The alcove was a pocket of cold silence carved from the Sump’s unending noise. Silja Valis sat with her back against a wall of pitted plasteel, the damp chill seeping through her duster. The alley was empty now. The sterile white of the Board Security Agents was gone, the crushing pressure of their neuro-dampening field a phantom ache in the air. Orina was gone. The gear was gone. All that remained was the hollow echo of failure.
She did not move. Her body was a system running on emergency power, every function throttled to conserve a dwindling reserve of will. The rhythmic clang of distant industry was a slow, mocking pulse. It was the same sound. The same smell of ozone and decay. The same cold weight of a mission spiraling into absolute loss.
Her mind, a machine built for navigating chaos, had turned inward. It replayed a different failure, a different mission. Operation Cygnus. The name was a shard of ice in her memory. She saw a failing hydraulic, its scream a high, thin counterpoint to the groan of collapsing metal. She saw a face, younger than Orina’s but with the same terrified hope in his eyes. Kaelen. A good pilot, a true believer. He had trusted her plan, her logic. He had followed her into a trap she had not foreseen.
The memory was not a story. It was a data loop, a recurring error she could not patch. The outcome was always the same. A flash of light. The smell of burning insulation. Silence. She had survived. He had not. The system had broken.
Now, the loop had run again. Different face, same outcome. She had taken a girl full of fragile, perfect logic and led her into the grinder. She had taught her to see the world’s soul, only to watch it get amputated. The pattern was undeniable. She was a catalyst for ruin. Her presence in any system guaranteed its eventual, catastrophic collapse.
Rhys found her there, a statue of defeat in the gloom. He moved with a quiet deliberation that was the opposite of his Husk-Frame’s massive potential, his heavy boots making almost no sound on the grimy floor. He did not speak. He simply sat down a few feet away, a solid, unwavering presence against the encroaching darkness. He held out a small, dented metal flask. Filtered water. A mundane, life-sustaining gesture in the face of systemic annihilation.
Silja ignored it.
— It’s the same, — she said, her voice a dead monotone. The words were not for him. They were for the ghosts.
Rhys was silent for a long moment, the only sound the slow drip of condensation from an overhead pipe.
— No. It isn’t, — he said finally. His voice was low, a gravelly counterpoint to the Sump’s high-pitched hiss.
She almost laughed. The sound was a dry crackle in her throat. — A bad plan. A lost asset. A body count waiting to happen. The variables change, Rhys. The outcome is a constant.
— This isn't the same, — he repeated, his gaze steady. He was not arguing. He was correcting a flawed data point.
He gestured vaguely toward the empty alley, toward the direction they had taken Orina.
— You changed her.
The statement was so simple, so direct, it bypassed her defenses. It was an observable fact she had not entered into her calculations.
— She changed you.
That, she rejected. It was a sentimental variable, an error in his logic. She was a constant. A black box of cynicism and operational efficiency. She did not change. She endured. She failed. She reset.
But the words lingered. She thought of Orina’s terror in the Echo giving way to a fierce, focused calm. She thought of the girl pointing at a solid wall, her voice filled with an impossible certainty. She thought of her own hand, reaching for the Phase Calibrator not to find a path, but to confirm the one Orina had already felt. The trust. That had not been part of the Kaelen protocol.
Silja pulled out her datapad. The slab of cool polymer felt alien in her hand, its logic a mockery of the current situation. Her thumb moved across the screen, navigating through layers of security. She did not access mission parameters or city schematics. She went deeper, to a partitioned, heavily encrypted corner of the drive.
The directory was labeled ARCHIVE/FAILED_OPS/.
It was her digital tombstone, the 1.2 gigabytes of data that constituted her soul. Each file was a ghost. OP_CYGNUS_X1. OP_VEGA_FALL. OP_ALTAIR_ECHO. A litany of failures, each one a carefully preserved record of her own flawed logic. She had kept them as a reminder. A penance. A data-set to prove her core thesis: systems break. Hope is a statistical anomaly.
Her thumb hovered over the file for Cygnus. Kaelen’s file. It contained his last transmission, a burst of static and a single, cut-off word. It contained her after-action report, a cold, clinical self-assessment of her failure. It was the anchor of her cynicism.
She had lost the physical gear, the small, worn token of that first failure. But this was the real thing. This was the source code of her despair.
Rhys’s words echoed again. She changed you.
Orina had not been an asset. She had been a student. A partner. The relationship was a new variable, one that did not exist in these old, cold logs. Kaelen had followed her because it was his duty. Orina had followed her, and then led her, because of a bond forged in the space between logic and chaos.
Her expression hardened. It was not an emotional shift. It was a logical conclusion. The old data was corrupting the new system. The archives were a bug, not a feature. They were preventing her from processing the new reality.
Her thumb moved with a final, decisive gesture. It tapped the function icon. It selected the directory.
It pressed DELETE.
A confirmation prompt appeared on the screen, its clean, sans-serif font a stark contrast to the grime of the alcove. DELETE *.*. This action is irreversible. Confirm?
She did not hesitate.
Yes.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, a single line of text appeared.
Files permanently deleted.
The screen was clean. The 1.2 gigabytes of failure were gone. The data was null. The ghosts were exorcised.
The weight in her chest did not vanish. The exhaustion did not fade. But the loop was broken. The past was no longer a recurring variable. It was simply gone. The silence in her mind was absolute.
She looked up at Rhys, her pale gray eyes clear for the first time in a decade. The path forward was no longer a calculation of probabilities based on past results. It was a single, clear objective.
— Let's go get her back, — she said. Her voice was quiet, but it was not the dead monotone of before. It was the voice of a system rebooted, its core programming rewritten. It was the voice of a navigator with a new destination.
