The Kausal Compass had led him here, to a wound in the continental shelf off the coast of what was once Norway. The submerged pre-war bunker was a black gash in the sonar return, a place the world had agreed to forget. His submersible, a matte-black RosNova dart, disengaged with a barely audible hiss, leaving him floating in the crushing dark. His objective was inside: a data fragment, another piece of Elina Petrova’s fractured legacy.
He pushed through the jagged breach in the bunker’s hull, his suit’s lamps cutting a cone of white through the swirling silt. The water was five degrees Celsius, a cold that seeped through the suit’s insulation as a persistent pressure. Inside, the air was thin, a recycled ghost tasting of brine and rust. Water, black and still, covered the grated floor to his knees, a perfect mirror for the few emergency lights that still flickered on the ceiling, their glow weak and intermittent. Structural integrity registered at 75%, a number that felt optimistic.
He moved down a corridor of weeping ferroconcrete, the sound of his boots sloshing through the water the only break in the profound silence. The place was a tomb, but not an empty one. His light swept across the far wall of a central chamber and landed on a massive disc of carved basalt, ten meters in diameter. The ritual calendar. It was not art. The glyphs were a form of hardened data storage, a dead language of pure causality that predated the Memory Wars. At its center, a small, recessed slot was visible. The data fragment was there.
On his way toward it, he passed a security station. A single chair, its synth-leather cracked and peeling. A console thick with a decade of settled dust. The space where a guard should have been was wrong. It was not empty. It was a hole.
His Ghost-Sight, the innate ability he never spoke of, flared without his command. It was a man-shaped patch of absolute nothing, a void that absorbed the beam of his lamp. It radiated a cold that had nothing to do with the water, a deep, ontological chill that his suit’s thermal sensors couldn’t even register. It was the cold of nonexistence, a place where a piece of the world’s script had been violently excised.
Around the edges of this void, Palimpsest Phantoms flickered. Not the quiet, looping ghosts of memory he was used to seeing in the undercity. These were different. They were violent, screaming bursts of static, fragments of the erased guard’s last seconds of existence being unwritten and re-written in a spastic, endless agony. A hand reaching for a weapon that wasn’t there. A mouth opening in a silent scream. A body twisting as its own physical laws came apart. They were not the echoes of a memory; they were the death throes of causality itself.
A sharp spike of pain lanced through his skull, a familiar consequence of witnessing such a profound wound in reality. The cognitive load made the edges of his vision crawl with static. He recognized the signature of the erasure, the clean, surgical horror of it. Oblivion Systems. This was Kosta’s work. This was the price of their philosophy of denial, a physical hole punched in the fabric of the world. He was not just a killer; he was an un-writer.
Sineus forced his gaze away, the act requiring a conscious effort of will. He had the truth of what his enemy could do. Now he had to focus on his own mission. He waded through the black water to the base of the calendar. His gloved fingers, nimble despite the cold, found the small, rectangular data chip nested in a perfectly machined slot in the ancient stone. He pried it loose with the tip of his combat knife.
The chip was cool and solid in his palm. A piece of truth, salvaged from a place of absolute erasure.
The moment the chip came free, the bunker groaned. It was not the sound of settling metal. It was the high, tearing shriek of physics breaking down. A main support beam near the guard station, its structural purpose partially unwritten by its proximity to the void Kosta had left, fractured with a deafening crack. Ferroconcrete dust exploded into the water.
Water erupted into the chamber from a new breach in the outer wall. The pressure change was a physical blow. The bunker’s integrity, already compromised, was now in freefall. The lie Kosta had left behind, the void where a man used to be, was now consuming the structure that housed it. Consequence, absolute and unavoidable.
Sineus turned and ran. The water, now at his waist, was a thick, pulling weight. The last of the emergency lights died, plunging the chamber into absolute darkness, broken only by the narrow, bouncing beam of his suit’s lamp. He navigated by the memory of the layout, a three-dimensional map in his mind, his feet finding purchase on the unseen floor. The roar of the incoming sea was deafening.
He reached the corridor, fighting a torrent that threatened to sweep him off his feet. The hull breach he had used to enter was now a gaping maw, the metal around it twisted and torn. He pushed through it, the force of the water trying to drag him back into the collapsing tomb.
Then he was outside, in the cold, silent dark of the deep ocean. The bunker imploded behind him, a muffled, concussive boom that sent a shockwave through the water, throwing him forward. The structure, and the void within it, was gone.
The silt kicked up by the collapse began to settle in the silent deep. His own breath was a loud, rhythmic rasp in the confines of his helmet.
