The hum was the first sign. It was not a sound Rhys could hear with his ears but a vibration he felt in the deck plates of his cybernetic leg, a deep and resonant thrum that traveled up his spine. It was the source of the tremor they had felt in the transit station, a promise of immense, buried power. The slate he had stolen from Julian Croft was cold and dead in his hand, but the coordinates it held had led them here, to a place where the world itself seemed to hold its breath.
Before them, the Sunken Archive rose from the grey dust like the tombstone of a forgotten god. It was a single, brutalist monolith of stained and pitted concrete, its upper levels shattered into a crown of broken ribs clawing at the permanently overcast sky. The structure was half-swallowed by the slow, inexorable tide of the wastes, a monument to a past that refused to be fully buried. This was their objective. This was the heart of the conspiracy.
The air was thick, heavy with the whine of failing machinery and the scent of ozone. It was a graveyard, but not a silent one. All around the base of the monolith, the air shimmered in columns of heatless distortion. Glass Echoes. Dozens of them flickered like phantom lanterns, each one a psychic wound burned into the landscape, trapping a moment of agony in a silent, repeating loop. Rhys felt the familiar ache behind his eyes, the phantom pain from Croft’s trap, now amplified by the sheer density of the psychic noise. His wrist-comm remained dark, its comforting, metronomic Geiger click replaced by this oppressive, industrial hum.
They began to move, a slow advance from one slab of shattered concrete to the next. Rhys saw the problem in terms of physics and angles, a tactical puzzle of cover and exposure. He was blind to the true danger. For him, the shimmering columns were just sensor ghosts, anomalies his dead comm could no longer measure or parse. He was a pilot without his instruments, a man of logic in a place that defied it.
Nysa saw the truth. To her, the courtyard was not empty space but a minefield of screaming souls. The Glass Echoes were not visual distortions; they were raw, unshielded memories of terror and pain, broadcasting on a frequency that scraped at her consciousness. She could feel the final, panicked thoughts of technicians and soldiers caught in the first moments of the Fall. It was a chorus of pure, undiluted horror.
A dense field of the echoes blocked the most direct path to the Archive’s foundation. Rhys paused, his hand resting on the grip of his sidearm, his gaze sweeping the area for physical threats he could understand. He saw nothing but shimmering air and ruin.
— I can’t get a read, — he admitted, the words tasting like failure. — It’s a ghost field. We go around.
— To go around will take hours, — Nysa’s voice was a low whisper. — We don’t have hours.
She stopped, her tall, gaunt frame becoming utterly still. She closed her milky white eyes. She did not look at the path. She listened to it. Rhys watched as she began the breathing exercise she had taught him, but for her, the purpose was different. He used it to filter the noise, to build a wall against the static. She was opening a door, letting the flood of psychic data wash over her, searching for the quiet currents in the torrent.
The pale light that pulsed in the veins beneath her translucent skin seemed to dim, the energy drawn inward. She was not seeing with her eyes. She was feeling the shape of the trauma, sensing the narrow, winding paths of relative silence that snaked between the roaring infernos of trapped memory. These were the places where no one had died, the forgotten spaces between the agony.
— Here, — she said, her voice barely audible over the hum. Her eyes remained closed. She reached out, her long, slender fingers finding his arm. Her touch was cool, a point of solid reality in the storm. — Stay with me. Do not look at the light.
He made the choice to trust her. It was an act of surrender that went against every piece of his Compact training, which taught that the senses of a Chorus oracle were the ravings of a diseased mind. But his own logic had failed him here. His technology was dead. All he had left was her. He let her guide him, his gaze fixed on the back of her grey robe, his cybernetic leg planting itself precisely where she led.
They moved through the invisible maze. To his left, a ghostly figure of a man in a lab coat silently clawed at his own face, over and over. To his right, a group of soldiers raised rifles that would never fire. Rhys felt a phantom heat brush his cheek, the psychic residue of a plasma fire from centuries ago. He flinched, but Nysa’s grip on his arm tightened, a silent command to keep moving. He focused on the pressure of her fingers, on the steady rhythm of her breathing, and walked through the graveyard of ghosts.
When they reached the far side, stepping out of the field of echoes, Nysa swayed. The light in her veins pulsed weakly, a soft, tired rhythm. The effort had taken something from her, a price paid in vitality for their safe passage. She leaned against the cold concrete wall of the Archive, her breath coming in shallow gasps. Rhys stood beside her, a silent guardian, giving her the time she had bought for them.
The wall was a sheer cliff of pitted, stained concrete. Set into it was a blast door, twelve feet high, its surface scarred by time and acid rain. A stylized sigil of a pre-Fall engineering corps was barely visible beneath the grime. The door was sealed, its locking mechanism buried deep within the wall. There was no external panel, no keypad, no obvious point of entry. It was a monument to impenetrability.
— Now it’s your turn, — Nysa said, her voice regaining some of its strength.
Rhys nodded. He could not feel the souls of the dead, but he could read the language of machines. He ran his hand over the door’s surface, his fingers tracing the hairline seams. He was looking for a weakness, a flaw in the design. He found it near the base: a small, rectangular plate, almost perfectly flush with the surrounding concrete. A manual override junction. It was a system of last resort, a way for engineers to open the door if all power was lost.
He pulled a heavy pry bar and a diagnostic kit from his pack. The tools felt solid and real in his hands, a comforting contrast to the phantom world they had just walked through. He wedged the tip of the bar into the seam and put his weight into it. Metal groaned in protest. Rust and concrete dust rained down. With a final, sharp crack, the plate popped loose, revealing a dark cavity filled with thick, corroded cables and a series of busbars.
— There, — he grunted, pointing with the bar. — Emergency battery lead. If it still has a charge, I can create a power loop.
He worked with a focused, economical precision. He stripped the insulation from two thick cables with a practiced motion, exposing the dull copper beneath. He clipped leads from his diagnostic kit, his flesh-and-blood fingers moving as deftly as his cybernetic ones. It was a delicate operation, a piece of field surgery on a dead machine. He was trying to trick the system, to convince the door’s ancient logic that a valid command had been issued.
He made the final connection. A shower of blue-white sparks erupted from the junction box, and the sharp, clean smell of ozone cut through the dusty air. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, a deep groan echoed from within the wall, the sound of immense, sleeping gears turning for the first time in centuries. Slowly, painfully, the massive blast door shuddered and began to slide sideways. It stopped after opening a gap of only three feet, its movement grinding to a halt with a final, metallic sigh. It was enough.
They slipped through the gap into the darkness beyond. The air inside was cold and stale, thick with the smell of profound decay and dust that had not been disturbed for generations. The door had taken its own price; the diagnostic kit’s primary battery was drained, its indicator light dark.
They stood in the echoing dark, the hum of the Archive louder now, a constant, oppressive presence.
— Your ghosts got us through the courtyard, — Rhys said, his voice low.
— Your machine opened the door, — Nysa replied.
It was a simple statement of fact, but it was more than that. It was an admission of mutual dependence, a truth that made them heretics to both of their worlds. A Compact Engineer would never trust the senses of a Chorus oracle. A Chorus shaman would never rely on the cold logic of a machine. But here, in the ruins, their combined skills were the only thing that worked. Their alliance was not just a truce; it was a new and functioning system, born of the failure of the old ones.
They moved deeper into the Archive, their footsteps muffled by the thick layer of dust on the floor. They were in a vast, cavernous space, a receiving bay or a vehicle depot. The skeletons of strange, pre-Fall machines loomed in the darkness, their shapes unfamiliar and alien. They were looking for a way down, a path into the sealed, subterranean levels where the true secrets were kept.
Rhys saw it first. His eyes, trained to spot structural details and maintenance access points, picked it out of the gloom. It was a heavy service hatch set flush with the floor, its edges outlined by a faint layer of less-disturbed dust. A series of pre-Fall engineering symbols were stamped into its surface, a language of function and flow that he understood instinctively. It was a path for technicians, not for soldiers or scientists. It was a way in.
As he knelt to examine the manual locking wheel, Nysa went still. She looked down at the hatch, but her gaze seemed to pass through the thick metal. The hum of the Archive was a constant pressure, but beneath it, she could now feel something else. It was not the chaotic, screaming static of the Glass Echoes. It was a single, steady, and impossibly ancient consciousness. It was the feeling of being watched.
The air from the dark shaft below smelled of cold, sterile metal and dust that had not moved in a century. A single drop of condensation, gathering on a corroded pipe overhead, fell and struck the hatch with a sound that was unnaturally loud in the profound silence.
