The alarm was not a sound. It was a violation of light, a silent, pulsing ghost in the corner of Jian’s private terminal. The specific rhythm was Lena Solheim’s signature, a pre-arranged warning she had buried deep in the city’s network. It meant they were coming. It meant he had seconds.
His goal was not survival, not yet. It was preservation. His hands moved with the practiced economy of a musician, not a fugitive. He bypassed his collection of antique physics texts and the nutrient paste dispenser. He went to the hidden compartment behind the wall panel, his fingers tracing the seam. Inside, he grabbed two objects: the Harmonic Cipher, a dense qubit crystal that felt cool and heavy as a stone in his palm, and a compact, fully charged power source. His life’s work and the means to give it a voice. The price of taking them was leaving everything else.
A concussive thump, deep and percussive, shook the wall. The magnetic lock on his apartment door, designed to withstand a kiloton of force, had been breached. He heard the hiss of hydraulics and the clatter of armored boots on his pristine floor. Jian was already moving, slipping through a service panel concealed by a hanging textile that depicted a flawless Euclidean proof. He closed the panel behind him, plunging himself into darkness and the smell of dust and old ozone.
He was in the city’s underbelly. The service corridors of Aethelburg were the chaotic, functional truth beneath the capital’s sterile geometry. Here, there were no clean lines or atonal hymns broadcast for public order. There was only the hum of massive power conduits, the drip of recycled water, and the dim, bloody glow of emergency lighting that cast his shadow long and distorted against pipes thick with grime. He was moving away from the world of forced order, one step at a time.
He ran, his soft-soled shoes making little sound on the grated floor. A faint crackle hung in the air, a sound like tearing fabric that he could feel in his teeth. It was the ghost of his own music, a faint echo of the schism static he had conducted in Zone 7, a constant reminder of why he was being hunted. He was a loose variable in a system that could not tolerate them.
He rounded a corner at a major junction, and stopped. They were not Union. There were five of them, materializing from the shadows as if they had grown there. They wore no white ceramic armor. Their gear was a mix of dark, woven fibers and what looked like hardened leather, gear that seemed to absorb the dim red light. They were specters from a different reality, and they had blocked his path.
One stepped forward. He was a man of average height, but his presence filled the corridor. His skin was weathered, and a thin scar traced a line from his temple to his jaw. His eyes were a startling, pale green. A complex, branching fractal made of living, bioluminescent lichen covered his right arm, and it pulsed with a soft, gentle light of its own. He was Beck Irvine, a Hunter-Gatherer Pathfinder, a man who could navigate the broken places of the world.
"Jian Li," Beck said. It was not a question. His voice was a low baritone, quiet but carrying an unnerving certainty.
Jian’s heart hammered against his ribs. He clutched the Harmonic Cipher in his pocket, his knuckles white. He scanned the junction. Two corridors behind him, one blocked by the Gatherers. No other way out.
"We tracked the resonance," Beck continued, taking another slow step. The lichen on his arm brightened, its green glow illuminating the dust motes in the air. "The planet sang your song. You're coming with us."
The words hit Jian harder than a stun bolt. They did not see an asset to be secured or a weapon to be analyzed. They saw a prophet. A tool of a different kind, one to be revered, shrouded in mysticism, and ultimately, controlled. He was trading one cage of logic for another of faith. The price of their sanctuary was his identity.
"I’m not a prophet," Jian said, his voice tight. He took a half-step back. "I’m a composer."
One of the other Gatherers, a woman with severe, dark eyes, shifted impatiently. — We don’t have time for this, Beck. The geometers are coming.
As if summoned by her words, a new sound echoed from the corridor behind Jian. The rhythmic, heavy tread of magnetic boots on metal grating. The clipped, technical shouts of a Union squad. They were closing in. The air grew thick, the faint crackle of schism static sharpening as the two opposing belief systems converged on this single point in space.
Beck’s gaze hardened. The moment for persuasion was over. — Now you have no choice.
His team tensed, preparing to rush Jian, to grab him and vanish back into the warrens they knew so well. Jian was trapped, a prize caught between two warring predators. The Union would put him in a lab. The Gatherers would put him on an altar. Both were prisons.
He saw it then. A third corridor. Not a main artery, but a narrow, unlit maintenance duct, its opening a rectangle of absolute blackness. It was a gamble, a path into deeper uncertainty. It was the only path that was his.
As the Gatherers lunged and the Union squad rounded the far corner, Jian sprinted. He didn't run toward the familiar tyranny of the Union or the suffocating embrace of the Gatherers. He ran for the darkness.
He plunged into the black, a ghost hunted by his saviors.
