The darkness of the Ghost Line was a perfect, devouring black. The darkness of the Prague under-levels was something else entirely. It was a cold, damp grey, thick with the smell of dust and decay. It was the color of a dead screen. Sineus felt the chill of it in his bones as he helped Zora through a narrow gap between two colossal, silent server racks. Her arm was in a sling, her face pale in the gloom, but she moved without complaint. The price of their escape from Moscow.
They had abandoned the burned-out maintenance car two kilometers back, at the end of the line. Now they were on foot, ghosts in a graveyard of the old internet. Ansel led them, his movements tight with paranoia, his hand never straying far from the pistol holstered under his worn coat. Ksenia followed close behind Sineus, a dark bruise blooming on her temple from where she’d hit the wall in the tunnel. She carried the Volkov Codex like a prayer book.
Their goal was simple: find the contact Mila had promised. Find a place to stop running. A place to open the 1.2 terabytes of truth they had bought with Zora’s blood.
The contact was waiting, just as Mila’s encrypted message had promised. He stood by a junction of rusted catwalks, a single work lamp at his feet casting a pool of lonely, yellow light. He was a thin man, older than them, with the pale skin of someone who had not seen the sun in years. He wore a technician’s jumpsuit, patched and clean. He was not a soldier. He was a librarian for a library of ghosts.
— You’re late, — the man said. His voice was flat, without welcome.
— We had complications, — Ksenia answered, stepping forward. — Mila sent us. The sparrow flies at midnight.
The man’s eyes flickered over them, assessing their wounds, their exhaustion. He gave a curt nod. — The sparrow is a noisy bird. This way. Stay close. There are things down here older than your Ministry.
He turned and led them deeper into the Digital Ossuary. For another kilometer and a half, they walked through the silent canyons of dead data. Racks of servers stood like forgotten monuments, their indicator lights dark for thirty years. Thick bundles of fiber-optic cable, the nerves of a dead century, hung from the ceiling like black, dusty vines. The only sounds were the drip of water from somewhere above and the crunch of their boots on the concrete floor. It was a tomb.
Sineus thought of the clean, white, silent halls of the Ministry of Public Harmony. This was the same silence, but it felt different. The Ministry’s silence was the sound of erased noise. This was the silence of true absence. The silence of a world that had simply been left behind.
The contact stopped in a vast, circular chamber. The ceiling was lost in darkness thirty meters above. In the center of the chamber, a section of the curved concrete wall was covered by a mural. It was immense, at least ten meters high and thirty wide, and it blazed with a chaotic, defiant life that was an insult to the grey decay surrounding it.
It was a family tree.
Hundreds of faces and names were connected by twisting, hand-painted lines of gold and red and blue. The style was raw, human, and utterly non-digital. It was a riot of color and history, painted directly onto the cold, dead concrete of the past. It was the most beautiful thing Sineus had seen in years.
— What is this? — Zora whispered, her artist’s eye taking in the sheer, impossible fact of it.
— It is the wall, — the contact said, as if that explained everything.
Ksenia, ever the archivist, stepped forward. She unslung her memetic scanner, a device designed to read the faint memory traces left on objects. She aimed it at the mural. The scanner was their compass, their map, their way of reading the secret history of the world.
The device whined. A high, thin sound of protest. The reading on its small screen was a frantic, meaningless scramble of static. It was trying to read the mural and failing. Ksenia tapped the side of the scanner, a frown creasing her brow. She ran the diagnostic again. The same result. Failure.
— It’s shielded, — she said, lowering the scanner. Her voice was tight with confusion. This was not possible. Nothing was shielded this completely. — Or… the memory is too strong. Too real.
The contact almost smiled. It was a faint, dry thing, like the cracking of old paper. — Your toys are loud, — he said. — But they don’t speak the language of this place.
He gestured to the mural. — That is not a memory you can scan. It is a memory that is. It is our history. It is us. The machines cannot read it because it was not made for them.
Sineus stepped closer, his own innate sense reaching for the wall. He felt no echo, no ghost. The memories here were not fragments of things that had been erased. They were solid. They were present. They had weight. He looked at the contact, a new understanding dawning.
— A bloodline thing, — the contact said, his eyes meeting Sineus’s. He saw the recognition there. — We don’t know how. We just know what. We remember. And the world forgets we exist. It is our shield.
The price of their safety was information. They had shown their hand, their reliance on technology to read the past. In return, they had been shown a truth that shattered their assumptions. Sineus was not the last of his kind. He was not an anomaly. He was just from a different family.
He saw his own reflection in the dark, cracked screen of a dead server nearby. The image was distorted, but behind him, the reflection of the mural was perfectly clear, its colors steady and solid. It wasn't a flickering ghost of what was lost. It was a declaration of what had been kept.
The contact watched them for a long moment, then seemed to come to a decision. — Mila said you could be trusted. She is rarely wrong. Your friend needs a medic, and you need a place to work.
He pressed a section of the seemingly solid concrete wall. A low grinding sound echoed in the chamber as a heavy door slid open, revealing a corridor bathed in clean, warm light. The air that drifted out smelled of hot electronics, filtered air, and cooked food. It was the smell of a hidden, living place.
— Welcome to the burrow, — the contact said. — Try not to break anything.
They stepped through the doorway, leaving the cold tomb of the Digital Ossuary behind. The heavy door slid shut, and the silence was replaced by the low, steady hum of scavenged power.
The air was warm and still. The scent of ozone from the purifiers was sharp and clean.
Ksenia didn’t waste a moment. She found a clean table, set up her datapad, and plugged in the data shard they had taken from Aris Brandt. The files began to decrypt. After a few minutes, she looked up, her face grim.
— He’s not on Earth, — she said, her voice a low whisper in the quiet of the room. — Voss. He’s in orbit. A private station. The Aegis Spire.
She pointed to a schematic on the screen. It was a weapon. A portable device designed to trigger a Lacuna Cascade on demand.
— And he’s building something, — she said. — It’s called the Void Catalyst.
