to get us through it. We need a mender to talk to the old machine.
Caleb’s prosthetic fingers twitched, a series of micro-movements as he processed the technical challenge. — The hardware will be non-standard. I’ll need to bypass the primary breakers and interface directly with the transmission buffer. It’s possible. Not clean.
— We don’t need clean, — Eva said from the shadows. — We need it to work once.
Kaito turned to the archivist. — Morgan, once Caleb gets us in, you’re up. The broadcast protocols will be ancient. We need you to prep Anya’s data, format it, and push it through their system. You know the old signals better than anyone alive.
— To make the ghost sing on their frequencies, — Webb murmured, a flicker of a smile on his thin lips. — A worthy challenge.
Eva stepped forward, taking on the role of coordinator. Her voice was crisp, all business. — I’ll arrange the barge and the supplies we’ll need for the run. It will cost us everything we have left. The smuggler will want his credits upfront.
The four of them stood in a loose circle, a conspiracy of ghosts in a concrete tomb. The weight of their shared purpose settled over them, a tangible thing. They were all erased, all hunted, all with nothing left to lose but a final, desperate act of defiance. In that moment, they were no longer four fragmented individuals hiding from the storm. They were a single, unified force, their desperation forged into a weapon.
Caleb reached out with his prosthetic hand, the diagnostic claw extending from his wrist with a soft click. He gestured toward the shielded data-chip Eva held. — Let me see the fragment. I need to know what I’m working with.
Eva handed it over. Caleb’s claw gently cradled the chip, a faint blue light scanning its surface. — The encryption is degraded from the transfer, but the core data is intact. I can build an interface driver that the Hub’s legacy hardware will recognize. It will hold.
Morgan Webb produced a worn data-slate, its screen flickering to life and displaying a wireframe map of the city’s industrial fringe. A single red dot pulsed on the screen. — The coordinates for the Broadcast Hub. I have them memorized from old network maps. There is one access point from the canal side, a maintenance dock. It will be our only way in.
Kaito looked at each of them, at the faces of the damned. The archivist, the mender, the broker. And him. The monster. He had started this hunt for selfish reasons, for credits and survival. Now, it was about something else entirely. It was about a final, authentic act in a world that punished such things with erasure. It was about ensuring Anya’s testimony was not a whisper, but a scream.
He gave the final nod, a simple, decisive gesture. The time for hiding in the dark was over.
The ghosts were going to war.
