The feeling of a hundred pairs of eyes, hollow with a desperate, starved-out hope, was a new and terrifying kind of pressure. The Undercity residents knelt in the damp, cold earth, their faces upturned, their whispers a rising, sibilant tide.
"The Child..."
"She has returned..."
I was a fugitive, a failed scout, a man with a sealed, broken power. And I was now, apparently, the unwilling bodyguard to a messiah. I had traded a prison of cold, hard logic for a new one, this one built of fanatical, suffocating faith. Both sides, Krauss and these... people... saw Nara as a symbol. A plague to be deleted, or a savior to be worshipped.
I was the only one in this entire, broken world who saw a seven-year-old girl.
"Enough," the Old Matron's voice rasped, cutting through the rising whispers. The crowd, despite their fervor, obeyed. She was their prophet, and her word was law. "She is not a relic to be gawked at. She is a child, and she is tired."
She turned, her ancient, piercing eyes landing on me. "And so are you, Faction-man. You have brought her home. Now, let us give you shelter."
She led us away from the main cavern, deeper into the warren of makeshift tunnels and hovels. The Undercity was a grim marvel of engineering, a testament to pure, desperate survival. Walkways made of scavenged metal and splintered wood crisscrossed vast, lightless chasms. Dim, yellow lights, jury-rigged from sparking, weeping power conduits, cast a sickly glow. The air was a thick, cold soup of damp earth, ozone, cooking fires, and the unwashed, close-pressed scent of humanity.
They had their own society. I saw people tending to patches of glowing, phosphorescent fungus—their only food source. I saw "engineers" tinkering with a massive, groaning water purifier, its parts clearly stolen, bit by bit, from the city above. And I saw fighters, men and women with the same hard, haunted eyes as Garr, patrolling their borders, armed with pipes and rebar. This was a true, hidden city. The city of the forgotten.
The Matron led us to a small, private hovel, built into a high recess in the cavern wall, accessible only by a narrow, rickety-looking rope bridge. It was, by the standards of this place, a fortress.
"You will be safe here," she said, pulling aside the heavy, canvas flap that served as a door.
Inside was... a home. It was small, cold, and carved from the damp rock, but it was clean. There was a small, smoldering fire pit, a stack of worn-but-clean blankets, and a few pieces of carved, wooden furniture. It was the Matron's personal quarters. She was giving us her own home.
"I..." I didn't know what to say. "Thank you."
"Do not thank me," she said, her voice sharp. "I am not protecting you. I am protecting her." She gestured for us to sit. Garr and the other two men stood guard outside, their forms grim shadows against the dim light of the cavern.
I gently set Nara down on the pile of blankets. She immediately huddled into them, her eyes wide, staring at the old woman with a mixture of fear and curiosity.
"Now," I said, my voice low, my hand still resting on my magun. "You have your messiah. You have your 'Child from the Wall.' What do you want from her?"
The Matron let out a dry, rasping laugh. "We want nothing from her, Faction-man. We want what she is. We want the hope she represents." She sat on a small, three-legged stool, the firelight catching the sharp, intelligent glint in her eyes.
"You heard my story," she said. "The Founders, your Builder, they lied to their own people. They told you they captured a 'blight.' A monster. A virus. They are fools. They are children playing with a power they cannot comprehend."
"What was it, then?" I asked, my voice a whisper. "If not a virus?"
"It was a scream," the Matron said, her gaze distant, lost in the ten-year-old memory. "The city... this world... it's all data. But the land they built it on, the Foundation... it was not empty. It was the echo of something... other. Something ancient. And when Krauss built his city on top of it, his 'order' on top of its 'chaos,' he began a war. The 'blight' wasn't an infection. It was the Foundation screaming in pain. It was agony, made manifest. It was un-making the city because the city was un-making it."
My blood ran cold. Krauss hadn't captured a monster. He had created one, by simply existing.
"And the child?" I asked, my voice barely audible. "The first child. The one you sacrificed."
"We did not sacrifice her!" the Matron spat, her eyes flashing with a sudden, hot anger. "We were dying. The blight was in our walls, in our heads, a constant, psychic scream. And then, a little girl... her name was lost to us... she wandered into the breach. And the screaming... stopped."
She leaned forward, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial, awestruck whisper. "She didn't fight it. She soothed it. She was... a counter-frequency. A perfect, innocent piece of data that could harmonize with the ancient, agonizing code. She was the cure."
My mind was reeling. Krauss's version: a mimic, a plague. The Matron's version: a peacemaker, a cure.
"And your Founders," the Matron continued, her voice thick with a decade of hatred, "they saw it. They saw the blight pacified, calmed by this one, small child. And what did they do? Did they learn from her? Did they try to understand? No. They saw a tool. They saw a plug. They saw a way to seal their prison."
She pointed a gnarled, trembling finger at the floor. "They built their 'Core Foundation' around the breach, with the blight and that innocent child inside it. They used a seven-year-old girl as a living, screaming shield to keep their monster caged, and then they sealed us, her people, in the dark to rot. They didn't just abandon us. They buried us."
The full, monstrous weight of the truth settled on me. Krauss... my master... my faction leader... he was a monster. A cold, logical, pragmatic monster who had sacrificed a child to build a prison and then sacrificed an entire district to hide the key.
And Nara.
I looked at her. She had accepted a small, hard piece of dried fungus from the Matron and was nibbling on it, her fear finally giving way to a child's simple hunger.
Who was she?
Was she, as Krauss believed, a new fragment of the blight, mimicking the original child to try and escape? A Trojan horse?
Or was she, as the Matron believed, the return of the original child? A miracle? A sign that the Foundation was failing and their messiah had been reborn to free them?
Both possibilities were terrifying. Both sides saw her as a tool, a symbol, a key.
I looked at her, really looked at her. The way her brow furrowed as she chewed the tough fungus. The way her eyes darted around the new, strange room. The small, dirty smudge on her cheek.
A plague? A savior?
She was just a scared kid.
My purpose, which had been a chaotic, reactive thing, now solidified into something as hard and as real as the obsidian of Valerius's shield.
It didn't matter what she was. It didn't matter which side's story was true. They were both monstrous. Krauss wanted to delete her to maintain his prison. The Matron wanted to worship her, to use her as a key to break that prison. And I had no idea what would happen to the city if that screaming, ancient data-god was set free.
Both sides were wrong. Both were willing to sacrifice her for their own ends.
I was the only one in this entire, broken world who was on her side.
My new mission was clear. It wasn't to save the city. It wasn't to join a revolution. It was to protect her. From everyone.
To do that, I couldn't just hide. I was a rat in a cage, and the gods were watching from above. I had to get stronger. I had to get smarter. I had to find the real truth, the one thing that neither Krauss nor the Matron was telling me.
I reached into my pocket, my fingers closing around the small, torn parchment fragment.
The Core Foundation.
I had to get back inside. Not as Kael, the fugitive. Not as Kael, the scout.
I had to become a ghost.
I looked up at the Matron, my face a mask of my new resolve. "These tunnels," I said, my voice low and steady. "You said they're the 'roots.' How far do they go?"
The Matron's lips pulled back in a grim, knowing smile. She had been waiting for this question.
"They are the cracks in their perfect, stone prison, child," she rasped, her eyes gleaming in the firelight. "They are the city's forgotten veins. They go everywhere." Her smile widened.
"They go... to the Core."