Echelon doesn't chase. It reshapes. It doesn't hunt; it quarantines.
The lockdown doesn't happen with sirens. It descends in layers, a silent, systematic suffocation. You feel it first in your teeth—a subsonic tremor as district gates, a hundred stories tall, grind into place. You feel it in the air, as circulation systems switch to sealed-loop mode, turning corridors into tombs. You feel it in the sudden, dead stillness of your implant's local network feed, gone from a river of data to a flatline of absolute silence. The Corporates don't pursue anomalies.
They compress them. They shrink the world around you until the walls are at your back and there's nowhere left to hide.
I run.
Behind me, the entrance to the relay room doesn't just seal. It dissolves. A corporate containment protocol triggers; the metal of the doorframe heats to blinding incandescence and flows like liquid wax, merging with the surrounding permacrete. Security foam, a vile grey polymer, erupts from vents, hardening in seconds into a substance denser than rock. My sanctuary is erased from existence, becoming just another solid chunk of the city's foundation.
I throw myself into a vertical maintenance shaft as the ceiling above floods with a sterile, surgical white light—a spectral scanner painting the area in wavelengths meant to expose anything that doesn't belong. The heat of it sears the back of my neck.
Too close.
My boots are a frantic drumbeat against the rusted iron rungs of the ladder. I descend into deeper blackness, the Grimoire a hard, insistent weight against my ribs. It feels different now—not just heavy, but rooted, as if it's threading itself into my energy field, an anchor in the storm.
Left.
The command forms in my mind, sharp, crystalline. Not a whisper, not a suggestion. A vector. I don't question it. Thought is a luxury I can't afford.
I push off the ladder, twisting in mid-air, and slip sideways into a narrow service tunnel just as the main shaft fills with a silent, deadly swarm. Drones. Not the clunky municipal models. These are Corporate Issue: sleek, black, faceless ovoids, their surfaces drinking the light. They move with a chilling, hive-mind synchronicity. Their sensor arrays—pulsing red points of light—sweep across the opening I just vacated.
They pause.
Searching. Reprocessing the emptiness where I should have been.
I hold my breath, pressed against the cold tunnel wall. The tunnel's own lighting strips, feeble and flickering, choose that moment to die completely. Whether by age or by the city's redirected power, the darkness is immediate and total.
And my shadow—our shadow—reacts.
It blooms from my feet without conscious thought, without the searing pain of a full summoning. It spills outward like ink in water, a soft, consuming darkness that doesn't just obscure, but confuses. It bends the hard edges of the tunnel, blurs the lines between wall and floor, creates depths where there are none. To a camera, it would be a blur of corrupted pixels. To a predictive algorithm, it would be a zone of statistical impossibility.
The drones hover at the tunnel mouth. Their sensors whir, recalibrating, trying to resolve the contradiction. For a three-count, they are still.
That hesitation is a flaw in their perfect programming.
It's all I need.
I am a blur in the confusion I created. I sprint, my footsteps silent on the grimy floor, guided by an instinct that feels less like mine and more like the Grimoire's pull. Behind me, I hear the frustrated whine of drones as they are recalled, reassigned to a perimeter they can actually define.
Distant, layered sounds penetrate the deep levels: the harmonic wail of sector-wide alarms, underpinned by the calm, synthetic tones of the public address system, struggling to maintain the illusion of order.
"BLACK-LEVEL SECURITY RESPONSE CONFIRMED. ALL CIVILIANS REMAIN STATIONARY. AID UNITS ARE EN ROUTE."
The lie is almost poetic. There are no civilians at a Black-level event. There are only assets and anomalies. And there are certainly no aid units. The only things en route are sanitizers and terminators.
I burst out of the tunnel onto a mid-level transit platform. The scene is frozen catastrophe. A mag-lev train sits silent on its guide rails, doors sealed, interior lights pulsing a frantic, locked-down red. Abandoned bags and scattered personal terminals litter the platform. Above, the arched ceiling of the skyway is a chaos of dying light; holographic advertisements for synth-juice and virtual vacations stutter and collapse, replaced by stark, rotating corporate sigils and the single, glowing word: QUARANTINE.
Then, a new sound cuts through the electronic din.
Footsteps.
Not the rapid clatter of boots in panic. Not the mechanical whir of drone propulsion.
These are measured. Heavy. Deliberate.
Click. Shush. Click. Shush. The sound of advanced polymer and plasteel meeting permacrete in a steady, unhurried rhythm.
A figure steps from a shadowed archway at the far end of the two-hundred-meter platform. Tall. Impossibly broad in matte-black combat exosuit armor, the kind you only see in corporate security briefings. Its surface is etched with faintly glowing blue runes—not decoration, but active containment glyphs. It has no identifying marks, no unit designations. Its face is a smooth, mirrored visor, reflecting the shattered platform, the frozen train, my own small, battered form.
A Retriever.
They're not spoken of, only whispered about. Corporate ghost stories. They don't hunt people, the rumors say. They hunt conceptual errors. Breaches in reality's firewall.
The Retriever stops. Its mirrored head tilts, a fraction of a degree, as if parsing me. A data-point made flesh.
A voice emerges, flat, devoid of inflection, layered with synthetic harmonics that make it sound like three voices speaking as one.
"ANOMALY PRIME. DESIGNATION CONFIRMED."
It takes a single, ground-shaking step forward.
"RELINQUISH THE ARTIFACT. COMPLIANCE WILL RESULT IN PAINLESS TERMINATION."
A hysterical laugh bubbles in my chest and escapes before I can choke it down. The sound is sharp, alien in the tense silence. It seems to surprise both of us.
"Yeah," I say, the word scraping out of my dry throat. I begin backing away, each step careful. "I've read the fine print on 'painless termination.' That's not happening."
The Retriever doesn't respond with words. It raises its right arm, not with a weapon, but with a palm facing me. The runes on its armor flare from blue to actinic white.
The air around me solidifies.
It's not just pressure. It's a localized gravity spike, a targeted field that slams down with the force of a fallen ceiling. My bones groan. I'm driven to one knee, the permacrete cracking beneath my boot. My vision tunnels, stars exploding at the edges. I feel it then, a sensation that chills me deeper than the physical assault—a resonant, humming wrongness in the field. It's not pure technology. Woven into the crushing gravity is a strand of something familiar, something stolen and shackled.
They didn't just cage magic.
They reverse-engineered it. They weaponized its grammar.
The Grimoire sears against my ribs, a brand of cold fire.
You will die if you submit, the voice within states. It isn't frantic. It's clinical. A statement of fact.
Open me.
My hand moves without conscious command. It's not my will anymore; it's the will of a survivor, primal and desperate. I wrench the Grimoire from my coat. The cover feels alive, vibrating. As my fingers find the edge, it snaps open of its own volition.
The platform screams.
Every light source—the red pulses in the train, the emergency strips, the dying holograms—shatters in a rain of glass and sparks. The magnetic guide rails below the train writhe like snakes, twisting with tortured shrieks of metal. The Retriever stumbles, a minute loss of balance, as its sensor suite and internal systems are flooded with impossible, paradoxical data—a screaming choir of corrupted physics.
From the open page, symbols don't just glow. They unwind. Silver-grey glyphs tear free from the paper, carving burning paths through the charged air. They don't attack the Retriever. They arrow toward my own pooled shadow, sinking into it like stones into dark water.
And the pain… it is an offering, a price. It rips through me, a lightning bolt of agony that strips my nerves bare. I scream, a raw, animal sound lost in the platform's death cries.
And the shadow answers.
It doesn't just rise. It erupts. No longer a passive cloak or a tool of confusion, it is a tidal wave of condensed negation. It slams into the Retriever with the force of a forgotten law of nature. Where it touches the gleaming armor, it doesn't dent or melt. It unmakes. Chunks of plasteel and polymer simply cease to exist, leaving smooth, impossible voids in the suit's structure. Not destruction.
Erasure.
The Retriever is flung back, crashing into a support column. But it doesn't stay down. In a movement of terrifying, mechanistic grace, it regains its footing. The mirrored visor fixes on me. I see the shattered platform reflected in it. I see myself, small and glowing with stolen power. And in the recalibration of its stance, in the minute adjustment of its humming systems, I see it.
Not fear. Not in a human sense.
Uncertainty.
A systemic exception. An equation it cannot solve.
I don't wait for the solve function to run. While the gravity field flickers and dies, I am already moving. I sprint past the damaged Retriever, my shadow recoiling from the fight, clinging to my heels like a wounded animal. The Grimoire snaps shut in my hand, its warmth now a throbbing, exhausted pulse.
Behind me, the platform detonates—not in fire, but in a storm of cascading system failures. Conduits explode in fountains of white sparks. The frozen train groans as its magnetic suspension fails, crashing onto the twisted rails with a world-ending shriek.
I don't look back. I find a maintenance access hatch, its lock fused from the energy surge, and kick it open with a strength that isn't wholly my own. I dive into the vertical drop beyond, into welcoming, insulating darkness.
I land in a heap on a soft mound of discarded insulation foam, the impact driving the air from my lungs. The world is silent, save for the roaring in my ears and the jagged symphony of my own breathing. My body is a map of pain. My vision swims, dark at the edges. The shadow, coiled around my legs, is thin, frayed, its substance depleted.
The Grimoire in my hand is quiet.
Too quiet. Dormant. A sleeping beast.
I lie there in the profound dark, staring at nothing, my chest heaving. The cold of the sub-level seeps into my bones, a familiar comfort.
I fought a Retriever.
A Corporate myth. A walking extinction event.
And I didn't just escape.
I hurt it.
I scarred it with an impossibility.
That fact settles in my gut, colder and heavier than the Grimoire itself.
It means one thing, a law as fundamental as gravity in this city: once you become an unsolvable equation, Echelon does not negotiate. It does not contain. It eradicates. It will tear itself apart layer by layer to scrub me from its code.
They will not stop.
And as the ghost of the Grimoire's power still hums in my veins, as the echo of its voice blends with my own resolve, I know the corollary with absolute, terrifying clarity.
Neither will I.