The night hung heavy over Duskgrave, thick with smog and the scent of oil-slick rain. Steam hissed from a cracked vent above Level 3's market alley, curling around the broken neon signs like ghost fingers.
Xander Croft walked quickly, hood low, hands in his jacket pockets. His boots echoed faintly against the grated steel walkways as he weaved past vendors packing up synthfruit crates and black market tech stalls. The city never truly slept, but it had moments—like now—when it held its breath.
He preferred these hours. The noise died down. The watchers got lazy. No one noticed a quiet seventeen-year-old slipping through the cracks.
"Croft." A voice rasped behind him. Too close.
Xander froze.
He turned slowly, one hand still on the pulse-stick hidden in his pocket. A hunched figure leaned from the alley's edge—gray coat patched with copper wire, one eye glowing red beneath a scuffed lens.
Juno, a junk dealer. Half-legit. Fully insane.
"You still working the elevator lines?" Juno asked, twitching. "Got a job. Easy one. One layer down. Just a glitch patch."
Xander hesitated. "Glitch patch?"
"Control node's acting up. Probably nothing. But the buyers want clean feeds from Sector Twelve. They're watching someone."
"Who?"
Juno's smile cracked across his face like a faulty weld. "Not your problem. You want the creds or not?"
The credits would help. Food wasn't cheap, and he needed another charge cell for his datapad.
Xander nodded. "Send the route."
Juno tossed him a metal chip, already hot with embedded code. "Run quiet. If you see flickering lights, keep your head down. They say ghosts get into the wiring sometimes."
Xander didn't respond. He just walked.
---
The elevator shaft groaned as it descended past Level 5, past 6, down toward the deeper strata of Duskgrave—where the lights grew sparse and the air tasted like rust.
The Sector Twelve terminal hadn't been touched in years, at least not by anyone who registered on the city's surveillance net. That alone should've made Xander think twice.
But he had no reason to fear ghosts. Not yet.
The panel ahead sparked slightly as he approached. A screen flickered, showing a grid of overlapping code layers. One of them pulsed red.
"Found it," he muttered, pulling a cracked tablet from his bag and syncing to the node.
It resisted.
The code inside... wasn't normal. It wasn't even wrong. It was old. Primitive. Yet somehow it overrode the modern layers like they weren't even there.
"Juno, what the hell did you send me into?"
He tapped in a bypass.
The screen flashed.
Just for a second—barely long enough to register—an image shimmered on the monitor: a symbol, curved like a coil of silver wire woven through an eye. Then it vanished.
The entire hallway buzzed.
The lights overhead dimmed, then strobed once.
Then silence.
Xander stepped back. A noise tickled his ears—like a whisper made of static. No words. Just a presence.
The air felt wrong, like the moment before lightning.
Then the screen rebooted. The red pulse vanished.
Job done.
Still… he couldn't shake the feeling that something had watched him. Something had recognized him.
And it hadn't been human.
---
Back in his corner of Level 4, Xander sat cross-legged on a pile of old crates, flipping the payment chip through his fingers.
The lights here flickered too—but that wasn't new.
He stared at the cracked mirror nailed to the support beam across from him.
For a moment—just a moment—his reflection glitched.
His eyes… shimmered silver.
Then normal again.
He blinked and leaned forward, inspecting.
Was it stress?
Lack of sleep?
He shut the mirror door. Locked the chip into his belt slot.
Tomorrow would come like it always did—quiet and forgettable.
But somewhere beneath his floor, something ancient had stirred.
And it had seen him.