The bridge was a lie. It arched over a chasm of grinding machinery, a structure of pure, silent, shimmering light. It offered a path out of the industrial hell of the Ferrous Coil, a clean line through the chaos. It was beautiful. It was hope. And to Silja Valis, it was the most obvious trap she had ever seen. The Echo did not build roads; it built lures.
— No, — Silja said, her voice a low rasp. Orina looked from the impossible bridge to Silja’s grim face, her own exhaustion a heavy weight. Rhys’s massive Husk-Frame stood motionless behind them, a wounded giant in the gloom.
— It’s a way out, — Orina whispered, the word tasting of ash and desperation.
— It’s a way in, — Silja corrected. — Into something’s stomach. There’s another way. A Synchronist tactic. It’s risky.
She scanned the area, her pale gray eyes missing nothing. Her gaze settled on a tangle of conduits pulsing with a faint blue light. — I can create a data-shadow. A false psychic trail. It will broadcast our signature heading north, deep into the old transit lines. It might buy us some time.
— Might? — Rhys’s voice crackled over the comms, the single word heavy with doubt.
— It’s the only card we have left to play, — Silja stated. She looked at Orina, at the girl’s pale, hollowed-out expression. The fear in Orina’s eyes was a physical thing, a pressure in Silja’s own chest. This was no longer just a mission. It was a promise. The weight of her responsibility for this girl, this fugitive from a world of perfect logic, was an anchor she had not felt in years. It was heavier than any memory of past failures.
They moved away from the beautiful, treacherous bridge. They found what Silja was looking for twenty minutes later, in a recess shielded by sheets of corroded plasteel. It was a data-nexus, a cancerous growth on the Grid’s nervous system where a thousand fiber-optic lines had been bundled and spliced together. The air around it was cool and smelled sharply of ozone. Thick, grime-coated cables wept a slow, viscous lubricant that dripped onto the floor with a sound like thick syrup.
— Stay back. And watch our perimeter, — Silja ordered, pulling a custom interface jack from a pocket in her duster.
She knelt, her movements precise, and plugged the jack into a raw port on the nexus. The screen of her datapad, which she balanced on her knee, flickered to life, displaying not the Grid’s clean interface but a chaotic waterfall of raw code. This was the language of the city’s subconscious.
Her fingers flew across the screen. She was not writing code. She was a sculptor, gathering stray bits of their own psychic residue, the faint energy they shed with every breath and heartbeat. She began weaving them into a coherent signal, a ghost of their presence. It was an act that required her full, undivided concentration, a delicate surgery on the fabric of reality.
Orina and Rhys formed a perimeter, their backs to Silja. Orina held a scavenged pipe like a club, her knuckles white. Rhys stood beside his silent Husk-Frame, its power reserves too low for anything but standing guard. Every distant clang of metal, every hiss of steam, was a potential threat.
In his sterile command center high in the Pinnacle, Corbin Vance watched a holographic map of the Sump. The three bio-signatures he was tracking had stopped. They were stationary. His predictive models suggested they were exhausted, their path deviation imminent. He waited, his patience as absolute as his logic.
Then, a new signal appeared on his display. Three signatures, moving north at a steady pace.
An alert flashed on his terminal, a soft, amber chime. The text was stark. DECEPTION PROTOCOL IDENTIFIED.
Corbin felt nothing. No surprise, no admiration. It was simply a new variable. AURA, its logic unburdened by emotion, was already working. The system was not built to track a signal. It was built to track a signal’s origin. The false trail, the data-shadow, was a psychic shout in the dark. And every shout has an echo.
The system analyzed the false trail. It cross-referenced the waveform with the residual psychic energy left at the point of its creation. The gambit did not just fail. It was a flare, illuminating their exact position with perfect clarity. Triangulation was 99.8% accurate.
— Final intercept vector locked, — Corbin stated to the open channel. His finger tapped the glowing red dot on the map that marked the data-nexus. His confidence in the asset’s location was now 100%. He had them.
The data-nexus in front of Silja sparked violently. A shower of blue-white energy erupted from the port, and the connection went dead. Her datapad screen went black. The air filled with the acrid smell of burnt polymer. She knew, with a certainty that was a cold pit in her stomach, that the trick had failed.
She had not just failed to deceive him. She had told him exactly where they were.
The silence in the alcove was absolute, broken only by the slow, thick drip of lubricant from the dead cables. There were no more tricks to play.
The low hum of the Sump felt different now, expectant. The distant, rhythmic clang of machinery was no longer random noise.
It was the sound of approaching footsteps.
