The One Who Dreams In Shadow

It starts with a sound I can’t explain. Not a laugh, not really. More like the memory of one—half-caught in the walls, muffled under the floorboards, echoing inside my ribs when I lie awake too long. It’s not something you hear with your ears. It folds itself into breath, into the space between the tick of a second and the awareness of it. Some nights it feels like it’s coming from the corner of the room, just past the reach of the lamplight. Other times it feels like it’s leaking out of me, like maybe I swallowed it years ago and now it’s trying to get out.

I’ve never been able to trace where it begins. Not in any way that makes sense. I’ve torn apart old walls, checked ducts and vents, run sound tests at night with a handheld recorder that picks up nothing but static and my own shallow breathing. Nothing. I’ve slept on every side of the bed. Tried earplugs, white noise, whiskey. Still there. Sometimes I think I dreamed it first and the world just bent to match the sound. Other nights, I’m sure it’s real. Not just real, but intentional. It crawls into my thoughts when I least expect it—at grocery store checkouts, on subway platforms, in the brief hush before someone answers the phone. Sharp and familiar, like something I used to love before I forgot how.

There are things I remember without context. That’s what makes them dangerous. The white hallway that buzzed too loud. It wasn’t a fluorescent hum like in hospitals or old office buildings. It was tighter, higher-pitched, something engineered to sit just under the threshold of what a brain can tolerate. And the taste of copper behind my teeth—sharp, warm, unnatural. Not blood. Not exactly. More like something that should’ve been blood but wasn’t. Something trying to mimic it. I remember fingers twitching in a rhythm that didn’t match my heartbeat. Or anyone’s. They moved like they were keeping time with something older. Not music. A code.

I used to write these flashes down. Not in journals—on whatever was nearby. Receipts, scraps of cardboard, napkins I’d tear in half just to give the memory its own square. I convinced myself they were fragments of something bigger. That maybe I’d stumbled into someone else’s dream. Or maybe something was bleeding through into mine. I filled drawers with those scraps. At one point, I kept a shoebox under my bed labeled “REAL” in black ink. Like that meant anything.

I burned all those notebooks three years ago. Or was it four? I remember the matchstick slipping in my fingers and the paper catching too fast. The flame moved like it had somewhere to be. I watched the pages curl, words turning to smoke, trying to lift themselves into the air one last time before disintegrating. It should’ve felt like release. Instead, I watched the smoke crawl up my arm like a vein. I watched it vanish, and I didn’t feel lighter. I felt recorded.

And the words never stopped showing up. They just changed their clothes. I find them now in the margins of bills, in the cracks of the ceiling plaster, sometimes in the steam on the bathroom mirror. I’ll wake up to see something written in the condensation, fading before I can grab my phone. A phrase I don’t recognize. Or worse—a phrase I do. Once, I found the word remember carved into the soft wood of my desk, shallow and deliberate. I hadn’t touched the drawer in weeks.

There’s a silence now that scares me more than any sound ever did. It’s not peace. It’s not even quiet. It’s waiting. Like something enormous is holding its breath, just beyond the curve of my perception. It thickens in rooms that should feel safe. I feel it every time I look at an old photograph and can’t remember taking it. Even when I’m in it. Even when I’m smiling. I feel it every time I wake up in the wrong part of the house, blanket twisted around my legs, facing the door like I was standing guard. Every time someone uses my name with too much certainty.

I wish I could explain it better than that. But there are limits to language, and I think I’ve finally found the edge of mine. I know how that sounds. I know what it looks like on the page. But there are moments when language simply… folds. When a sentence can’t carry what a body knows. That’s where I live now. In the folds.

I’ve read accounts from places most people pretend don’t exist. Hidden archives. Declassified nightmares. Articles that vanish after one view. Audio clips that play backwards even when you don’t reverse them. There’s a pattern buried in all of it—something laced through our history like a second bloodstream. Faint, but undeniable once you feel it. I don’t know who drew it first, or why it looks so much like a double helix turned inside out, but I’ve felt it. I’ve walked it.

There’s a stretch of road in the southwest, unmarked on any current map, where the pavement hums if you walk barefoot at night. It sings—not with sound, but vibration. I’ve felt it hum beneath the soles of my feet when I take those roads the GPS won’t acknowledge. The ones the satellite forgets to see. I’ve seen people look up at me with that stuttering terror you only see in the second before the mind rewrites what it thinks it knows. They open their mouths, they nearly say something, and then it’s gone. Like someone flipped a switch mid-thought. Their faces go slack. Their eyes blink too slow.

None of them ever remember afterward. I always do.

Whatever this is, it wants to be remembered. Not understood. Not solved. Just held in someone’s head long enough to keep it alive. And I think that’s why it picked me.

Not because I’m special.

Because I was already cracked open.

I smelled jasmine and charred wood the night the dreams returned. The kind of smell that shouldn’t belong together. Like someone had taken sweetness and ruin and braided them into a rope, then hung it just above my pillow. The scent didn’t come from outside. The windows were closed. No incense, no neighbors. And I’d never kept jasmine in the house. I knew right then I wasn’t waking up from something—I was waking into it. Not fear, exactly. Just that sensation of having been hollowed out and filled back up with someone else’s ache.

I didn’t scream. I gasped. Not because I was scared. Because I knew. Deep in the space behind my ribs, where recognition lives without language. Something had been taken from me. Not stolen—not violently. Removed. Tenderly, like a memory held too long in the dark. I couldn’t say what it was. A name, maybe. A single word. Or maybe a moment. A gesture. I lay there tangled in the sheets, the ceiling fan ticking above like it was marking down seconds I didn’t own. The sweat along my back cooled fast, like it had already decided I’d failed some test I hadn’t studied for.

And behind my teeth—still now—there’s this syllable that never quite arrives. It’s not mine, but it should be. Something that once belonged in my mouth like breath. I try to remember it every night. Try to lure it forward with silence. With stillness. With questions. It won’t come. But it won’t leave either.

This isn’t about ghosts. I’ve said that out loud more than once, mostly to remind myself. Because ghosts are manageable. They’ve got rituals, rules, warnings. They behave, more or less. They’re echoes. But this—whatever this is—it’s not interested in being remembered that way. It eats rules like candy. It chews through grief and structure and meaning until all that’s left is the quiet certainty that something is wrong with the architecture of your life. Like waking up to find your bed’s in a different corner, or the light switch is on the wrong wall. Tiny things. But they add up. They always add up.

It eats memories. Not with teeth, but with patience. And when it’s done, it doesn’t leave a hole—it leaves a shape. A feeling. That thinned-out hollowness where you’re supposed to be. And people walk around with it every day, never realizing they’ve been edited. Half-smiling. Laughing at the right moments. But if you look close, their joy has seams. I’ve felt it happen. Watched someone go from whole to wrong in the space of a blink. Like the light changed in their head, and they forgot what color it used to be.

I’ve found its fingerprints, but only in places where time buckles. Old hospitals—ones that were never officially closed but somehow stopped being listed on any registry. I’ve stood in a hallway where the clocks all ran counter to each other, like they couldn’t agree on what hour they were surviving. In the Bonneville flats, there’s a spot so flat your voice bends backward. My boots sank into salt that hissed like static. Something was under that desert, and it was listening. And in Algeria, I spent two days in a cave with no ceiling. Just sky where there should’ve been stone. The deeper you go, the higher the wind. That’s where I first heard the laugh again.

It’s always there, layered under the world. Like it lives just beneath the crust of things. Never loud. Never singular. Just that ripple of sound, like children giggling in a room you haven’t opened yet. Always overlapping itself, always coming from somewhere too far down to reach. I’ve tried to record it. The files come out blank, or corrupted, or worse—echoing with my own voice, saying things I swear I’ve never said.

This isn’t history. It’s still happening. I know that now. This isn’t an aftermath. It’s a method. Something deliberate. Strategic. I don’t think it hates us. I don’t think it loves us either. It’s interested. That’s worse.

Whatever’s behind this—it peels people open. Not all at once. It starts at the edges. No blood, no panic. Just warmth that starts to fade. That’s what survivors always say. They felt less warm. And not like a fever breaking. Like something good left the room and forgot to close the door.

I’ve spoken with some of them. Not many. They don’t last long. I met one man in Berlin who hadn’t slept for twelve days. Said if he closed his eyes, she’d come back. “She doesn’t walk,” he told me. “She unfolds.” He said it like a prayer. I watched him cry while smiling, shaking my hand like I’d done him a kindness just by showing up. That smile—I’ll never forget it. Like his face didn’t belong to his body anymore. Like he wasn’t sure what expressions were for.

There was a woman.

I don’t know her name. Not yet. But I know her shape better than I know my own. She’s appeared in sketches I’ve found in convent libraries, in field notebooks buried in government attics, in margins of letters from the 1600s. Always the same gaze. That slight angle of the jaw, the softness beneath her eye, the curl of her bottom lip like she knows something kind and cruel at once. Sometimes her hair changes—coiled tight, shaved to the scalp, silver with age. But it’s always her. I feel it in my teeth when I look too long.

She’s the key. If there is one. I don’t think she’s hiding. I think she’s waiting. Watching, maybe. To see who notices. To see who makes it far enough to write this down. To ask the wrong questions in the right tone. I think she’s always been watching.

Or maybe—just maybe—she’s waiting for someone like me to get close enough to—

CHAPTER 1

She enters with the crowd. Not through it. With it. Her steps fold into the greater pattern without hesitation, the same way a whisper finds space inside a roar. No one notices her. That’s the point. That’s the art. Her hips shift in time with the shoulder ahead of her, the woman in the green jacket who doesn’t know she’s part of the rhythm being borrowed. The man behind her will forget her as soon as she rounds the pillar. The old couple by the escalator will never recall that someone passed between them like a shadow that didn’t stretch quite right. The trick isn’t invisibility. It’s rhythm. She doesn’t vanish. She syncs.

Her left hand grazes the fold of her coat, fingertip brushing against the inside seam where the fabric has started to fray. Not from neglect, but use. Over time, even the best disguises show signs of belief. The other hand—loose, relaxed—dangles just low enough to appear vulnerable but never quite soft. Her knuckles know the weight of pressure points and silence. She walks like a woman who’s met gods and decided they weren’t worth worshiping. Her gait neither hurried nor languid. A steady pulse. People sense it and step aside without knowing why.

The terminal smells wrong. Not in any sharp, alarming way—just off enough to nudge something primal. Layers of old gum and linoleum wax grind against floral ghosts, the kind sprayed too hard onto necks before quick goodbyes. Over it all floats the ancient scent of mechanical air—processed, filtered, fake. She tastes it in the back of her throat, past the static that lives under her tongue. It reminds her of elevators in buildings that no longer exist. Of underground places with no clocks. Of waiting rooms where the waiting never ends.

Footsteps. Always the footsteps. That’s the language of places like this. She doesn’t just hear them—she listens to the conversation between tile and sole. A thousand little betrayals offered up with each step. That man, the one with the duffel bag and urgent shoulders, he’s lying to someone. She catches his muttered confession into the receiver—“I’ll be there soon”—but the rhythm of his shoes says otherwise. The woman ten paces back, laughing too hard at nothing, breathes through her teeth like the smile hurts. To her left, a security guard adjusts his belt at the same moment his gaze flickers toward a woman in too much eyeliner. It’s all catalogued. Stored. Filed away. Her mind is a library with no doors.

The hum of movement surrounds her. It crackles against her skin like old radio fuzz. Every breath she takes is tuned to the frequency of the space. She filters it, not consciously—more like how you blink without thinking. It’s reflex, not ritual. But there’s tension in her gut, something rising slow. Not hunger. Not fear. It’s older. A low ache, like the bones of her were asking for something they couldn’t quite articulate. A draw. A need. The echo of an appetite she was born into but didn’t name until she learned what laughter felt like before it was hers.

There are children nearby. She doesn’t look. Not directly. Children have a habit of noticing things their parents don’t—especially things that shouldn’t be wrapped in human skin. One of them, small enough to still believe in monsters, tugs at a father’s coat and whispers something sharp enough to draw a flicker of tension into the man’s spine. But the father never turns his head. Never breaks pace. The boy stares, though. She feels it—a thread pulling between them, taut and curious. She keeps walking. Her face doesn’t twitch. Her steps stay clean. But her pulse ticks up. Just enough to mark it.

When she finally sits, it’s with precision. The bench groans faintly beneath her, warm from the previous occupant, some woman who left behind the faintest trace of citrus and defeat. She crosses her legs at the ankle, not the knee, hands folding into her lap with the weight of someone prepared to wait as long as necessary. The screen above her spits out updates in colors that don’t belong on skin. Arrivals. Delays. Cities she’s memorized in reverse, not because she’s sentimental but because each name has echoed once in someone’s final breath.

Around her, the world moves on. Lovers part with that hushed intensity people mistake for importance. A child cries because of a vending machine betrayal. A businessman drops his ticket, stoops to grab it, and nearly remembers something before shaking it off. No one sees her. They pass within feet of her body, unaware of the weight pressing out from her skin like a second gravity. If she reached out, she could touch any of them. Could take what they’re not even guarding. But not yet.

Her eyes stay half-lidded, heavy-lashed, unreadable. She’s watching—but not in the way people think of watching. She’s measuring. She’s listening to absence. The way people cough when they forget themselves. The sound of a footstep that should’ve landed harder than it did. The skip in a laugh that means it wasn’t real. There’s an entire grammar in the negative space between sounds, and she’s fluent in it.

Today, the air feels different. Denser. Like something in it wants out. There’s a pressure behind her molars, a humming in her spine, the faint metallic buzz she associates with dreams gone stale. And there’s laughter in the mix—not heard, not yet. But close. It hangs like pollen before spring, weightless and electric, caught in the mouths of people who don’t know what they’re about to say. She tastes it. Bitter and bright. The kind of laughter that hasn’t decided if it’s joy or warning.

She doesn’t reach for it. Not here. Not yet. Let it build. Let it fill the space the way steam fills a room before something shatters. She’s patient. Always has been. That’s the first rule. Let them come to you. Let the resonance find its center. When they’re ready to laugh, they’ll open wide—and that’s when she feeds.

But today, something is off. Not wrong, just… nearer. Something old brushing the edge of her perception like a name she once wore on someone else’s tongue. She closes her eyes. Breathes in. Holds it.

And waits.

A woman sits beside her. Not slowly, not cautiously—just drops into the seat like it belongs to her, like the world’s been making room for her all day and this spot happens to be where the invitation led. It’s not rude, not quite. She doesn’t brush against her or lean too close. But still, she’s in range. Within breath. Within thought. One of those people who treats shared space like it’s theirs by default, as if nothing with teeth or purpose would ever waste time breathing this same recycled air. And that assumption, that blind comfort in proximity, presses hard against the matriarch’s skin in all the wrong places.

She doesn’t look at her. Doesn’t shift. Keeps her face where it was—eyes locked on the digital arrivals board like it holds a secret no one else has cracked. But inside, her muscles seize. Not the full freeze. Just a whisper. An echo of older instincts that haven’t dulled with time, no matter how many subway benches or park benches or courtroom benches she’s learned to look harmless on. The breath that comes next tastes metallic. She doesn’t blink. But she feels it. The tensing. That quiet alarm behind the sternum, old as childhood, older than language. A flash of memory darts out before she can stop it: calm voices with calculated tone, the scrape of leather on tile, gloved hands that smiled before they grabbed.

She pushes it down. Swallows it into the center of herself. She’s practiced at this—coiling the reflex back into its cage, layering over it with breath and posture and the illusion of calm. But the memory leaves fingerprints as it goes. Cold stone beneath bare feet. Not cold like ice, but the kind of cold that tells you nothing alive built the place you were standing in. The kind of cold that presses up through your soles like a warning, like something dead but listening. She remembers the blood too—not her own, never her own, though she felt every drop. It had pooled around her toes that first night, sharp and hot, gone slick between steps. She didn’t flinch then either. The others had. One slipped. One froze entirely. One whispered a name into the dark and wouldn’t stop.

Silence had pressed in thick around them. Not the silence of absence. Not a peaceful hush. This was presence—the kind of silence that knows your shape and holds its breath to match yours. She hadn’t breathed right for weeks after the escape. Her lungs had forgotten how. Every inhale was too sharp, too full of sky, too bright. Light had felt hostile. Not blinding—just loud. It painted their skin in shades they didn’t recognize. One of the others—his name doesn’t matter, not anymore—had thrown up under the twisted tree at the hill’s edge. Another girl had curled into herself and wept without sound, rocking like the motion would erase what they’d left behind. No one asked questions. Not then. Not about the place. Not about what they were. Some truths don’t need breath to survive.

And it wasn’t until later—weeks? months?—that they saw real children for the first time. Not the sort from inside. Not the ones shaped by hands they never saw. No, these were wild. Bright. Soft. Loud. Their skin held no bruises. Their eyes held no calculations. Just want. That first sight was unbearable. Unfair. The matriarch remembers standing behind a row of shopping carts, watching a little girl laugh so hard her gum fell out. That sound cracked something inside her. She’d reached for it, barely realizing. Not to harm. Just to touch that kind of softness. That unscarred joy. But even then she knew—touching was the fastest way to ruin it.

That ache hasn’t faded. It settled into her bones like a second marrow. It shaped how she walks, how she speaks, how she chooses which streets to turn down. It sculpted the face she wears in places like this—neutral, gentle, maybe a little tired. The kind of face no one watches for too long. And she’s kept it that way. Because laughter, real laughter, unearned and loose in the wild? That kind of thing is sacred. And dangerous. And too easy to take.

Beside her, the woman coughs. Not violently. Just a dry scrape of air at the back of the throat. The kind of sound you don’t apologize for. The kind that slips out of people who’ve spent too long swallowing everything else. The matriarch lets her eyes flicker left—not enough to invite conversation, just enough to register shape. Blonde. Hair pulled back into something that used to be neat. Shoulders hunched in the defeated way of someone carrying too many invisible bags. Hands tight around a purse, white-knuckled. She’s got that look, the one that says this is the last stop before a choice no one’s going to believe was fair. The matriarch turns her gaze forward again. This woman is not her concern.

And still—it happens.

Something shifts. It doesn’t creep. It blooms. A thread of joy, too clean to belong here, rises like steam from a sidewalk. It doesn’t match the atmosphere. Doesn’t match the woman. Doesn’t match anything. But it’s real. Thick and warm and close enough to taste. Her head lifts just slightly, unbidden. There, across the concourse near the newsstand, a knot of people huddle around a phone. One of them laughs. A good, hard laugh. That bright, accidental kind that’s too loud for politeness but too pure to be shameful.

And the matriarch feels it. The pull. It hits low, behind the ribs. Not hunger. Not quite. More like recognition. Like a song you forgot was yours until someone else hums the tune. Her fingers twitch once in her lap. Her spine straightens a fraction. Her jaw clenches—not in anger, but in reflex. The sound fills her head. Not the volume. The feel of it. It pushes into her chest like warm hands. She wants to lean. Just an inch. Just enough to draw it in. Just enough to feed the ache that’s been sitting quiet all day, waiting for this.

But she doesn’t.

She stays still. Breath steady. Expression loose. She closes every door inside her, one by one. Bottles the reaction like lightning in a glass. Not here. Not now. Not in front of the blonde woman with the broken bag and tired cough. Not where anyone might see her slip.

She swallows the feeling. It goes down rough. Jagged. Like eating a secret. She stays smiling. Stays present. Stays hidden.

And waits.

CHAPTER 2

The lights in the archive room flicker again, just like they always do. Not a wild strobe or a theatrical flash, but a soft, sickly hesitation—the kind that feels personal. Like the electricity’s not sure it wants to be here either. He tells himself it’s voltage. A tired circuit. Dust on copper. Old wiring threaded through stone that remembers violence too vividly to ever rest. But there’s a part of him—tight and quiet and unwelcome—that doesn’t buy the explanation. Not really. Rome has always been more corpse than city. Streets paved with centuries of skin, prayers whispered over bones no one dared dig too deep for. Maybe it’s just the air in here. Too still, too old. It holds onto sound longer than it should. He exhales anyway. Tells himself not to look over his shoulder. He doesn’t.

His fingers don’t shake, though they should. They rest on the edge of the desk, the bone at the heel of his palm pressed flat against the smooth glass top like he’s anchoring himself to the present. He clicks the file open. The screen blooms to life—not suddenly, not brightly. Just opens like a lid you didn’t know was sealed. The monitor casts its usual glow, a blue that’s too cool for human skin, too soft for the kind of truth it holds. The video loads with the kind of silence that doesn’t feel accidental. Like it’s making space for something else.

She’s already there when it begins. Sitting. Not posing. Not aware of the camera in the usual way suspects or witnesses are. No tics. No shifting in her seat. No hair-tucking, no throat-clearing. Just… there. Present. Completely and without apology. She looks like someone you’ve passed a thousand times in airports, in checkout lines, on the steps of museums. Civilian blandness. Not forgettable exactly—just unmarked. But his stomach tightens. Hard. Immediate. He leans closer without meaning to. It’s not what she’s doing. It’s what no one around her is doing. No eye contact. No shared laughter. No accidental brushes. The people in her radius are reacting like planets grazing the edge of a black hole—subtle, off-path, intuitively repelled.

He slows the footage. Watches her breathe. Inhale, slow. Deep. Her eyes aren’t fixed on anything visible. She’s tasting the room. That’s the only way he can describe it. She doesn’t blink often. Her stillness isn’t dramatic—it’s biological. Like she’s holding in heat. Her posture is exactly what the oldest files described. Not military. Not regal. It’s something else. Something that doesn’t translate easily into words humans were meant to use.

His thumb hovers near the timestamp controls, and the next blink on-screen ticks the clock forward by ten seconds. She still hasn’t moved. The civilians around her continue to orbit, none aware that something ancient is sitting six feet away calculating how they feel before they even feel it. He feels sick. Not nauseous. Just displaced. Like the shape of the room has changed and he’s the last to notice.

He opens the internal tag list. It’s classified, obviously, but not cleanly. Someone’s fought to keep it visible—buried three levels down instead of six. The file name is marked “Category Black.” A placeholder. A warning. It’s what they write when they don’t want to admit which documents survived the first purge. He knows what that means. The legacy files. The ones too old to scan, too dangerous to trust to digital. The ones the Custodia Veritatis smuggled out of Ethiopia before the world’s eyes got too big for its mouth. The ones built from the silence between scripture and rumor. This one came with a red-coded lineage marker: (Alchemical Deviant, Gestational Origin, Class: Extincted—Dallol Variant).

His jaw clenches. That last phrase always lands like a punch. Dallol. He’s read the recovered fieldwork. What was left of it. Ten children. Ten experiments. Ten graves. Except not all of them were filled. And this—this one—they tagged her with the match. Full genomic alignment. No degradation. He doesn’t say the word. No one does anymore. Not after what happened in Geneva. But it breathes between his thoughts anyway. Oneirophage. It tastes like blood and copper.

He rewinds. Plays the moment again when the child drops the toy. Watches her eyes flick—not wide, not startled, just precise. Preemptive. Calculating resonance before it even strikes the air. Not looking at the child. Looking through the sound. He jots it in shorthand: Mirroring intact. No decay. Sublayer resonance probable. He doesn’t write the next line, though it hangs heavy behind his teeth: She’s aware of the surveillance. She knows. Somehow. She always knows.

The knock lands sharp against the glass wall. One-two. Just enough to register as intentional. He pauses the feed, his hand resting on the mouse like it might freeze time along with the image. Behind him, a gray jacket waits—internal clerk. Young. Nervous. Lips pressed too tight, like the weight of what they’ve been reading has finally crossed the bone. The folder in their hand is plain. Unlabeled. Another warning. He stands. Nods once. Takes it gently. Doesn’t open it. He doesn’t need to.

He knows exactly whose eyes will be staring back at him from the first page.

He slides the folder an inch farther across the desk, like distance will dilute whatever’s already wormed into his bloodstream. The paper hums faintly under his fingertips, too light to be static, too alive to be dust. Somewhere in the back of his skull, a familiar migraine gathers itself for later—a small, inevitable reckoning. His eyes blur over the Vatican seal again. Always the same cruciform design, always inked with that dried-blood red they pretend is just pigment. But this one’s lighter than usual, like whoever printed it wasn’t entirely sure it should exist.

He leans back and exhales through his nose, slow and shallow. His knuckles are white where they rest against the arm of the chair, though he hasn’t noticed. His body knows before he does, before the rest of him can catch up to the fact that what he’s holding isn’t just a report. It’s a fault line. And someone—probably someone older than him, higher than him, crueler than him—has decided it should crack open on his watch. He flips back to the image with the thermal distortion. That impossible, wrong-shaped flare still radiating from her chest. Like the heat was being devoured mid-exit. Not cooled. Consumed.

He’d seen a field agent lose their mind over less. Fifteen years ago. A deep-dive in Dakar. No footage ever made it out, but there’d been sketches in the after-action report. Crude, shaking hand. Circles around mouths wide open in sleep. Circles over eyes that never closed again. The page had been filed under CLASS-GHOST / MNEMOTACTILE INTERFERENCE, which wasn’t even a real category until the Vatican made it one that week. He remembers it because the words “possible memory graft” were scratched in the margin beside the crude sketch of a woman’s silhouette—head tilted, palms open. Exactly like this.

He turns the folder sideways, tilts it toward the overhead fluorescents, as if there might be a watermark only guilt can reveal. There isn’t. Just the same ghost of an old pen stroke across the bottom of the earlier page, looping back through his vision like it wants to be re-read: She walked out of Aevum. Not limping. Not lost. Whole. The kind of note you write when you’re not afraid of dying, but of being believed. He swallows, but his throat’s dry enough that it clicks audibly. He tries not to wince at the sound.

The room feels thinner now. Like it’s shedding layers he didn’t know it had. That pressure again—metallic, like licking copper, like tasting someone else’s blood through a screen. He’d thought it a trick of stress the first time. Some lingering echo from induction training. But no. It’s her. Still. Not even here, and still managing to take up space in the parts of his mind that language doesn’t reach. And what’s worse—he wants to see her. Not just know more. See. That’s how it gets in, he thinks. Not as a threat. As a need.

There’s a buzz in the hallway—low, conversational static. Somewhere between a prayer and a warning. He doesn’t move. Doesn’t want to invite questions, or worse, attention. A shadow slips past the frosted glass. Not a cardinal. He recognizes the gait—just another late archivist pacing off sleep. But it’s enough to snap him out of it. He refocuses. Back on the file. Back on the heatmap. There, in the corner: the signature anomaly he never stopped dreaming about. BERF displacement. Bioelectromagnetic resonance fields shouldn’t invert. And they sure as hell shouldn’t harmonize across species barriers.

He taps his pen against the corner of the page. Once. Twice. Three times. Then he draws a tiny, precise circle around the spike in the scan. Not because it adds anything. But because he needs to feel like he’s doing something to hold this moment down. To mark it before someone else decides he never saw it at all. He flips forward—appendix pages, field logs, three anonymous audio transcripts scrubbed to hell and labeled only by day code and region. But one of the voices. He knows it. Not the words—the cadence. That barely-suppressed awe wrapped in terror. A voice trying not to call what it saw a miracle.

The hair on his arms rises before he even hears it again.

“…didn’t touch the boy. Just looked at him. And it was like—like he forgot why he was crying. I didn’t know you could unmake sadness like that. I didn’t know that was allowed.”

He stops the recording. Lets the silence stretch. His pulse is in his neck now, not from fear, exactly. From a kind of psychic recoil. The thing that turns faith into dread. That voice came from a Custodia witness. Not a civilian. Not some street-washed clairvoyant with a gift and a diary. One of theirs.Someone with the gloves. With the burns.

And they sounded grateful.

He closes the folder. Not because he’s finished. Because he’s reached the edge of where this version of himself can go. Anything beyond this page belongs to a man who no longer works here. Not in the ways that matter. He lets his hand rest flat on the surface of the folder. Cold sweat coats the back of his neck. The itch to destroy it is almost chemical. Just tear it in half. Swallow the pieces. Pretend it was never real. But he doesn’t move. Because policy says destroy the copies, not the proof.

Behind him, the archive system resets with a faint whir, as though impatient to be forgotten. He doesn’t turn around. Instead, he whispers the name under his breath. Just once. Not aloud, not really—just enough to feel it vibrate against the back of his teeth.

Aevum.

And for the first time in years, the echo answers back.

CHAPTER 3

The name lingers in the air long after she speaks it, fading not like breath, but like a thread stretched too thin, snapping in the heat. She doesn’t repeat it. Doesn’t have to. It’s already sinking back down where it came from—into that place where language dies before it forms, where memory stops pretending it’s linear. The shower water hisses louder, like it’s trying to drown out what she just gave voice to, but it’s too late. The name has teeth now. She feels it nipping at the back of her thoughts even as her forehead presses against the tile. The ache behind her ribs intensifies, not pain exactly, but recognition. The kind that makes your blood feel too rich, like it’s holding someone else’s heat.

She rolls her neck slowly, vertebrae clicking like old tumblers trying to realign. Beneath her hands, the wall stays solid, but her balance shifts for a second. She doesn’t stumble. She never stumbles. But the floor feels farther away than it should. This happens sometimes, after too much restraint. When the laughter stays unharvested, when the ache goes unmet. It builds. Warps the edges of things. The tiles don’t blur, exactly, but they ripple—not visually, not in the way eyes can catch, but deep in the pressure of the room. That shift where spatial logic hiccups and then pretends nothing happened. The Paravest pulses once, a low, curling pulse that doesn’t ask—it reminds. She’s not empty yet, but she’s close.

By the time she steps out, the mirror is unreadable. A soft wall of condensation where a face should be. She doesn’t wipe it clean. Doesn’t need to. She knows what she’d see, and the water doesn’t lie. It distorts, yes. But it doesn’t fabricate. Just bends the truth until it’s more digestible. A kindness, really. One of the last this world has to offer. She reaches for the towel, wraps it around her torso with the same precision she used to fold her coat, and walks barefoot across the chilled wood floor. The ache is sharper now, knotted somewhere just below her clavicle, spreading slowly outward in small spirals. Not yet dangerous. But aware. Which is worse.

She dresses without ceremony. No ritual, no vanity. The clothes are plain—dark, soft, functional. She moves through the motions like someone rehearsing for a life she doesn’t quite believe in. The windows are closed, curtains drawn. A single lamp glows by the bed, casting long shadows against the uneven plaster walls. The room smells faintly of lavender and wax, but beneath that, there’s something older. Earthier. The trace of fire long since burned out. She sits on the edge of the mattress and exhales through her nose. Her fingers rest lightly on her thigh, not shaking, but not still. The silence around her shifts again.

Then—

Laughter. Not inside. Outside.

Her head turns before she registers moving. It’s faint, three layers away—through the wall, down the hall, probably on the street—but it cuts clean. Not drunk. Not cruel. Just sudden. Startled. That breathless kind that spills out of a person before they can decide if it’s appropriate. It hits her like wind. A full-body inhale from a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. The ache inside her snaps taut, vibrating like a pulled wire, and the Paravest surges once, twice, then stills. She doesn’t stand. She doesn’t need to. That much laughter, that specific resonance, it won’t sustain her yet, but it touchesher. And that’s enough to change the air in the room.

She closes her eyes and lets her awareness skim outward, soft and slow. No hunting, no reach. Just listening. That deep-listening—the kind the old ones used, back before they knew what they were. Before the terminology came. Before the classifications. When it was just survival and joy and the narrow bridge between them. Her breath matches the laughter’s echo as it fades. And then the silence returns, but altered. Loosened. As if the world forgot to tighten its grip on her.

She opens her eyes again. Blinks once.

“Too soon,” she murmurs, voice dry.

Not to herself. She doesn’t believe in that habit. It’s never just herself. Not when you’re built to echo others. Her voice carries further than it should in a room like this. The sound isn’t amplified—it’s acknowledged. That’s the difference. The architecture remembers. She rubs the back of her neck, where the vertebrae feel unusually warm. A faint tingling begins at the base of her skull. Residual trace. Someone nearby just felt a memory they couldn’t place. She knows the flavor of it. She seeded it, whether she meant to or not.

That’s the risk of staying too long in one city. The resonance builds. Not just in people, but in place. Structures. Streets. Even the weather. Cities remember. They metabolize presence like flesh does a wound—scar or scab or echo, depending on how clean the incision. This city is starting to scar. She should move on. Wait out the heat somewhere with fewer eyes. But something is anchoring her here. Not physically. Narratively. There’s a pattern coalescing. And that name—Cael—it’s pulling at the thread.

She reaches under the bed for the black case. Not locked. Not warded. Just weighted. She opens it slowly, like a ritual, though she denies herself any reverence. Inside: a small device that shouldn’t exist, at least not in any record still circulating through official channels. A compact dial-tuner, relic tech, pre-Vatican Excision. She flips it on. The screen flickers. A low hum crawls into the base of her skull. She tunes it by instinct—left-right-left again—until the pattern emerges: low frequency BERF feedback. Not active. Residual. Someone is trailing her wake. Carefully.

Her fingers tighten on the dial. Her mouth hardens. They’ll be close. Within twenty-four hours, max. The only question now is: Which version of them this time?

She clicks the device off, places it back into the case, and rises to her feet with a slow roll of her spine. Not tense. Not relaxed. Just ready. The ache has lessened. But it’s only deferred. Soon, someone will laugh again. And this time, it’ll be closer. This time, it’ll be enough.

The ache doesn’t retreat so much as change shape—blunting at the edges, slipping deeper beneath the muscle like it’s looking for softer ground. She exhales and lets the name roll through her again, this time without sound. Just the movement of the mouth, the memory of syllables that once tasted like sunlight. Cael. Even now, it sits differently in her body than any other name. She’s spoken thousands—borrowed, stolen, forgotten—but that one never belonged to the world. It belonged to him. Or maybe to whatever they were before the world forced them into names at all.

The water slows to a trickle. She lets it finish without turning the knob, listens to the final drops knock hollowly against the floor. Her fingers are pale, wrinkled, but steady. She steps out, wraps the towel again around her frame, and catches her own eyes in the mirror this time. No blur. No fog. Just her. And not her. There’s still a part of her that expects to see both of them there—reflected like they used to be, one in each other’s shoulders, mouth, glance. In the old days, when the Paravest would flare in time with his heartbeat, not hers. When they could sit pressed back to back and hum the same sound without ever deciding on a key.

That was before the silence. Before the breach in their shared thread.

She dries her face and walks barefoot across the chilled wood floor again, slower this time. Not careful—there’s no danger here—but reverent, in her own quiet way. She picks up the folded coat she’d laid on the armchair earlier and presses her fingers into the collar seam. The fabric gives just enough to remind her it’s real. That she is still here. That time hasn’t eaten everything. There’s a small tear hidden in the lining where a clasp used to be—an emergency extraction tag, long since cut. He’d sewn it in with a bit of wire from the observation grid. She hadn’t asked. He’d done it anyway. “In case,” he’d said. She never needed to ask what he meant.

She turns away from the chair. Walks toward the nightstand. Picks up the old photo tucked behind the lamp base, the one she keeps even though it doesn’t show him. No face. Just shadow. An overexposed smear of light from one of the rare surface days, a vague outline with too-long limbs and a bent wrist caught mid-gesture. It was his, though. She remembers the gesture—how he’d move like he was always mid-sentence, like the air itself was responding to his presence. He never walked anywhere, he moved through it. Like story through a dream.

“Still chasing echoes,” she whispers, thumbing the edge of the photo until the skin around her nail flakes. “You bastard.”

She doesn’t say it with anger. Just fact. If he’s alive—if there’s anything left of that link hiding in the folds of the world—then he’s not running. Not from her. Not from the past. But toward something. And it burns her a little to admit it, but she wants to know what that something is. Not because she needs him back. That ship sank in a fire years ago. No, it’s something else now. It’s about alignment. Legacy. Truth. If he’s still tethered to the same pattern that shaped them both, then she isn’t wandering. She’s being drawn. And if he’s gone—truly gone—then she needs to feel that absence as an ending, not a wound.

The ache pulses again.

She sets the photo down carefully, turns off the lamp, and crouches beside the bed. From beneath the frame, she pulls out another case—thinner than the black one, made of matte steel, unmarked except for a tiny pinprick of glass embedded in the clasp. She presses her thumb to the sensor. It opens with a soft sigh.

Inside: a strip of preserved fabric, dark and stiff with age. A single wire curled like a fossil. And one glass shard, no bigger than a fingernail, humming faintly with an echo signature she hasn’t been able to decipher in over a decade.

It’s the only physical evidence she has that he survived the fall.

That night—what they called the unraveling—wasn’t documented. Not properly. Not by anyone who lived through it. The surveillance systems in Aevum’s Core didn’t fail. They blinded themselves. She knows this. She felt the shiver of retreat across the internal net before the cameras went dark. Something had entered the corridor—or had been made inside it—and the network, designed to observe everything, chose not to. Only three artifacts survived the escape. These. These fragments. And none of them belonged to her.

“Coward,” she says, voice softer now. “You still think I needed saving.”

She lifts the glass between two fingers, holds it up to the moonlight bleeding between the curtain seams. It hums louder, just for a second. Then stills. There’s no resonance. No trace of his pattern in the room. He isn’t near. But he’s alive. She’d know if he weren’t. The failsafe—the one they were never supposed to know about—would have activated. Her body would have felt it. Burned it. Rebuilt what was left. But there’s been no call. No spark.

She replaces the shard and closes the case.

By the time she’s dressed again, the ache has dulled. The thread of laughter from earlier has faded entirely, and with it, the faint humming of the Paravest. She can suppress it longer now. That’s what time buys—resistance, not immunity. But the more she dulls it, the harder it hits when it returns. Joy leaves a bruise. Laughter is a blade. Most people don’t know that. They treat it like air. She knows better. Laughter is a knife held edge-out, passed between strangers who don’t know the weight of it.

Cael did.

That was what made him different. He never feared what he was. Never flinched from the truth of it. He honored the blade. Made her laugh once, just once, before the handlers caught on. That one time—it almost killed them both. But she still thinks about it. The sound of her own voice cracking open. The way it made her feel her own face for the first time. Not from the outside. But from inside. Like identity growing backward, inward, blooming from the echo of something only he could have shaped.

She ties her hair back in a loose knot, opens the door to the hall, and steps into the stillness beyond. There’s no sign of pursuit yet. No flicker of Vatican-grade surveillance at the periphery. Just the dull buzz of electricity in old walls. Her boots hit the carpet with the same rhythm they always do—measured, soft, certain. She walks forward without hesitation, past the ice machine, past the faded painting of seagulls pinned to a sky that never existed.

As she rounds the stairwell, she hears a child laugh again. Just once. Far below.

And this time, she doesn’t pause.

She smiles.

CHAPTER 4

He doesn’t flinch when the vault door hisses shut behind him, but he feels the sound settle in his spine like an old injury resurfacing. The room seals with a hydraulic sigh, and the air pressure changes just enough to remind him this space wasn’t built for comfort. It was built to hold things the Church couldn’t destroy and didn’t dare leave buried. His boots make no sound on the polished epoxy floor, but the soles drag faint static—residue from whatever shielding the archivists installed decades ago, meant to keep electrostatic resonance from triggering dormant anomalies. Meant to keep memory in its cage.

He adjusts his coat, more for habit than temperature, and steps further inside. The dim overhead strips activate as he moves, blooming in slow pulses like nervous breaths. This part of the archives isn’t mapped. Not officially. No blueprints, no heat traces, no digital trail. Even the custodial staff rotate out before they learn its full layout. That’s the point. You don’t file black-tier material. You entomb it.

The walls are covered in rows of matte drawers, each about the length of a femur, labeled with coded stencils that only make sense if you’ve trained at three different classification levels and memorized the conversion matrix. He has. He knows how to read the dead language stamped on the tags. The one the Custodia invented for internal containment indexing after the Oneirophage rupture. Each tag looks innocent enough—Latin base, numeric root, timecode tail—but they hum if you hold your breath near them. He tries not to notice that.

Top shelf. Third from the left.

He slides the drawer free and lets it settle on its hydraulic runners. The sample rests in the center, double-sealed and sheathed in medical-grade suspension gel, a faint ring of condensation frosting the interior layer like breath on glass. He crouches slightly, bringing his eyes level with the containment unit. It’s smaller than he remembers. But of course it would be. Memory always scales with trauma.

The red cross etched into the lid is uneven. Not a factory mark. Handmade. Shallow cuts, two strokes intersecting at an angle that doesn’t match standard Vatican iconography. He’s seen it before. Once. In an old surveillance still from inside Aevum’s Core, captured a week before the breach—one of the final logs to make it past the internal lockdown. The same cross had been scraped into the floor just outside detainment ring three. At the time, analysts said it was damage from a dropped tool.

He hadn’t believed them then either.

He leans in closer. The notation printed below the symbol is almost too faint to read, but he doesn’t need to. He memorized it years ago. D-VR13. RSDR:ΔZ. The shorthand reference to the Dallol Variant, Row 13, Resonance Sub-Deviation Range Delta-Zeta. What it really means is: don’t open this unless you’ve already signed your will, your conscience, and your metaphysical stability over to the papal registry.

He doesn’t open it.

But he does press two fingers lightly to the lid, the way priests touch relics they’re not allowed to bless. The chill of the cryo-seal radiates up his skin, but beneath it there’s something else. Not warmth. Not even vibration. Just the sense of attention. Like something inside the tube is quietly wondering if it should wake.

A sound tickles the edge of his hearing.

Not loud. Not clear. Just faint laughter. Too high to be human. Too layered to be memory. He closes his eyes for a moment, tilting his head slightly to isolate the source. It’s not coming from the hallway. It’s coming from the drawer. From the sample. The laugh doesn’t increase. It doesn’t even repeat. It just remains—like it’s been there all along, and he’s only now tuned to the right frequency to notice.

He exhales slowly. Opens his eyes.

“No,” he says under his breath. “Not today.”

The sample remains inert. The laugh doesn’t return.

He rises, knees crackling. The archive lights dim behind him as he steps backward from the drawer. Not retreating. Just resetting the distance. There’s a fine line between curiosity and summoning, and he’s not arrogant enough to think he knows where it is. Not with this. Not with her.

Because this sample—it isn’t just a relic. It’s a breadcrumb. A biological receipt from a lifeform that doesn’t fit the taxonomy of creation. If the readings are accurate—and he knows they are—then it came from a fringe variant of the Oneirophage. One that showed post-breach memory enhancement beyond normal imprint patterns. One that retained full emotional mimicry even after detachment from the core link network. That’s not supposed to be possible. The old files said emotional siphoning had a saturation point. This sample says otherwise.

He logs the resonance manually on the portable reader—no uplink, no network. Just analog transcription. Pen and paper, as old as Judas. The reader pings once. Then again. Then flatlines. He blinks at it. The battery’s full. The sensor’s working. But the readout refuses to stabilize.

He knows what that means.

There’s more than one signature in the sample.

That should be impossible. A singular containment unit. Single donor tissue. But the harmonic trace has bifurcated—two distinct patterns. Interwoven but not merged. And one of them is pulsing at a frequency just slightly above standard Oneirophage profile. Subtle. Elegant. Female.

He steps back again.

If that’s what he thinks it is—if the sample carries residuals from a second hybrid form—then someone else got out. Or was born after.

He checks the drawer again. No other markings. No duplicate tags. Nothing to indicate the sample ever left the vault. But the resonance is undeniable.

“She’s not alone,” he mutters, almost reverently.

It doesn’t make sense. There were only ten. The Aevum files were clear. Ten prototypes. No reproduction. No cloning. And only one known survivor.

Unless that’s the lie.

Unless the matriarch isn’t just a relic.

But a mother.

He stares at the frost rim circling the seal, and suddenly it looks less like condensation and more like breath caught mid-exhale. He closes the drawer. Doesn’t slam it. Just pushes until the latch clicks. The hum in the room fades by degrees, but not completely. That laugh—he still hears it. Nestled now in the architecture of the vault. Somewhere behind the steel. Not active. But waiting.

On his way out, he passes the archivist without a word. She doesn’t ask what he found. She doesn’t look up from her monitor. That’s the unspoken rule down here. You don’t speak the names of the things you’ve touched.

Outside the chamber, the door seals again with that soft surgical sigh.

He doesn’t let it settle this time.

He’s already moving.

He doesn’t move for several seconds. Doesn’t speak. Doesn’t blink. The screen glows red in the half-light, casting his reflection back at him in fractured contours—part man, part shade, part something the Vatican still doesn’t have a word for. The spectrometer remains steady, no further alerts, no sound beyond the low whir of its internal processor catching up with what it’s just read. Cael recognized. That line doesn’t belong to any current interface protocol. That style of confirmation was decommissioned before he was born. Before the Geneva rupture. Before the last time anyone said the name Cael aloud and lived long enough to regret it.

He lifts a hand from the edge of the workstation and brings it to his mouth, not to cover it but to feel something solid. The rubberized glove makes his breath rebound against his face. His tongue is dry. His molars ache. The part of him trained for containment wants to scream. The rest—the older, quieter part—just listens. Because Cael wasn’t supposed to be real. Not anymore. Not outside those files locked twelve floors beneath the Papal Citadel, in a vault whose entrance no longer exists on any blueprint. That name belonged to a dead category. A myth buried inside an error code. And now it’s blinking at him from a machine that shouldn’t even have access to that lexicon.

“Cael,” he mutters, just to feel it in the air.

The room doesn’t react. Not audibly. But the air changes. Thickens. Like the stone walls have exhaled something they were holding back. Like the sample on the table didn’t need permission to hear, just acknowledgment. The glass on the canister fogs slightly, not from condensation—but something finer. Like breath pressed against the wrong side of reality.

He forces himself to look down again, to re-engage the interface. His fingers hover above the manual command line. The spectrometer has locked the result. No override accepted. No edits allowed. The machine has made its determination—and it’s reverted to a firmware framework not used in over thirty years. An old build. One of the original Custodia deep trace protocols. Something that was supposed to be deleted after the incident at Aevum.

He types anyway.

>> Access Sample Traceback

The cursor blinks for six seconds.

>> Confirmed. Genetic residue: Oneirophage Variant Class-1.

>> Ancestral Origin: Hybrid Core / Caelus Iterum.

That last part twists something in his stomach. Caelus Iterum. Not a designation. A name. A rebirth.The field journals from Dallol speculated that the prototypes retained ancestral mnemonic layering. But none had hard confirmation. Until now.

And he’s standing in front of it.

“Why now?” he whispers. “Why surface now, after all this time?”

The machine offers no answer. It doesn’t need to. The implication is already screaming in his head. If this sample contains trace resonance from Cael himself—then the surviving variant, the woman now tracked across half of Europe, didn’t just walk away from Aevum intact.

She took something with her.

A strand of him.

A memory.

A child?

He swallows hard, then kills that last thought before it finishes forming. The Oneirophage were sterile. Deliberately. Engineered that way. No reproductive capabilities, no lineage, no potential for proliferation. That was one of the Vatican’s fail-safes. Or at least it was supposed to be. But now… now the machine has printed a term that shouldn’t exist.

Subvariant Echo.

Not offspring. Not clone.

Echo.

A reverberation of presence. A psychic remnant strong enough to outlive its source. Not parasitic. Not independent. A tether. And if Cael’s resonance still exists inside the sealed sample—and if that resonance has just awakened—then the living Oneirophage variant has reestablished some form of contact. Maybe not directly. Maybe not even consciously. But it’s enough. Enough to pull him back from wherever death tried to hold him.

The spectrometer chimes again.

He flinches.

A new line appears on screen.

>> Subconscious pairing detected. Cryptocallum pattern: mirrored.

His knees nearly buckle. The Cryptocallum. That word was only mentioned in the fringe papers—theory documents circulated among the deepest-level neuroalchemical departments, ones that were dissolved after the Mnemosite exterminations in Algeria. If that pattern’s been recognized, then the sample isn’t just alive. It’s actively remembering.

This shouldn’t be possible.

His hands tremble. He presses one flat to the spectrometer housing and breathes slowly through his nose. Focus. Ground.

“She took part of him with her,” he says aloud this time. “Not metaphor. Not mourning. A literal imprint.”

Not just a tether—a failsafe.

He thinks of the Vatican records on the prototypes. Each of the ten had unique imprint behaviors. But Cael was different. His laughter, his mirroring strength, his tethering capability—those weren’t just traits. They were mechanisms. And if the Oneirophage matriarch managed to anchor him within herself before the Core fell… then the whole theological framework the Custodia built their policies on collapses in one keystroke.

Another alert pings softly.

>> Trace Pattern Correlation: Live Field Match Available.

He freezes. Live? There shouldn’t be a live trace. Not unless…

He drags the window open.

A location feed populates.

Triangulation Source: Rome Sector 3. Cathedral Vicinity.

“Jesus,” he breathes, involuntarily.

She’s here.

Not just somewhere in Europe. Not hiding in old stations and train terminals.

She’s in Rome.

She brought him back here.

Back to where he was made. Where they tried to burn out the proof. Where she watched the others fall. Where the vault walls still carry the names of the dead in frequencies only the faithful can hear in their sleep.

The spectrometer pulses one final time. Then everything on the screen fades. Not a crash. A retraction.As if the machine has decided that what it just said is too dangerous to leave recorded.

Only one line remains.

A phrase in Latin:

“Resurgemus in Silentio.”

We rise in silence.

The words weren’t programmed into this unit. They’ve been burned in.

His mouth is dry. He steps back, finally. Every breath in the room feels louder now, even though his own has slowed to a crawl. The sample remains locked in its canister, the frost re-settling like it never left.

But he knows better.

He knows exactly what’s begun.

CHAPTER 5

The air around him feels wrong.

She doesn’t slow her stride. Doesn’t pivot. Doesn’t betray the fact that her entire nervous system has just pivoted around the space he occupies. His presence hums at a different frequency—lower, not louder, like something submerged beneath still water. Her steps stay even, heel to toe, soft against the slick stone. She adjusts the fall of her coat just slightly with one gloved hand, a gesture anyone else would mistake for a tic. But inside, the Paravest contracts. Hard. A ripple arcs through her torso, no stronger than a breath but pointed. Directional.

He’s not leaking resonance. He’s holding it.

She risks one glance—quick, nothing more than a flick of peripheral vision. His hair’s damp. Not rain-wet. Shower-wet. Controlled. The kind of cleanliness that means he just entered the field. He’s wearing a civilian jacket, but it doesn’t fit right. Military shoulders. Field-stitched. The kind of garment you borrow from someone who was taught to kill in silence. His hands are loose at his sides, fingers slightly splayed—not casual. Open. Deliberate.

He’s not just watching her.

He’s inviting her to notice.

That’s worse.

She keeps walking. Crosses the street diagonally with a small knot of passersby. A couple arguing softly, a woman pushing a stroller, a courier on a rental bike. All heat signatures. All safe. The man’s body remains anchored to that wall behind her. Still as gravity. The Paravest flares again—this time sharp enough to make her teeth itch.

He’s not Oneirophage. She’d know.

But he’s close.

An echo, maybe. A contact vector. A carrier.

Or worse.

Her breath stays steady. She’s practiced this for too long to fumble now. But her steps falter a half-beat as another bout of laughter peals behind her—the group under the awning still erupting like someone dropped a joy bomb and no one remembered how to stop. The laughter turns strange now, too sustained. Too synchronized. Like a loop caught on the verge of skipping.

It’s artificial.

Or it’s being manipulated.

She turns the next corner with surgical precision and slips into the recessed shadow between two shops. A dry cleaner. A bakery closed since sundown. She waits, pressing her back flat against the stone. Feels the vibrations come up through her spine from the sidewalk. They’re wrong, too. Not just sound—resonance. A feedback loop. Someone is using group laughter as bait.

Or as cover.

She lifts one hand to her jaw and presses just below the hinge. A nerve cluster there connects directly to the Paravest’s outer sheath. One soft push, and it begins to scan—biochemical signatures, emotional currents, residual field wake. The reading spikes instantly. Not just laughter. Induced mirth. It’s not coming from the kids.

It’s coming from him.

She peels out of the alley and blends into the flow again. Fast enough to avoid anchoring, slow enough to seem aimless. The man is gone now, not even a trailing silhouette in the window glass. That means he wanted her to know he was there. Not because he was warning her.

Because he was marking her.

The realization settles into her stomach like a hot coin dropped in water. There’s only one type of trace agent trained to do that—walk into a city humming with strangers and bend the resonance without drawing heat. Mnemonic Nulls. Vatican-designed. Built to carry psionic traces from one variant to another like a biological courier. Blood-clean, brain-mapped, emotionally sterile.

But if he’s active, if they’ve reactivated a Null, that means the Church has already narrowed its net.

That means they’re not looking for her anymore.

They’re tracking her.

And she led them here.

She angles her route toward a side street—narrow, two exits, one dead camera tucked high into an unlit doorway. She’s memorized the city’s blind spots like a map of old scars. As soon as the traffic breaks, she slips through and puts her back against the alley wall, squatting low, breathing shallow.

The Paravest surges like a flame caught in a jar.

Something’s coming.

She turns her head slowly and sees the afterimage of the bookstore wall—his imprint still faint in her mind’s eye. Not visually. Neurologically. He left a pressure field behind, like a sonar pulse folded backward in time. Her mind’s never done that before. Not for strangers. Not since Cael.

Her eyes narrow.

Could they have touched? Not physically. But psychically? Could the resonance be that entangled?

The implications spiral quickly. If the Null carried a Cael-encoded tether—if the Vatican somehow distilled a strand of his signature from a cryo sample or a discarded relic—then what she just sensed wasn’t a warning at all. It was a message.

Or a threat.

She runs her thumb along the inside seam of her glove. There’s a micro-injection reservoir there. Synthetic feed—safe, sterile, manufactured. She hasn’t used it in years. Refuses to feed like that. Feels like cheating. Like pretending she isn’t what she is. But the ache is starting to flare now, and the Paravest is wide awake, scanning for ambient frequency anomalies faster than her conscious mind can process.

She clicks the seal loose.

Doesn’t inject.

Not yet.

Just prepares.

A faint hum scrapes at the edge of her hearing. Not from the street.

From below.

She moves.

Two steps to the side. Drops to her knees. Presses one palm to the ground. There’s laughter under the pavement. Not metaphorical. Not hallucinated. The kind that skates along your bones and makes your teeth clench involuntarily. Someone’s built a resonance pocket beneath the street. And she’s walking across the lid.

That’s not a leak.

That’s a trap.

And now she knows what the Null was doing.

He wasn’t bait.

He was the beacon.

She stands, fast. Pulse spiking. Scans again—faces, reflections, thermal echoes in the windows. Nothing obvious. But the air is tightening. Folding inward. The Paravest curls like a fist behind her heart.

They’re closing in. Quietly. Smartly. Not to kill.

To contain.

Her lips twitch.

“Not tonight,” she whispers.

Then she moves.

The man doesn’t follow her, but the echo of his presence clings to the curve of the street like smoke—just out of sight but thick enough to taste. She can feel it in her molars, in the subtle prickling behind her ears, that sensory half-shadow that doesn’t belong to physical space but lingers anyway. She doesn’t look back. She’s learned too well what happens when you give shape to something watching you. Naming it makes it real, and real things have teeth. Her boots strike the pavement with deliberate rhythm, each step calibrated, each breath slow and shallow. The Paravest pulses in her chest again—low, consistent, like sonar pinging in the deep.

The wind shifts. Something cold rides its back—not weather, not smell. Memory. That same texture her skin learned to interpret during the first year after the Core fell. Her internal register marks it automatically: low-spectrum empathic bleed. Not hers. Not recent. She knows that flavor. Knows how it bends light and thought in the same motion. The man’s field—whatever’s left of it—is unstable, smeared at the edges like a print dragged through water. He’s not a threat in the tactical sense. He’s a variable. And variables are dangerous in ways she can’t afford tonight.

She makes it two more blocks before the ache begins to shift. Not outward—deeper. Behind the sternum. Between vertebrae. Hunger and memory always touch in the same place. The Paravest tightens in response, not with urgency but with recognition. Whatever he was—whoever he had been—was connected to the old circuit, the one she thought burned out years ago. She considers, briefly, whether he might be an offshoot. One of the sleepers. But that doesn’t sit right. Sleepers don’t wake unless she calls them. And she hasn’t. Not since—

No. It’s not him. Not Cael. Not even close. But he’s been touched by something that remembers. That much is obvious.

She presses her back against the side of a closed café, the chipped metal awning dripping onto the sidewalk beside her. She pulls her scarf up slightly, shielding the lower half of her face. A group of teenagers ambles past, their laughter genuine but toothless, the kind that doesn’t reach bone. It passes over her without consequence. Her Paravest stays quiet. Whatever had stirred it isn’t in them. It’s residual. Traced from the man, or maybe what used to be inside him. A fragment. A whisper. A piece of the Core, out of place, uncontained.

Her gloved fingers reach into her coat pocket, brushing against the familiar weight of the capsule she hasn’t cracked open in years. Not since Prague. She doesn’t pull it out—just feels the edges. Reminds herself it’s there. A failsafe. A trigger. And a bridge she hopes she never has to cross again.

Her breath clouds in the cold. She watches it dissipate, waiting for the Paravest to settle. It doesn’t. If anything, it sharpens. A slow-building resonance that doesn’t come from external laughter or even human proximity, but from internal echo. Recognition. A name brushing the inside of her skull, not spoken but pressed there like a thumbprint. Not his name. Hers.

It comes all at once: a flash behind the eyes, a twitch of phantom pressure in her palms, the sound of metal scraping tile in some long-forgotten corridor. The Core again. Not the architecture—never that. But the sensation of eyes behind glass, watching her sleep. Watching all of them. And the knowledge that at least one of those eyes had been his. Not Cael’s. The other one. The one who didn’t escape.

Her vision clears, but the sidewalk under her feet feels different now. More real. More chosen. She straightens, adjusts her coat, and steps back into the stream of traffic like nothing has touched her. But she walks with a new vector. Not away. Not toward. She doesn’t need to know his direction. He’s not following.

He’s a beacon.

Whatever has activated him—whatever old layer is bleeding through—wasn’t random. Someone wants her to know. And that narrows the list considerably. Vatican? No. Too blunt. Too loud. If it were them, she’d be bleeding already. A Vatican shadow team doesn’t watch—they remove. Which means this was orchestrated. Measured. Maybe even personal.

The last thought makes her jaw clench. She hasn’t had to use that word in years. Personal implies connection. History. Vulnerability. But it’s the only explanation that fits. If someone’s reaching back through the chain, it means they’ve found a tether that still holds. One she thought had snapped when Cael vanished. One she should have buried deeper.

Her shoulder brushes a lamppost, and she stops. Turns. Not fast. Just enough to see the reflection in the convenience store window. The man is gone. The space where he’d been standing is now filled with a drunk woman arguing with her own reflection. But there’s something wrong with the angle. The shadow she casts has an extra limb. A line that shouldn’t be there. A second silhouette, half-erased. Not visible to anyone else.

She inhales once, sharp. Then walks.

Not faster. Just further.

The night has shifted again. The city bends in small ways, subtle and deliberate. She recognizes the signs. Mirth fog. Someone is amplifying resonance in the low registers—just enough to tilt perspective without triggering full laughter exposure. Dangerous in untrained hands. Lethal in skilled ones. She’d seen what that kind of subtle warping did in Lyon. Whole blocks collapsed into fevered joy. People laughed until their lungs collapsed. And afterward, no one remembered a thing.

She slips into the alley behind the pharmacy, listens for footsteps, hears none. Still, she knows he’ll reappear. Or what’s wearing the memory of him will. It’s only a matter of time.

The Paravest hums again.

Not warning.

Summoning.

CHAPTER 6

He loops the scan again. Slows it frame by frame, fingers tapping against the edge of the console in that same arrhythmic way addicts scratch at skin they no longer feel. The light from the monitor carves lines into his face that the mirror hasn’t caught yet. He doesn’t notice. The rest of the lab is still, quieter than most tombs, though better lit. The faint hum of containment units thrums against the floor, low and even, like the room itself is holding its breath. A subtle click every few minutes from the thermal regulators punctuates the silence—an artificial heartbeat in a place that was never meant to accommodate life. Seven hours. No water. No food. No break. But the data in front of him has eclipsed every biological demand, because what he’s watching doesn’t belong in any known category of the living, and it sure as hell isn’t dead.

The Cael imprint—what the Vatican should have destroyed, what they swore was unrecoverable—refuses to stay inert. At first it held in the sandbox like a dormant spark. Residual noise. Harmless. But something changed on the third loop. He saw it. That flicker. That shift in the interior topography. The pattern wasn’t just resonating anymore—it was multiplying in place. Not growing, not expanding in size or strength. But folding inward. Deepening. Refining itself the way you might revise a sentence until it sounds more like the person you used to be. It’s not mimicry. It’s evolution by recursion. He hadn’t realized he’d started holding his breath until the image jumped slightly and his lungs kicked back on, sharp and burning.

He killed the loop and replayed from the beginning, just to be sure. Same anomaly. Same internal distortion, nestled beneath the baseline pulse of the mnemonic signature. At first he assumed an artifact—noise introduced by the spectrometer or ambient interference from the vault’s shielding. Old tech bleeding into new processes. But this wasn’t noise. This was form. A lattice. Three layers deep. Four. Eight. And always the same structure beneath the fluctuations. Not language in any conventional sense. No phonetic encoding. But something adjacent. Architectural. Spatial. It made his skin crawl in a way that went far beyond fear—more like recognition at a molecular level.

He clicked open the neural encoding matrix overlay and dragged the resonance profile into it, heart thudding once, hard. The translation took a few seconds. Long enough for him to remember what his clearance level actually was, and what corners he’d already cut to get this far. The Vatican had redlined this branch of spectral forensics decades ago. Declared it heretical by classification, not doctrine. The kind of work you could only do once, and never mention again. When the rendering completed, the screen went dark for a breath, then blinked into a simulation that made his mouth go dry.

The map wasn’t static. It pulsed. Flared. A simulated cortex lit up on the screen—not with real synapses, but with emission nodes that mirrored human neuroelectric behavior. The spectral data had arranged itself into a structure indistinguishable from early-stage cortical development. Memory residue wasn’t supposed to do that. Not even the Oneirophage samples had demonstrated anything close to this level of synthetic complexity. It wasn’t just repeating—it was rehearsing. Reinforcing. Attempting to rebuild a framework not from stored experiences, but from the behavioral impulse to have experiences. This wasn’t a recording. It was a living feedback loop—an orphaned instinct trying to rebuild the thing that once housed it.

He backed away a single step, the heel of one shoe catching slightly on the raised edge of the lab mat. It broke his contact with the screen, and that was enough to let some sliver of distance crawl back into his spine. The breath he pulled in wasn’t deep. It felt filtered, like breathing through cloth. His mind dredged up fragments of lectures from his training—never written down, never recorded. Only spoken, and only once. The kind of warnings that came after a long silence in retreat cells, when the senior field operatives would lean in, eyes tired, and talk about resonance bleed, contamination risk, mnemonic entanglement. Echo contagion. Thoughtseed transference. Impossible theories wrapped in soft tones. Not science. Not scripture. Just fear, shared across generations of men who had seen too much and come back humming unfamiliar lullabies.

His cursor hovered over one of the denser nodes. The structure rippled in response—not visibly, not really—but he felt it in his teeth, in the tiny bones behind his ears. A pressure change. A shift in cognitive temperature. There was no sound in the lab, but his ears still rang. That same high-pitched frequency, like glass under tension. A sound that could split you open without leaving a mark. He didn’t move. The node flared again. A tiny flash, a pulse, a rhythm. One-two. Pause. One-two-three. Pause. One.

It was counting.

He leaned in, against better judgment. Watched the flare cycle through again. Not just counting. Repeating. Intentionally. Not a loop. A structure. A tempo. Not words. Not numbers. But rhythm. Rehearsal. The raw shape of memory before it takes form. An old phrase surfaced in the back of his head, one he hadn’t thought about in years: pre-linguistic architecture. A behavioral precursor. A way for consciousness to remember itself before it remembers its name.

And this pattern—it wasn’t looking for an answer.

It was asking a question.

A hum ran through the base of his skull, low and inquisitive. He wanted to step back again but didn’t. Couldn’t. The simulation now centered around a single node. A recursion anchor. The others pulsed in slow sync around it, like petals forming around a bloom. A phrase formed—not in words, not even in thought, but in need. It wanted something. It was searching. Not spatially. Not temporally. But mnemonically. Like a blind hand reaching through a memory that wasn’t its own.

He felt it reach toward him.

Not metaphorically. Not intellectually. Physically. A warmth behind the sternum, just beneath where the Paravest would sit if he’d been fitted for one. He wasn’t. But something stirred there anyway. Some ghost of mirror neuron activity pinged in his chest, lit up behind his eyes. Not control. Not possession. Not even influence. Just resonance. An echo looking for its twin.

It’s trying to remember something.

Or someone.

The thought hit him in a way that didn’t feel internal. It landed like a whisper dropped from a height, too soft to echo, too precise to ignore. He blinked, throat dry. The simulation blinked with him.

It’s not finished yet.

He blinks and the screen bends. Not in a glitchy, mechanical way—but like skin pulled taut across the wrong shape, warping in a ripple too organic to belong in a lab. The corners shudder, fold inward, then straighten again. Barely a breath. Not long enough to register on the machine’s diagnostics, but more than enough to fracture his orientation. His sense of center shifts. Just a sliver. Just enough to make the blood in his limbs feel displaced, as if gravity itself has been subtly rerouted and forgot to send the memo to his bones. He exhales through his nose, slow and steady, pretending control is still possible. His hand finds the counter edge, fingers dragging lightly across the textured metal, anchoring him. It helps. Slightly. But not enough.

The hum of the lab, once white and clean and forgettable, has taken on teeth. It drills behind his ears now, less a tone than a frequency he can’t seem to blink past. The temperature’s gone sideways too—an impossible collision of sensations. His spine is slick with warmth, like something breathing across his nape, while the tips of his fingers are numb with cold, the kind of chill that sets in deep enough to feel like old bruises. He frowns. Shifts his stance. Checks the room again with a glance meant to be casual, clinical. But his muscles are holding strange now. Defensive. His body already understands something his mind won’t name.

And then it happens.

The edges of his vision pulse, as if the world’s boundaries are suddenly more fluid than fixed. A flicker blooms in his peripheral—not light, not quite—but shape. Movement. A shadow that refuses to obey the source of illumination. He turns, but nothing’s there. Or rather, too much is. The screen in front of him isn’t a screen anymore. For a second—and only that—it deepens into perspective. Depth replaces flatness. He sees stone. Walls, rough-hewn and wet, breathing faintly like old tissue too long removed from a living thing. There’s a phosphorescent pulse along the seams—greenish, organic. The air smells wrong, too. Damp, mineral-rich, metallic. And then, layered over it all, there’s laughter.

Not a sound. A pressure. A memory that vibrates behind his teeth like an aftershock. A child’s laugh, giddy and unformed, tumbling end over end through the marrow of a place he’s never been. But he knows it. Knows it the way you know an old scar before you remember how you got it. His knees bend slightly as if to run, but he doesn’t move. Can’t. He stumbles backward half a step and his shoulder clips the corner of the storage cabinet behind him. The sound is sharp, real, grounding. The cabinet shudders under the impact, but doesn’t tip. His hand grabs the edge, knuckles going white.

He stands there, breath dragging ragged at the edges, and the vision doesn’t collapse entirely. It recedes. Becomes memory instead of perception. But it doesn’t go. It sticks. Behind his eyes. A small hand, pale and smudged, drawing spirals into a stone floor. The floor is warm. The spiral bleeds light. And a voice—one he doesn’t recognize—whispers something soundless into his head. A name not made for the throat. A thought passed like smoke between skulls. He squeezes his eyes shut, hoping it’ll dissolve. But the image holds. It won’t move. And worse—it feels earned. Familiar. His. Which it isn’t. Which it shouldn’t be.

His pulse scrapes against the inside of his ears, a thudding too fast, too loud, like it’s echoing off something close to bursting. He opens his eyes again. No delay. No flicker. The screen is back. As it was. Still looping the signature pattern. Still locked into its recursive rhythm. But now it looks… different. Tighter. Less a simulation and more a coiled presence. Like muscle tensed before a strike. Like breath drawn before a scream. The nodes blink in sequence, faster now, closer. And he sees it: a pulse forming in the cycle. A heartbeat. Not random. Not artifact. Deliberate.

And not his.

He opens his mouth to speak—maybe to call for someone, maybe to name the thing rising in his throat—but the words are gone. His throat locks. Not with fear. Not exactly. More like disuse. As if speech itself has been turned off at the source. A beat passes. Then two. And then the word surfaces. It doesn’t arrive like a thought. It arrives like a memory. Whole. Heavy. His. Not his.

“Ashil.”

It leaves him soft and slow, lips barely parting. The syllables don’t belong to any language he knows, but the weight of them is undeniable. It tastes of something ancient—stone turned to steam, metal burned too hot to cool. The moment the sound clears his mouth, the room exhales. The heat leaves his spine. The cold vanishes from his fingertips. And the screen—

The screen goes black.

No flash. No glitch. No fade to grey. Just gone. Like someone pressed a kill switch that doesn’t exist. Like something heard him speak and answered by ending the conversation. The room holds its breath. He waits for the flicker of reboot. The recovery protocol. Anything. But the screen stays dead. The console doesn’t beep. The lab’s hum thins to near silence, like the equipment itself is waiting for instructions it’s suddenly too afraid to execute.

He backs away a step, eyes locked on the blank monitor. Nothing. Still nothing.

The breath he drags into his chest this time doesn’t help.

Because somewhere, buried deep under the science and protocol and Vatican-classification framework he spent his entire career trusting, something else has already taken root. Something that doesn’t obey.

Not containment.

Not logic.

Not the Church.

Just rhythm. Just memory.

And a name no one should have spoken aloud.

CHAPTER 7

The stairs creak under her weight, but it isn’t just the wood—it’s history. Saturated, softened, half-splintered under the weight of too many exits, too few returns. Every riser breathes dust and mildew, every tread bowing like it remembers names. She doesn’t move fast. Doesn’t need to. The rot’s not deep enough to give way, but it speaks to her anyway, whispering its slow ruin in creaks and sighs. She counts each step under her breath, a rhythm more than a necessity, bones remembering what the mind doesn’t trust right now. Thirty-two steps. Always has been. Always will be. Her boots find the familiar depressions worn by strangers long dead. Paint peels down the hallway walls in long, curling ribbons like regret, and the light above flickers twice—once for her arrival, once for something else. She feels it before she sees it. The pulse. Not hers. Not quite.

By the time she reaches the door, her hands are already too cold. She bolts it behind her—not rushed, not paranoid, just certain. One slide. One click. One breath that holds in her lungs a few seconds too long. She doesn’t exhale right away. Doesn’t move toward the switch. The lights remain off. Her eyes drink the dark easily, pupils opening wide, black swallowing color, then shape. The room is rust-tinted and half-shadowed, soaked in the dull glow of late dusk pushing through the tear in the curtain like blood through gauze. The place smells like fabric left too long in humidity. Something acidic beneath. Like rust. Or adrenaline metabolized and abandoned in the air. It clings to her tongue, metallic and warm. Her hands twitch once. Not visibly. Not enough to betray the static inside. But the shaking is real. Beneath the skin’s permission. Below what muscle admits.

The Paravest is still active, but it’s gone irregular. Not the low hum she trusts, the gentle vibrational echo of alignment. No, now it catches—stutters, jerks, rattles like a transmission seizing mid-gear. Her breath comes harder. Shallower. She presses her back to the door and slides down to the floor, knees drawn up, forehead resting against her arms. Her core pulses once, hard, a shockwave under her ribs that doesn’t settle. The resonance she passed through—the laughter field, the false joy leaking ambient around those kids, the man’s eyes—she carried it back with her. It’s not fading. It’s not hers. But it’s inside her now, swimming the circuitry of her organs like a rogue signal looking for somewhere to land.

The Gelastocore keeps trying to absorb it. Keeps mistaking it for sustenance. Reflexive. Automatic. The metabolic reflex of a system built to feed off mirth and human joy. But this isn’t that. This isn’t joy. It’s a mirror held too close, angled wrong. It reflects but doesn’t belong. Someone crafted that laughter. Bent it. Directed it at her with precision too sharp to be accidental. And it stuck. Her chest feels congested with it. Like laughing with lungs full of ash. The signal has a hook. She doesn’t know what it’s attached to, but she knows better than to pull it free.

She stumbles toward the sink like the floor’s tilting. Braces herself there, palms flat on the edge, letting the cold enamel anchor her. The counter presses hard against her hip. She doesn’t care. Her forehead drops to her forearm, and she exhales like she’s exorcising something. Her pulse skitters again. Too fast. Then nothing. Then fast again. A faulty circuit trying to reset through muscle memory. Her eyes squeeze shut, and the images come unbidden: Cael’s hand in hers. Not in battle. Not in ritual. Just in stillness. Just because. His fingers warm, long, callused from climbing the vent shafts under Aevum’s Core when no one was watching. His laugh in her ear, a real one. His voice saying her name. Not the one she uses now, not the public alias or the intermediary signature scrawled on forged documents. The real name. The one she hasn’t let pass her lips since the night the link went dark. Hearing it again is like swallowing glass.

She blinks hard. Her vision blurs. But not with tears. She doesn’t cry. Can’t. Not anymore. Whatever allowed for that was burned out during the second reconstruction cycle. Her ducts still function, but the neural trigger is gone. What stings now is not sadness. It’s displacement. Light that isn’t real. A dream she didn’t dream. Someone else’s memory bleeding into her skull. Cael’s? Or something wearing him like a mask? She doesn’t know. That’s the part that makes her stomach turn. The not-knowing.

Her body is riding the edge of contradiction—starving and overfed all at once. The Gelastocore keeps pulling energy from the corrupted laughter resonance, but none of it lands clean. Every absorption blooms static through her veins. Every cell it touches misfires. She’s jittery, not from adrenaline, but from energy her body doesn’t recognize as valid. She feels inflated. Light-headed. Too many frequencies shoved inside a frame that only speaks one dialect. It’s like eating poisoned honey—sweet until it unthreads your insides.

She needs to flush it. Burn it out. But her system won’t release. Not on its own. And if it builds too far, she’ll crash. Hard. Full systemic lockout. The Paravest will auto-isolate. The Gelastocore will fold in on itself to protect the organ’s inner sheath. She’ll drop where she stands. No time to explain. No time to cover. She’ll wake up in a clinic or not at all. If she wakes up with Vatican hands on her, she’s finished.

So she does the thing she hates more than starvation.

She opens her mouth.

The sound that comes out is not a laugh so much as a decision wearing laughter’s mask. It’s too short, too sharp, cut off like it was rehearsed and never meant to make it past the lips. It’s not real, and that’s the point. It doesn’t have to be. The Gelastocore doesn’t care about authenticity. Not in this moment. It only needs the signal. The simulation. The neural cue to reset its cycle.

She hears it catch. Feels it. A soft whirr, a tuck of alignment, the echo of artificial joy processed into clean energy. The feedback loop slows. Her chest unclenches, not all the way, but enough. Her limbs stop buzzing. The Paravest hums—not right, but closer. The shaking in her bones subsides, slips back into muscle, then into nothing.

She breathes.

And for a second, the silence is safe.

The laughter tastes like metal. Not the bright clang of silver or clean steel, but rust—iron caught beneath the tongue, warm and oxidized and old. Like biting your cheek during a smile and pretending not to notice. It lingers there, coating the back of her throat with a heatless static, not acidic enough to hurt, but enough to mark. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand even though she knows there’s nothing there—just instinct. A reflex learned young. Get rid of the trace. Remove the evidence. As if the Vatican ever needed blood to find her. The Gelastocore flutters once, a hiccup in her gut, then settles. Not completely. But enough. Its pulses fade into the slow background rhythm of post-intake dormancy. Like a heart after the adrenaline drains. Like grief settling into its final shape.

Her limbs stop buzzing. The tremor in her thighs, her wrists, even the tiny, maddening pulses under her clavicle—all of it fades like static tuning out. But the cold remains. Not around her. Inside. Beneath the ribs. Beneath the sternum. Deep in the subcutaneous space where the Paravest folds when it doesn’t want to be seen. It’s not cold like air. It’s cold like absence. Like an echo of something that isn’t there anymore, but was. She pulls her knees closer and holds them in a gesture that isn’t comfort, just containment. Her skin is warm to the touch. But she can feel the old frost blooming beneath it. The kind that never melts. The kind that has nothing to do with temperature.

She tells herself not to sit. That the couch is too soft, that the cushions sink too far. That the quiet in the room is the wrong kind of quiet. Too round. Too ready to swallow a scream. But her legs betray her before she finishes the thought. They fold. The muscles release without permission, and she drops, not heavy but sudden. The cushions pull at her like they remember the shape of her from before, back when the Core was whole and the shadows weren’t just metaphor. The fabric gives a sigh beneath her weight. She hates the sound. It reminds her of breath. And nothing that breathes that easily can be trusted.

Outside, the light fails. But it doesn’t vanish. This kind of dusk isn’t honest enough for night. It just loiters—drawn-out and purpling, as if the sky is trying to decide whether to commit to darkness or just hover in indecision until morning makes the choice for it. Through the slashed curtain, the bruised amber light paints soft fractures across the far wall. She watches them bend and shift as the hour crawls forward, watches as the shadows from the window frame extend like fingers. The room is still, but the silence isn’t. It vibrates. Carries memory in it. Too much memory. Her own, and someone else’s.

Her fingers begin to twitch, small and deliberate. Her right hand rests in her lap, index and middle fingers tapping against her leg in a slow, syncopated rhythm. She doesn’t know she’s doing it at first. Not consciously. But when the beat sharpens, aligns, she feels it in her bones. That cadence. The echo of it like a pressure in her temples. She knows this pattern. It’s the one Ashil taught her. One of the silent rhythms they used when sound was too dangerous, when even breath had to be calculated. A loop of five, then two, then five again. It wasn’t code. It was comfort. Presence. Proof of existence without needing eyes.

She hadn’t said goodbye. Not to Ashil. Not to any of them. That wasn’t how it worked. When you were one of the ten, there were no farewells. No final touches or hand-squeezes or words exchanged in whisper. The link had always felt infinite. Constant. Like breath. Like water. Like something that couldn’t be severed without severing the world itself. But Ashil didn’t fade. Didn’t slide out gently. It was rupture. Instant. Full-body. A scream that didn’t have sound but burned through every nerve just the same. A detonation in the dreamfield. One second she was there. Then gone. And in the wake, nothing but heat.

Three days of static followed. Painful. Silent. She hadn’t slept. Couldn’t. The images came in flashes—stolen fragments from Ashil’s last thoughts. Disjointed, not in sequence. A blood-wet floor. Salt-crusted cloth wound around wrists. A mouth gasping without function, the sound stolen before the lungs could move. Something glowed faintly in the corner, maybe lichen, maybe the Exovest trying to hold itself together as the Core collapsed. It didn’t matter. Nothing in those flashes made sense, but they were real. Ashil’s real. And then they were gone.

There was no body. No trace. No residual psychic waveform in the Aevum lattice. No dreamprint left in the Mnemosite echo bank. She was just—gone. And the space she left behind bent inward like gravity around a collapsed star. That was what killed the silence. Not her absence. The shape of her absence. Like something had learned how to erase not just a person, but the idea of them. And that was new. That was worse.

The others felt it too. Even miles apart. Even after their dispersal. Cael had shut down entirely—didn’t speak, didn’t dream, didn’t hum the Core tones for weeks. One of the twins bit through their lip during sleep and bled through the sheets, didn’t even blink when it happened. The youngest boy tried to laugh once, and it came out as a scream. None of them said her name out loud. Not once. But they all knew. Not who took her. Not the method. Just the truth that followed.

Something had learned how to unmake them.

She shifts in the half-dark, one hand lifting slowly to press against the base of her throat. Right above where the resonance coils when she sleeps. Her pulse is steady now. But wrong. Smaller than it used to be. As if something about the world has shrunk since Ashil left it. She closes her eyes and draws in a breath through her nose, lets it out slow through parted lips. Behind her lids, she lets herself remember—not images, not even memory. Just presence. The shape Ashil took in the dreamspace. The feel of her moving through thought. The edge of her laugh. That dry wit no one else could land without sounding cruel. Her hands. Always twitching in sleep. Always moving, even in stillness. She used to hum when the lights went out. Not songs. Not melodies. Just frequency.

She whispers it now. The old phrase. The one they’d pass to each other when the blackout drills came down and they weren’t allowed to link.

“Don’t forget the shape of me.”

The words feel sharp in her mouth. Real. Anchor-weighted.

And for a moment, just a breath, she doesn’t feel quite so alone.

CHAPTER 8

His boots echo in a way they shouldn’t. The corridor was built to swallow sound—every wall layered with acoustic foam beneath its sleek façade, every seam calibrated to erase footsteps before they could register. But tonight—or this morning, it’s impossible to tell anymore—each step lands with the soft insistence of a heartbeat echoing through bone. The sound follows him. Not just behind. Beneath. Like something is mimicking the cadence but can’t quite match the weight. He doesn’t turn around. Not out of confidence. He’s not that kind of stupid. It’s because turning would acknowledge it, and acknowledgment is an invitation. Instead, he keeps moving, shoulders square, head low. The folder is pressed tight under his arm, its spine worn smooth from how many times his thumb has passed over it in the last hour. He counts each rub like a prayer, silent and nervous. He doesn’t need comfort. He needs rhythm.

The corridor narrows as it descends, the walls no longer the brushed white of Vatican-approved anonymity but something older—bone-colored stone, textured and imperfect, slightly warm to the touch. The air grows still, then thinner. The light doesn’t dim exactly. It just bends wrong. Like it’s passing through memories instead of air. The transition always creeps up on him—first, the floor tile’s sheen dulls, then the corners of the ceiling lose their right angles, and suddenly he’s inside the part of the building that doesn’t exist on blueprints. The restricted levels. Below the Chapel Registry. Beneath even the false morgue. A place where you don’t speak unless the walls ask you to.

The doors here don’t open for everyone. They’re not keyed to rank. They’re keyed to certainty. The system doesn’t look for identification—it measures intention. A pulsewave scan. A molecular check for doubt. If you’re unsure of your right to be here, the locks don’t fail. They pretend you don’t exist. Which is worse. He stops in front of Archive Slot C-Δ15, exhales slowly through his nose, and stares into the iris scanner. It flashes red, then pauses just a beat too long. Long enough for the tightness in his throat to flicker into dread. Then—click. The light shifts green. The air depressurizes. The magnetic seal releases.

He doesn’t move right away. The hiss of the door feels wrong in his ears, like he’s hearing it from someone else’s memory. But he steps forward, because there’s nothing to gain from hesitation now. The hallway behind him doesn’t offer safety, only slower endings. Inside the room, the lights are already on. Dim. Amber-toned. Meant to preserve paper, not welcome humans. A desk sits in the center, the kind that predates Vatican automation—no screen, no ports, just polished wood and a single brass terminal node buried under lacquer. Dust motes drift like disturbed sleep.

He sets the folder down gently, but it makes more sound than it should. The weight of it feels disproportionate. Like something’s been added. But he knows what’s inside. Every page was printed manually—he’d used the old back-office terminal behind the diagnostic lab, the one that still had analog override permissions. It left no digital trail. That was the point. Three copies printed. One already filed in deep archive. One tagged for Council Eyes Only. And the third—this one. The one he brought here. The one he hasn’t decided what to do with. Not yet.

He flips it open. The top page catches the light, and there it is again—Cael’s name, in Vatican black. The line below still reads: “Awake.” No formatting. No signature marker. Just that word. Plain. Present. Unpermitted. He skims past it and moves to the scan logs. The anomaly registers every five seconds, recursive, building complexity with each loop. No system could fabricate that. No deepfake algorithm runs clean enough to fake node development across a neural lattice simulation. This is real. Raw. And alive in a way that documentation has no business being.

His fingers drift toward the archive slot on the far wall. It looks the same as it always has—etched stone frame, seamless steel cap, the Vatican seal embossed with chemical encryption. Except now there’s something new. A slip of red wax. Thin. Fresh. Draped perfectly across the seam of the handle, pressed with an insignia he recognizes immediately. High-Chancellery. Not just upper-tier clearance. Supreme Ecclesial Oversight. The kind of rank that gets you into places where language is considered a security risk. Where silence isn’t just observed. It’s enforced.

His breath sticks halfway in. That wax shouldn’t be here. No one else had access to the spectrometer logs. The analog printer was offline. The backup file was segmented. He burned the paper trail, cut the node log, even wiped the thermal register from the terminal panel. No one should’ve known this scan existed, let alone preemptively filed it. And sealed it. Not without a command-level forewarning from someone who’d already seen the result.

His hand stops inches from the seal. He’s not stupid enough to touch it. Breaking that wax without proper clearance doesn’t just get you excommunicated—it gets you removed. From the record. From the memory. From reality, if some of the older whisper-codes are true. He swallows hard. His jaw clenches until the ache spreads through his molars.

They knew. Somehow, they knew. Not just that he was coming down here. That he would. As if they’d run the timeline already. As if the choice wasn’t his.

He steps back. One foot. Then another. He doesn’t take the folder. Doesn’t touch the table. He’s left fingerprints, sure, but that hardly matters. If they wanted deniability, they’d already shredded it.

His heart kicks once, sharp and sudden, against the cage of his ribs.

This wasn’t a discovery.

It was a setup.

His pulse thuds louder than the vault’s silence. It’s not racing, not quite—it’s just… pronounced. Present in a way that makes it impossible to ignore. A slow, deliberate thump that echoes in the hollow of his throat, through the cartilage of his ears, along the tendons of his jaw. The kind of pulse you only feel when your body is screaming something your mind refuses to hear. A biological warning bell, knotted into the muscle, urging him to get out. Leave. Forget. But he doesn’t move. Not yet. His hand still hovers inches from the red wax, fingers suspended in the static charge between curiosity and self-preservation. He can feel the heat of it—or maybe that’s just his skin remembering what fire feels like. Either way, he holds.

The insignia stamped into the seal is unmistakable. Delta-Lumen. High-chancellery. Reserved for active, confirmed living classifications. Not historical anomalies. Not relics. Living. The fact that it’s here at all means someone above him didn’t just receive the imprint scan log—they read it. Understood it. Filed it. And then made a choice. They stamped it not with redaction, not with quarantine, but with acknowledgment. That seal is a statement. Not just “we know.” It says, “we expected this.”

The air shifts slightly at the backs of his knees, like a breeze in a sealed tomb. Sweat beads against his skin despite the cold, trickling from the crease where thigh meets hip. It’s not fear exactly. It’s weight. Something denser. His fingers begin to curl inward, joints tightening until the knuckles whisper. He doesn’t reach again. Doesn’t touch the seal. Because some part of him still wants to live. And touching that wax might count as suicide under the current protocols. If they even bother to classify it. This place is old enough to swallow dissent whole. To bury it beneath good intentions and retroactive approvals. Recklessness here doesn’t register as courage. It reads as absence of function. And they erase dysfunction quickly.

He exhales through his nose. A quiet sound. Not a sigh. More like the release of pressure from a pipe that’s about to split. His breath fogs faintly, even though the temperature hasn’t dropped. That’s the thing. The climate controls in this sector are fixed, monitored. But the vault feels colder now. Like the air’s being shared with something else. Or someone else. The hallway beyond the archive slot remains empty, but its silence bends at the edges. Waiting.

He steps back. Slowly. Just one foot, then another, toe to heel. Careful not to make it look like retreat. One boot scuffs the polished floor—barely. But the sound cracks like a matchstrike. Too loud. Out of place. The kind of noise the walls remember. For a second, he’s sure he hears something respond. Not aloud. Not external. A scent, maybe. Sharp. Ozone? No. Too earthy. Like lavender burning in an old room. Smoke and sweetness braided together. It vanishes before he can name it.

His spine straightens. He turns on his heel, smooth and precise, like a man who was never standing at the mouth of something forbidden. His gait resumes—measured, even, authoritative. No panic. No backward glance. But his left hand, hidden inside the lining of his coat, curls tighter around the real reason he came. The second copy. The unsanctioned one. Folded once, then again. Sealed in heat-resistant archival wrap, tucked beneath the false lining stitched by an exiled tailor who owed him too many favors and never asked questions. This copy doesn’t exist in any log. It bypassed the trace systems, avoided the scan pings, skipped the thermal imprint registry. He made it because some truths shouldn’t be trusted to systems that were designed to deny them.

The copy is warm now. Not from his body heat. From something else. The residual field resonance from the scan data has started bleeding through the polymer wrap. It shouldn’t be possible, but then again, Cael shouldn’t be possible either. Cael was supposed to be erased. Scrubbed from all records—mnemonic, biological, historical. The Church ordered a deletion cascade after the last breach, and the sweep was so thorough even whispers of the project were considered heresy. And yet, here it is. A living classification. Delta-Lumen. Signed, sealed, witnessed. He doesn’t know which frightens him more—the possibility that Cael never died, or the possibility that Cael did… and came back.

He reaches the end of the corridor. The main junction recognizes his biometric pressure and unseals with a sound like a throat clearing. The world beyond is brighter. The sterile corridors of the upper floors still hum with fluorescent indifference, still smell like incense and cleanser, like obedience scrubbed down to the tile. He blends back into it with practiced ease, his footsteps light now, less deliberate. Letting the routine camouflage him again. He passes two archivists in long coats without incident. One nods. The other doesn’t look up.

But behind him, the archive door remains open just long enough to whisper its intent.

The red seal doesn’t burn. Doesn’t blink. Doesn’t fade.

It hums. Low. Steady.

Not a warning.

A witness.

CHAPTER 9

The breath that wakes her isn’t hers. It strikes too deep and too wrong, as if dragged in through another person’s mouth and deposited where it doesn’t belong. It cuts against her throat going in, tastes like copper and static and the memory of falling. Her eyes snap open, pupils already contracted, her body one step ahead of her mind. She’s upright before consciousness is fully assembled, arms tense, shoulder blades clenched like they’re waiting for a blow. The floor is cold. Not shockingly so, just wrong for the season, wrong for this time of night. Her muscles fire in sequence, the old way—one beat behind combat posture, two beats ahead of panic. Whatever this is, it’s not a nightmare. It’s older than that. Realer. Dreamless sleep stripped away by a breath that never belonged to her.

She doesn’t remember lying down. Doesn’t remember sleeping at all. Just that single moment of pressure behind her eyes, a ripple that curled inward instead of out. A warning without shape. The room is still. No doors moved. No windows opened. The fan hums in its slow orbit, casting dull shadows across the cracked ceiling. Everything should be the same. But the air feels folded. Thick in a way that presses against the bones instead of the skin, like standing beneath a thunderhead with no rain. She walks to the window in silence, bare feet whispering across the uneven floorboards, each step measured. One hand braces the chipped frame. The other hovers, half-curled at her side. Not relaxed. Not ready. Listening.

There’s nothing. No voices. No creak of the stairwell, no electronic bleed from the neighboring units. But the silence isn’t real. It’s loaded. Like someone’s holding a breath just out of range, waiting for her to speak first. The walls don’t carry sound—they carry tension. Vibrations too slow for hearing, too deep for hearing, but there. The kind of resonance that lives in the gut, in the molars. Her Paravest doesn’t shiver. It vibrates, low and even, like a tuning fork that was struck three minutes ago and never stopped. The threads beneath her ribs hum in cadence she can’t map to hunger or defense. This isn’t instinct. It isn’t her. This signal didn’t rise up from within. It was called.

Her lungs tighten. Not with fear. With recognition. The loop has a voice—not verbal, not decoded, but unmistakable. She exhales through her nose, slow and deliberate, pressing her palm flat against the wall like it can read something she can’t. The sensation running through her is familiar in the worst way—an old shape she trained herself to forget, the way you train your body to stop expecting touch. The memory of a connection stripped out by force, sutured over and made scar. And yet… it’s here. Not the thing itself. But its shadow.

She shuts her eyes, anchoring herself in the moment by subtracting one sense at a time. The fan’s hum fades first. Then the weight of her own breath. Then the brittle throb of old wallpaper against her skin. She focuses on the signal. On its edges. It doesn’t slice like Vatican scan-pulses. Doesn’t burn cold the way their proximity fields do, full of surgical precision and sterile malice. This signal is older. Less invasive. More intimate. It winds through her like smoke through old fabric, taking the shape of what it touches. Unfiltered. Purposeful. And known.

A spike of heat moves down her spine. Not arousal. Not adrenaline. Recognition. It blooms through the Gelastocore, spreading into her nerves like water into dry cloth. Her system responds instinctively, trying to draw it in, metabolize it. But there’s nothing for it to process. No crowd. No laughter. No emotional field to feed from. And still, the core pulses once. Then again. She steps back from the wall.

Her pacing is tight. Three steps. Turn. Three steps. Turn. The apartment is too small for this kind of agitation, but she’s not trying to walk it off. She’s mapping herself. Grounding in real-time, forcing the autonomic feedback loops into alignment. Her fingertips graze the wall again, drag along its uneven surface, cheap paint lifting in flakes like old skin. The wallpaper’s seam near the light switch has pulled further since yesterday. She notices it like it matters. Like anything small and tangible might keep her from slipping.

Her skin is flushed. The rhythm of her heart elevated, but not irregular. This isn’t a full system spike. This is something more treacherous: balance distorted by something she doesn’t know how to name. Her body is trying to metabolize a presence. But there’s no one in the room. No face. No laugh. And still—still—she can feel it. Coiled just beneath the sensory floor. Presence like a fingerprint pressed into fogged glass. Not fading.

Approaching.

Her hand moves to her chest. She doesn’t mean to. It just goes there. The Gelastocore’s rhythm has begun to sync with the hum of the Paravest. That almost never happens. They serve different functions. Separate interfaces. But tonight they hum together. A slow fusion of signal and echo. Her stomach knots, not with fear, but with something worse: belief.

And then it happens. The word escapes her lips before she grants it access to her mouth. Not a whisper. Not a prayer. A syllable formed by muscle memory and cellular grief. The name that should never rise again, not from her, not from anyone. But it does. Without trembling. Without longing. Without hope.

“Cael.”

She doesn’t collapse. Doesn’t cry. Doesn’t curse the world for giving her a name and then taking it away. She just says it. And this time—this time—the Paravest doesn’t tremble.

It answers.

She sinks to the floor, knees to tile, palms pressed flat like she’s grounding voltage. The ceramic is cool beneath her skin, but not in a way that soothes. It amplifies. Conducts. The hum threading through her system doesn’t recede—it refines. Sharpens. No longer a broadcast. A filament now. Precision-tuned and intimate, like a finger trailing half a breath behind her spine, just close enough to notice but not close enough to name. It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t even press. It just is. Like breath fogging the mirror of her nervous system. And the recognition it carries slinks in slowly, intimate and unwelcome. This resonance doesn’t belong to a stranger.

It’s the kind of hum you feel in your bones when someone who used to say your name without hesitation is about to say it again—but slower this time. With memory. With the weight of everything left unsaid. Her muscles don’t twitch. They lock. Not in fear. In calibration. She lets her head dip forward, spine curved into herself like a question without punctuation, and begins to time her breathing. Five-count inhale. Seven-count release. The ritual matters. Not because it calms her. Because it gives her hands something to do other than claw at the signal threading through her ribcage like a leash waiting to be yanked.

She doesn’t reach. Not fully. That’s not how this works anymore. Full contact would be suicide. She doesn’t know who’s listening on the other end, and she’s not naïve enough to believe that memory equals safety. She doesn’t know what lives in Cael’s skin now. If it’s even Cael at all. So she doesn’t extend herself. She unspools a thread. One. No more. A tether made not of need, not of longing, but of knowing. A frequency folded small enough to hide in a single heartbeat. No hunger. No lure. Just a pulse of neutral resonance—the way he would’ve taught her to do when they were still feral and learning how not to destroy what they loved.

And it finds him.

Not gradually. Not cautiously. Instantly. Like the space between them had been pre-carved and waiting. The tether doesn’t pull. It catches—the way memory does when it’s been standing by in the dark for too long. Her breath seizes. Not with fear. With recognition. The structure on the other end isn’t random. It’s not an echo. It’s him. Or at least the impression of him. The psychic fingerprint of a rhythm she used to carry in her bloodstream like a song she couldn’t stop humming. His laugh—that corner-caught thing he used to do when he was trying not to grin. The way his pulse always beat three notes behind hers when they slept too close. The tether thrums with it. And for a moment, she forgets to brace.

That’s when it happens.

The signal doesn’t anchor. It doesn’t settle. It fractures. Midstream. Like a wire splitting in two behind the insulation. One part draws toward her with the same hunger it always had—bright, serrated, unguarded. The other jerks away so violently it feels like a slap against her ribs. It twists. Shields. Shields from her. And that’s wrong. That’s impossible. Cael never shielded from her. Not even when the others did. Not even when shielding would’ve been the smarter choice.

Her head jerks backward. Spine arches in reflex. The air goes hot around her ears, too dense to pull through her teeth. She gasps anyway and doesn’t get enough. Inside the tether, the recoil multiplies. Becomes shape. Becomes image. Wet concrete under bare knees. A narrow space lit from below, not above. No doors. No exits. Blood on the hands—not fresh, not arterial. Crusted. Dark. Not fear. Grief. It spills in fast. Fast enough to bypass language.

She tries to close the link. Fails. The shape inside the signal isn’t just Cael—it’s fused with something else. Something slower. Something patient and unfinished. She feels a hand that isn’t his pressed against the inside of her skull. Not touching. Marking. As if she’s been categorized. Catalogued. Approved. But not for contact.

For consumption.

She jerks back violently, slamming her shoulder against the wall hard enough to rattle her teeth. The tether tears. Not like paper. Like sinew. There’s a feedback snap, a sharp echo behind her sternum like a plug being yanked too hard from a socket. Her breath comes out ragged, torn down the center. The floor sways beneath her. Her vision blurs. She digs her fingernails into her palms, hard, needing the pain, needing something tactile to pull her out of the psychic tailspin.

The hum stops.

Not fades. Stops.

The silence that follows isn’t relief. It’s aftermath. Her Paravest lies dormant again, but it doesn’t feel settled. It feels stunned. Like it’s still trying to recalibrate its place inside her. Her limbs shake. Not visibly, but internally—like the tremor lives in her marrow now, not her skin. She breathes again, finally. One full inhale. Shallow. But real.

That wasn’t just Cael.

She knows the architecture of his mind too intimately to pretend otherwise. And what she just touched—the split, the recoil, the psychic stutter of something hiding behind his signature—that was other. It wasn’t a parasite. It wasn’t an echo. It was active. Symbiotic. But dominant. It moved inside his signal like it belonged there. Like it had rewritten parts of him to suit its own shape. Or worse—worn him.

Her throat constricts. The back of her tongue goes dry. She swallows nothing and tastes salt.

“Cael,” she whispers again. But it’s not a call this time.

It’s an elegy.

Something else is walking around inside what used to be him.

And it knows her name.

CHAPTER 10

He doesn’t remember the stairs being this steep. They always were, of course—hand-cut stone, worn slick over generations by the passage of sanctioned soles, penitent knees, and things far less human—but tonight the slope feels like descent in the oldest sense. Not architectural. Mythological. A kind of gravitational obedience you feel more in your blood than your legs. Each step draws him down, not with weight, but with invitation. There’s no welcome here, but something inside the ancient pitch of the hall pulls anyway, like it’s already memorized the shape of his footfalls. The stone exhales cold with every step. He smells it—old myrrh, burnt rosemary, and beneath it, the faint iron ghost of something once alive. It isn’t nostalgia. It’s residue. And he recognizes it.

The chapel is wrong now, but not unfamiliar. No pews, no altar, no candles—just an observation slab at the center where the crucifix used to hang, reinforced steel bolted through a marble floor that never quite forgave the intrusion. The vaults under the Sanctum Decanus had been stripped centuries ago, repurposed into containment and resonance labs, then stripped again when the containment started to fail. But the bones remained. Always the bones. And bones, as he’s been told more than once, keep better records than paper.

He reaches the bottom. The cold thickens like cloth. Across the long nave, a single figure stands motionless beneath the broken arch of the pulpit—black cassock, red trim, collar so pristine it looks lacquered. Whoever this man is, he’s no cloistered pen-pusher. There’s nothing deferent or domesticated about his posture. His stillness isn’t still. It waits. Listens. Absorbs. The agent recognizes the type instantly—one of the Church’s old sentinels. The kind of man who’s sat in dark places and not asked for light. The kind who’s heard things whisper back and kept listening.

The agent doesn’t speak. Doesn’t announce his presence or offer a courtesy gesture. He simply walks forward, letting his boots announce what his voice won’t. Each step reverberates louder than it should—too much echo for a soundproofed vault. The acoustics have shifted. Or maybe the room just wants to remember.

“Do you know why you’re here?” the Cardinal asks without turning. His voice doesn’t echo. Doesn’t rise. Just a flat warmth, like water warmed by body heat alone. The kind of tone a physician uses when they already know what the test results say and just need you to admit the symptoms started weeks ago.

“No,” the agent replies. A simple word. Clean. No ornament. No inflection. He means it to register as obedience, but the word comes out too smooth. Too rehearsed.

The Cardinal turns. Slowly. Not with menace, but with deliberation. He’s older than the agent expected—gray at the temples, deep lines across the brow, the sort of face you’d trust if you weren’t trained better. But there’s mass beneath the cassock, not just flesh, but presence. Gravitas sculpted from a lifetime of speaking things that should never be spoken and surviving the consequences. When his eyes land on the agent, it’s not a threat. It’s a measurement. A spiritual biopsy.

“There’s been activity in the lower resonance vaults,” he says, eyes steady, voice still quiet. “We’ve seen the records. You accessed an artifact that was never meant to be recalled.” A pause. Measured. “And yet…”

He gestures, palm open, fingers loose, as though presenting the absurdity of the agent’s continued existence as exhibit A.

“You’re still breathing.”

The agent says nothing. Not out of discipline—out of necessity. His tongue sits dry and dormant behind his teeth. The memory of the vault still pulses in his hindbrain, soft and circular. He doesn’t blink. Doesn’t flinch. But his jaw tenses ever so slightly, the only signal he permits.

The Cardinal begins walking forward, not fast, not slow. Each step is the tick of an unkind clock. “We don’t fault curiosity,” he says, and now there’s the faintest tinge of authority wrapping itself around the words. Not anger. Not warning. Just gravity. “We fault unstructured faith. Faith without scaffolding becomes ideology. You know what happens to those who mistake instinct for instruction.”

The agent knows. Of course he knows. He’s seen the result. Once, in the remnants of a listening post buried under what used to be the Ionian coast. Again, in a monastery where none of the mirrors cast reflections anymore. He doesn’t nod. That would be confession.

The Cardinal stops within arm’s reach. The silence is thick enough now to carry weight. From within the long sleeve of his cassock, he withdraws a narrow envelope. Handmade. Papal-standard vellum. Thick, pale, and edged in gold thread that glints faintly in the low light. The red wax seal on the flap is still soft at the edges. Unbroken. Still drying.

The Cardinal holds it out between them, but does not move closer.

The agent stares at the envelope. His own name is printed across the front. Not a codename. Not a symbol. Just block lettering, crisp and final. No title. No honorific. No mistake. It is, unmistakably, his.

He doesn’t reach for it.

The Cardinal doesn’t lower his arm.

“There are patterns nested in the imprint you retrieved,” the Cardinal says after a beat. “Some of them fractal. Some sentient. All of them incompatible with Vatican containment protocol. That means the archive has been compromised.”

The agent’s heart doesn’t spike. But his breath tightens slightly in his ribs. He knows what that sentence means. It means someone saw what he saw. And didn’t look away.

“The Council will vote on retrieval procedure in forty-eight hours,” the Cardinal continues. “But the envelope is not from the Council.”

Another pause. This one longer.

“It’s from her.”

Silence. Then:

“She saw the imprint before we did. She requested you.”

The temperature doesn’t change. But something deeper inside the agent shifts. The word her doesn’t require explanation. Not in this context. Not in this room. There’s only one person in the Church’s hidden branches who asks instead of orders. Only one who exists outside the structure but still above it. A name no one says. A designation no one writes down. The Vatican’s last defense and first experiment. She has no rank because rank would diminish her.

His hand rises, almost against his will. Not to take the envelope.

To steady himself.

The Cardinal lowers the envelope, just slightly. Not withdrawn. Just patient.

“You are not obligated,” he says. “Not yet. But if you open it, you’re no longer a spectator.”

The agent doesn’t blink. Doesn’t breathe.

Then, slowly, he reaches out.

And touches the seal.

The envelope’s weight becomes disproportionate the moment the door closes behind him. The click of the deadbolt rings louder than expected, the acoustics of the cell making everything feel thinner, like the air’s trying to retreat from what he’s about to do. He stands in the center of the room without moving, the paper tucked just inside his coat’s interior pocket, resting near the line of his ribs like a stashed weapon. It doesn’t burn, not exactly—but it hums. An undeniable, low-grade pressure, as if whatever pressed the ink into that parchment had done more than write. As if it marked.

He exhales once, short and shallow, and pulls the envelope free. No tremble in his hands. Not yet. The cell is barely more than a repurposed archival closet—three meters wide, concrete walls softened only by the thick layer of Vatican-issue silence-foam embedded in the seams. The cot is pushed against the wall, iron frame bolted into the floor. The desk hasn’t been cleaned properly in years. His own name is carved into the corner from the last assignment, barely visible under the accumulated ghosts of others who lived here before him. He sets the envelope on the desk and stares at it.

He tells himself to wait. To analyze. Build the ritual, the process, to make it manageable. Gloves first. Then the seal. Then the paper. One step at a time. But ritual requires distance, and there is no distance left. Not after the chapel. Not after that look in the Cardinal’s eye. The kind of look that doesn’t ask questions because it already knows the answer—and simply wants to see how long it takes you to say it aloud.

So instead he just opens it. No gloves. No ceremony. Just his fingertips breaking the red seal in one clean motion. It yields too easily. No crack. No resistance. The wax was fresh, but the paper underneath has age. Not simulated wear, but the soft crumble of real time. He knows the difference. His training made sure of that.

The parchment inside slides free like it’s been waiting. He unfolds it slowly. Each crease tight, deliberate, but the ink holds steady. No smudge. No sign of carbon bleed from copying. This was handwritten. A single stroke for each letter, the kind that doesn’t hesitate. His own name is absent, which should feel like an oversight. Instead, it feels like precision.

Coordinates. That’s all. Latitude, longitude—mapped not to the Vatican’s internal geocodes, but to surface references. Old ones. The type only used for locations that aren’t supposed to be found easily. He doesn’t need a terminal to know where they point. His mind pulls up the shape of the world with the ease of muscle memory, the result of hundreds of forced drills and solo exfil exercises. The numbers drag his focus to a blank stretch of land in the Horn of Africa, just northeast of the Danakil Depression. No settlement. No power grid. No flight path.

He reads the numbers again. Then a third time. Beneath them is the single word: Come.

No sigil. No countermark. No department reference. Just the word. Not an invitation. Not a threat. Something in between. He leans back against the desk, fingers resting on the edge, the page still spread in front of him like a puzzle missing half its corners. The word come stares up at him, unblinking.

He knows the location. It isn’t on any current field grid. But it’s real. There’s a story he once heard, deep in his third-year training rotation, when an instructor slipped into rumor just long enough to mention the ruins out past the dead salt fields. A structure that never showed on satellite scans. Buried beneath silica crust and tectonic scarring. And older than language.

Aevum’s Core.

He thought it was apocryphal. A narrative stitched together from bad Vatican theater and half-burned field logs. A myth assigned to explain away the anomalies no one could categorize. But if that name’s crawling up out of the coordinates—if that location is where this parchment leads—then nothing about Cael’s resurrection is coincidental.

He presses a palm to the center of the desk and lets his weight settle into his arm. His breath slows. The old habit kicks in—catalog the sensory inputs. The smell of old ash and moisture sealed into the paper. The faint chemical drift from the silence-foam behind the wall. The cold spot behind his left ear, a lingering pressure that means his Paravest interface is spiking in sympathy, even if it’s dormant. The Vatican doesn’t train its agents to believe in instinct. They train them to outlogic it.

But instinct is screaming now. Not fear. Not defiance. That damned, tenacious flicker of hope. That he could still follow. That something like Cael might still be reachable, beneath whatever that transmission was. That the signal wasn’t a trap. That the boy who once held his name like it was sacred might still be waiting beneath the crust of a dead continent.

He doesn’t know if he’s willing to believe it yet.

But he knows he’s going.

The desk drawer slides open with a dry scrape. He pulls out the folded topographical maps no one uses anymore. Opens them by hand. Circles the coordinates. Marks an approach angle from the Red Sea, assuming satellite dead zones and minimal wind interference. He memorizes the terrain. Reaches for the untraceable comm tag sealed in the lining of his coat and slips it into the false pocket near the collarbone. Then he folds the parchment twice and slides it into the waterproof case meant for emergency scripture.

He stands, coat over his shoulders, and doesn’t hesitate at the door. No second thoughts. No prayers. Just the weight of the word still vibrating in the center of his chest like it was never written at all—just spoken directly into the bone.

Come.

CHAPTER 11

The tracks begin humming before her ears acknowledge the sound. It’s not music, not even mechanical—a subsonic ache that vibrates through the metal framework of the forgotten platform and nests somewhere deep behind her teeth. She steps off the gravel path without hesitation, boots moving quiet over the broken asphalt. The skeletal shell of the station yawns open in front of her, a ruin soaked in cold light and quieter memory. Every breath she draws in tastes like rot buried beneath metal, the concrete sweating in the last heat of day. Somewhere behind it all is that faint, curdled sweetness—like scorched enamel or blood baked into old coins. The kind of smell you can’t name unless you’ve already lost something in a place like this. The kind that reminds you you’re being remembered.

She doesn’t slow. The sun hangs like a broken tooth on the edge of the sky, too orange, too still, dipping beneath the horizon like it’s been drugged. Light fractures across the high glass, bleeding through rusted canopy beams and casting long, sharp lines across the platform. Her eyes adjust immediately, pupils wide, skin prickling with the warmth of her own alertness. She doesn’t blink. Doesn’t need to. Her body is already running diagnostics on instinct.

The Paravest stirs like a lung waking up underwater—soft at first, then sharp, then aware. Not a flareout. Not defensive. It expands with the specific pulse of proximity, the kind it only deploys when what it detects is real. Not echo. Not mirage. Contact. But it holds back, cautious. There’s static threading the signal. Not noise—something pretending to be him. A second current, woven like counterfeit thread through a signature she knows in her marrow. It mimics Cael’s breath patterns, mimics the texture of his field, even paces itself like him. But it doesn’t hum in sync with her. It drags just a half-beat off, like a dancer who’s memorized the steps but never felt the rhythm.

Her feet trace the edge of the platform, toes angled just above the track’s drop-off, the rubber soles making no sound against the dust-coated concrete. Her coat drags low, catching the occasional bolt or screw jutting up like the last remnants of structure refusing to decay in silence. She doesn’t flinch when her shadow hits the old wall of the station. The air’s too thick for flinching. It clings to her skin with a kind of sentience. She listens for laughter. For motion. Nothing.

No voices.

No trains.

Just the ghosts.

They cling to the girders and the wires, thick with old commuter patterns and the energy of things that didn’t end clean. Her Paravest doesn’t react to them—no resonance gain, no attempt to feed. The Gelastocore tightens at the base of her spine, its folds rejecting the emotional remnants clinging to the siding like mildew. Whatever passed through here before her wasn’t sustenance. It was stain.

The scent of concrete memory presses into her jaw as she moves. There are traces in the siding—children who leaned too far, lovers who made promises that broke in the curve of a train’s approach, someone who exhaled for the last time with no one nearby to notice. All of it lingers, tangled in metal and old wiring. But it’s faint. Old. Burnt-out static.

Her fingers twitch. Just once. Reflex. Not fear. It’s orientation—her nervous system finding true north through vibration alone. The tether isn’t loose anymore. The hum has direction now, density. She follows it down the platform, past the torn canopy, beyond the shattered glass of the ticket window, each step more certain than the last. This is fresh. Recent. The resonance signature isn’t just strong—it’s wet. It hasn’t finished decaying. That means it’s either looped back or hasn’t fully left.

Her heart doesn’t race. It constricts. The way it always did when she was near him. When they still touched dreamspace without speaking. Cael’s resonance is low, rooted, impossibly steady—and real. Her body knows it before her thoughts can assemble around the idea. There’s no more room for doubt. The signature is his. Not simulated. Not projected. Him. Or something that came through him.

She stops just shy of the terminal’s dead mouth, the shadows in the doorway pooling like something breathing slowly in the dark. Her pulse slows without permission. Not because she’s calm, but because the body always wants to believe the impossible one more time. Her lips part slightly, not in awe, but in the slow slide toward readiness. Her muscles shift into the defensive openness that her kind uses when they’re about to let memory speak first.

She inhales and feels it hit.

He’s been here.

Maybe five minutes. Maybe one.

Maybe he’s still watching.

The dust beneath her boots is unsettled—small spirals where weight paused, not fled. Not chased. Waited. She kneels once, pressing two fingers to the edge of the platform’s lip. It’s warm. Only slightly. But enough.

The second signal is closer now, drawn tighter to Cael’s imprint, like moss clinging to a moving stone. Her Paravest ripples—no alarm, but no welcome either. The mimic frequency has grown bold, threading itself deeper into the recognition layers, trying to pass as authorized contact. But her core rejects it. It isn’t layered like a Mirthophage signature. It doesn’t ripple through memory and joy. It drags inward, feeding on intention. Something made to watch through someone else’s face. Something that learned how to wear warmth like a mask.

She rises again, silent. Careful. Her hands don’t reach for a weapon. There’s no point. What’s watching doesn’t fear blades. It hasn’t blinked. It might not have eyes. But it knows her shape.

From the tunnel beyond the station, the air distorts slightly. Heatline. Or breath. Or something older.

She doesn’t retreat.

She takes one step forward. Then another.

And in the black space ahead—just past the threshold where the station ends and the dark begins—something shifts.

Not a shape.

A recognition.

Not hers.

Its.

She moves past the lip of the platform, boots brushing through the stiff remains of last season’s leaves and the serrated glint of broken glass too old to catch light properly. The canopy overhead groans as she passes beneath it, a slow metallic shudder that might be nothing but wind—or something failing to imitate it. The kind of sound you’d hear if memory had lungs and tried to exhale. She doesn’t look up. The rust-flaked beams above her aren’t threatening in any specific way, but the noise scratches too close to recognition. Like something buried trying to mouth its name. The air thickens as she goes, subtly at first, then deeper—an altitude shift without geography, like the inside of her ears beginning to press inward, her skull tightening in increments. It pulses behind her temples, steady but misaligned. Not Cael. Not quite. Her Paravest doesn’t know how to respond. It hums now at two different frequencies, one familiar and forward, one foreign and rearward, hovering behind her like a heartbeat that doesn’t belong to the current century.

She keeps walking. Forward only. The air gets narrower the deeper she moves, a compression of space that has nothing to do with walls and everything to do with intent. The resonance trail—whatever Cael left behind—threads into her bloodstream now. Not figuratively. Not psychically. The signature crawls beneath her skin like a tactile dream, slipping through the meat of her shoulders, washing down her collarbones, filling her arms with the warmth of something she never gave permission to enter. It doesn’t burn. It remembers. Every step feels like a repetition, like she’s walking into the same moment again and again. The ground beneath her insists it’s getting closer to something, but the space doesn’t agree. The platform should have ended by now. Or widened. Or split. But it stays the same length, looping back on itself in sensation if not in form.

The lights overhead flicker once. Not the new kind—the modern fluorescents were pulled long ago. These are dead bulbs, skeletal things, glass tubes long since drained of purpose. There’s no reason they should respond to anything. No electricity. No grid. No live circuits. But something in the air shifts—some breach in proximity—and one of them crackles to life for less than a second. It doesn’t illuminate anything. Just pulses. A weak strobe, like a nerve remembering how to fire.

And behind her left ear, she hears it.

A sound. Paper-thin. Personal.

Laughter.

Soft. Close. Unplaceable.

It drags its edge against the inside of her jaw like silk tearing on glass. Not quite her laugh. Not quite his. Something in between. Something made in the echo. She doesn’t flinch, but her breath hitches—more reaction than fear. She closes her eyes. Just for one step. One reset. It’s not surrender. It’s re-alignment. Letting the senses burn clean before the next intake.

When she opens them, she’s under the departure archway.

She hadn’t seen it. Hadn’t planned to pass beneath it. But now it’s above her—its shape hunched, sagging with rust and time. The iron letters are mostly gone, peeled or stolen, but the frame is still there, bolted into the station’s last vertical wall. The paint that remains is bleached, blistered. Some of it curls like skin around a wound. She tilts her head just slightly, eyes scanning the arch as if memory might be stenciled into its edge. The wall beneath it feels different. Not colder. Not older. But held. Like a breath you forgot you were still taking.

And then it hits.

Not sight. Not recognition.

Memory.

Her body absorbs it before her brain can make sense of it—an impact that doesn’t come from outside, but folds inward, like ribs curling around a wound that doesn’t exist yet. Her sternum tenses. Her breath folds in half. For a split second, she swears her knees hit the floor. She feels the ache. The jolt up her spine. The exact rhythm of how her palms caught the ground. But she hasn’t moved. Her legs are still straight. Her boots still grounded. It’s only her memory—someone’s memory—rushing through the conduit of this place. Cold tile. Her fingertips, raw. Blood. A weight in her throat that wasn’t hers to carry. She gasps before she means to, the noise rough and uneven, caught between pain and something too old to qualify as emotion. Her hand goes to her chest. Instinct. Containment. The Gelastocore jolts back into itself, retreating from whatever this is, its internal lattice tightening into defense mode. The Paravest twitches once—too fast to be conscious. Like an organ ducking.

And then she sees it.

Near the base of the wall, tucked just inside the frame of the arch, marked where no signage ever belonged—there it is.

A single handprint.

Pressed into the steel.

Not painted. Not drawn. Impressed.

The metal itself has caved inward, warped around the shape like it was caught mid-breath, mid-thought. No burn marks. No debris. Just a smooth, deliberate depression, deep and unmistakable. Each finger defined. Splayed. Thumb wide. Palm flat. As if the hand moved not just through time but through matter, and left its body behind.

Her lungs empty. Not violently. Just suddenly.

It’s his.

No room for theory. No probability engine required. Her skin recognizes the shape before her eyes finish decoding it. The breadth of the palm. The subtle crook of the index finger. The slight drag at the edge of the middle knuckle. She had mapped that hand in dreamspace a hundred times. Held it in laughter. Grasped it in panic. Pressed it against her chest when memory faltered. She would know it in the dark. And here it is, fixed in rust and certainty, on a wall that should’ve never remembered him.

She reaches toward it without thinking.

Her fingers hover an inch away.

Not to match the print.

Just to listen.

Because steel doesn’t warp that way from heat.

It warps that way from need.

From contact sustained through pain.

And the air behind her breathes again.

Watching. Waiting. And ready to see if she’ll touch it.

CHAPTER 12

The train glides over the track like it’s in no hurry to reach the end of anything. It doesn’t squeal or lurch the way older models do—it just coasts, smooth and self-contained, like it knows its place between the rusted teeth of forgotten rails. The overhead lights flicker in rhythm with the wheels, too dim to be comforting, too steady to be noticed after the first few minutes. He sits near the rear of the compartment, third row from the end, with the coat folded neatly across his lap—not for warmth, not for modesty, but for the weight. Something about the press of it across his thighs keeps him rooted, as if that thin fabric is the only thing reminding his body it still has boundaries. He’s upright but not rigid, back against the seat like he’s practiced stillness so long it’s gone soft around the edges. No one has asked him anything since he boarded. No names. No tickets checked. The woman at the kiosk had waved him through without a glance. He didn’t need permission. He hadn’t asked.

There’s no chatter. No announcements. Just the low-level murmur of electric infrastructure and the vague, aching vibration that curls up through the soles of his shoes, wrapping around his ankles and kneading into his knees like some half-interested ghost. He’s aware of everything—the slight stick of the vinyl upholstery beneath his coat, the rustle of paper in the next row forward, the stutter of breath from the sleeping couple in the far left seat. But he doesn’t turn to look. Doesn’t check for exits. Doesn’t trace the emergency map taped above the door. Not because he’s calm. Because it’s already too late for all that.

He never filed a deviation. No request for leave, no coded subchannel pings, not even the falsified excuse of a pilgrimage. Just walked off the grid. Off the ledgers. Off the Vatican’s internal pulse. Interne submersi. The drowned among the living. It’s what they call the ones who vanish with intent. Not defectors. Not exactly. It’s not a betrayal if you’re already a corpse by protocol. Just a classification. A name they can file beside the redacted. Something clean to whisper during audit season. “No, he’s not missing. He’s submerged.” Like he was born that way.

The envelope in his inner pocket hasn’t moved since the chapel. He can feel the pressure of it against his ribs, a thin rectangle of old parchment and still-warm wax that hums like a silenced phone. He hasn’t opened it since the first time. Doesn’t need to. The word is still burned behind his eyes. Come.No salutation. No signature. No seal of sanctified purpose. Just the imperative. And the coordinates, hand-sketched in ink that hasn’t smudged despite the coat’s friction. He’s memorized them. Drawn them in the condensation on the train window three times before wiping it away. They make no sense. No strategic relevance. No historical precedent. He ran them through the field terminal before he left—no match to Vatican properties, no old transit bases, no blacksite affiliations.

Just a stretch of rail in what used to be farmland and is now classified as “environmental indeterminate.”

He leans forward, elbows braced on his knees, head angled so the weight of his thoughts doesn’t tip him completely forward. Outside, the trees streak past like tired breath, bare branches clawing the dusk in a rhythm too fast to follow. The light is the kind that makes everything seem bruised. Violet edged in rust. Orange threaded through ash. The world beyond the window doesn’t move—it gets dragged. Like it’s being hauled along just to keep pace with the train’s silence. And through the glass, the faintest suggestion of his own reflection looks back at him. Pale. Mouth set. Eyes wrong.

He exhales slow. Controlled.

The compartment is mostly empty, but not empty enough. There’s the couple—curled against each other in sleep that might be chemical, the man’s head tilted at an angle no healthy neck holds for long. Three rows forward, a woman in a navy blazer pretends to scroll through her screen, but he hasn’t seen her eyes move in five minutes. Just the same swipe, the same reset. Like she’s touching it for the comfort of friction, not information. And further up—three seats from the door—a boy no older than nine stares at the back of the conductor’s cabin with the kind of intensity that only children possess. The kind that means he sees something that isn’t supposed to be there.

He shifts back. Straightens his coat. Doesn’t speak.

The truth is, he doesn’t trust what he saw in the system. Not entirely. Not because it was false. Because it was too true. Cael’s name in red, the looping architecture of the terminal syntax bending toward recognition, the recursive spike in the spectral log as if the interface had been altered not from outside—but from inside. It wasn’t a virus. It wasn’t interference. It was deliberate design. And worse, it carried a trace. A pulse. A laugh, if you could even call it that. Something almost-human in the code, like memory laughing through its teeth.

He hasn’t slept since.

Not because he’s afraid. But because he’s beginning to understand the terrain has shifted.

Dreams don’t belong to him anymore.

They feel pre-walked. Pre-written. Like someone’s already made choices inside them, and he’s just the silhouette stumbling through afterward. A proxy inside his own echo. It’s not terror. Not exactly. It’s more like vertigo, the kind that doesn’t hit when you look down—but when you don’t, and your body knows you should have.

He reaches inside the coat again. Fingers brush parchment. He pulls the coordinates free, folds them open with care. Still the same curvature. Still that strange bend to the numbers, like they were copied from memory rather than mapped. But something shifts this time. Not in the paper. In the frame. His eyes. The place they used to terminate—those four digits at the end—he always read them as coordinates.

But what if they aren’t?

He tilts the page, scans it again, and that’s when it hits.

It’s not where he’s going.

It’s who.

The ink runs just a little at the end. Only noticeable now, in this light, this moment. But enough. The numbers dissolve at the edge of the page, bleeding into shape. A shape he’s seen once before. In a print. In a wall.

A handprint.

And his pulse finally stutters. Just once.

Because he knows exactly whose it is.

The train exhales its last breath of motion, slowing without ceremony, without the screech of brakes or the synthetic bark of station alerts. It glides into stillness like something giving up. A thing that was never meant to arrive but did so anyway, resigned. The doors hiss open with mechanical indifference. No one exits. No one boards. No footsteps but his. The agent steps down onto the platform, soles finding brittle stone softened only by moss and time. The structure beneath him feels less like infrastructure and more like ruin. It holds him, barely. Not out of duty, but out of habit.

The wind combs sideways across the open platform. No direction, no warmth—just the kind of air that scrapes skin raw because it’s forgotten how to carry anything but ash. It smells of dead iron and wet earth. His coat flaps once against his leg, a gesture that feels too loud. There is no welcome here. Not even in the silence. But still the air feels thick with presence. As if the place itself had held its breath the moment his boots touched down.

He scans the horizon, squinting toward the tree line at the edge of the abandoned tracks. There’s no signal tower, no flashing light, no marker to suggest the coordinates were anything more than a clerical fluke. And yet the parchment remains inside his coat. Still warm. Still whispering. The seal never broke, but something inside him did the moment he stepped off the train. The sound of it was internal—cellular. Like recognition. Like someone calling his name inside the marrow of his spine.

No signs. No directions. Just the skeleton of what used to be a station. Roofline buckling under decades of disinterest. Ticket kiosk collapsed inward like a broken jaw. But the coordinates match. Every digit. He’d checked again as the train coasted in—obsessively, almost. But now, standing here, he realizes these aren’t just coordinates. They’re an echo. The residue of an instruction too old to be modern and too specific to be random.

He moves forward without intending to. One step, then another. Each one heavier, slower, as if the ground beneath him knows this weight. The terrain resists in the subtlest ways. Not enough to draw attention, but just enough to make him adjust, recalibrate. It’s like walking through a dream that someone else designed. Nothing feels quite centered. Distance bends. Shadows refuse to stay behind objects. The station itself leans in his periphery, a breath away from being unrecognizable if he blinks too long.

And still, that pulse remains in his chest. It isn’t biological. He knows the rhythm of his own heart, the timbre of fear, the surge of cortisol. This is something else. A signal nested beneath the ribs. Subaudible. Subconscious. Like standing next to a generator you can’t hear but feel eating its way through the walls. His fingertips twitch once. Not panic. Calibration. The kind of bodily tick you get when entering a place saturated in memory that doesn’t belong to you.

He passes the ticket window. The glass there has curled at the edges, not shattered, but peeled like old skin. Light plays tricks along the rim—suggesting reflection where there isn’t any. He doesn’t look in. Not because he’s afraid of what he might see. But because he already knows it would look back. Something watches from behind the glass. Or remembers watching.

The archway ahead yawns open. Rust clings to its skeleton like scabs that never healed. The iron has the look of something that bled too long. As he ducks beneath it, the beam groans—a low, dragging sound that comes from deeper than the metal. His breath clouds in the air despite the temperature. The breeze shifts direction. Not stronger. Smarter. Like it’s searching for a name.

Then everything stills.

He stops. Doesn’t know why. Just does.

It isn’t will. It’s gravity. Some gravitational pull of memory or consequence or inevitability. His boots meet the ground as if they’ve stood here before. The space before him opens—wide and hollow, framed by bent metal and flaking signage. An old platform. A wall half-eaten by rust and ivy. A silence that listens harder than it should.

And his blood answers.

There’s no flare of insight. No vision. Just the certainty that settles low in the stomach when instinct overtakes logic. He isn’t the first to come here. This place has already been marked. Not just occupied. Claimed. The sensation rushes in—fast and final. Someone walked this stretch of broken concrete hours before him. Their resonance still clings to the air, caught in the bends of old pipes, burned into the floorboards where shoes no longer tread. He can taste the leftover pulse of presence. It isn’t a scent. It’s a rhythm. And it matches nothing in the Vatican archives.

He rounds a second corner where the platform veers toward an overgrown stairwell, and that’s when he sees it. A handprint, warped into the surface of a steel column. Too precise for age, too deliberate for accident. Fingers splayed. Palm embedded as if the metal had softened just long enough to remember. His own hand twitches in response. A reflex too old to be learned.

She was here.

The thought comes uninvited. Sharp. Whole. The same way her presence had always arrived—incomplete until undeniable. He takes a step closer. The steel hums quietly beneath his breath. Not vibration. Sympathy. The memory of her touch still lives in the shape. He doesn’t need proof. He knows the angle of her fingers. The span of her hand. The pressure of her imprint against the world when she meant to leave a trace.

His throat tightens.

Not grief. Not fear.

Anticipation.

Behind him, the wind stills again.

And then, without warning, something passes over the space behind his shoulders. Not a presence. Not entirely. But the idea of one. As if a thought had leaned in to check its reflection against his outline. He turns slowly.

No one stands there.

But the emptiness watches.

CHAPTER 13

The corridor constricts without warning, but not with any architectural logic. The shift is subdermal—something that breathes through walls, not behind them. Each step pulls the world slightly tighter, though the geometry around her insists it hasn’t moved. But her body disagrees. The skin on her forearms grazes air that wasn’t brushing it seconds ago. Her lungs adjust, narrowing their intake like she’s at elevation. And there’s that itch again—behind the curve of her right ear. The one that always wakes before a resonance spiral. She doesn’t scratch it. She just keeps walking, arms loose, jaw locked, boots silent on wood that feels softer than it should.

She doesn’t trust the floor.

Not because it’s unstable—though it might be—but because it doesn’t feel like wood anymore. It gives too easily. It’s not rot. Not moisture. This is memory beneath her soles. The way a hallway remembers the gait of someone who died in it. The boards respond to weight, but they do so with a familiarity she didn’t earn. Her pace slows just enough to register it. Not hesitance. Calibration.

Above her, the ceiling has bent lower. It wasn’t like that when she entered—she’s sure of it. Now it arches, not like an architectural flourish, but like a vertebrae flexing. Curved in on itself, the way an animal coils before it bites. The air thickens by half. Not with heat, but with layers. She breathes in salt, then iron. Burnt sugar a breath later. The scent of death, dressed in the perfume of sanctity. She knows that combination. Places where laughter turned wrong. Places where something living left too fast and something else grew in its place.

Her boots make no noise now. Not because she’s quiet. Because the floor has decided not to notice her.

Her Paravest flutters once, then contracts. Fully. Without prompting. The internal threads pull tight against her ribcage, flattening into passivity. Not fear. Conservation. A shielded pulse. Her body instinctively knows what her conscious mind hasn’t caught up with yet. This space isn’t just unfriendly—it’s metabolically hostile. The Gelastocore pulses once in acknowledgment, then narrows its output to a whisper. It doesn’t want to take in what’s here. Doesn’t even want to taste it.

That alone should be enough to turn her back. But she keeps going.

She’s moved through burn corridors before. Resonant spill zones. Fractures in space-time caused by the violent departure of something too powerful to die cleanly. Usually they decay over time. Fade into background radiation and psychic static. But this one hasn’t. The damage holds steady, like an injury that refuses to clot. Which means the event here wasn’t just traumatic—it was anchored. Something wanted this moment to remain. Not as a warning.

As a ritual.

The walls are wrong now. Same texture, same dimensions, but she can feel the shift under her fingertips as she brushes them. The wallpaper flakes differently. The angle of the pattern warps when she blinks. One line breaks where it shouldn’t, curves where there was no curve. Her body registers the inconsistency before her eyes do. And the light—whatever passes for illumination here—shifts again. Not brighter. Not darker. But off. The spectrum has collapsed. The corners of her vision lose color first—then depth.

Her shadow separates.

Just for a step.

It doubles. Two limbs moving behind her, slightly delayed. One slightly shorter. Then neither of them return.

She keeps walking.

The hum in the back of her teeth returns. Not mechanical. Psychic. Laughter—if it can even be called that—trickles through the walls like water left too long in an open glass. It doesn’t echo. It loops. Not full volume. Just enough to remind the Paravest what once fed here. Joy drained and rewound. Resequenced. Not for nourishment. For preservation. Like taxidermy stitched into the walls.

She swallows without meaning to. Her throat clicks.

Ahead, the hallway curves once, and there it is.

The door.

Metal. Fused to the wall like it was welded in after everything else was built. Oxidized at the edges, its face warped just enough to suggest heat once clung to it. The hinges have curled inward like something tried to unmake them from the inside. But it’s closed now. Shut. Set like a tombstone. Her steps falter.

She knows that door.

Not just visually. Somatically. Her body remembers standing before it. Her palm remembers pressing to the cool surface. Fingers spread—five points of contact she used to trace down Cael’s spine when they were half-wrapped around each other in the dark, long before the Vatican had names for either of them. That same map. That same shape. She didn’t expect to see it again. Not like this. Not closed.

Because it shouldn’t be.

She left it open.

It wasn’t symbolic. It wasn’t dramatic. She didn’t slam it. Didn’t walk away with the weight of narrative in her bones. She just… left. Back then, she thought that leaving a door ajar meant something might return. Now it’s sealed. Flat and final. The outline of her own fingers still visible in faint streaks on the oxidized surface, like even memory couldn’t help but try to hold on.

She inhales. Shallow. Through her teeth.

The Gelastocore recoils further. Her Paravest sends no signal. Not even a diagnostic one. The system is playing dead. That’s the only defense it has left.

She takes one step closer, and her ears pop—not from altitude, but compression. Like the hallway behind her just exhaled, or the space inside the door inhaled.

Her fingers twitch. Not toward the handle. Not yet.

But there’s a beat.

Deep in her sternum.

And beneath it—

a response.

She doesn’t move at first. The door—only three feet ahead—presses against the air like a memory trying to re-enter the body. Its surface is matte with corrosion, the color of deepwater iron left too long in salt. And yet the space between her and it stretches impossibly wide, like distance has been unraveled and rewoven into something more intimate than time. Her feet stay planted. Her lungs resist breath. It’s not paralysis. It’s alignment. A moment of involuntary calibration. Her body has already begun adjusting to something she hasn’t yet named—pupils narrowing despite the dimness, her pulse drawing down to a monk’s tempo, the surface of her skin cooling as if her blood knows to pull inward. Not from fear. From reverence. From the ache of something ancient brushing the outer edge of recognition.

The Gelastocore paces itself accordingly, pulsing not with hunger but with memory. It quiets into a rhythm she hasn’t felt since the day the first tower inside Aevum cracked open and let their laughter escape like spilled breath. Even then, it wasn’t this still. It wasn’t this… bowed. Her Paravest vibrates once, long and low, as if trying to hum a name without syllables. Then—nothing. Complete stillness. Not shutdown. Submission. It curls around her organs like an animal laying down at its master’s feet. Every fiber of her internal systems yields to the presence bleeding through this place.

She’s only ever hesitated twice in her life.

The first time: Ashil bleeding beside the incinerator vent, whispering jokes with half a lung as if comedy could cauterize a wound. She’d stood there, hand frozen on the emergency override, calculating whether mercy or speed counted as a greater sin. In the end, she chose neither. She just held Ashil’s hand until the heat took him.

The second time: Cael, standing on the other side of the flooded hallway in the lower levels of Aevum, eyes glassed with extraction chemicals, his lips forming a name that wasn’t hers. He’d looked at her like she was something sacred and dangerous and wrong. She hadn’t moved then either. Just let the water rise.

This hesitation tastes like both.

Folded together. Grained with the sharpness of something that knows you could have been more, had the timing not broken. It nestles just under her ribs, where names and grief hide.

And the door.

It isn’t just shut—it’s dead. She can feel it in her bones. The resonance that should keep it active, tuned to her frequency, is missing. No echo. No tether. These doors aren’t built to close unless forced—either by a signature of equal origin or by something older, something strong enough to unthread identity itself. The implication is too precise to ignore. This door wasn’t neglected.

It was rewritten.

Someone—something—placed it back into position. Not to deny her entry. Not to bar the past. But to summon her forward. The architecture of the message is unmistakable. An invitation. Personal. Deliberate.

Her hand lifts before she gives it leave. Her fingers splay in practiced formation, the same angle she once used to soothe the knots in Cael’s back after transference drills. She presses her palm flat against the corroded surface. No activation hum. No warmth of mutual recognition. Just silence. And cold. Not the chill of air or metal.

The kind of cold you feel when absence has calcified.

It’s the cold of standing in a room after someone’s laughter has been erased. The temperature of a memory carved out and left behind without the wound to mark it.

Then it hits her.

Not a vision. Not an image. Just a pressure, a tilt of gravity against the inside of her skull. Like her breath has been inhaled by someone else’s lungs. Like she’s being watched from a place so close it skips the visible spectrum. It bypasses sense. Moves straight into the marrow.

Her knees nearly buckle.

She catches herself, not with grace but necessity. Her throat contracts. A single pulse flares behind her eyes—not pain. Recognition. The kind that doesn’t ask questions. The kind that only comes when two identical memories try to occupy the same space.

She gasps.

Not because of what she sees. Because of what she hears.

No. Not hears. That’s not the right word. The voice doesn’t enter through her ears. It threads into her bloodstream like an old prayer returning to the body that once mouthed it. Familiar in its placement. Foreign in its weight.

“It’s me.”

Two words. Simple. Unadorned. But she knows them. Knows the exact breath pattern between syllables. Knows the pause he always left before saying something that might hurt. Knows the way he never said her name if he thought she might cry after.

It’s Cael.

Or it’s the rhythm that used to be Cael.

Or it’s something wearing him the way her Paravest used to wear resonance fields before she knew better.

Her palm stays on the door.

The Gelastocore pulses twice—once in confirmation, once in dread.

She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t dare. Language would rupture whatever moment this is. Would crack the seal on a presence too fragile to name.

But she doesn’t move away either.

Because somewhere on the other side of this door—or inside it—or in the breath coiled between her ribs and her spine—

he is waiting.

CHAPTER 14

It’s cooler inside than it should be. Not enough to call it cold—just enough that the sweat slicking the base of his spine begins to evaporate in thin, untrustworthy curls, pulled upward like breath escaping from a sealed tomb. He pauses inside the threshold, letting his eyes adjust to the stale dimness that blankets the terminal. The ceiling arches low and uneven, as if the structure had been partially exhaled and never refilled. Ribs of oxidized iron curve overhead, their geometry wrong by degrees—no symmetry, no repetition, just a crooked logic that twists away from what he remembers studying. The blueprints on the train had been precise. Sterile. But this isn’t sterile. This is marked. The bones of this place have shifted, like something inside them had turned over in its sleep.

He doesn’t draw a weapon. Doesn’t posture. Just lets his hands hang by his sides, fingers open and quiet. Not because he’s ready to strike. But because he’s waiting for proof. Confirmation. The kind that doesn’t arrive in words or evidence but in that whisper of cellular intuition—the tilt of gravity you feel when something once buried opens its eyes beneath you. He walks with the deliberate silence of someone who knows the difference between being watched and being remembered.

His boots click once on the tile and then stop echoing as they should. The acoustics betray the shape of the space. Each step lands louder than its echo, like the sound is being siphoned off, eaten midair. It unnerves him. He doesn’t let it show. The light shifts as he moves—first a gray so pale it nearly reads as colorless, then a greenish wash that pools like algae on stone, then something darker, stranger. A gleam like silver poured through soot. It isn’t his eyes. The world is changing in real time around him. The atmosphere itself refracts. The station breathes memory.

He sees it first in the dust near the benches, faint but deliberate: a drag trail about a meter wide, its curves too clean for natural erosion. Something heavy was moved. Once. Not recently. But not ancient, either. A groove left by passage, not collapse. He crouches beside it, fingers ghosting over the depression in the dirt, reading it like Braille. Not wheels. Not a stretcher. Something alive, perhaps. Or something that had once been. His breath hitches in his throat but doesn’t break the surface. His heartbeat holds steady. He trained for this. But the muscles across his ribs flex involuntarily, like they remember pain his mind hasn’t caught up to yet.

Then fresher signs: a single scuffed print at the point where the tile gives way to split concrete. A partial toe-slide, tread pattern blurred but human. Left shoe. Too deep for a casual step, too shallow for panic. It’s newer than anything else in the room, preserved under the dust like a breath held too long. Not more than twelve hours. Maybe less. It makes his mouth go dry. He closes his eyes for a moment, lets the pattern sink in.

The scent hits next. At first it’s just rust, thick and expected. But beneath that, something more delicate. A sweetness. Not floral. Not rot. Citrus, maybe. Or imitation citrus—something manufactured, clean enough to be forgotten except for the sharpness left behind. Soap. Old hotel soap, the kind you keep in your bag because it reminds you of somewhere you’re not supposed to miss. It roots in the back of his sinuses. Female. Middle-aged. But not biologically whole. His nose tells him the rest: no rot, no bodily distress. But high resonance. Very high. His internal catalog begins running calculations. High emotional transference signature. Mirthophage-adjacent. Possibly modified. Possibly rogue. Possibly known.

There’s a hallway ahead. To the right. Not wide. Utility-grade, half-swallowed by time. Its trim curls back in thin, brittle strips, the paint pulling away from the wall like peeling fruit skin. He follows it. Not because the parchment coordinates directed him. But because something else has taken their place. A different map. Internal. A quiet compulsion sliding under his ribs like heat. He doesn’t know her name. But her signal patterns match his in all the wrong ways.

The corridor narrows the further he goes, bending imperceptibly, as if resisting his presence. There are no bulbs overhead, but the hallway glows faintly in blue—a soft, unnatural illumination that defies physics. No shadows. No source. Just color held in suspension. He slows his steps. Not from fear. From necessity. The pressure in the air has shifted again. Not heavier. Denser. It coils now like held breath, like the whole corridor is waiting for something to touch its lungs. The hairs on his forearms rise. Not from static. From proximity. He’s close now. Close to a memory not his own. Close to something that knows what his skin felt like when it laughed.

And then he sees it.

At the end of the hall, beyond the last bend. Recessed into the wall like a kept secret.

The door.

Closed.

Rusted.

Not cold—but warm. Wrongly warm. Not heated from within. Not thermally sustained.

The warmth of something just touched. Of presence not yet gone.

He doesn’t reach for it yet. Just stands there, lungs half-filled, watching the light bend around its edges.

There’s no mistaking it.

She’s already been here.

The rust has bled into the seams. It spiderwebs down the door’s surface like veins torn from the body of something that never quite died, thick with time and something deeper than corrosion—something earned. The oxidization isn’t uniform. Some streaks gleam dully in the lightless blue like cauterized wounds, others clot dark as congealed breath. He reaches out slowly, the back of his hand grazing the edge first, careful not to lay pressure on it. The contact is subtle, a whisper against his skin, not friction but frequency. A shimmer just below sensation, like the memory of heat after a flame has gone out. His fingertips tingle with it, faint and uneven, as though the metal’s been touched too many times before—by the same kind of hand. Or the same one. Over and over again.

He draws his hand back for half a second, just enough to think. Then, deliberate, he presses his palm flat against the steel. No force. No ritual. Just skin against threshold. The metal doesn’t shift beneath him. Doesn’t respond with heat or vibration. But the moment warps. Quietly. Like breath held too long beneath still water. The sensation that follows is not movement. Not truly. His body remains where it is, anchored to the frame and the silence beyond it, but his perception fractures—splayed out sideways into something deeper than vision. A distortion in the air that feels like memory trying to inhale.

He doesn’t blink. Can’t. His eyelids stay open on instinct, as if blinking would sever the tether between now and what was left in this space before him. A sharp ache spreads across the bridge of his nose, then tunnels backward into the sockets of his eyes—not from light. There is no light. Just the weight of an emotion swelling too fast to contain. The grief is sudden, unannounced, round and whole and absolutely not his. But it knows where to live in him. And it chooses that place with surgical precision.

He sucks in breath too late. His lungs stall. The cold isn’t atmospheric—it’s mnemonic, drawn from the place where her breath once lingered. Her, though he still doesn’t name her. Can’t. The recognition lives below language. The echo of her presence doesn’t arrive in image or sound. No face. No whisper. Just pressure. Like a body curled between seconds. He feels her hand where his is now—smaller, scar-lined, shaped by repetition and the constant necessity of leaving. She didn’t grip the door like he does. She laid her palm to it in something closer to reverence. Not to the place. Not to what it held. But to what it had failed to keep.

And in that overlap, their skin meets. Not in real time. Not in physics. But in some echo chamber of loss that remembers both. The resonance doesn’t broadcast. It vibrates low and buried, like a prayer whispered into the bone of the world. Her signal doesn’t seek him. It doesn’t even know he exists. But it folds around him anyway. An unspoken hum, the frequency of memory softened by distance and devotion. The ache in his ribs sharpens. The Gelastocore inside him—dormant for days—shifts slightly, absorbing the echo without metabolizing it. No energy taken. Just recognition held.

Then, without warning, it cuts. Not gently. The connection severs like a thread yanked from wet fabric. Abrupt. Cold. His breath escapes half-formed, lodged in his throat like a syllable that never learned how to finish. His hand falls from the door not by decision but by necessity. The sudden emptiness inside his skin is jarring. His equilibrium tilts. He staggers, not dramatically, but just enough to mark it. One hand slams against the wall, catching his weight against the grain of the concrete. The surface burns faintly. Not heat. Residual friction. Like touching something that remembers being alive.

He blinks. Once. Slowly. And now his head feels misaligned—not dizzy, not disoriented, but wrong. Too full. As if someone else’s timeline is threading through his own. He can’t tell if the things he’s remembering are his or borrowed. He exhales slowly through his nose, grounding himself on muscle memory: weight distributed evenly, shoulder braced, eyes scanning peripheral threats. But the only thing hostile here is time itself.

This isn’t a door, he realizes. Not anymore. It’s an imprint. A record. A wound that was never allowed to close. The rust, the warmth, the subtle flex of grief hanging just beneath the surface—none of it is defensive. It’s not holding something in.

It’s remembering who tried to leave.

And who couldn’t.

He studies the shape of it again. Not just the architecture. The angles. The hinges. He sees where her fingers must have rested. Not once. Dozens of times. A repetition of ritual—press, pause, breathe. Like she was waiting for it to answer. Like she believed it eventually would. The realization comes with a weight he doesn’t expect. His knees tighten. His jaw locks.

Whatever happened on the other side of this door, it didn’t stay there. It reached back through the metal. Through her. Through time. And now through him.

He could walk away. There’s no command on the parchment telling him to open it. No protocol he’s obligated to obey. But he already knows this isn’t about obligation. Not anymore.

He sets both palms to the surface now. Full contact. Symmetrical. Letting the temperature flood into him. Not warm, now. Neutral. Like something ready to be decided.

And behind his eyes, not in sound, not in vision, something shifts again.

Her voice.

Not a whisper. Not a hallucination.

Just one word.

His name.

And it’s not the first time she’s said it.

CHAPTER 15

She doesn’t remember the door opening. No creak, no pressure shift, no physical moment of passage. One breath she was pressed against rusted steel, her pulse ticking against her palm, and in the next she was already through—inside—though there had been no moment of movement. Not a step. Not a sound. Just the abrupt severance of before and after. A shift. Like waking mid-dream into a scene you’ve never seen but know by heart. The corridor on the other side narrows around her in a way that should scrape her shoulders, but somehow doesn’t. Her body angles naturally, as if it always knew how to fit into spaces not built for breath. Her lungs tighten anyway. The air here is viscous, thick with condensation that sweats from the walls in rhythmic beads. It smells like copper and petrichor—rain on stone dragged from memory too old to name. She inhales once through her mouth and instantly regrets it. The taste isn’t wrong, just familiar in the way rot is familiar when it comes from something you loved.

She steps carefully, but the dust doesn’t stir beneath her boots. It curls up instead, slow spirals rising in the wake of her heat, as if the air has been waiting for movement. Every exhale folds back into her, no echo. The hallway has no natural sound of its own, only the presence of sound remembered—murmurs that lived here long enough to etch themselves into the shape of silence. Her Gelastocore pulses in a thread-thin rhythm, not drawing, not releasing. Just pulsing. A tuning fork left humming. And still, she knows this place. Not in the way she knows cities, or bodies, or the weight of someone’s voice on her chest. She knows it the way she knows teeth before they break. The architecture is wrong in the exact same way it always was. Every line of the hallway bends slightly inward, subtly convex where it should be straight. Walls too close. Corners too soft. But it’s intentional. Not malfunction. Not neglect.

This place was built to hold resonance. Not physically. Structurally. Spatial memory encoded into form. Like Aevum. The same manipulative geometry, designed not for aesthetics but for control—dreamlink resonance channeling. Energy re-routing. Influence extraction. They called them “clean chambers.” A bitter joke. Nothing clean ever happened inside them. No scrubbed surfaces. No antiseptic mercy. Just trauma scraped raw until it lost the decency to bleed. These corridors weren’t built by human architects. They were designed by the same minds that believed silence could be weaponized. The ones who studied how dream-frequency interfered with physical matter. The ones who figured out how to make emotion echo in walls.

Her Paravest coils tighter, its threads winding through her torso like muscle trying to remember where it came from. It doesn’t flare. Doesn’t warn. It knows this signal. Recognition hums through her spine, low and weighted, like hearing her own name whispered in a room she thought was empty. She pauses near a bend in the hall where the concrete buckles inward—not like it cracked, but like it was warped by some invisible pressure. The center of the distortion glistens faintly under the skin of the wall, darker than mold, not quite burnt. She crouches beside it, one hand steady on the floor. The distortion is circular, blooming out from a single point in the exact radius she’s felt only once before.

A full Gelastocore ignition. Not a partial surge. Not an energy spill. This was someone like her—someone with the same internal resonance matrix—reaching a metabolic threshold and releasing everything. But this burn isn’t old. It hasn’t been consumed by time. The edge of the bloom hasn’t calcified. The heat signature is dormant, not faded. It happened recently.

Too recently.

She rises slowly, moving further in. The corridor kinks left, then tightens again, forcing her shoulders closer together. A rusted stool emerges from the wall like a tumor—bolted to the floor, its base corroded but still rooted. The kind used during calibration trials. The kind she was chained to more than once. Beside it, a tether-ring is half-ripped from the wall, steel peeled outward like something human-shaped tried to tear itself loose and nearly succeeded. Dried blood clings to the surface just below it—not red. Not black. Something in between. It hasn’t flaked. It clings. Her fingertips brush it once as she passes, and for a moment, it feels like the blood pulls back. Not rejection. Recognition. It remembers her.

And then her breath catches.

In the far corner of the room, half-shadowed beneath a collapsed piece of paneling, something waits. Wrapped in cloth gone soft with rot, the shape almost indistinguishable from the ruin surrounding it. But the way it sits—precise, centered—gives it away. It hasn’t been tossed. It’s been placed. Carefully. Reverently. She takes a step forward. The cloth breaks open on one side, exposing a sliver of carved wood, worn smooth at the edges. No paint. No insignia. Just age and shape.

She knows it.

Doesn’t need to touch it to be sure. Doesn’t even need to kneel. Her breath thins into something brittle. The pressure in her skull pulls back, replaced with a sensation she hasn’t felt in years. Not grief. Not shock. Something deeper. An ache that knew what it was before she ever named it. The object—small, carved, unremarkable to anyone else—is the totem Cael kept beneath his bed. The one he never let anyone else touch. The one he held between two fingers on nights when he couldn’t sleep, rubbing the ridge at its center with his thumb until the friction burned. She buried it with him.

She remembers that part too clearly. The ground had been too hard. Her hands were already shaking from what they’d lost. She wrapped the totem in part of her sleeve, tore the fabric without looking, and pressed it to his sternum before the fire. No one else had seen. No one else had known. She’d told herself it was a symbol. Something to anchor him. Something to keep him from fading.

But it’s here.

It’s here.

And that means either he never burned.

Or something that did, brought it back.

She crouches slowly, every vertebra folding inward with care, the bones of her knees whispering faint protest beneath her weight. The dust stirs as if insulted, rising not in plumes but in deliberate spirals that twist once and fall still. Her coat pools at her ankles. The cloth at her wrist grazes the floor and picks up the residue like static. Her hands hover just above the wrapped object, fingers splayed, held open as though in prayer or surgery. She doesn’t touch it. Not yet. She lets her breath thin into the stillness until it no longer disturbs the air around her. The scent sharpens again—ionized, not just metallic, but scorched with a charge that doesn’t belong in the modern world. The kind of smell that used to cling to the air inside ignition chambers, seconds after they failed.

Her eyes trace the edges of the object. It doesn’t shimmer, doesn’t whisper, doesn’t pulse with any of the dramatic resonance signatures she’s spent her life hunting. It just sits there, inert and unremarkable, cradled in folds of fabric that have molded to its shape. But she catalogues every line with surgical precision—this isn’t habit; it’s devotion. Every notch is right. Every shallow curve and jagged edge where the grain had refused her knife the first time around. Her fingers shift just enough to show the base, and there it is: the mark. Her mark. Three vertical lines, etched shallow, tucked beneath the carved lip like a secret meant for only two people. She used the back end of her calibration blade to do it, sitting on the floor of that old sleep chamber while Cael pretended not to watch. It had been a joke. A code. A promise neither of them understood yet.

This is the totem. The real one. She had folded it into his shirt herself the night before the breach, pressing it to the center of his chest like it might serve as a second sternum. He’d looked at her without speaking. They’d already said everything. He told her not to wait for him. She hadn’t listened.

She lifts it.

It’s light. Of course it is. Just wood. But it carries weight like blood does. Not heavy in the hand—heavy in the breath. The second it leaves the ground, the air splits. Not loudly. Not visually. No crack of light or flash of memory across the walls. It’s quieter than that. Deeper. Something opens, not in the room, but in her. It’s not a resonance flash. Not a psychic echo. It doesn’t translate into the sensory language of her training. This is something else. Older. Purposed. A memory, but not hers—not in the usual sense. It doesn’t play across her vision or ring in her ears. It maps itself directly into her bones, overlaying her skeleton with his last moment like a second skin sliding into place.

The cold hits first. Internal. Sudden. Not like winter or fear, but like a Gelastocore throttling itself down to avoid rupture. A survival reflex. One she’s felt only once before—when her own nearly imploded trying to metabolize grief. Her pulse stutters. The ache blooms next. Low and unmovable. Centered somewhere between her spine and the back wall of her ribs. It’s not pain, exactly. It’s a decision. Or the residue of one. An emotion that doesn’t have a human name but means something like: I am doing this. I am not sorry. I know what I am giving up.

And then comes the restraint. It’s the worst part. Not because it hurts—because it doesn’t. It’s sterile. White-hot, but clean. A scalpel of will pressed around sorrow. He had wrapped his own pain like a medic dressing someone else’s wound, too tight, too fast, without pause. She feels that. The urgency of it. The clarity. He hadn’t tried to run. Hadn’t summoned strength. Hadn’t resisted at all.

He yielded.

And the moment he did, something answered.

Her breath stills.

It hadn’t been a void. It hadn’t been death, at least not as she understood it. It was presence. Immense. Silent. Old. Not in years—but in structure. Something that existed long enough to forget it had a beginning. It wasn’t watching him. It was with him. It entered him, not as possession, not as mercy. But as acknowledgment. She doesn’t get a name. Doesn’t see a shape. But the awareness radiates back through her body now, layered over the memory of his choice like pressure on the inside of her skull.

Whatever answered him knew her too.

Her hand starts to shake.

Not from fear. From resonance bleed. She’s metabolizing the memory too fast, her systems struggling to keep up with the recursive emotional imprint. Her Gelastocore pulses once, hard, and then retracts again into dormancy. Her Paravest does nothing. It can’t. This is beyond it.

She closes her eyes.

Holds the totem tighter in her fist. Her knuckles blanch, but she doesn’t loosen her grip. The breath she exhales doesn’t come from her lungs—it comes from someplace lower, older, as if it had been stuck beneath her sternum for years, waiting to be released. It leaves her in pieces. And in its wake, silence folds inward.

Her mouth opens. Not voluntarily. The words come out dry, soft. They’re already leaving her lips before she hears them, like someone else said them first.

“You knew.”

The words fall once.

Then again. Same cadence.

“You knew.”

And once more, quieter this time, almost buried under breath.

“You knew.”

It isn’t an accusation.

It’s an answer.

EPILOGUE

I didn’t think I’d make it this far.

Not in the survival sense—though, to be fair, I’ve outlived enough classified terminations, silent poisons, and intercontinental manhunts to qualify as an insult to God’s schedule. No. I mean here. This place. This singular, irreversible moment that doesn’t have a precedent in any of the Vatican’s operational manuals or encrypted transmission codes. This isn’t an end. It isn’t even a closure. It’s something worse. It’s the edge of a page I was never meant to reach, the part of the story they never taught us how to write, because we were never expected to survive long enough to hold the pen. We were meant to die in footnotes. And yet—here I am. Ink-stained fingers. A pulse that won’t quite steady. A name caught in the back of my throat like it has barbs.

The building looks like nothing. Less than nothing. Like a crime scene the earth has already forgiven. Three stories of quiet concrete pinned between an abandoned rail spur and a field of tall grass that’s forgotten what season it is. Reinforced steel skeleton beneath false rot. Windows shuttered not for privacy but for containment. There’s no sign. No gate. No camera. Just a door made of old wood and wrong math. And silence. A silence so full it feels alive. It doesn’t warn. It waits. I’ve stood inside the ossuaries beneath Vatican Hill, held skulls that once whispered divine riddles, and felt less pressure than I feel now standing on this rotted stoop. The air moves wrong. Not in direction or speed—just in intent. It’s not moving past me. It’s circling.

My foot hits the bottom stair, and it’s like the stair remembers me. Not personally. Just the type. The weight. The sin. There’s a rhythm under the structure, buried deep in the spine of the building. Not seismic. Not mechanical. Organic. Like a heartbeat too large to measure. I put one hand on the railing and feel it pulse. Not again. Still. It never stopped.

I have the file in my coat. Sealed in triplicate, printed on Vatican-black paper, encoded in the dead language of my mentors. I told myself I compiled it for justice. For the record. To blow the story open if I died, if I disappeared, if she turned out to be everything they feared. But that was never the reason. Not really. I built it because I was trying to hold onto her shape. Trying to assemble the shadow of a life that had rewritten the boundaries of my own. Every page in that folder is a breath I stole to understand her. Every annotation, every contradiction, every redacted phrase—those were me, clawing at a truth we buried beneath doctrine and fear and myth until it grew teeth.

Her name isn’t in the file. Not really. Just aliases. Codenames. Classification threads that lead to nowhere. But I’ve stopped pretending she’s a concept. She’s a person. A choice. A consequence wrapped in flesh. And she’s here.

I don’t say that because of some tracker, or resonance pattern, or Vatican algorithm designed to recognize her presence only after it’s too late. I say it because I feel her. The way children feel a thunderstorm approaching before the first dark cloud bruises the sky. The way animals bolt from valleys just before they flood. My spine remembers. My lungs remember. Even my blood shifts temperature. There’s a pressure in the bones of my feet, traveling up through my ribs like a sound I can’t hear but can’t unhear either. I know she’s behind that door.

I’ve dreamed this moment a thousand ways. I’ve rehearsed every version. The confrontation. The apology. The silent nod from across a dark room. The possibility that I’d knock, and she’d be gone. Or that I’d open it and she wouldn’t be her anymore. Maybe she’d be monstrous. Maybe she’d be human. Maybe she’d already be dead, and I’d be left alone with the echo of what could’ve been. But none of the versions looked like this. None of them had me standing still, hands shaking, breath caught not in fear but in reverence. I don’t believe in saints. Not anymore. But I think this is what it would feel like to kneel before one who used to bleed.

I can’t decide whether to knock or not.

The irony is almost funny. I’ve breached encrypted bunkers in seven countries. Killed men whose names were erased before their bodies hit the ground. I’ve impersonated agents so well I almost forgot who I was underneath. But this—this door, this silence, this breath I’m holding like it might decide the outcome—that’s the threshold I can’t cross.

She doesn’t know me. That much I’ve protected. Across continents. Across years. I kept my distance. I watched. I learned. I documented. I made myself a ghost in a world that doesn’t forgive memory. But that’s the problem with people like her. Memory is the only thing they can’t unmake. She doesn’t know me. But if she looks at me… if she really looks at me… maybe she’ll remember anyway.

And maybe—if the gods are cruel, and they always are—she already does.

The door isn’t locked. It just opens. Quietly. Without ceremony. Without even a breath of resistance, like it had been holding itself shut all this time out of politeness, not duty, and now—finally—it’s decided I deserve in. There’s no click, no mechanical grind, no creak to mark the moment. Just movement. Smooth. Intentional. Like the building itself had been listening, and now that it knows my pulse, it has decided: yes, you may pass.

The threshold gives way to silence. Not the hollow, sterile quiet of absence, but the kind that waits. A breath held past its comfort. A held note in a song that knows it shouldn’t end yet. The kind of quiet that used to make me look over my shoulder in Vatican sanctums, thinking maybe I’d stepped into the wake of something divine. There’s no dust. No furniture. No sound. But light spills through an uneven skylight, washed and angled by time, and in it, motes float without ever quite settling. The light hums, but it’s not from bulbs or devices. It’s from the air itself, like the molecules are trying to remember what movement used to mean.

She’s already there.

Of course she is.

Seated at the far end of the long room—if it can even be called that. She sits in stillness, neither waiting nor watching, but simply… present. Upright. Unflinching. One leg crossed over the other, like balance is just something she was born knowing. She wears stillness the way others wear armor—not rigidly, but with certainty. The kind of stillness that lets you know she’s heard a thousand footsteps like mine before and counted each one by breath alone.

She doesn’t turn her head. Doesn’t so much as blink in greeting. But I know she feels me enter. Not because she tenses—she doesn’t. Not because her posture shifts—still perfect. It’s because the air tilts around her, like the atmosphere realigned itself to acknowledge my arrival. Animals have that awareness. So do mirrors. And she’s a little of both.

I don’t speak. My mouth opens slightly, but no sound leaves. Not out of fear. There’s no fear in me. There hasn’t been in a long time. I bled that out of myself in ruined crypts and flame-warped corridors and sleepless years of watching without blinking. What I feel now is something different. Something old. Like reverence, maybe. Or ache. A recognition I haven’t earned. There’s no Vatican directive for this moment. No code phrase. No posture of submission or professionalism that feels anything but absurd under the weight of her gaze. She doesn’t even need to look at me directly for my rehearsed lines to die mid-throat.

She’s older than I expected.

Not aged, exactly. Not diminished. Just… weathered. Like she’s been sanded down by time and consequence, but never broken. Her hair is longer than it was in the final captured footage. Worn loose. Her hands rest open on the table, fingers relaxed, spread just slightly. And it hits me that I’ve seen those hands in a hundred classified photographs and none of them prepared me for the stillness they now hold. Those are not the hands of a killer. Or a savior. They’re the hands of someone who’s held grief in every form it’s ever taken and still hasn’t clenched shut.

And her face—

No image could’ve told me what it feels like to be in the same room with that face. Not because of beauty. Not because of power. Because of truth. Every line on her skin feels earned. Every angle of her jaw declares that time tried to take her and failed. She looks like someone who’s watched the world end more than once, and each time, she stayed behind to sweep the floor.

I step forward once, instinctively, then stop. My legs know better than I do. There’s no safe place to stand here. Not because she’s dangerous, but because I am. Because I’ve built a life out of following, interpreting, labeling her with terms like “uncontained entity” and “volatile resonance host” and “alchemical anomaly” when none of those meant anything real. I built walls out of classifications because it kept her at a distance. It kept me human. And now, here I am, twenty feet from the thing I feared and adored and chased into myth, and all I can do is stand still and breathe like it hurts.

She doesn’t move. But something in the room does. A subtle pressure shift. A tension drawn thin and tuned like string. My lungs feel thick. My vision blurs just a little, like tears are preparing but haven’t yet committed. Her eyes lift.

And when they find mine—

I forget how to stand.

I forget my name, and the false ones I’ve used, and every oath I ever swore beneath that bladed crucifix. I forget how I got here. My spine tries to straighten, and fails. I’m not collapsing. I’m just remembering the shape of reverence. Her eyes don’t judge. They don’t scan or invade or demand. They witness. Not just my face. All of me. Everything I brought. Everything I hid. Every betrayal I justified in the name of the mission. Her gaze lands on me like an answer to a question I’ve been too afraid to ask.

And I understand something I never dared put in the file.

She never needed to be found.

She didn’t run. She didn’t vanish. She just… stopped waiting.

She let the world rot itself quiet around her. Not as retreat. As test. And now that I’m here, now that her eyes are on mine and my knees refuse to unlock, I know. I know. This wasn’t her hiding.

This was her watching.

And I am not the first to arrive. I may not be the last. But I am the one who dared to look.