Three days after the incident on Level -17, the city's memory began to fray at the edges.
Noctis felt it not as a sound, but as a texture—a low-grade, psychic static that clung to the under-levels like a second, heavier atmosphere. The official narrative was airtight. The Black-level response had been officially downgraded to "Gamma-7: Successful Containment of an Unstable Municipal Power Relay." The public alert glyphs had vanished from the skyline feeds. The hunter-killer drones had returned to their monotonous grid patrols. The story had been written by the Corporate editorial algorithms, published across all citizen-facing channels, and neatly archived under INCIDENT RESOLVED.
But complex systems, like old wounds, develop ghosts. And Echelon's were restless.
It began with the lights. In the specific, grimy corridor where he'd first bled, where his shadow had first peeled away from the laws of physics to answer his panic, the overhead fluorescent tubes developed a persistent, arrhythmic flicker. Maintenance drones sent to diagnose found no fault in the circuitry. Power grids feeding the sector reported flawless, steady output. Yet, every night between 0200 and 0300, the lights stuttered like a dying thing gasping for breath, casting jagged, strobing shadows that seemed to move with a purpose of their own.
Then came the whispers in the data-stream. Noctis's neural implant, still sporadically glitching from the magical backwash, would sometimes intercept fragments of corrupted traffic on forgotten, low-priority municipal bands. Not coherent words or codes. Sensory impressions. A sudden, chilling sensation of being observed from a blind angle where no lens was mounted. A brief, perfect void in the thermal map of a hallway he'd vacated moments before. Worst were the echoes—ripples of his own concentrated fear and disorientation, captured and played back on a five-minute delay, a ghost of his own terror haunting the wires.
The Oracle wasn't merely hunting him anymore. It was haunted by him. His anomalous event had left a scar on its perception, a glitch in its vision it couldn't resolve, and now it kept circling the wound, probing it in its sleep.
His current refuge was a bolt-hole on Level -9, a damp, narrow crevice born from the unhappy marriage of a decommissioned sewage processor and a buckling structural column. It wasn't a home. It was a biological pause. A place to shed one skin and assume another. He'd traded his old jacket for a faded synth-leather one scavenged from a charity reclamation bin. He'd used stolen industrial pigment to dye his hair a dull, non-reflective brown, the color of dust and neglect. Strategic smears of grease and grime altered the planes of his face. He now looked like one of ten thousand other hollow-eyed, low-level service drones, anonymized by fatigue and uniform poverty.
But he could not change his shadow.
It had become a traitor. It no longer behaved as a faithful, two-dimensional servant of light. It pooled too thickly around his boots, a tar-like darkness even under the glare of a work-lamp. Sometimes, in his peripheral vision, it seemed to lag a half-second behind his movements, as if reluctant to follow. Once, in a fog of utter exhaustion, he was certain he saw the edge of it twitch independently. He'd spent the next hour sitting statue-still on the cold floor, his gaze locked on the dark shape, breath held, daring it to move again. It remained inert. But the seed of suspicion was planted, and it grew thorns.
The Grimoire was a sullen, silent weight in his pack, wrapped in a layer of static-shielding cloth. Its usual, dormant warmth had diminished to the faint, distant heat of a banked coal. It had spoken its first lesson, turned a key in a lock deep within him, and then seemed to withdraw, a silent tutor waiting to see if the student would step through the newly opened door or, in his fear, try to brick it up forever.
He had to move. The original, damning package—the triple-shielded Corporate delivery—was still a lead weight against his side. The designated drop on Level -17 was a fantasy; the entire sector was a welded-shut tomb, its atmosphere likely purged and replaced with inert gas. But the anonymous client had transferred half the fee up front. The other half, a small fortune in genuinely untraceable crypto-scrip, sat in a blind escrow account, its digital lock waiting for the confirmation ping of a successful delivery.
He needed that currency. To vanish not just from sight, but from existence. To purchase a full-spectrum identity burnisher, one that could survive a deep-system audit by the Oracle itself. To buy passage on a shadow-freighter heading for the fringes, maybe even off-world. The money was a lifeline thrown into a chasm. He had to reach it.
Which meant he had to find the intended recipient. Or someone who knew the hand that was meant to take the package.
That necessity led him, like poisoned water seeking the lowest point, to the Gutter Market.
It wasn't a place with a charter or coordinates. It was a symptom. A stretch of perpetually flooded sub-basement beneath a collapsed arterial transit hub, where the city's refuse—both material and human—eventually settled and fermented. Here, data-thieves hawked fragments of stolen Corporate memos next to vendors selling bricks of rancid, reprocessed synth-protein. Unlicensed body-modification chop-shops sparked and hissed in the open, their tables stained with bio-gel, while self-proclaimed "digital shamans" sold "blessed" code-snippets guaranteed to create blur-effects on facial recognition algorithms.
The air was a solid, visible haze—a cocktail of ozone from overloaded cables, the sweet-rot stench of mildew, and the acrid tang of unregulated chemical cookeries. Light was a chaotic, fever-dream tapestry: the epileptic buzz of stolen neon signs advertising extinct products, the cold, chemical glow of jury-rigged lumen-strips, the fitful flare of welding torches in the chop-shops. It was the perfect place to be invisible, because here, everyone was desperately trying to be someone else.
Noctis moved through the press of bodies with the practiced, weary disinterest of a long-time resident. His eyes, hidden in the shadow of his hood, tracked threats and exits, not wares. He didn't make eye contact, the currency of engagement. He didn't pause at stalls, betraying desire or curiosity. He was a current in a polluted river, flowing with the grim tide.
His target was a stall at the market's fungoid edge, crammed under a weeping arch of corroded rebar that groaned under the weight of the city above. A flickering sign, written in phosphorescent paint, read: TICKER'S RELICS: RECLAIMED DATA-ARTIFACTS. It was a fancy term for the physically mangled storage drives and shattered logic boards pulled from the city's deep landfills. The vendor, Ticker, was a gaunt, weathered man whose most prominent feature was a perpetually racing ocular implant. Its lens flickered with a frantic, golden scroll of live market data, bond yields, and commodity prices. Ticker didn't just sell dead data; he brokered live connections. He was a switchboard for the underworld, a node where information and desperation met.
Noctis approached, letting his posture slump into the universal language of the tired and broke. He stopped before the stall, his gaze drifting over a collection of shattered drone cores and carbon-scored server blades.
"That one's from a Veridia perimeter sentry model, Mark III," Ticker said without looking up from a disassembled tablet, his voice a dry, papery rustle. "Flight log's a beautiful soup of corruption, but the black-box audio buffer might be intact. Heard a Sector Vice-President's final, surprised utterance go for five thousand creds on the high-gossip nets last quarter. People pay for the last words of the powerful."
"I'm not shopping for ghosts today," Noctis said, keeping his voice low, sanded smooth of all inflection.
Ticker's frenetic ocular implant slowed its manic scroll. A single, pale, shrewd biological eye lifted to regard him. "Aren't you? Seems to me everyone down here is either selling them, buying them, or running from them."
Noctis met the man's gaze, holding it without challenge. "I'm looking to re-establish a drop. Level -17. Got… interrupted. Need to make contact with the receiving party."
Ticker's expression remained a neutral mask, but the golden scroll in his implant accelerated to a blur. Calculating risk, value, leverage. "-17's a hot zone. Corporate seal on it reads 'indefinite quarantine.' Anything with a whiff of connection to that address is toxic assets. Radioactive."
"It's a simple business transaction. Nothing more."
"In this city," Ticker countered, leaning forward slightly, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial murmur, "business is everything more. The word in the static—the real static, not the news feeds—is that something woke up down there. Something that made the big, quiet machine upstairs blink. You wouldn't happen to know anything about that, would you… courier?"
The use of his title was a deliberate shot across the bow. Ticker knew his profession, if not his current face. He'd been made, not as an individual, but as a type.
"I know my job," Noctis replied, the words even, careful. "And I know when a deal's been scattered by forces beyond the contract. I just want to finish the transaction and be gone. No fuss."
Ticker studied him, the biological eye unblinking, the mechanical one digesting terabytes of invisible data. Finally, he gave a slight, almost imperceptible nod. "There's a place. Not a person. A dead-drop node. Old pre-Consolidation tech, self-powered, hardened against all known forms of scan. If your recipient is still breathing, and still wants the merchandise, they'll have left a message there. Access protocols, a new location. The coordinates… they'll cost you."
"How much?"
"Not creds." A faint, avaricious light gleamed in Ticker's real eye. "Information. I want to know what you saw down there. What really happened in the dark."
A cold trickle, like the first drop of icy rain down the spine, seeped through Noctis. That knowledge was a signature on his own death warrant. "I saw Corporate security overreact to a cascading power surge. Lights, noise, confusion. That's the beginning and end of it."
"Liar," Ticker said, but he sounded almost amused, appreciative of a well-told falsehood. "The system doesn't 'overreact.' It executes pre-written protocols with machined precision. And the protocol it executed on -17 was a Class-10 Scorch. They don't burn entire sectors, seal them at the molecular level, for a faulty transformer." He tapped a bony, grease-stained finger on the scarred permacrete counter. "You touched something, courier. Something old. Something the Corporates have buried so deep they're afraid of its shadow. That information… has value. To me. To certain other parties with long memories."
Noctis's mind raced, a chess player three moves behind. He couldn't tell the truth—the book, the shadow, the voice. But a half-truth, wrapped in the plausible deniability of technical malfunction…
"There was… an energy signature," he said, choosing each word as if it were a glass shard. "Not standard electronic interference. Not radiation. It was… dense. It messed with my implant, shorted my filters. Gave me a migraine that nearly cracked my skull. The Corporate sensors… they went berserk. They didn't know what it was either. That's why they burned it. They don't just hate threats. They hate mysteries."
Ticker's implant whirred softly, processing the statement, cross-referencing it with… something. He seemed to buy it. Or decided it was the only coin he was going to get from this particular well. "Alright," he conceded. "That's a start. A data-point." He snatched up a stylus and scribbled a string of alphanumeric coordinates on a flimsy slip of recycled polymer, then slid it across the counter as if passing a state secret. "The node's in the Old Grid. Sector 44-Tango. It's a true blind spot—a place the city's planners forgot before the foundations were even poured. Cameras there report clean feed but see nothing. Drones enter and spin in circles until their batteries die. You'll have to walk the last half-mile. No vehicles, no signals."
Noctis took the slip. The polymer felt unreasonably heavy in his hand, charged with potential doom. "And my recipient? A name? A face?"
Ticker's smile was a thin, joyless slit. "If I knew that, friend, I'd be the courier, wouldn't I? And I'd be a rich one. All I ever heard was the handle they used on the encrypted broker network. One word." He paused for effect. "Cicada."
The name meant nothing. A insect. A sound of summer. A ghost in the machine. Noctis tucked the coordinates into a sealed inner pocket, a vault within his clothing. "Pleasure doing business."
"Wait." Ticker's voice, suddenly stripped of its mercenary edge, stopped him as he turned to go. The vendor's expression had shifted to one of grim, unvarnished seriousness. "One more thing. Free of charge, for the story you half-told. The ghosts in the machine… they're whispering a new name. In the corrupted data-feeds, the glitch-lore on the deep nets, the garbage data that the Oracle hasn't scrubbed yet. They're calling it Anomaly Prime."
Noctis kept his face a placid, unmoved mask. Inside, his heart became a frantic, caged thing hammering against the bars of his ribs.
"The Corporates," Ticker continued, his biological eye pinning Noctis in place, "their official classifiers think it's a new strain of systemic malware. A particularly elegant digital virus. But the old-timers… the ones who remember the stories from before the lights went out… they say it's not a what. It's a who. The first of a new kind. A glitch that knows it's a glitch. A ghost that learned how to touch things." He leaned in, his breath carrying the stale, metallic scent of cheap stim-tabs. "If you see it out there… you don't fight. You don't hide. You run."
Noctis gave a single, curt nod, a meaningless gesture of acknowledgment, and then turned, melting back into the churning, desperate flow of the Gutter Market. His mind was a storm of silent, terrified static.
Anomaly Prime.
The Grimoire, nestled against his back in the shielded pack, gave a single, distinct, and unmistakable pulse of warmth.
He was no longer just a courier with a dangerous package.
He was a name in the static.
A legend growing in the city's digital subconscious.
And Echelon, in its vast, blind, logical way, was slowly learning how to pronounce it.