He left her in the reading nook, the ghost of her shocked face imprinted on the back of his eyes. The walk back to his quarters was a journey through a foreign country. The air in the Sunken Athenaeum, usually thick with the scent of damp earth and blooming flora, felt thin and sharp in his lungs. Water dripped from hanging mosses with a sound like clocks ticking out of sync. Every soft, glowing light from the greenhouse cloisters seemed to mock him, a placid beauty that had no place for the hard, ugly thing he had to do now. He had to lie to the law.
His room was a small, damp space carved from the living rock of the canal wall. It smelled of stone and wet roots. He ran a hand over the rough wall, the texture abrasive against his skin. This was the world he had chosen to protect, a world of feeling and chaos. And to protect it, he had to return to the cold, clean world of logic and deceit he had just tried to escape. He had to call his handler.
There was no terminal here, no greasy data-node bolted to the wall. The TAC had provided a single-use comms relay, a thin, black wafer that felt like a shard of frozen night. He placed it on the small, unadorned wooden table. For a moment, he just looked at it, a portal back to the system that owned him. His fingers found the obsidian charm in his pocket. It was smooth and cold, a useless stone that had somehow become the anchor for the choice he’d made. He was choosing a person over a ledger. He was choosing her. The price of that choice was a lie, and the lie had to be perfect. He pressed his thumb to the wafer.
The air shimmered. A column of sterile, white light solidified in the center of the room, sucking the warmth from the air. It resolved into the holographic form of Felix Hayes. The handler’s face was a flat, emotionless mask, his grey eyes focused on some point beyond Kaelen’s shoulder. The charcoal-grey of his TAC uniform seemed to absorb the room’s soft light, leaving only the cold projection.
— Report, — Felix said. The word was not a request. It was a command prompt.
Kaelen kept his own voice level, the same monotone he had used for years in tribunal reports. He was an auditor again. The data was all that mattered.
— I have acquired a file, — Kaelen began, choosing his words with the precision of a man defusing a bomb. He had to deliver a partial truth, a piece of the whole so convincing it would pass for the entire thing. — A contingency plan from a misfiled ledger. It details a proposal for the temporal annexation of the Veridia District.
He watched Felix’s projection for any flicker of reaction. There was none. The handler was a perfect mask of procedural calm. But the data-stream Kaelen could still feel, a phantom limb from his old life, showed a faint but distinct spike. A flicker of code that translated to approval. The TAC believed the bait was being taken. They thought their pawn was performing as designed.
— The authorization is a single Resonance Signature, — Kaelen continued, letting the information hang in the air. — Identified as belonging to the ranking manager, Seraphina Vey.
Another spike. Stronger this time. This was the kill shot. The clean, undeniable evidence the TAC needed to make its political move against the Seers. Kaelen felt a cold knot tighten in his stomach. He had just handed them the knife.
Felix’s voice cut through the silence, sharp and final.
— Leak it. Frame Vey. Your deadline is accelerated.
The words hit Kaelen like a physical blow. Accelerated. He had expected pressure, a demand for the file. He had not expected them to shorten the leash. The walls of the small room, which had felt merely damp and confining, now seemed to press in on him. The air grew thick. He was losing time. The price for his hesitation in the library, for closing that file, was the one resource he could not afford to spend.
He had to stall. He had to find a way out of the corner they had just backed him into. He fell back on the only thing he had left: the system’s own rules.
— The signature requires verification, — Kaelen said, his voice a careful instrument of professional doubt. It was a good lie, rooted in procedure. — A single authorization on a document of this magnitude is a procedural anomaly. For it to hold up in a tribunal, it needs corroboration. It could be a forgery.
He was using their own logic against them, arguing for the very rigor they claimed to embody. It was a desperate, calculated gambit. For a long, silent moment, Felix simply stared, his grey eyes unblinking. The silence stretched, and Kaelen could hear his own heart beating a frantic, panicked rhythm against his ribs. He could feel the cold weight of the obsidian charm in his pocket, a silent testament to the person he was trying to protect.
Then Felix spoke, and the last of Kaelen’s hope withered and died.
— Verification is not your objective, Auditor. — The use of his old title was a deliberate cruelty, a reminder of the status he was trying to win back. — Compliance is.
The handler’s face did not change, but the message was absolute. The TAC was not interested in truth. They were interested in a result. They had their weapon, and they wanted it fired. Now. The distinction between justice and politics, a line Kaelen had once believed was sacred, dissolved into nothing. He was not an auditor. He was an asset. And his compliance was required.
The connection was cut.
The column of white light dissolved, plunging the room back into a dim, watery gloom. The sudden silence was deafening. Kaelen stood alone in the dark, the handler’s final word echoing in the space where the hologram had been. Compliance.
He was trapped. The path back to his old life was clear, but it required him to sacrifice Seraphina. The path to protecting her required him to defy the TAC, an act that would trigger his own temporal repossession. Betray her, or betray the system and die. There were no other options. The move away from self-preservation had led him here, to a choice with no right answer, only a choice of how to lose. The red digits of his T-Minus, reflected faintly in a puddle of water on the stone floor, seemed to burn brighter, a hungry, insistent fire.
He sank onto the edge of the simple cot, his head in his hands. The smell of damp stone and rot filled his senses. He had failed. He had tried to play a game on his own terms and had been outmaneuvered at every turn. He was a pawn, and the board was closing in.
Then he heard it.
A sound so out of place in his world of harsh commands and imminent doom that it took him a moment to identify it. It was not the heavy, measured pounding of a Repo Auditor. It was not the crackle of a comms unit or the hiss of a failing temporal stabilizer.
It was a soft, hesitant knock at his door.
