The mission began in silence.
Samantha led them not through the main corridors, but along a servant's passage behind the ward's kitchens—a narrow artery of worn brick and the ghost-smells of old stew and soap. Leximus moved in the center of the formation, flanked by two operatives whose names he hadn't caught. Their movements were efficient, their breathing controlled, but their eyes kept flicking toward him. He was the anomaly, the weapon, the reason they were running this gauntlet in the dead of night.
The hollow space inside him, left by the Water's "healing," did not ache. It echoed. It was a cavity that caught the faint, sub-sonic tremor of the dissolving rite still occurring far below their feet. It felt less like a wound and more like a tuning fork struck by a note no one else could hear.
"Echo status," Samantha whispered, pausing at a junction.
One of the operatives, a woman with close-cropped hair, pressed a finger to the comm-crystal in her ear. "Signal is holding at eighty percent peak amplitude… but the waveform is degenerating. Reading multiple, unstable harmonic frequencies. It's not a clean anchor. It's… a mess."
"Calvin's problem," Samantha said flatly, though her jaw was tight. "Our window is now. The capital's sensors will be drowning in that noise, but it won't last. Move."
They descended a rusted iron staircase into the city's underbelly. The air grew cold and damp, smelling of fungus and stagnant water. The hollow in Leximus's chest tightened—not with fear, but with a strange attunement. The deep, wet dark down here resonated with the deep, dissolving thing that Rylan was becoming.
In the sub-basement, the battle was not one of force, but of containment.
The watery Phantom of Rylan did not attack. It expanded. It wept from its form in a slow, inevitable seepage across the stone floor, the liquid ignoring gravity, climbing the walls in shimmering, translucent films. Where it touched, the stone didn't wet; it remembered. Patches of the granite softened, their edges blurring, reverting to the silt from which they were formed eons ago. The Phantom was un-making the present into a remembered past.
"You see?" the Phantom murmured, its voice the sigh of a sinking ship. "All things yearn to return to their source state. This resistance is a temporary friction."
Calvin stood firm, sweat beading on his forehead. His Stormmind power wasn't about brute strength. It was about pressure differentials and directed currents. He couldn't punch water. He had to divert it.
He exhaled, and the air around him stirred. Not a wind, but a sharp, localized pressure drop in front of the advancing seepage. The ambient moisture in the air condenses instantly, and the Phantom's creeping liquid wall was pulled, siphoned against its will, into the low-pressure zone Calvin had created. It coalesced into a swirling, suspended orb of confused brine.
"You manipulate the symptom, not the cause," the Phantom observed, even as another tendril of itself began weeping from a different part of the floor. "The cause is in him." It gestured to the shivering, semi-conscious Rylan. "His soul is a leaking vessel. You cannot patch it with air pressure."
"I don't need to patch it," Calvin gritted out, creating another pressure siphon. "I need to give him a shape to remember. He's lost his self-boundary. You are that lost boundary, given sentience."
He shifted his focus from the Phantom to Rylan. He couldn't fight the ocean. He had to remind the drowning man what air felt like.
The rendezvous point was a condemned pump station, its great iron heart silent and rusted. The asset was there, a wiry man with the perpetually nervous look of a clerk, clutching a wax-sealed tube.
"The transcript," he hissed, thrusting it at Samantha. "They requisitioned the original docket three days ago. This is the verbatim copy. The seals on the original were already broken when it arrived in the archive. Someone else had been in it first."
Samantha took the tube. "Noted. Exfil route?"
"South conduit, past the old overflow gate. It's clear for the next twenty minutes. After that, the city's nocturnal Etheric flush cycles through. It'll… disaggregate any organic matter in the tunnels."
Lovely. A deadline within a deadline.
As they turned to go, Leximus's hollow core gave a sudden, violent thrum. It was a sympathetic vibration, so strong he staggered, his hand flying to his chest.
Below, in the sub-basement, Calvin had made his move. Abandoning defense, he focused all his will on Rylan. He didn't try to push the water out. He tried to define the space it was in. He crafted a memory of air not as emptiness, but as separation—the thing that allows one drop to be distinct from another, that allows a man to have a surface where he ends and the world begins. He poured this concept, sharp and clear as a blade of logic, into Rylan's dissolving mind.
The memory was of learning to swim. The terror of sinking, then the sudden, shocking understanding: to float, you must trust the water to hold you, but you must also be a thing that can be held. You must have a shape. You are not the lake. You are in the lake.
Rylan's body convulsed. A gasp, raw and desperate, tore from his lungs—his first voluntary breath since the rite began. The Phantom, everywhere at once, shuddered.
"No," it whispered, its form becoming turbulent. "That is the pain. That is the loneliness."
But Rylan was clutching at the memory, at the concept of a boundary. He was remembering he had skin.
The Phantom shrieked—a sound of tearing tides and breaking coral. It didn't attack Calvin. It retreated, collapsing inward from the walls, flowing back toward its source. Not to re-integrate, but to drown the spark of separation at its source. It surged toward the prone Rylan.
Calvin was faster. He unleashed not a siphon, but a concussive blast of solidified air pressure, a wall of invisible force that slammed into the flowing Phantom just before it reached Rylan.
The entity didn't scatter. It shattered.
Into a thousand glistening, pearl-like droplets, each hanging in the air, each containing a fragmented, dying reflection of Rylan's face. The dissolution was complete, but contained. The psychic pressure in the room dropped suddenly, leaving a deafening, damp silence.
Rylan lay unconscious, breathing ragged but his own. He was whole, but Calvin knew he was not intact. The Phantom was gone, but the Dissolution Event had occurred. A part of Rylan's soul had been permanently lost to the tide. He would advance to Adept, but he would carry a Philosophical Scar: a chronic, low-grade empathy for entropy, a quiet voice always whispering that to let go was easier than to hold on.
On the monoscope, the chaotic signal flatlined into a weak, stable rhythm. The beacon was out.
In the pump station, the violent thrum in Leximus's chest subsided, leaving a cold, clear emptiness behind. He looked up to see Samantha staring at him, the transcript tube in her hand forgotten for a second.
"What was that?" one of the operatives asked, weapon half-raised.
"An echo," Leximus said, the truth of it undeniable. He had felt Rylan's fracture, his near-unmaking, and his painful, scarred reassembly. The hollow in him now felt less like an absence and more like a receiver.
Samantha's eyes were hard. "Can you still function?"
Leximus nodded. The hollow was quiet now. Waiting.
"Good," she said, tucking the tube into her vest. "Because the beacon just died. Which means every capital sensor that was dazzled by it just got a clear picture again. Our twenty-minute window just became five. We run. Now."
She plunged into the dark mouth of the south conduit without looking back. The operatives followed. Leximus took one last breath of the foul, stagnant air, felt the deep, wet silence below and the coming storm of attention above, and followed them into the dark.
The mission to retrieve the past was over. The mission to survive its consequences had just begun.