Neon rain braided the night into thin blue threads over Sector-13. Ryo watched it crawl down the cracked window like veins, listening to the generator's low, tired hum. Aya's voice whispered through his earpiece, light and strained, a tether in the storm."Obsidian Spire is running a skeleton crew," she said. "Three patrols on rotation. Security grid is patterned—eight-second gaps, east face only. You'll have to be quiet."Mei flicked her wrist and a fan of paper seals whispered into the air, the inked sigils drinking the light. "Quiet is a luxury," she murmured. "We'll settle for unseen."Shin adjusted the bandage under his collar and offered Ryo a thin smile that didn't touch his eyes. "We go in, pull the Oracle Shard, go out. Any questions?"Ryo tightened the wrappings on his right hand and felt the familiar thrum of the blade resting against his spine. Kaminari-no-Ha—lightning in a sheath that remembered him. The steel remembered him better than he remembered himself."No questions," Ryo said. "If Hazama wants it, we break it."Obsidian Spire waited like a black tooth in the city's jaw, its edges swallowing the sky. The corridors inside were white and mercilessly straight, broken only by the slow blink of status lights and the silver eyes of cameras tracking nothing because Mei's sigils whispered them to sleep.They slipped past the first patrol in the silence between Mei's breath and Shin's footfall. Ryo counted each pulse of the grid and moved on the eighth, shoulders brushing cold metal, chest ghosting the fringe of an alarm's sensitivity cone. His heart thrummed to a rhythm that did not belong to him."Left at the atrium," Aya said. "Archive Seven. That's where they're calling it the Umbral Engine.""Engine?" Shin frowned. "We're stealing the Shard, not a vehicle.""Not a vehicle," Aya said. "A factory. It spins shadows into data. And it's keyed to someone's pattern."Ryo swallowed. "Whose?"There was a pause where he could hear the rain hit the dish above Aya's head, timestamped storm against steel. "We'll know when we reach it," she said.Archive Seven was a room grown from symmetry. Black pillars rose like bundled spears. The machine at its heart was a cage of glass and charred iron, coils spiraled around a crystal that pulsed with a slow, lucid heartbeat. It threw a soft violet aura into the world, and the world recoiled.Ryo felt it before he saw it—an ache in the old scar under his ribs, the one that never closed all the way. His blade hummed in answer. The crystal's glow shifted, and it was like a glance across a crowded street, two strangers recognizing the same ruin in each other.Aya exhaled, close to reverent. "The Oracle Shard is keyed to… Subject R-01." Her voice went smaller. "Compatibility 99.7%. There's a secondary key… Director Node H."Shin moved without a sound, his hand on Ryo's shoulder. "Don't."Ryo wasn't sure what movement Shin was stopping. He hadn't named it even in his own bones. The ink of Mei's seals shivered in the machine's light. She gathered them, eyes flicking to Ryo's face. "We cut it free," she said. "We leave before the grid wakes."The room's temperature sank. The hair on Ryo's arms lifted. The violet aura folded, dimmed, then flickered—like the Shard was narrowing its eyes. The darkness around the pillars thickened until it had edges.A voice came from the deep shade. It did not echo. "If you take it, the city cracks sooner."Ryo drew his blade before his body decided. The voice wore restraint like armor. It wasn't Hazama's. The figure that pulled itself from the pillar's shadow moved with a practiced precision that felt almost like a memory—lean, a mantle that looked built from scaled leather, a mask of tempered glass that held no reflection. The katana at his hip was a sibling to Ryo's: different in shape, matched in cadence. When he breathed, the room listened.Mei's seals flared. Shin slid into a guarding angle. Aya's breath clipped into a sharp intake over the line. "Warden on deck," she said. "Codename: Nocturne."Nocturne's hand eased to his hilt. The Umbral Engine brightened as if in approval. "Leave," he said, "and the cuffs stay locked. Take the Shard, and you'll strip the city's anesthesia. You think you hate the screams now."Ryo took a step forward, rain still crawling phantom-cold down his spine. "We don't bargain with poison. Especially not poison that wears a mask.""You want a face?" Nocturne tilted his head, and for an instant Ryo saw the outline of a mouth like his own, the curve of a cheekbone that could have been an echo. Then the mask cleared into a mirror that showed Ryo's shoulder scar and nothing else. "Faces are for the naive."Shin moved first. His blade described a clean, merciless arc. Nocturne met it without changing posture, steel ringing in a register that made Ryo's ribs ache. The second strike stabbed for tendon. Nocturne's parry was a hinge with no squeak. Mei's seals whistled and split into a lattice; the lattice rejected him: it folded, struggling to frame his outline, but shadow obeyed Nocturne like a trained hound. He stepped perpendicular to his own reflection and appeared at Shin's off-hand. The flat of his blade kissed Shin's wrist. Shin hissed, stumbled, regained his stance by force of will.Ryo moved. The sword came free of the sheath like lightning remembered how to be linear. He met Nocturne's weight and it wasn't weight at all—it was a pattern. Two lines intersecting where they'd intersected a hundred times in different rooms in dreams Ryo didn't admit to. Sparks blew out and hung like fireflies that forgot how to fall."Who taught you that cadence?" Ryo asked.Nocturne didn't answer. He drew a simple vertical cut that the Umbral Engine stretched into a spear of dark light. Ryo split it and felt the backlash rattle his molars. Violet poured down his blade, and his fingers went numb. Kaminari-no-Ha wanted to sing, but the song snagged on something inside the crystal.Aya's voice thinned to a wire. "Ryo, the Engine is feeding him projections. He's moving along your predicted vectors. He knows your —""Don't tell me how to be me," Ryo snapped, surprised at the heat in his throat. He shut off the feed. Silence roared. His breathing and Nocturne's breathing made a rhythm that could have been lullaby if you didn't listen to the edges. He remembered, unhelpfully, a tune hummed by a voice he could never place when he was small and burning with fever, a melody that wrapped itself around a boy terrified of thunder and taught him to count lightning.Nocturne's blade kissed his shoulder and drew a line of fire. Ryo's return stroke skidded on an angle that should have been wrong. The impact rang in his wrist in a way he recognized from training he didn't remember having."Why protect a nightmare machine?" Ryo forced the words between his teeth, not to sway Nocturne but to keep his own thoughts from settling. "What did Hazama promise you?""He promised to keep the roof from caving in," Nocturne said, tone almost irritated, as if Ryo was wasting time. "He promised to burn first."Shin feinted, and Mei's lattice snapped tight. For an instant, Nocturne's shadow lagged behind his body. It was enough. Ryo drove the blade into the seam between shadow and flesh and felt something give—not skin, not armor, but a thread in the loom of the room. The Umbral Engine shrieked—not in sound; the light went white and the whiteness felt like hot glass under the eyelids. The Shard's pulse tripled.Alarms finally woke. Red bled up the walls. Aya's voice came back, close to breaking. "Containment protocols kicking in. I'm opening a vent shaft two floors down. You have two minutes to either kill him or get smart."Nocturne stepped back and held his blade in a formal angle that made Ryo's chest hurt. "Two minutes," he said. "Decide what kind of hero you're going to be."Ryo looked at the cage. Behind the Engine's glass, shadow-shapes shifted, and he realized they weren't shapes. They were people in slow motion, their movements dulled by a light that refused to be seen as light. The anesthesia Aya had named. The price the city paid to forget.Mei's voice cracked. "Ryo."He moved past Nocturne.The Warden followed half a step behind, not to stop him but to watch what choice he made. Ryo cut the first glass strut. The sound it made was small. The second strand sang; the third screamed. When the cage broke the air changed. The aura folded in on itself and then blew out, a tide of shadow and memory and grief that had nowhere to go but everywhere. The people behind the glass fell, one by one, and then started breathing like drowning men who found a shore.Nocturne's mask tilted as if he'd swallowed an unfamiliar emotion. "You just woke them up," he said. "They'll remember.""They deserve to," Ryo said. "We all do."The Warden moved, finally, in earnest. Their blades wrote a paragraph Ryo could not summarize. He bled at three punctuation marks and forced Nocturne back by making a mistake on purpose, stepping wrong in a way no projection would predict. The Engine blinked out. The room's shadows reverted to ordinary, mean darkness. Without the projection feed, Nocturne was just a man with a discipline. A terrifying discipline. But a man.Shin slid into the vent first with two of the freed, Mei covering the retreat with sigils that burnt her fingers raw. Ryo fought Nocturne to the threshold, and in that bobbing darkness, their breathing became the only reliable thing."You shouldn't have his cadence," Nocturne said softly, and for a second there was no mask, no mantle, just a violence made polite by training. "You shouldn't.""Tell him that," Ryo said, too breathless for bitterness. "Tell your Director."Nocturne's blade shifted as if he'd swallow a name and decided to starve instead. The Warden pressed a coin into Ryo's free hand, closed his fingers around it like an elder giving a blessing or a curse. "Take this and remember when it matters," he said. "Then leave, and don't look back unless you want to see everything you've ever lost."Ryo didn't look. He slashed the vent's grate, dropped into a throat of black air, and felt the city's guts wrap around him as they crawled through the shaft. The roar of alarms receded. Aya's voice came back, knees-in-chest relieved. "I've got you. North alley exit. Eyes down."They spilled into rain. It greeted them with honest cold. Mei collapsed against a crate, palms blistered, laughter stitched with sobs. Shin checked pulses, counted names into a small book he kept like an altar. Ryo opened his hand.The coin gleamed silver, stubborn in the low light. On one side, a dragon coiled around a circle of teeth. On the other, a little notation of five notes engraved like a secret. Ryo didn't know the tune by name, but his bones did. He could almost hear it hummed over a window during a storm, a voice promising the thunder counted because someone was counting with him."Ryo?" Aya said, softer. "You okay?"He closed his fingers over the coin until the edges bit. "We didn't get the Shard.""You got people," Mei murmured, eyes closed. "And you broke their machine."Ryo looked back only once. The Spire's lights pulsed like a giant heart that had been taught to keep time for the city. Somewhere inside it, Nocturne was putting his sword away with a care that bordered on tenderness. Somewhere higher, a man stood at a window that had forgotten how to be a mirror.Director Hazama watched the storm fold the city into a single, wet secret. He lifted a hand to the glass and for a moment his reflection wasn't the one he remembered. "Protocol Remnant," he said without raising his voice. "Forty-eight hours. Prepare reconciliation."He lowered his hand and the room seemed to breathe. "He's learning," he added to the empty air. The words were affectionate the way a blade is affectionate to a whetstone. "But not yet."Ryo slid the coin into the inner pocket over his heart. The thunder counted, and he counted with it, and he told himself he didn't care that for the first time in months the numbers felt like they fit."Let's move," he said, and the four of them vanished into the alley's wet breath, carrying a piece of the city that had decided to wake up even if it hurt.
