The city never truly slept anymore. Havencrest breathed in slow, mechanical pulses—the hum of repair drones overhead, the distant clatter of scaffolds against half-rebuilt towers, and beneath it all, the soft hiss of rain sliding down glass. From her apartment window, Sera Donovan watched the reflection of the skyline ripple across the puddles below.
Six months should have been enough time for peace to mean something. It didn't.
Her terminal still blinked on the desk behind her, that single message frozen on the screen:
The fire never ended. Look beneath the ruins. – K
She'd read it a hundred times. Deleted it once. Recovered it again minutes later.
No trace. No source. No server log. Whoever sent it had buried the trail deep.
Sera's heart told her it was Kael. Her logic—her journalist's mind—said impossible. The tower had swallowed him whole. She'd seen the reports, seen the DNA confirmation, seen the file marked DECEASED.
And yet…
The code in that message wasn't a forgery. Kael's encryption key used a double-layer signature, one he'd built himself—she'd watched him do it, long ago in the smoke-filled ruins of the East Sector. No one else could have mimicked it exactly.
Sera turned away from the rain, grabbed her coat, and slung her bag across her shoulder. The city would have answers, or ghosts pretending to be them.
The elevator to the street level smelled of ozone and burnt copper. As she descended, she caught her reflection in the metal door—dark circles under her eyes, hair tied back, the faint scar along her jaw that the medics hadn't been able to smooth out. She'd earned every mark.
Outside, the air bit cold. Neon signs flickered over crowded walkways, rain catching light like shattered glass. Vendors shouted over the hum of the crowd; police drones floated overhead, scanning faces in lazy arcs. Havencrest looked alive, but its heartbeat was off. Too quiet between the noise.
She moved fast through the crowd, heading toward the Archives District, where all post-incident data was stored. If the signal had come from inside the city grid, she could trace its echo there—what the technicians called signal ghosts.
Inside the Archive, light pulsed from endless columns of data cores. A bored technician looked up from his monitor as Sera flashed her press ID.
"Again?" he said. "Didn't you dig through all this after the collapse?"
"Something new came up," she replied.
He sighed. "You've got fifteen minutes. No external storage, no downloads."
She nodded and slipped between the aisles of humming servers. Her fingers hovered over the console, entering Kael's encryption ID.
Nothing.
She exhaled, then typed another line—his old military code, the one buried beneath Division Nine's security layer. The screen flickered, glitched, and for a heartbeat she saw it: a pulse of static shaped like a heartbeat rhythm. Then it vanished.
Someone was scrubbing the trail even as she searched.
The hum of the servers deepened, like the sound of the city holding its breath. Sera's fingers flew across the console, bypassing protocols she had no clearance for. Every command she entered returned a warning: ACCESS REVOKED. TRACE INITIATED. She ignored them. The risk didn't matter.
She rerouted through the emergency grid, piggybacking on the Archive's backup stream—a forgotten system still connected to Division Nine's old data vaults. The moment she forced the final key, the room flickered with a surge of blue light.
A single file appeared on the screen.
No name. No extension. Just a timestamp.
14:06:09 — The day Kael died.
Her pulse quickened. She opened it.
Static filled the monitor, then slowly resolved into a grainy video feed. The sound of heavy rain bled through the speakers, mixed with distant explosions. The image cleared—black smoke, collapsing steel, a man stumbling through the wreckage.
Her breath caught.
It was Kael.
He was alive.
Covered in dust, limping, but alive. The feed jittered as he reached the base of a fallen bridge. He pressed something—small, metallic—into a comms unit, glancing once toward the camera as though he knew someone might find this. His lips moved, faintly caught beneath the storm's roar:
"If you see this, stay away from Havencrest. It isn't over."
Then the video cut off.
Sera stared at the frozen frame, her mind reeling. Every instinct screamed to copy it, but before she could act, the screen went black. Red text filled the terminal:
> INTRUSION DETECTED.
PURGE INITIATED.
She ripped her data key from the console and backed away as alarms began to blare through the Archive. Technicians shouted, and security drones spun to life. Sera slipped her hood up and darted toward the exit, boots splashing through puddles as the lights stuttered overhead.
Outside, the rain came harder—thick, relentless, as though the sky itself was trying to drown the truth.
She ran three blocks before stopping under an old transit tunnel, lungs burning. She checked her device. The file was gone. Wiped clean. But deep in her bag, her recorder blinked once—a faint green light.
She smiled despite the chill.
She had audio. Just enough to prove the impossible.
The next morning, Sera sat at a diner on the city's west edge, her coffee untouched. Across from her, Detective Aiden Reaves watched her with quiet suspicion. He was one of the few people left from Division Nine who hadn't vanished, his badge now attached to the Reconstruction Bureau.
"You said you had something," he said.
"I saw him, Aiden." Her voice trembled just enough to make him lean forward. "Kael. There's footage."
He frowned. "That's not possible. You know what we found—"
"I know what you said you found," she snapped. Then, softer, "But I know his encryption, his voice, his handwriting in code. He's out there."
Aiden's jaw tightened. "If that's true, it's not safe for you to keep digging."
Sera looked past him, through the fogged window. The rain hadn't stopped since the message appeared. The city looked half-drowned, and for a moment, she wondered if Havencrest was trying to erase itsEelf—one memory at a time.
"I don't care about safe," she whispered. "If Kael's alive, then the story isn't over. And neither am I."
That night, she sat in her apartment again, every light off. Her laptop glowed in the dark, running silent scans through the city's undernet. Nothing yet.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small metal fragment she'd found outside the Archive—a piece of circuitry, stamped with a serial number. It wasn't random. It was Division Nine tech.
And on the edge, scratched into the metal, three words:
"Trust the signal."
She turned the fragment over and over in her hand, rain pattering softly against the window. The world had declared Kael dead. But Havencrest had always been a city built on lies—and she was done believing them.
Far away, beyond the skyline, a faint transmission blinked across the sky grid for just one second.
A signal.
And somewhere in the dark, someone was listening.