The past few days had settled into a new, strange, and almost domestic routine. I was still the faction's official scout, but I was also, by default, Nara's full-time guardian. My grand city-wide inspection was on an indefinite pause, and my days had become a bizarre mix of childcare and communal living.
This morning, the main hall, usually a place of quiet, focused work, was filled with a new, chaotic energy. Nara, now fully recovered from her terror, had decided she was an official "Builder's Apprentice." She had taken it upon herself to "help" Fen, who was meticulously calibrating a series of pressure-sensitive cogs for a new structural support. Her help mostly consisted of taking the cogs he had just sorted by size and re-sorting them into messy piles based on which ones she thought were "shinier."
Fen, to his eternal credit, just grunted, his expression one of profound, stoic suffering, and would silently re-sort them the moment she turned her back.
I, on the other hand, had been inspired by this new domesticity. Feeling a nostalgic pang for a life I'd barely lived, I decided to try and make a "real" breakfast. I had found the kitchen Lyra used, a space as clean and precise as a laboratory, and located a bag of flour and some preserved egg-substitute.
The result was a disaster.
I was standing over a hot metal plate, scraping at a blackened, smoking mass that was supposed to be a pancake, when Lyra entered. She stood there for a long, silent moment, her placid gaze taking in the smoke, the flour-dusted counter, and my own pathetic, soot-stained form.
"Kael-sama," she stated, her voice a calm, analytical monotone. "Your application of thermal energy to the carbohydrate-protein mixture has exceeded the optimal Maillard reaction threshold by approximately 300%. You are no longer cooking. You are manufacturing carbon."
"I was trying to make pancakes," I grumbled, slamming the spatula down in defeat.
"A pancake is a chemically leavened flat-bread," Lyra replied, as if reading from a textbook. "What you have created is a high-density, low-yield biomass fuel. It is an inefficient conversion of raw resources." She glided past me, took the bowl of remaining batter, and in a series of impossibly fast, precise movements, poured three perfect, identical circles onto the plate. She flipped them exactly once, and slid the stack onto a plate. She then handed me a standard, grey-colored ration bar.
"Thank you, Lyra," I said, my voice dripping with sarcasm.
"You are welcome, Kael-sama," she replied, completely missing the tone as she handed the perfect pancakes to Nara, who giggled at my failure. It was a light, happy sound in the stone hall, and it made the entire, humiliating ordeal worth it.
But the warmth of the morning, the light-heartedness of our new, strange family, only served to sharpen the edges of the dark questions that now lived in my mind. Nara's words—"the lights stopped listening after the big wall fell"—had become a splinter, lodged deep under my skin.
Later that afternoon, while Nara was napping on a pile of spare cloaks (a nest she had built herself), I saw my chance. I approached Lyra, who was cataloging data-slates.
"Lyra," I said, trying to sound as casual and professional as possible. "I need to prepare for when I resume my survey. I should review the original structural maps for the western sectors. The city-wide map you gave me is a good overview, but I need to see the foundational details. To check for vulnerabilities."
It was the perfect, logical, Builder-approved lie.
Lyra's amber eyes held mine for a beat, processing the request. "A logical preparatory step," she conceded. "The archives are in the lower level. Sub-level two. Do not disrupt the organizational schema."
"Wouldn't dream of it," I said.
The archives were not the dusty, parchment-filled library I had half-expected. They were a cold, sterile, and perfectly organized data vault, lit by the low, humming glow of crystalline storage units. Massive, rolling shelves held thousands of blueprint tubes, each one labeled with a precise, coded designation. This was the city's source code.
It took me twenty minutes to find what I was looking for. 'Sector Designations: Pre-Consolidation Era.' I pulled out a heavy tube and unrolled the blueprint on a wide, backlit table.
My breath caught. It was a map of the city, but an older one. And it was just as I'd suspected. The Neutral Sector was... incomplete. The western-most edge, the part that bordered the grey, endless wasteland, was a blank, empty void on the parchment. It wasn't just "undiscovered"; it was redacted. This wasn't a map with a missing piece; it was a map that had been surgically, intentionally altered.
My hands trembled slightly. I was in a place I shouldn't be, looking at things I wasn't supposed to know.
I put the map away and dug deeper. I wasn't just looking for the wall. I was looking for the lights. I found a schematic so old it was on brittle, physical parchment, not a data-slate. It was titled: 'Primary Power Grid - Foundational.'
My eyes traced the glowing, blue lines. I saw the central hub—the Builder's Core, our headquarters. I saw the main conduits branching out, thick and bright, to Sector Alpha, Sector Beta, and Sector Gamma. And then I saw the fourth line, the one heading west. It was cut. Not broken, not frayed, but terminated with a brutal, precise finality. A digital amputation.
And then I saw it. The source. The power for the entire city, the "lights" Nara had spoken of, didn't just come from the Builder's Core. The conduits didn't just start there. They all drew their power from something beneath it. A complex, circular sigil, buried deep in the bedrock of the city's data, labeled with two words that made my blood run cold.
"THE CORE FOUNDATION."
I had no idea what it meant, but the hair on my arms stood on end. This was the city's heart. Its true, hidden heart.
"This data is not relevant to your current directive, Kael-sama."
The voice was a soft, polite whisper, not two inches from my ear.
I yelped, a pathetic, strangled sound, and spun around, dropping the blueprint. Lyra was standing right behind me. She hadn't made a sound. Her feet were silent on the stone floor. She was just... there. Her placid, amber gaze wasn't on me. It was on the blueprint I had just dropped, on the glowing, forbidden sigil I had been studying.
"I-I was just..." I stammered, my heart hammering against my ribs. "I was cross-referencing the power grid with the structural weak points in the Neutral Sector. Just... doing my job."
"Your job," Lyra stated, her voice still perfectly level, "is to log superficial structural decay. This is foundational code. You do not have the clearance."
"But why?" I pressed, my fear being overtaken by a sudden, desperate need to know. "Why is it cut off? What happened to the wall? Why is the map blank? Why did the lights stop listening?"
I threw Nara's words at her, a challenge. I wanted to see a reaction. A flinch. A spark of anger. Anything.
Lyra's face remained a perfect, unfeeling mask. But her stillness, her absolute lack of any micro-expression, was more terrifying than a scream. She was a program that had encountered a query it was designed to deny.
"There are questions that do not exist, Kael-sama," she said, her voice a soft, chilling blade of pure, unwavering logic.
I stared at her, confused. "What does that mean? 'Forbidden'?"
"No," she replied, her gaze finally lifting to meet mine. Her amber eyes were as deep and empty as a void. "Not forbidden. That would imply the question is allowed, but the answer is withheld."
She took a small, precise step, bending to retrieve the blueprint.
"They do not exist... because they were never designed to be asked."
The words hit me like a physical blow. This wasn't a secret. This was a command. A fundamental, core-level piece of programming for the entire faction. The Builder hadn't just told them not to talk about it. He had built them in such a way that they were, on a fundamental level, incapable of even processing the inquiry. The past, the Neutral Sector, the fallen wall… it was a blind spot in their very creation.
She rolled up the blueprint, her movements deliberate and final, and slotted it back into its shelf. The conversation was over. I had my answer. And the answer was: Do not ask.
I stood there, my mind reeling. Lyra waited politely by the doorway, holding it open for me. I was being dismissed. As I walked past her, my hand, shaking almost imperceptibly, brushed against the edge of the archive table.
My fingers closed around a small, torn fragment of the blueprint I had been studying, a piece that had ripped off when I'd dropped it. I palmed it, my heart hammering, and walked out of the archive, my face a mask of casual, cowed obedience.
Lyra said nothing, her placid expression never changing. But I knew, with a bone-deep certainty, that she had seen it. And she had let me take it.
I didn't look at the fragment until I was back in the safety of my own room. I uncurled my fist. It was a small, brittle corner of the old parchment. On it was a single, partial, hand-drawn image: the top arc of the mysterious sigil.
And just below it, the two words that were the key to everything.
The Core Foundation.