The Barcelona sun was a hammer, beating down on the stone of the Plaça Reial. Tourists and locals mingled under the palm trees, their chatter a low, pleasant hum punctuated by the clink of glasses from the surrounding cafes. Sineus, Moreau, and Nadia Petrova moved through the crowd not as a group, but as three separate points of a triangle, their paths converging on a small, wrought-iron bench near the central fountain. They were following the faint, steady pulse of the micro-tracker, a ghost leading them through the living city.
Sineus took a seat on the bench, unfolding a local newspaper. He did not read it. His eyes scanned the plaza, logging exits, cover, and potential threats. Moreau stood fifty meters away, ostensibly admiring the architecture of a Gaudi-inspired building, her reflection a fleeting shape in the glass of a storefront. Nadia sat at an outdoor cafe, a small cup of scalding coffee in front of her, her laptop open. They were a machine, assembled for a single purpose: to retrieve the data bought with the Mirror Fragment Rico Vargas had so graciously allowed them to steal.
The tracker’s signal strengthened, originating from a man now walking toward the bench. He was in his late fifties, with a tweed jacket that was too warm for the Spanish sun and a face pale with academic anxiety. He carried a worn leather satchel. This was their dead-drop scholar, the man who had paid Vargas a fortune for a memory-eating artifact. He was a civilian caught in the gears of their war.
The man sat at the other end of the bench, not looking at Sineus. He placed his satchel on the ground between them. His hands trembled slightly.
— You have it? — the scholar asked, his voice a dry whisper.
— It’s being delivered to a secure locker at the airport, — Sineus lied smoothly. — The access code will be sent to you once our transaction is complete.
The scholar flinched, a flicker of fear in his eyes. This was not the simple exchange he had paid for. He was being managed.
— That was not the arrangement.
— The arrangement changed, — Sineus said, his tone leaving no room for argument. He was not here to negotiate. He was here to collect. — The data slate.
The man hesitated, his jaw tight. He was weighing the value of his prize against the sudden, terrifying complication. The choice was not a choice. He reached into his satchel and pulled out a thin, dark grey rectangle of ceramic and metal. The data slate. He slid it across the bench. Sineus picked it up, his fingers brushing against the cool, smooth surface. It was heavy, dense with the information they needed.
— The code will be sent in one hour, — Sineus said, standing. The transaction was over.
The scholar nodded, defeated. He clutched his satchel, a man who had just traded a map to the end of the world for a ghost. He scurried away, disappearing into the throng of tourists.
Sineus gave a subtle hand signal. Moreau began to move from her position, converging on their pre-planned exit route. Nadia closed her laptop, leaving a few euros on the table for the coffee. They had the final piece: the navigational formula, an index linking the star phases from the Subterrane Logbook, the parallax data from Polyus-9, and the deep ocean currents. They had the path to Thule Ultima.
Then the world broke.
It began without a sound. The color bled out of the plaza, draining away as if pulled down a sink. The vibrant reds of the cafe umbrellas, the green of the palm fronds, the blue of the sky—all faded in an instant to a stark, cinematic monochrome. The cheerful hum of the crowd died, replaced by a sudden, confused silence.
Sineus felt it a split second before he saw it. A pressure in his ears, a static charge that made the hairs on his arms stand up. The small, brass gimbaled compass in his pocket, a steady anchor of truth, suddenly felt like a spinning top against his leg. A Reality Glitch. A massive one.
A low, groaning sound echoed across the plaza, the sound of immense weight shifting. It was the sound of metal under a strain it was never designed to bear. The three bronze statues of historical figures that stood on pedestals around the fountain began to move.
It was not a smooth or lifelike motion. It was a grinding, shuddering protest of physics. Bronze arms, meant to hold stoic poses for centuries, lifted. Torsos of solid metal twisted. The statues were forgetting they were statues. They were forgetting their purpose, their very identity as inanimate objects. One of them, a depiction of a forgotten 19th-century poet, took a single, creaking step off its stone base. Its bronze foot hit the plaza’s paving stones with a deafening clang that broke the spell of silence.
The screams started then. A wave of pure, animal panic washed over the plaza. People scrambled, tripping over chairs and each other, their faces masks of disbelief and terror. The world they knew had just shown them it was a lie.
The poet statue took another step, its head turning with a shriek of tortured metal to look at the fleeing crowd. Another statue, a general on a horse, raised its bronze sword, the movement jerky and unnatural. The horse bucked, its metal legs scraping against the pedestal. For three seconds, the plaza was a scene from a nightmare, a monochrome world of screaming people and walking metal ghosts.
Then, as quickly as it began, it stopped.
Color flooded back into the world, so bright and sudden it was painful. The groaning of metal ceased. The statues froze in their new, impossible positions. The poet stood in the middle of a walkway, one arm outstretched. The general’s horse was reared back, its front hooves hanging in the air meters from its base. They were silent and still once more, but they were wrong. The evidence of the glitch was now baked into the physical world.
— Move! — Moreau’s voice was sharp, cutting through the chaos. She was already pushing through the panicked crowd, creating a path.
Nadia was right behind her, her face pale but her eyes wide with a kind of horrified academic fascination. — The glitches… they’re getting stronger.
Sineus followed, the data slate clutched in his hand. He could feel the aftershock of the glitch in his bones, a deep, resonant wrongness. He slipped his hand into his pocket, his fingers finding his compass. The needle was no longer spinning. It had settled, but the brass casing felt unnaturally cold, a lingering chill from the touch of Oblivion.
They moved through the screaming, crying tourists, three islands of cold purpose in a sea of chaos. Police whistles began to shriek in the distance. This was no longer a secret war. It was a public spectacle, a crack in the fabric of reality for all to see. They had the formula, the final key to a phantom island at the heart of the storm.
But the world they were trying to save was dissolving under their feet.
The plaza was a frozen tableau of the impossible, a monument to a moment when memory had failed. The silence that followed the screams was heavy, filled with the weight of what everyone had just seen.
They reached the edge of the plaza and melted into the labyrinth of Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter, leaving the chaos and the impossible tableau behind them.
