CHAPTER 8
Kade had always known the world in layers.
He measured it in rhythms, seams, the tiny deviations that told you a wall was hollow or a face lied.
Blackridge had textures he'd never felt outside walls and code. It had a loneliness he could taste in the pipes.
Now that loneliness had shape. It had a name.
The Maw.
They said the Maw was where truth went to die.
Kade had been inside the Maw. He had felt the thing at its heart like a pulse.
He had been ripped, probed, asked to hand over memories like coins.
He'd been spared. For now.
Dorian had torn him out.
Dorian — who smiled like a man who knew how to end a sentence with a blade.
Kade lay on a cot in a maintenance alcove under Sublevel 10, breathing slow to calm the tremors in his hands. Concrete bit into his shoulder through a thin blanket. His neck ached from where the emergency collar had bruised him. He felt animal tired. He felt furious.
He also felt the drive in his hand. The file had no easy name. Core.archive.parallax. It had weight.
"You sure about this?" Dorian asked.
He was not tired. Not yet. The light that had shone in the PM bay — Dorian's eyes — were back to normal. But in the dark, in the tiny pool of light, Dorian looked like a man who had been remade.
Kade pushed himself up.
"We either find Elias or we become the people they said we'd never be."
Dorian's jaw worked. He nodded.
"Right."
They moved like thieves. Quiet. Predictable. Kade liked predictable. He could beat it.
He had a list. Sublevel 10 maps rarely matched the physical world; architects lied when they needed to hide rooms. But black maps always left fingerprints. Kade ran them like fingerprints now.
They passed an access hatch. It was older than the rest. The rivets were stamped with a manufacturer's mark—one Kade had seen in civilian records once, on a door to a closed research lab in a seaside town their mother had mentioned in a letter they never found.
"Old Scylla contracts," Dorian said, softer than a confession.
Kade didn't answer. He had a noise in his ear. A memory. A word. Parallax. It echoed like a bell.
They reached a door labeled only with a stamped metal plaque: **MEMETIC ARCHIVE — ACCESS: AUTHORIZED**. The lock looked like it had not turned in years.
Dorian produced the stolen card again. He slid it in. The lock clicked. The door groaned.
Inside: rows and rows of cabinet banks. Files. Vials. A glass case at the room's center. The case looked ceremonial, as if someone had decided the thing inside deserved a shrine.
Within it: a small metal sphere the size of an orange. It had delicate latticework like a sea urchin. It glowed faintly, as if something inside breathed.
Kade's hand hovered above the glass. He felt the pull of it. The pull of Parallax.
He had always thought the archive would be vast. He'd imagined racks, drives, vaults of faces. Instead, the Parallax Core, or at least an artifact of it, sat quiet and elegant. A piece of design so careful it had become a lie.
Dorian moved to the case and tapped the glass. He smiled the way people smile before they break into a cathedral.
"This is it," he whispered.
Kade's fingers tightened.
"Is it safe?"
Dorian's smile froze. In the reflection of the glass, Kade saw something else: the faint outline of a man standing behind them. Not in the room on the plan. Behind the shelves. Watching.
Kade turned. Everyone turned. The old lights in the archive hummed. The watchers did not move.
A woman stepped forward from between two cabinets. Her uniform was an old Citadel lab coat. Gray. Worn. Her hair was pulled tight. Serious eyes. She had that look people got when they kept truths in their bodies for too long.
"Sera," Kade breathed.
She looked older than in the infirmary. War had carved a line at her mouth. She looked at Dorian with something like dead recognition. Then she looked at Kade as if seeing a boy she'd lost.
"You weren't supposed to come this deep," she said. The voice had a softness that was dangerous.
"You didn't either," Dorian replied.
Sera's eyes flicked to the glass case, then to the sphere. When she spoke, she did not look at them.
"This is an echo," she said. "Not the core. A redundancy. A shard. It holds traces — echoes of the full Parallax architecture. Enough to reconstruct if you have the proper scaffold."
Kade's throat tightened.
"So it's not whole," he said.
"It never was," she replied. "No physical thing can be the entire architecture. It lives in blood. In memory. In the pattern of thinking. This," she touched the glass but not the sphere, "is a talisman."
Dorian stepped forward. "Where is Elias?"
Sera's jaw tightened.
"He's been moved," she said. "Deep."
"How deep?" Kade asked.
She hesitated. The pause sat like a weight.
"Two levels below the Maw," she said finally. "A private suite. No cameras. No records." Her voice went quiet. "And not all of him returned."
Kade felt the floor slip.
"Not all of him returned?" The words scraped.
Sera closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them, they were full of something that made Kade's blood cold.
"He came back," she said. "But in pieces. Fragmented. They kept some parts and grafted others. His behavior — Kade, it's wrong. He answers questions with questions not his own. He remembers rooms he has never been in. He sings songs with voices that are not his. He changes mid-sentence like someone flipping a file."
Kade's stomach rolled.
"Parallax in practice," Dorian said. "They compress association, then graft meaning onto new neural nodes. They can rewrite loyalty."
Sera looked at him sharply. "Do you know how they graft? They need a scaffold. Somebody with a mind mapped to the architecture. They use a host. A template."
He thought of their mother. Of letters half-burned. Of the micro-implant under his skin. Of his own blank birth records.
"You mean—" he began.
Sera cut him off.
"Yes. You."
He felt the heat of her words.
"You are the scaffold, Kade. You have traits in patterning—your brain is a perfect fit. That's why they left you alive. That's why Citadel kept you. And why someone wants you back."
Kade tasted iron. He wanted to take Sera by the shoulders and shake the truth into her, but a different kind of movement interrupted them.
Footsteps. Not Blackridge footsteps. Smooth. Professional. The sound of boots that did not clomp. A woman's laugh that was too bright to belong in any archive.
The three of them turned.
At the doorway stood Director Halima Arden.
She was not alone.
Behind her: a man in a long coat with no rank. A face as calm as a stone. And beneath the coat—an insignia Kade had seen in flash files: the Citadel sigil, carved in black.
Arden smiled like someone delivering bad news with measured grace.
"Well," she said. "You found the shard. Charming."
Sera's posture turned hard. "You shouldn't be here."
Arden's eyes cut to Kade. "You shouldn't be anywhere but under Observation."
"You took him," Sera said. "You used him."
Arden shrugged. "Used? The term is so crude. Consider it… development."
Kade's mind did what it always did — it saw options like doors. Some were barbed. Some were plain. None invited sleep.
Arden moved closer to the glass. She tapped it lightly. Up close, the sphere seemed to breathe.
"You know," she said to Kade, the words small and poisonous, "some people grow into monsters precisely because they are afraid not to."
Kade's hands went cold.
"What do you want?" he asked.
Arden's smile widened. She turned and addressed the room, not the men in it.
"Take them to Observation," she said softly. "I want their minds sorted. I want Sera's loyalty audited. I want the fragments cataloged."
Two guards stepped forward. They were not Blackridge guards. They had the clipped walk of Citadel men—surgical, efficient, and smiling.
Sera's hand went to the neck of the coat she wore. She paled.
"You'll not take him," she said. The sentence had an edge that screamed.
Arden's laugh was small, disarming. "You misunderstand me, Doctor. We will not take *him.* Not yet. We will take the—three of you."
Dorian's muscles coiled.
Kade put his hand on the glass. The sphere's dim light reflected on his palm like a pulse.
Sera looked at him. For a second, his mind read the truth in her face: she loved them both in differing, dangerous ways. She had saved him once. She had betrayed them once. Now, she would have to choose.
She looked at Arden. Then at Kade. Then she did something that startled them all.
She smiled. Not gentle. Not kind. A smile that meant calculus.
"Fine," she said. "Observation. I will go. But if you touch the shard, I end this room."
Arden's eyes narrowed.
"You will be punished if you interfere," she said.
Sera laughed softly, a sound like wind in dead trees.
"You think any of this is not interference?" she said. "You carved truth out of people and called it security. I will not let you finish."
The guards closed in.
Dorian moved first. He pushed a stack of files off a cabinet—small, noisy things meant to hide intentions—then turned and vaulted the glass case. The guards reacted. Two shots rang out, not aimed at them but rather as warnings.
Chaos erupted.
Sera shoved a small pistol she had kept in the inside of her coat—an old thing, illegal—and fired a single round into the ceiling. Sparks rained. The glass shattered. The shard rolled. The air changed.
Arden's face did something rare: it turned hard. But for a single beat, Kade saw wear on it. The woman who was always composed had a fissure.
Sera grabbed the shard as it rolled free and clutched it like a talisman. Her eyes met Kade's. She mouthed one single word:
"Run."
They did.
Footsteps. Shouts. The lights betrayed them with strobing. The guards flooded the room with disciplined violence.
They ran through dead corridors of Scylla's making. The warnings tore at the air. The Maw groaned under them like a beast roused.
They rounded a corner and came face to face with a wall of men. Citadel men. Arden's men. The insignia a black wound in the light.
Kade's chest hitched. He had no plan. No pattern. Only a small, bright hope: the shard in Sera's hands. The belief that Elias was not entirely gone. That he could still be found.
Sera lifted the shard as a shield. The light from it caught the men's visors like a flare.
Arden stepped forward.
"You can run," she said, "but you're all playing someone else's hand."
Sera tilted her chin.
"And you?"
Arden's smile was the last thing Kade saw before a heavy blow cracked the world to black.