My magun was rock steady, my arm a steel bar of pure, unadulterated terror. The hovel, which had been a desperate, grimy sanctuary, was now a trap, a tomb. The four figures in the doorway, silhouetted against the bleak, grey light of the Neutral Sector, were the end of the line.
The old woman's words hung in the dusty, stagnant air, a phrase of pure, crystalline madness.
"It's the child... The child from the wall. She's back."
My mind, already running a frantic tactical analysis of a four-on-one fight I couldn't possibly win, simply stalled. It was a system error. The words were a non-sequitur, a line of corrupted code that meant nothing.
"I... what?" The word was a pathetic croak.
The old woman, her face a spiderweb of wrinkles, took a shaky, shuffling step forward. The three men behind her, the ones with the rebar and pipes, tensed. They looked at her, then at my magun, their knuckles white on their makeshift weapons.
"Stay back," I growled, my voice a low vibration of fear and warning. I shifted, my body coiled, keeping Nara's sleeping form shielded behind me. "I don't know what you're talking about, but you take one more step, and I'll end this."
"It's her," the woman whispered again, ignoring my threat. She wasn't looking at me, or my gun. Her gaze, sharp and impossibly bright in her ancient face, was locked on the small, sleeping child in my lap. It wasn't the predatory look of the thugs in the alley. It was something else. Something that terrified me on a level I hadn't known was possible. It was awe.
"Old woman, I swear..." one of the men behind her said, his voice rough. "Be careful. He's Faction-born. He's got a burner."
But she didn't listen. She shuffled closer, her thin, gnarled hand reaching out, not for me, but for Nara.
I instinctively flinched, my finger tightening on the trigger. "Don't touch her!"
My shout, sharp and panicked, finally broke the spell. The old woman stopped, her hand trembling in the air. The three men, taking my shout as a sign of aggression, raised their weapons.
"Easy, Faction-man," the biggest of the three men warned, his voice a low growl. "Nobody wants to get hurt. We just want to see. The old mother, she... she thinks she knows the girl."
"Knows her?" I said, my mind racing. "That's impossible. I just found her. She's..." A plague. A mimic. An echo of a virus. Krauss's words.
The old woman's head snapped toward me, her eyes, now burning with a fanatic's light, finally locking onto mine. "You found her?" she rasped.
"She... she hasn't aged," the woman whispered, her gaze returning to Nara. "Not a day. Not a single day in ten years."
The hovel was silent save for the sound of my own, frantic pulse. Ten years. The same number the acolyte had given me. The same number Krauss had spoken.
"I don't know who you think she is," I said, my voice strained. "She's just a child. Her name is Nara."
The name seemed to hit the old woman like a punch. Her face crumpled, a mask of a profound, ancient sorrow. "Nara..." she repeated, the name a prayer. "We... we didn't know her name. We only knew her as... as the sacrifice."
Nara stirred in my lap, her sleep broken by our tense, hushed voices. She whimpered, pressing her face deeper into my tunic, away from the strangers.
"What are you talking about?" I demanded. "What is the 'wall'?"
The old woman looked at me, her gaze seeming to pass through me, looking at a ghost. "You're a Faction-man. You wear their cloak." She spat on the floor. "You wouldn't know. You're the ones who built it."
"I... I'm not like them," I said, the words tasting like a lie. "I'm trying to protect her. The Factions... they're hunting me, too."
That, at least, was the truth.
The four of them exchanged a look. The suspicion on their faces didn't vanish, but it shifted, complicated by this new information. The enemy of my enemy.
"The wall," the old woman said, her voice dropping, as if reciting a forbidden history, a ghost story. "Ten years ago. Before the 'Great Silence,' when the lights still listened to us. Before they sealed us in. There was... a sickness. A blight. It came from the west, from the dark. It... it didn't just break the stone. It un-made it. And it un-made us."
She was telling me Krauss's story. But her version was tinged with a terror he had never felt.
"It wasn't a monster," she whispered, her eyes dark. "It was a voice. A scream in the code. It... it... it took people. It hollowed them out. And then..." She shuddered. "Then the Founders, your masters, they came. They brought their war. They said they would save us."
Her face twisted into a mask of pure, undiluted hatred. "They lied."
"They didn't save us," she spat. "They sacrificed us. They built the wall, the great, internal wall... and they sealed the blight in. With us. They cut the power. They cut the lights. They left us all to die in the dark, with the monster."
My god. Krauss had lied. He hadn't just sealed off the sector. He had sealed the people in with the blight, a mass-grave-in-waiting.
"But the blight... it was still here," she continued, her voice trembling. "It was still screaming. And then... a child. A little girl, just like her. From right here. She... she wandered toward the breach. The place where the blight was strongest. We thought it would take her. But it... it got quiet. The blight... it stopped screaming. It just... stopped."
The old woman was crying now, silent, dusty tears carving paths through the grime on her face. "And then your Founders, your Builder, they came. They saw the blight was quiet, that it had... found something. Found her. And they acted. They didn't save the child. They sealed the wall. They built their prison, the 'Core Foundation' they call it, right on top of her. They buried the blight and the child with it, all to keep their precious, glowing city safe."
I was reeling. Krauss's story: the virus mimicked a child. This story: the virus was pacified by a child, who they then buried alive as part of a containment system. Two versions of the same monstrous event.
The old woman finally looked at Nara again, her gaze no longer just awestruck, but filled with a terrifying, desperate hope.
"We called her the Child of the Wall," she whispered. "Our sacrifice. The girl who bought our survival with her own soul. We have... we have prayed to her, in the dark, for ten years. Prayed that she would one day return. That the light she contained would... would finally listen to us again."
She took a wobbly step forward, her gnarled hand outstretched. "And now... she is back."
The men behind her had lowered their weapons, their faces a mixture of confusion, fear, and a dawning, fanatical awe. This wasn't a kidnapping. This wasn't a rescue. To them, this was a resurrection. A Second Coming.
Nara, now fully awake, looked at the old woman. She wasn't screaming. She just looked... confused.
"I... I'm not..." Nara whispered, her voice tiny. "My name is Nara."
"Yes," the old woman said, her voice weeping. "We know. A new name. For a new time."
I was in so far over my head, I couldn't even see the surface. I was no longer a fugitive protecting a child. I was a bodyguard to a messiah I had just learned was a biological impossibility and was maybe, just maybe, the key to the sentient plague sealed beneath the city.
The old woman turned to me. Her entire demeanor had changed. The suspicion was gone, replaced by a hard, calculating respect.
"They hunt you," she stated. "The Faction-men."
"Yes. They... they think she's a monster. They want to 'delete' her," I said, the word tasting like poison.
"They want to take her back," the old woman corrected, her eyes flashing with a cold fire. "They want to put her back in the dark. To re-seal their prison." Her gaze hardened. "They will not."
She turned to her men. "This hovel is a tomb. It's the first place they'll look. We're exposed." She looked back at me. "You brought her back to us, Faction-man. You have done the one good thing your kind has ever done for the Neutral Sector. But you cannot protect her alone. You are one man, with one little gun. They are coming for her with gods on their side."
She was right. I had nowhere to run.
"Come with us," the old woman commanded, her voice no longer a plea, but an order. "You brought the Child home. Now, let us protect our own."
The choice was simple. Die here, alone, fighting my own former family. Or cast my lot with the lost, the broken, the cult-like fanatics who lived in the dark and worshipped a child they believed was a ghost.
It wasn't a choice at all.
"Where are we going?" I asked, pulling Nara close, my magun still in my hand, but now pointed at the floor.
The old woman gave a grim, thin-lipped smile. "They have their glowing, pristine city. Their Core. Their spires of power. We... we have the roots. The broken parts. The places they are too afraid to look."
She turned, and her men parted to let her pass. "We are going to the Undercity. To the old, forgotten maintenance tunnels, right where the old wall fell. They built their prison on top of our sacrifice. We have been living in its shadow ever since, waiting."
She looked back at me, her eyes burning. "We've been waiting for her. And now she's here. The war for the light is about to begin."