I stare at the screen—at the face that looks like his, but isn’t. At the code that could’ve been mine, if things had gone just slightly differently. And I know, without doubt, that the moment we send this data, there’s no turning back.
We’ll burn every bridge.
But maybe that’s the point.
“They built Obol in the dark,” I say. “We burn it in daylight.”
Tatek stands.
Straightens his spine.
And nods.
Together, we reach for the light.
CHAPTER 18
TATEK
The chamber smells like old circuits and stale air, the kind that settles into wiring no one's touched in years. We’ve stripped the fake garden of its illusions—cut the sim feed entirely—and now it’s just exposed projection panels, cracked utility lines, and the quiet hum of a system still too stubborn to die. It’s better this way. Cleaner. Truthful. No stars. No scripted breeze. Just reality.
I sit cross-legged in front of the access terminal, backlit by the dying glow of the diagnostic console I’ve cracked open. The interface is analog-coded, the kind designed before predictive logic took over, with data layers that unfold like origami instead of blinking overlays. Mara crouches beside me, her thigh pressed against mine for warmth and solidarity both, arms crossed tightly across her chest like she’s holding herself together by sheer will.
“You sure they’ll still hear it?” she asks, her voice low and rough with sleep not fully shaken off.
“If they’re still out there,” I say, not looking away from the screen, “they’ve been waiting for this.”
“And if they’re not?”
I pause only long enough to glance at her—just a flicker of eye contact—and say, “Then we go it alone.”
She nods once, lips pursed. There’s no fear in her. Just that surgical stillness she gets when a plan starts moving through her head like a wire being drawn tight.
I return my focus to the interface. The keystrokes are muscle memory, locked behind layers of conditioning I thought I’d buried when I left the Alliance behind. But they come back like a pulse, like a rhythm you don’t forget because it’s wired into your bones.
Two taps. Pause. Long press. Hold.
Then the unlock key.
Ember-9.
It was never a command line. Never an order. It was a promise. A protocol built for defectors and deep ghosts who’d rather die than let the truth rot in the dark. No names. No badges. Just a signal—and a choice.
A new window blinks open. White screen. Red cursor. The kind of minimalism only used in messages that aren't meant to be intercepted by accident.
“You’re shaking,” Mara says quietly.
I hadn’t realized I was.
I flex my hands, one knuckle popping. “It’s not fear.”
“What is it, then?”
“Memory.”
I start to type. Not a message—at least, not one anyone untrained would read as such. It’s a data-buried pulse string, disguised as corrupted logistics chatter. It rides on an outdated bandwidth channel most systems auto-archive without parsing. But the right eyes—Alliance loyalists, embedded defectors, agents who never stood down—they’ll see it. And they’ll know.
I embed the cipher.
