The registry shard is the size of my thumbnail.
That’s the part that almost makes me laugh hysterically, if my stomach weren’t currently trying to crawl out of my body and hide under a couch.
Ishaan almost deletes it.
We’re back in the municipal sub-basement archives again, same brutalist concrete bunker, same stale air that smells like lemon cleaner and dust and burnt circuitry, same aging terminal banks humming like exhausted bees. He’s running a batch purge on corrupted pre-Alliance data clusters, muttering to himself about storage inefficiencies and civic IT negligence, when a single orphaned shard pings yellow instead of red.
“Wait,” I say, too sharply.
He freezes mid-gesture.
“What.”
“That one,” I say, pointing. “Don’t delete that one.”
He squints at the screen.
“That’s junk,” he says. “No ownership metadata, no active jurisdiction tag, no modern schema compatibility. It’s a ghost file.”
My pulse is suddenly loud in my ears.
“Open it anyway.”
He sighs theatrically.
“You and your haunted zoning bullshit.”
He taps his cybernetic fingers against the terminal.
The file header resolves.
REAPER TRANSIT INFRASTRUCTURE
NODE DESIGNATION: F-17
SUBTERRANEAN CONVERGENCE HUB
REGISTRY: FIERSION DISTRICT
STATUS: DORMANT / SEALED
CLASSIFICATION: BLACK VAULT
I don’t breathe.
My hands go numb.
“Oh,” Ishaan whispers.
The room feels like it just tilted five degrees to the left.
“Run checksum validation,” I say, my voice coming out thin and wrong. “Cross-reference it with historical zoning exemptions and municipal blackout periods.”
He looks at me.
“Kim—”
“Do it,” I snap.
