The icon was still burning behind his eyelids when he wrenched his attention back to the rooftop.
Rain hammered the gravel surface in sheets, each drop hitting with the flat percussion of something deliberate. Aaron pressed his palm flat against the wet aggregate and used the physical sensation—cold, gritty, real—to shove the Janus encounter into a mental compartment he'd label deal with this later and possibly never. The compartment was getting crowded.
Lara was three feet away, crouched low, her weight shifted onto her forward knee. She wasn't looking at the street below anymore. She was looking at him. The angle of her head, the stillness of it, told him she'd been watching for several seconds and had already decided something was wrong.
"You went somewhere," she said. Not an accusation. A fact, stated the way you'd note a cracked foundation.
"System noise." He kept his voice flat. "I'm back."
She didn't push it, which he filed under things he appreciated about Lara in a list that was slowly but meaningfully growing. Instead, she shifted her weight back onto her heels, redistributing, ready to move or hold position depending on what came next. Her crossbow rested across her thighs, bolt already seated.
Aaron pulled his attention to the building below. Circuit Haven squatted in the middle of the block like something that had survived by being too stubborn to collapse—reinforced shutters, scavenged plate steel bolted over the lower windows, and two visible sentries working a rotation on the ground level. Kael and Rourke. He'd clocked their pattern twice already: forty-second sweep east, pause, forty-second sweep west, brief overlap at the rear corner.
He had a window. A small one.
"Okay," he said, and pulled the Error Logger's diagnostic overlay back into focus. The fault line was still there, pulsing slow and ugly beneath the building's system architecture like a bruise that hadn't quite decided whether to heal or rupture. "There's a bug in the building's base code. A Reconstruction Fault—dormant, but I can trigger it."
Lara's chin came up a fraction.
"It's a rollback exploit," he continued, keeping his voice low and clipped. No time for elegance. "The System occasionally tries to restore a location to a pre-event state when structural integrity data conflicts with current reality. This one never fired properly. It got stuck." He tapped two fingers against his sternum, over the pocket where the Null Phone sat. "If I spend Debug Points to manually kick it loose, the rear wall of that building will revert. Temporarily. We're talking full pre-apocalypse reconstruction—display lighting, holographic ad panels, the works."
Lara's expression didn't change, but her breathing did. A slight deceleration, the kind that happened when someone was running fast calculations behind a still face.
"How long?" she asked.
"Sixty seconds. Maybe ninety if the patch cycle is slower than I'm projecting." It will absolutely be slower. Patch cycles are always slower. That's the only thing consistent about this System. "Long enough for Kael and Rourke to lose their minds over it and move to investigate."
"And you?"
"I activate it from the exterior wall. Physical contact required." He glanced at the rooftop edge. The drop to the alley below was manageable. "You cover the approach. If either of them doesn't take the bait and holds position, I need to know before I'm standing in the open with my hand on a building that's about to light up like a mall on Black Friday."
She was quiet for two full seconds. He watched the rain trace channels through the grime on her jacket collar, watched the way her thumb moved—not dramatically, just a small rotation against the crossbow's stock, the kind of unconscious motion that meant she was running scenarios.
"The Debug Points," she said. "How many?"
"Five hundred."
Another beat of silence. He knew what she was calculating. She'd seen him use the Logger before, knew the points weren't infinite, knew that spending them on a distraction rather than a direct advantage was a significant commitment to a plan that had a lot of moving parts and exactly zero room for a third variable to walk in.
She's right to hesitate. I'd hesitate. I am, in fact, currently also hesitating, which is why I'm explaining this to her instead of already doing it.
"Once you're in," she said slowly, "where are you going?"
"High-density data drives. Back storage, probably. You?"
"Magic-conductive wiring. I know what the spools look like."
He nodded once. Clean. No overlap in objectives, no reason to stay together once they were through the door, which meant fewer variables, which meant the plan was actually better than he'd initially—
"Fine," Lara said.
The word landed with the weight of a door closing. She rose into a low crouch, repositioned to the rooftop's edge, and brought the crossbow up to a ready angle that covered the alley approach without silhouetting her against the grey sky. Professional. Economical.
She gave a sharp nod, and her hand tightened around the crossbow's grip until the knuckles shifted pale beneath the rain.
The alley behind Circuit Haven smelled like wet concrete and old copper. Rain drilled against the dumpsters in steady percussion, loud enough to mask the sound of Aaron's breathing, not loud enough to mask the sound of his pulse.
He pressed his back flat against the rear wall, shoulder to shoulder with Lara. The concrete was cold even through his tactical vest, the kind of cold that had memory in it—winter-before-the-System cold, the kind that used to mean heating bills and not hypothermia.
Through the wall, muffled and distant, Kael said something. Rourke laughed. Short, clipped. Sentry boredom.
Sixty seconds, maybe ninety. Aaron needed every one of them.
He rotated his left hand palm-up, watching the Error Logger overlay flicker into existence across his vision—that familiar lattice of green diagnostic text that the System almost certainly believed was a standard class interface. The bug entry was already pinned at the top of his queue, flagged in amber:
[FAULT_ID: RCN-7741 | TYPE: Reconstruction Fault (Dormant) | LOCATION: Rear Structural Surface, Circuit Haven | TRIGGER COST: 500 Debug Points | ESTIMATED DURATION: 60-90 seconds | STATUS: READY]
He glanced at his balance. 1453 DP.
This is going to hurt. Not physically. Financially. Five hundred points was not pocket change; it was the accumulated residue of three days of careful, obsessive bug-cataloguing, of walking past obvious shortcuts because every point had a purpose downstream. He was about to light four hundred and fifty-three dollars of equivalent effort on fire for a distraction.
Worth it, he told himself, and almost believed it.
He turned and placed his palm flat against the concrete.
The wall was rough under his hand, aggregate stone and old paint, decades of weather compacted into a surface that felt permanent. Immovable. He could feel the faint vibration of rain hitting the other side.
In the overlay, he selected RCN-7741.
A confirmation prompt materialized:
[EXECUTE RECONSTRUCTION FAULT? COST: 500 DEBUG POINTS | REMAINING: 953 DP | CONFIRM: Y/N]
Aaron pressed Y.
The wall ate his hand.
Not literally—but the sensation was close enough that his body registered it as threat before his mind caught up. A deep, subsonic shudder moved through the concrete from his palm to his sternum. The rain sound cut out for exactly half a second, as if the world had hiccupped. Then the wall beneath his fingers went warm.
Then it went wrong.
The concrete dissolved. Not crumbled, not cracked—dissolved, pixels-first, the surface breaking apart into a storm of green and black static that hissed and spat like a live wire dragged through standing water. The sound it made was somewhere between tearing fabric and a hard drive dying mid-read: a high, ugly shriek that lasted three seconds and then stopped.
Lara made a sound beside him. Not a word. Just a sharp intake of breath through her nose, the kind that meant what did you just do.
Aaron kept his eyes on the wall.
The static churned, collapsed inward, and then—
Light.
The rear wall of Circuit Haven became a display window. Floor-to-ceiling, pristine, zero damage. Pre-apocalypse glass, polished to a transparency that hadn't existed in Seattle for two years. Behind it, holographic advertisements cycled in cheerful, relentless loops: a sleek laptop rotating against a gradient background, a pair of wireless earbuds trailing clean white text, a smiling face holding a tablet above the tagline CONNECT. CREATE. DISCOVER.
The holograms were wrong. Not glitching—perfectly rendered. That was the horror of it. They were absolutely, immaculately correct, as if someone had lifted a single square of 2021 and pressed it into the rotting meat of the present without asking permission.
The glow hit Aaron's face in blue and white and the amber of a promotional banner. He felt it on his skin like the first morning of a season that didn't exist anymore.
From inside the store, through the now-impossible glass, he could see the interior. And he could hear—clearly, suddenly, the sound-dampening of the old wall gone with it—Kael's voice cut off mid-sentence.
Then Rourke: "What the—"
Boots. Moving fast. Moving away from the front entrance, toward the back.
Aaron looked at Lara. Her face was washed in holographic light, the promotional glow catching the water on her cheekbones and turning it silver. She was already in motion before he opened his mouth, already reading the same clock he was.
Fifty-eight seconds, give or take.
The new wall held, solid and impossible, its advertisements cycling with the cheerful indifference of a world that had already forgotten it ended.