The alley was a lie. It was a place built from the shared, quiet confidence of three minds, a construct of order and light woven to catch a thing that fed on order and light. Lena Petrova stood at its center, flanked by two of her best hunters. Their dream-avatars were solid, their focus absolute. Around them, the alley curved away into an infinite, repeating loop of damp brick and the soft glow of a single, imagined streetlamp. It was a perfect, predictable pattern.
Their bait, the Consensus Geode, pulsed with a low, rhythmic hum. It was not a physical object but a state of being, a lighthouse of pure, stable thought. In the Waking, in the humming darkness of the Foundry Chorus, Elias Thorne watched the biomonitors. The three green lines representing the Lure Team were smooth, their biometrics stable. The Geode’s integrity held at ninety-five percent. He kept his hand away from the emergency cut-off switch. The price of this knowledge was focus, a shared breath held across two worlds.
"Vitals are stable," Elias murmured to the figures hunched over terminals beside him. "Geode at ninety-five percent."
Then the hum changed. In the dream, the steady pulse of the Geode was joined by a second sound, a dissonant, scraping hum that seemed to come from inside their own skulls. It was the same 15-hertz frequency they had felt in the cold room where Kael’s mind had been erased. The bricks on the left wall began to sweat a greasy, black film. Gravity felt thick, then thin, like wading through water and then air. The alley was no longer a stable lie. It was becoming sick.
A figure appeared at the far end of the curve, a hundred meters away. It was a glitch in the fabric of the dream, a humanoid shape made of fractured glass and shifting shadow. It did not walk. It simply was, and then it was closer. Its unnatural speed was a violation, a piece of cold, external logic injected into the fluid poetry of the Dreamscape. The air grew cold, and the imagined light from the streetlamp flickered, casting long, jerking shadows.
The Cognitive Stalker advanced. Its presence warped the alley, the neat lines of the brickwork seeming to bend and smear at the edges of their vision. The psychic pressure was immense, a feeling of being watched by a security camera that could see your soul. This was the trauma they had planned for.
— Hold the shell, — Lena commanded, her voice sharp and clear inside the dream. — I’m taking the shot.
She reached into the chaotic heart of the Geode, the Grief Storm they had woven inside the stable shell. She pulled out a spear of pure, focused rage, a needle of black energy that vibrated with contained pain. It was the first true test of the Sheathed Spear principle. She launched it. The spear crossed the distance in an instant, a direct vector of attack aimed at the Stalker’s center of mass.
The Stalker did not dodge. It did not block. It did not react. It was simply somewhere else. One moment, it was in the spear’s path. The next, it was three meters to the left, its movement instantaneous, non-physical. It had not interacted with the dream’s physics at all. The spear of rage, finding no target, flew on and dissipated harmlessly against the far wall of the alley, leaving a scorch mark that smelled of ozone and sorrow.
The Stalker was now only ten meters away. It raised a shadowy appendage, a limb that was not a limb, and touched the hunter on Lena’s right. The man’s avatar did not bleed. It did not cry out. It flickered. The color desaturated from his form, leaving a gray, static-laced outline. He was still standing, but he was becoming undone, a thread pulled from a tapestry.
In the Foundry Chorus, a klaxon blared from a single biomonitor.
"Spike!" Jax yelled, his voice cutting through the tense quiet of the Waking. "Vitals are flatlining! I’ve got a nine out of ten stress load on the others!"
Elias’s hand shot to the cut-off switch, but Jax was faster. The technician’s job was not to hope; it was to react. He slammed a heavy, guarded key on his console. The data-capture protocol, their only way to record information about the enemy, flashed across his screen. He was trading a clean sample for a life.
— Capturing… now! — Jax barked.
He triggered the forced collapse.
For the Lure Team, the world ended. The connection to the Dreamscape was severed with the violence of a snapped cable. They were thrown back into their own minds, into the Waking, into the cold, hard reality of the metal cots in the Foundry Chorus. Lena gasped, sitting bolt upright, the psychic whiplash leaving her dizzy and nauseated. The other hunter was already on his feet, stumbling away from his cot.
But the third man, the one the Stalker had touched, was convulsing. His body arched on the cot, a low moan escaping his lips. His eyes were wide with a terror that was no longer in the dream. It was here. It was real.
The hunt was a failure. The trap had not worked. They had sustained a casualty. But on Jax’s screen, amidst a sea of red error messages, was a single, tiny file. It was 1.2 seconds of captured information. A corrupted, almost useless fragment of the Stalker’s code.
The air in the Foundry was still and heavy. The only sound was the quiet hum of the life support machine being wheeled toward the convulsing dreamer.
The data was damaged, a ghost in a broken machine, but it was the only lead they had.
