Time, in the aftermath of survival, becomes a viscous, unreliable thing. I don't know how long I lie there, sprawled on the forgiving softness of discarded insulation foam. It could be minutes. Could be an hour. My body has its own timeline, dictated by the fire in my nerves and the slow, sickening recalibration of senses that have been stretched beyond human limits. The city above me is a distant, malevolent intelligence, its systems whirring, coldly recalculating vectors, probabilities, and escalation protocols. I can almost feel the ghost of its logic—a spider patiently re-spinning a web that was torn.
My body feels… wrong. Not injured in a way I can point to, but misaligned. Parts of me feel hollow, too light, as if some essential mass has been scoured away. Others feel leaden, anchored by a deep, bone-deep fatigue. It's the disorienting sensation of being only partially inside my own flesh, a tenant rattling around in a house that's suffered structural damage.
When I finally force my hands under me and push up, the tremor in my limbs is a violent, uncontrollable thing. I stare at my own hands as if they belong to a stranger. Beneath the skin, a tracery of fine, black veins pulses with a faint, sullen light before fading, receding reluctantly like ink being sucked back into a pen. A souvenir. My head isn't just pounding; it feels cavernous, echoing with a pain that isn't localized but pervasive, making the very act of coherent thought feel like balancing on a razor's edge.
I won.
The thought surfaces, cold and clear. It doesn't bring triumph. It brings a dread so profound it tastes like metal on my tongue. Surviving a Retriever isn't a victory. It's a declaration of war in a language the Corporates understand perfectly: unacceptable defiance. The fear that follows isn't of death, but of what they will send next.
The chamber I crashed into is a forgotten bubble in the city's infrastructure—a small, circular utility space, its walls lined with dead conduits and sealed access panels. The only light comes from two fist-sized emergency globes casting a dim, bloody glow. No camera ports. No wireless signal penetrates the thick shielding. It is a true dead zone. A pause in the symphony of surveillance.
For a moment, the instinct to run, to keep moving, to be a blur in the machine, is almost overwhelming. But a counterweight holds me down, a gravity of its own.
The Grimoire.
It doesn't just sit against my ribs. It hums. Not an audible sound, but a low-frequency intent, a patient, pulling awareness. It is waiting.
Gritting my teeth against the protest of every muscle and nerve, I pull it from my coat. The simple act of holding it makes the lingering pain sharpen, focus, as if it's tuning my suffering to a specific frequency.
"Figures," I mutter, the words dry and cracked. "No free rides."
The book opens, not with the violent, page-flipping urgency of before, but with a slow, deliberate motion. The arcane symbols on its pages no longer writhe in chaotic agitation. They settle. They align into coherent patterns, like iron filings finding the poles of a magnet. The chaos is giving way to instruction.
A single right-hand page begins to glow with a soft, internal silver light.
Words form, not on the page, but directly in the theater of my mind, etched in lines of cool, merciless fire:
MAGIC IS NOT FREE.
IT IS BORROWED FROM THE FABRIC OF WHAT IS.
ALL DEBTS ARE COLLECTED.
ALWAYS.
The finality of it is absolute. My jaw tightens. "What's the cost?" I ask the silent air, the question hanging between me and the ancient thing in my hands.
The glowing page darkens, the silver light snuffing out. For a breath, there is nothing.
Then it answers.
Not with words.
With records.
My mind is not my own. Images, sensations, lifetimes that are not mine flood my consciousness with devastating clarity. I see a man in a rain-slicked alley, his hands glowing with ethereal light as he mends a broken child's toy for a crying girl. The next year, he stares at the same toy in his hands, his face a blank slate of confusion, unable to recall the child's name, or his own. The memory is simply… gone. Paid.
I feel the emptiness of a woman who used her power to soothe the panic of a crowd during a lockdown. She succeeded. She saved dozens. And in the aftermath, she feels… nothing. No joy at the salvation, no fear of the hunt, no warmth, no cold. She becomes a hollow statue, and one day, she walks, calm and utterly vacant, into the path of a Corporate patrol drone. A final, silent transaction.
I witness a man simply… un-write himself. He is there in his bolt-hole, studying a page not unlike the one before me. Then his outline wavers. His presence, his very essence, is siphoned away. He leaves behind a body, still warm, still breathing, but utterly empty. A vessel with no tenant. It's not death. It's erasure from the inside out.
My stomach convulses. A cold sweat breaks out on my skin.
"What happens to me?" My voice is a rasp, stripped of defiance.
The symbols on the page rearrange, swirling into a new, stark configuration.
YOU WILL BLEED FROM PLACES THAT HAVE NO VEINS.
YOU WILL FORGET WHAT YOU CHERISH MOST.
YOU WILL CHANGE UNTIL YOU DO NOT RECOGNIZE THE REFLECTION.
It's not an answer. It's a pronouncement. A sentence passed in a court of uncaring law.
Revulsion surges through me. I slam the book shut, the sound like a gunshot in the small chamber. My breath comes in ragged gasps. The whispers in my mind recoil, a sensation of offended sharpness. The shadow pooled at my feet flickers, wavers, its loyalty suddenly in question, as if it can't decide whether it belongs to me or to the grim accountant that is the Grimoire.
"So that's it," I whisper, the sound swallowed by the red-lit dark. "Piece by piece. Memory by memory. Feeling by feeling. I trade myself to fight them."
Silence hangs heavy.
Then, a thought-impression, softer, less formal, almost… empathetic.
You were already being erased.
The truth of it hits me with the force of a physical blow, freezing me in place.
The city. Echelon. The constant, grinding pressure of surveillance that sandblasts individuality into smooth, predictable data-points. The Corporate re-education mandates for "deviant behavior." The way people in the lower levels simply vanish—not with drama, but with bureaucratic silence, their ident-codes recycled, their hab-units reassigned before the scent of their lives has faded. A slow, systemic erasure of anything that doesn't fit the perfect, efficient model.
The Grimoire isn't wrong.
I slide down the wall, my back scraping against cold metal, until I'm sitting on the floor. I stare at my hands, turning them over. They look normal. No scales, no glowing runes, no visible corruption. Just the familiar scars and calluses of a courier's life.
That terrifies me more than if they'd turned to claws. The corruption is internal. The cost is invisible until it's already been extracted.
The Grimoire, tucked beside me, pulses once. A gentle, almost reassuring warmth.
A new line of text ignites in my mind's eye, clean, formatted, terrifyingly systematic:
>> FIRST TENET UNLOCKED: SHADOW MANIFESTATION (BASIC)
>> OPERATIONAL LIMIT: 7-12 SECONDS (USER-DEPENDENT)
>> PRIMARY COST: NEURAL PAIN, ACUTE PHYSIOLOGICAL FATIGUE
>> WARNING: ESCALATION OF USE OR COMPLEXITY WILL ESCALATE DEBT. MANIFESTATION IS A CONTRACT.
A system. Rules. A user manual for damnation.
A quiet, bitter laugh escapes me, devoid of any humor. "You're teaching me," I say to the book, to the voice, to the cursed legacy in my blood.
*So you do not die ignorant, comes the reply, tone flat. An informed sacrifice is still a sacrifice. But it is longer-lived.
Above, in the world of light and steel, I feel it—a subtle but definitive shift in the pressure. The hunt hasn't called off. It has integrated new data. The anomaly (Prime) has demonstrated offensive capabilities. Threat assessment updated. Response protocols escalating. They will send more Retrievers. They will send things for which there are no whispers in the lower levels.
I push myself to my feet. My legs tremble, but they hold. The unsteadiness is no longer just weakness; it is the aftermath of a transaction. A price paid.
I tuck the Grimoire back inside my coat. Its weight is no longer just physical; it is the weight of a covenant, of a terrible, clarifying choice.
If survival in this gleaming, suffocating cage means transforming into something it cannot categorize, cannot predict, cannot comprehend…
If the only way to resist being erased by the city is to willingly erase parts of myself, trading them for power in a cosmic ledger…
Then I'll pay.
I'll bleed. I'll forget. I'll change.
For now. For the next breath. For the next step away from the light that seeks to dissect me.
The debt is accepted. The terms are clear.
Now, let them try to collect.