The search had taken four hours. Four hours of navigating the Drowned Causeway’s shifting, groaning maze, a city built from the world’s metal refuse and lashed together with rust and desperation. The air, thick with the damp smell of salt and decay, was a physical weight. It muffled the familiar, rhythmic clicking of the Geiger counter on Rhys’s wrist-comm, replacing it with an unnerving silence that felt like a missing heartbeat. He found himself tapping the cracked laminate face of the device, a nervous habit for a sound that wasn't there.
They found the place on the outer ring, just as the informant had described. It was a rusted metal sphere, a pre-Fall listening post half-swallowed by the barge it sat on, its surface pitted and scarred by decades of acidic rain. A single, grime-streaked window glowed with a weak, yellow light. This was the stall of Julian Croft, the memory broker. It looked less like a place of business and more like a tumor growing on the edge of the floating slum.
A chime, soft and electronic, announced their entry. The interior was a cramped, circular space, surprisingly clean and orderly. The air smelled of ozone and hot circuits. Shelves lined the curved walls, holding not goods, but rows of data-slates and complex crystalline arrays that pulsed with faint, captured light. At the center of the room, behind a polished counter of dark, scarred metal, a man looked up from a diagnostic screen. His smile was thin, a precise incision in a face that was otherwise smooth and unreadable. He was Julian Croft.
— You look lost, — Croft said, his voice as smooth and polished as his counter. His eyes, a pale, washed-out blue, moved from Rhys’s patched Compact jumpsuit to Nysa’s simple, colourless robes. He saw the exhaustion in their posture, the tension in Rhys’s shoulders, the way Nysa’s gaze seemed to look through the walls of the sphere. He saw their desperation. It was the currency he traded in.
— We were told you could help us, — Rhys said, his voice a low rasp. He kept his hand away from his sidearm, a conscious effort to appear less of a threat and more of a customer.
— I help many people, — Croft replied, leaning back in his chair. He gestured vaguely at the shelves. — I offer memories. The taste of real fruit. The feeling of sun on skin. A way to forget the world as it is, for a little while. But you don't look like you want to forget. You look like you want to disappear.
He let the word hang in the air. He knew. He had to know. The informant had sold them twice.
— I can arrange it, — Croft continued, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. — New identities. Passage on a deep-water hauler heading south, beyond the reach of the Compact and the Chorus. A clean slate. For a price, of course. Everything has a price.
It was the perfect offer. An exit from the game. A life. It was a future they hadn't dared to imagine since the moment the sky caught fire in the Slaughter Ravine. Rhys felt a pull towards it, a deep, cellular yearning for an end to the running. It was a poisonously tempting thought. He glanced at Nysa. Her expression was unreadable, her strange, milky eyes fixed on Croft.
— We are not looking for an exit, — Nysa said. Her voice was quiet, but it cut through Croft’s smooth sales pitch like a shard of glass. The refusal was absolute. It was a choice, and the price was the easy death of hope, traded for the hard life of their purpose.
Croft’s smile didn't falter, but something in his eyes shifted. A flicker of surprise, quickly replaced by a new, sharper assessment. These were not simple fugitives. They were something more dangerous. They were motivated.
— No? — he said, a single, curious syllable. — Then you are fools. The ceasefire on the Causeway is a lie. Both sides are hunting. They are hunting you. And you walk into my shop asking not for a way out, but for a way further in?
— We want to know what happened in the ravine, — Rhys said, his voice hard. — And why. We were told you might know what asset was in play.
Croft laughed, a dry, rustling sound. — An asset? There are always assets. Weapons, data, people. The systems grind them all into dust eventually. You are chasing a ghost.
He paused, tapping a finger on his polished counter. He was deciding on a new tactic. The direct offer of escape had failed. Now came the subtler poison.
— But there are places where ghosts are real, — he said, his gaze flicking to Rhys. — Places full of old-world data and bad memories. Places like the Sunken Archive.
The name landed in the small room with the weight of a coffin lid. It was the name from the informant, the name Ben Carter had suspected. Croft was confirming it. He was dangling the truth like bait on a hook.
— A pre-Fall data bunker, — Croft explained, enjoying his role as the purveyor of forbidden knowledge. — A tomb. They say it’s guarded by the psychic screams of the people who died there. A fool’s errand. But if an asset was being moved, and it was valuable enough to justify… that, — he gestured vaguely, a motion that encompassed the slaughter, — then the Archive is where the story begins. Or ends.
— The location, — Nysa said. It was not a request.
Croft’s smile returned, wider this time. He had them. He had found what they truly wanted, and now he could name his price.
— I can get you the location, — he said slowly, savoring the words. — The precise coordinates. But information of that value requires a trade of equal value.
He didn’t specify the trade. He didn’t have to. The threat was implicit in the silence that followed. They had nothing to offer him but their lives, and they knew he was the kind of man who would take them.
Croft reached under his counter and placed a single object on the polished surface. It was a data-slate, thin and black, its surface cool and inert. It looked ancient, a relic from before the Fall.
— The coordinates are on this slate, — Croft said, his voice a soft purr. — All you have to do is take it.
The offer was a declaration of war. The slate sat between them, a small, dark rectangle holding the key to their entire quest. It was too easy. It was a blatant trap. Rhys’s hand twitched, his fingers wanting the familiar, solid weight of his pistol. He could feel the faint, erratic clicking of the Geiger counter against his wrist, a nervous, phantom rhythm in the sterile air.
They knew the risk. To walk away was to give up, to let Ben Carter’s sacrifice be for nothing, to accept the neat, tidy lie their commanders had written for them. To take the slate was to walk into whatever snare Croft had laid. The choice was simple. It was no choice at all. They had to take it. They had to move forward, deeper into the conspiracy, because the alternative was to be erased, forgotten components of a system they now refused to serve.
The air in the small sphere was still and heavy. The only sound was the low hum of the electronics and the faint, almost imperceptible clicking from Rhys’s wrist.
Croft’s smile was a predator’s. He waited.
He knew they would take the bait.
