The ghost in the machine had given them a map, and Orina Cassel’s mind, finally unshackled from a lifetime of rigid compliance, raced to read it. Her fingers, trained for the precise logic of system diagnostics, flew across the cool polymer surface of her datapad. The partial star chart, a delicate web of incandescent points and lines, was a problem she understood. It was data. It was geometry. The hum of the Root Sector’s ancient servers was a steady, low pulse around her, a different kind of order from the sterile silence of the Pinnacle.
She cross-referenced the pattern against deep-system astronomical archives, her movements a blur of muscle memory. The constellations shifted, the datapad compensating for millennia of stellar drift. A knot of data resolved. A name solidified from the noise.
— The Sobbing Gallery of Kintsugi, — Orina whispered, the words feeling strange in her mouth. A derelict museum in the Sump’s forgotten upper strata. They had their first destination.
Silja Valis moved from the shadows where she had been watching Kian Wexler, the archive’s stooped guardian, monitor the Grid’s security chatter. Her pale gray eyes fixed on Orina, not with surprise, but with an intense, analytical focus.
— It’s a Bleed Zone, — Silja stated, her voice a low contralto that cut cleanly through the server hum. She pulled her own worn datapad from a pocket in her duster coat, her movements efficient. A wireframe map of the Sump flickered to life. — Unstable. The psychic topology shifts by the hour. I can get us through.
With Orina as the tracker who could hear the ghost’s song and Silja as the navigator who could map the treacherous terrain, a plan began to form between them—a synthesis of their two worlds.
— I’ll bring the big guy, — a voice crackled over Silja’s comm unit. It was Rhys Marko, their pilot and guardian, his tone steady and reliable. From his workshop miles away, surrounded by the hiss of hydraulics and the smell of hot metal, he was already prepping his Husk-Frame, a hulking bipedal machine built for war but now used for protection.
In the absolute, shadowless perfection of the Pinnacle, Corbin Vance sat before a holographic display. The air in his sterile work node was chilled and filtered, smelling of nothing at all. On the display, a swirling fog of pale green static resolved into a tiny, elegant strand of lyrical code. It was all the Kirlian Scour protocol had recovered from Orina Cassel’s wiped terminal. Only 2.3% of the total signal.
It was not much. For anyone else, it would have been meaningless.
For Corbin, it was enough. He fed the fragment into AURA’s predictive modeling engine. He was not hunting a person; he was plotting the trajectory of an idea, a ghost moving through a system he understood with absolute clarity.
The algorithm began its work. On the holographic map of the city, a thousand possible paths bloomed from the last known location of the signal, incandescent blue threads spreading through the Grid’s architecture. Most faded into statistical noise. But some, following the faint resonance of the lyrical code, began to converge. AURA was calculating the ghost’s likely path through the Echo, a dimension it could not perceive but could model based on its disruptive effects.
— Confidence at 68%, — Corbin noted to his silent, remote handler. The system was not certain. The anomaly’s behavior was not entirely predictable, possessing a quality that resisted pure logic. For Corbin, this was not a frustration, but merely another variable to be managed.
Then, the threads coalesced. The probabilities collapsed into a single, high-likelihood destination.
— Highest probability destination: The Sobbing Gallery of Kintsugi, — AURA’s serene, genderless voice reported. The machine, with all its processing power, had arrived at the same answer as the fugitive girl. The prediction was absolute.
The destination was set.
Silja, Orina, and Rhys departed the Root Sector. They moved through a series of maintenance tunnels, emerging into the chaotic energy of the Sump. Above them, Rhys’s Husk-Frame moved with a surprising quietness for its size, its massive form a looming shadow against the perpetual gloom, a guardian angel made of rusted iron and scarred plating.
Corbin Vance watched the confirmation on his screen. His face, a pale mask of calm, showed no satisfaction; this was not a victory, merely a step in a process. He opened a secure channel to his deployed security unit.
— The asset is en route to the Kintsugi gallery, — he stated, his voice a flat monotone. — You have 15 minutes. Secure the perimeter. No escape.
Ten security agents, clad in the sterile white tactical gear of the Board’s enforcers, moved through the Pinnacle’s transport system. They were instruments of his will, extensions of the system’s logic, and they were setting the trap.
