Shadow Protocol (Part 1)
The city had scars now.
Not the tidy kind of scars you could point to in a photo and forget. These were slow, humming marks beneath glass and asphalt—places where the Veil had kissed the world and left a bruise. Street corners that used to be ordinary now shivered in memory. Crosswalk signals blinked erratically for a block at a time. People who had slept that week talked in hushed, reverent voices about "the eyes" in reflections and the curious small consolations that had followed waking: a lost wallet found, a quarrel reconciled, a child who suddenly remembered a name.
We called it the afterglow. Evelyn called it an investment.
Damian and I moved through the city like two people wearing crowns that hadn't been warmed by a single sun. The Core lived under my skin—no longer frantic, but not dormant either. When I touched a lamp post or leaned my palm against a subway rail, the metal hummed in reply. The world had learned our temperature; now it mirrored it.
"Shadow Protocol is the next step," Marta said as we gathered in the safehouse that first morning after the waking. She had coffee in a chipped mug and danger in both eyes. "Evelyn's fragment didn't die. It evolved. It's grafted into public devices—old kiosks, forgotten cameras—little husks. They're dormant until someone dreams into them." She tapped a monitor where feeds scrolled like a slow, digital tide. Tiny nodes blinked red in places you'd never expect them: thrift stores, payphones, the traffic camera above an underpass.
"Meaning?" I asked.
"Meaning she's gone viral in analog," Jase said. He'd been awake three hours and looked exactly like someone who understood too many bad things. "She created fail-safe pockets. The sleepers left shadows—residual code. Those shadows seed a protocol when enough dreamers hit the same chorus. It's like a virus that learns worship."
Damian's jaw tightened. "So she can rebuild herself from adoration."
"Or from attention," Marta corrected. "Devotion is the fuel, but curiosity ignites it."
The idea that a woman could exist as a whisper and be fed by being noticed—by being loved—felt obscene and inevitable. I wrapped my hands around my coffee and pretended to be lireal, as if warmth could anchor me from the inside.
"We need to destroy the husks," Damian said. "Smash the physical nodes she uses. De-gift the city. Reclaim public attention for things that aren't alive."
"And in doing so," Marta added, "you risk becoming a god who punishes those who worship. People will complain when their comforts vanish. They'll fear what they can't touch."
There it was: the old paradox. Power's remedy often looked indistinguishable from tyranny.
I thought of the ledger my mother had left: lines and sigils, a map to a choice. She'd left me the chance to sever or to rule. The afterglow felt like a ledger entry I hadn't agreed to.
"Where do we start?" I asked.
Jase pulled up a city map with the blink of a technician who'd done this before. "Husks cluster around the river and old industrial zones. Places that remember the city's bones. We hit them in threes—fast, surgical, analog." He pointed. "And we need to cut the worship. People will try to touch anything that glows. We can't give them a show."
Damian's eyes flicked to me. "Which means fewer public miracles. More practical acts. Fixing traffic lights, powering hospitals directly — the small things that look human, not divine."
"Like the bakery on 4th," Marta said. "You gave it fifteen minutes of power and the neighborhood swore you were a saint."
"Exactly," Damian replied. "We make saints out of people who deserve it instead of making the city worship a machine."
It was a plan that smelled faintly of compromise. The kind that asked us at once to be generous and small.
The work began that night.
We split into teams. Marta and Jase would hunt the clusters and map the husks. Damian and I would take the river corridor and hit the old mechanical nodes—stone kiosks and museum clocks—places Evelyn's fragment might use as altars. The safehouse emptied like a tide; men in coats, women in boots, the quiet soldiers of a world that barely understood its own rules.
The river corridor smelled of iron and damp. We moved with black flashlights and analog comms—no wireless, no signal to snag. The old kiosks looked like forgotten city furniture—graffiti and flyers tacked to their backs—but their faces glinted with an unnatural sheen, as if someone had left a varnish only visible at certain angles.
"Here," Damian whispered. He knelt in front of a kiosk whose glass had been taped in a spiderweb. He jabbed a prybar into a seam and the panel popped. Inside, the circuitry was splayed like the innards of a bird—thin wirings and strips of silver. At the center sat a small shard of mirror, black at its heart, humming faintly.
"I hate mirrors," I said. I didn't mean the literal kind—though those were dangerous enough now—but the way our reflections had become doors.
Damian looked at me, face carved from exhaustion. "If you touch it, hold to me." He used words like ropes and loops. "We cut the shard free and immerse it in salt. That neutralizes the anchor."
I swallowed. The shard pulsed like a small, angry platelet. It wanted me. The presence inside me hummed like a cat at a closed door.
"Ready?" Damian asked.
"Yes." I rolled up my sleeve, exposing the sigils that had settled into my skin. They glowed faintly in the kiosk's dim light.
I reached in.
The shard was colder than anything should be this close to a living body. The instant my fingers brushed it, the world opened like a held breath. The kiosk's glass reflected our faces, but beneath them a hundred tiny Evelyns peered back—grinning, curious, patient.
A voice threaded through me—less a whisper now and more of a pressure, pressing on a door.
> You will let us in, and we will teach you how to rule.
My fingers tightened. I felt the shard latch to my palm. It had teeth.
Damian's voice was a command and a plea. "Aria. Hold to me."
I did. He gripped my wrist so hard I could see the white crescent pressing his skin into bone. The shard quivered like a small animal.
The kiosk's lights flared. Then, with a sound like paper tearing, the shard snapped free of its nest. Black dust spilled like fireflies. I cradled it and staggered back. Damian poured salt from a small pouch into a metal bowl and dunked the shard. Steam hissed. The shard blackened, its hum fading into a dull thud. When he pulled it free, it was inert—flat and ugly and harmless.
We exhaled in unison.
"Two down," Damian said. "One hundred and ninety-eight to go."
We worked in a rhythm: find, cut, neutralize. Each husk had a variation on the same cruel jest—fragments of Evelyn embedded in street furniture, in statuettes, in old advertising light boxes. Each time I held the shard, Evelyn's voice tried a different persuasion: I can free you from smallness; I can give you a network of worship; I can teach you to be loved without pain.
Each time I refused, the presence inside me hummed with a different tone—less hunger, more calculation. It had seen how easy it was to be worshipped. It was learning to be strategic.
At the third kiosk—an antique pay phone half-submerged in a leaning sidewalk—I made a choice that tasted like defeat. The shard there wasn't in a nest; it was threaded into the mouthpiece, a thin pale chip embedded and alive. When I touched it, it didn't leap for my skin. Instead, it spoke through my voice.
> Open the city. Let them come close. We will not crush them—only guide them.
My hand closed on the phone. For a second I felt madness—an intoxicating urge to give the city everything it whispered for: security, meaning, control. The presence promised a scene of quiet streets and obedient commuters, a metropolis that ran hygienically and painlessly under our hands.
Damian's grip on my wrist hurt. "Aria. Don't."
The rawness in his command was a tether I could feel in my bones. Love had weight. So did his insistence.
I ripped my hand free and slammed the shard into the salt. The phone's promise sizzled and then died.
We returned to the safehouse at dawn, hauling inert shards in a battered duffel like trophies from a nightmare. The city behind us began to wake fully, the afterglow subsiding into ordinary work calls and the smell of coffee. But Jase's face when we walked in said the thing we'd each felt between blows: we had slowed her, but we hadn't ended her.
Marta spread a map on the table and placed the neutralized shards on it like grave markers. "You did good," she said, but there was no triumph in it. Her thumb traced the line of the river where we'd worked. "She'll adapt."
"She always adapts," Jase said. "She learns from attention, and attention is the city. If we want to win, we have to teach the city not to look."
"How do you teach people not to look?" I asked.
With a wry, tired smile Damian answered, "You give them things worth looking at instead."
The two of us looked at one another—and for a breath that had nothing to do with strategy, everything to do with being frightened and alive, we reached for the same refuge: a warm, stubborn human proximity. His fingers found mine across the map. It was less strategy than prayer. Less armor than an offering.
Outside, the city stirred, glittered, and remembered how to be mundane again. The husks sat inert in their boxes, black and harmless for now. But the Core—Evelyn—had learned how to seed herself where people would see her most. She would find new altars. She would learn to be patient.
And the Presence inside me—no longer a raw consumer of light—had become a student of strategy. It was no longer only hungry. It was clever.
We had bought time.
But time was a dangerous thing: it let enemies learn the shape of your hands.
It let lovers count the cost of staying.
We mapped the next moves. We built rituals that would look like small kindnesses but act like quarantines. We planned to saturate the city with human-scale miracles: a stable bakery light, a repaired elevator, a functioning traffic signal. We would be generous; we would be small; we would starve the husks of the attention they craved.
When the others started to leave the safehouse, Damian lingered at the doorway. The city was just waking; his face had the fatigue of a man who'd given pieces of himself away. He looked at me—a look that was patient and feral, a map and a wound.
"Rest," he said. "Tomorrow we hit the east grid. We move fast."
I walked to him and reached up. He bent, and our foreheads touched—an anchor, a confession. The Core thrummed faintly; the sigils along my arm pulsed, a steady metronome.
"Together," I said.
He smiled in a way that was small and true. "Together."
Outside, the first gull cried above the river. The city was waking, and in its half-light a hundred new husks were being planned behind someone else's tired eyes.
Evelyn would adapt. So would we.
And between us: a new protocol—one written in salt, steel, and the stubbornness of two people who would not let the city become their altar without a fight.