Morning didn't come to Tier Nine — it leaked in, slow and dirty, like everything else.
The rain had stopped, but the streets still glistened as if trying to remember it.
Stitch walked through the back corridors of the old market district, hood low, eyes tracing the gutter lines. The city was quieter now — a kind of aftermath silence that made every echo sound guilty.
He hadn't slept. Couldn't. His body buzzed with leftover adrenaline, muscles twitching like live wire. He'd replayed the chase a hundred times — the flashes of light, the voice in his head, the figure in the rain.
The tag burned against his leg through the pocket.
It wasn't just metal — it hummed. Not loud enough to hear, but enough to feel, like a faint vibration that synced with his heartbeat.
He stopped beneath an overpass where the light turned amber through the grime. Pulled the tag out. It was blackened steel, smooth except for one side — a glyph etched deep into it, like circuitry drawn by hand.
He turned it over again and again, hoping it would make sense. It didn't.
"You're fast… but not invisible."
The words hadn't left his head since she said them. Whoever she was, she wasn't system. She didn't move like a patrol. She moved like someone who'd spent their life learning where the city bent.
And that voice — steady, precise — didn't sound like mercy. It sounded like command.
He slipped the tag into his glove and started walking again, heading toward the underbelly — the transit veins below the old mag-lines. Down there, you could find anything: fake IDs, scrap chips, ghosts of machines, information if you had something to trade.
The corridors grew darker, walls sweating moisture. A smell of oil and rust thickened the air. He passed old men selling modified chips, kids sleeping under heat vents, graffiti that pulsed faintly with electropaint.
Then he saw it — the mark.
Same glyph as the one on the tag, scrawled high across a concrete column. Not painted. Burned in.
He stopped.
Beneath it, a stairwell led down into the dark. No signs. No voices. Just that faint vibration again — the same hum from the tag.
He looked around. Nobody.
He hesitated. He'd learned to trust hesitation — it had kept him alive this long. But something in him, some small rebellion against the endless run, wanted to see what waited below.
He descended.
The steps creaked under his boots, wet and narrow. At the bottom, a corridor stretched ahead — walls lined with flickering light panels. The hum grew stronger.
Then — movement.
A door slid open ahead, silent.
Inside was dim, warm, filled with the smell of circuitry and rain-soaked fabric.
He took one step in.
Voices murmured, low but sharp — arguments, code, the hum of machinery. Silhouettes moved through the haze: thin figures, faces half-covered, neon threads stitched into their clothes.
One turned toward him.
Not her — not yet — but someone older, with eyes that glowed faintly under the lens light. He looked Stitch up and down, as if weighing the shape of him.
"You shouldn't be here," the man said.
Stitch didn't answer. Just held out the tag.
The man's expression shifted — not surprise, but recognition. He nodded once, slow, then glanced deeper into the room.
"He's awake," the man called.
From the far end of the chamber, the shadows moved. A shape detached from the rest. The air changed — quieter somehow. More aware.
He knew before she stepped into the light that it was her. The rain ghost.
She stopped a few feet away, eyes hidden beneath her hood. Her voice, when it came, was exactly as he remembered it — calm, surgical, human only at the edges.
"You made it."
Stitch's throat tightened.
"You planned it," he said. "The chase."
She didn't deny it.
"We had to know if you could run."
"For what?"
Her pause was long enough to make him feel the gravity of it before she spoke again.
"For Ghostline."
The word hung in the air like a pulse.
He'd heard it whispered before — in alleys, between runners — but hearing it from her mouth made it feel real.
"You saved me," he said quietly. "Why?"
"We don't save," she said. "We recruit."
The others watched from the edges — silent, half in shadow. The hum of old servers filled the air.
"You can leave," she said. "Forget this place, forget me. Or you can stay — and never be free again."
Stitch looked at her, then at the flickering lights behind her. At the faces that weren't sure if they were alive or surviving.
He thought of the night sky above Tier Nine — endless, cold, unreachable.
Then he said, "Show me what you do."
Her lips curved — not a smile, not yet, but something that might become one someday.
"Then welcome to Ghostline."
The lights dimmed, and the hum deepened — as if the city itself was taking a breath.