The shadow dissolves the moment I release it, not like mist, but like ink in water—a reluctant, particulate fading that leaves the air feeling thinner, colder. The physical weight vanishes from my hand, but the metaphysical toll remains, a phantom ache in my palm. The corridor lights snap back to life with a violent, buzzing crackle, as if the power grid itself is recoiling from the touch of the unnatural. My head throbs, a deep, pulsing ache behind my eyes, the precursor to a migraine that will linger for hours. I wipe the last smear of blood from my nose with the back of my sleeve, the fabric rough against my skin, and force my legs to move.
Stopping is how you die in Echelon. Motion is life. Hesitation is a data point.
My boots echo in the now-illuminated passage, a sound that feels dangerously exposed. I need to be elsewhere. Now. My comm implant, nestled just behind my ear, crackles to life—not with a message, but with a burst of raw, undifferentiated static. That's bad. Deeply bad. Corporate channels are pristine, noise-filtered streams. They don't glitch. Static is a symptom of system stress, of bandwidth being hijacked, of security protocols engaging in a frantic, invisible war. It means something has gone very wrong, or someone, somewhere, has executed a plan that is going very right.
I push my pace, the triple-layer casing of the package a persistent, accusing weight against my ribs. At the corridor's end, a rusted service door, its original designation scratched away by time, groans in protest as I shoulder it open.
The sensory overload of the under-market hits me like a physical wave. I step from sterile, monitored silence into a boiling cacophony of life on the edge. The air is thick with the smells of sizzling synth-protein, stale ozone from overloaded power conduits, and the pungent, earthy scent of unregulated fungal growths sold as delicacies. Vendors shout in a pidgin of Corporate Standard and gutter-tongue, their voices competing with the grinding hum of jury-rigged generators. Overhead, a tangled web of stolen cable and patched-together neon signs flickers and spasms, casting frantic, epileptic light in languages and symbols half-forgotten by the upper levels.
Here, anonymity is a collective practice. People don't look at each other. Eyes are kept down, tracking wares, feet, the hands of potential pickpockets. Eye contact is an invitation—to a deal, to a fight, to a connection that could be leveraged or betrayed. It's a dance of deliberate isolation.
Good.
I melt into the flow of the crowd, a piece of debris caught in a sluggish, polluted river. My heart is still a trapped bird against my ribs, but the rhythm of the market—its chaotic, purposeful disorder—provides a cover the empty corridors could not. The psychic whisper of Noctis is gone, retreated back into whatever locked vault within me it calls home. But the cold it summoned lingers, a deep-seated chill in my marrow, an afterimage seared into my soul. Magic always leaves something behind. A residue on reality, a scar on the local physics. A scent.
That's how they find us.
Up in the spires, they teach that magic is rare. A historical curiosity, a statistical blip eradicated in the Great Rationalization.
That's a lie, polished and repeated until it gleams with the sheen of truth.
Magic isn't rare. It's hunted. It's weeded out, silenced, dissected in black-site labs. Its practitioners don't fade away; they are systematically deleted from the ledger of existence.
A new sound layers under the market's din, so low it's felt in the teeth before it's heard. A sub-auditory hum, a vibration that rolls through the permacrete floor and up into the spine. The pressure in the air changes, thickening, electrifying. The city is holding its breath.
Drones.
The reaction is instantaneous, a study in ingrained, terrified reflex. A vendor selling bootleg stimulants cuts the lights on his stall with a sharp click. The man next to him, hawking reclaimed data-slivers, yanks a tarp over his wares. A chorus of small, desperate sounds follows—the snap of power switches, the hiss of gas flames being extinguished. The brilliant, chaotic neon tapestry of the under-market unravels into darkness, stall by stall, like cells in a body shutting down. Shadows, once contained and broken by light, now stretch and merge, becoming vast, pooling entities.
I curse, the word a silent heat on my tongue.
They're not just passing through. They're sweeping. A grid search, methodical and merciless, starting at the site of the anomaly and expanding outward.
A sound cuts through the new quiet, metallic, amplified, and utterly devoid of life. It drops from the high ceiling, from unseen speakers, a voice of god in the darkness.
"ATTENTION, CITIZENS. A ROUTINE SECURITY CALIBRATION IS IN PROGRESS. REMAIN CALM. COMPLY WITH ALL DIRECTIVES."
Routine. The lie is almost elegant in its audacity. They use the language of maintenance, of system updates, to mask the hunt.
My implant doesn't just buzz this time. It sears. A warning glyph, sharp and angular, burns itself directly into the center of my visual field, a phantom image overlaid on the darkened market. It pulses with a malevolent, urgent red.
ANOMALY PROXIMITY: HIGH
CONTAINMENT PROTOCOLS: ACTIVATING
My blood doesn't run cold; it seems to freeze solid, a slurry of ice in my veins. They felt it. Not me, not Noctis directly—I was a ghost for those few seconds. They felt the hole I left. The disruption. Magic, even when cloaking, creates a ripple in the predictive models that govern Echelon. It's a null signal in a field of constant data. A gap in probability. And the Corporates, whose power is built on forecasting and control, despise a gap. An anomaly must be categorized, contained, or excised.
I move.
Not with the crowd, which is now a frozen, terrified statue garden, but against its current. I slip into a narrow crevice between a shuttered noodle stall and a wall dripping with condensation, my coat snagging on rough metal. I find a service ladder, its rungs slick with grime, and descend into the bowels.
The drainage tunnels. The city's true circulatory system, carrying away what it no longer wants. The smell is a physical assault—a complex, gag-inducing bouquet of decay, chemical runoff, and stagnant water. It's also one of the few places with limited surveillance. Cameras corrode here. Drones, with their sensitive aerofoils and optics, avoid the moisture and the corrosive gases. It's a foul sanctuary.
Down here, the darkness is different. It's not the artificial, charged dark of the magically-shrouded corridor. This is a deep, consuming, almost honest dark, born of absence and neglect. My footsteps are too loud, splashing in shallow, unseen puddles, echoes chasing each other like startled bats. I run, my lungs burning with the acrid air, the package slamming against my side with each stride.
I risk a single, frantic glance over my shoulder.
The tunnel behind me ignites.
Not with the return of the old, flickering work-lights, but with a stark, blinding, surgical white. It's a light that leaves no shadow, that exposes every crack, every stain, every sin. But the real terror isn't the light itself.
It's what comes with it.
A wave of pressure, silent and immense, rolls through the solid concrete. It passes through the walls, through the filthy water, through me. It's not a scan for heat or motion. It's a resonance scan, searching for the unique, discordant frequency of spent magic, for the psychic scar-tissue I carry. It is a feeling of being utterly, intimately known.
Agony, sharp and brilliant, explodes behind my eyes. I cry out, a ragged sound lost in the hum of the lights, and stumble. My knee hits the wet concrete, shock radiating up my leg. I catch myself with one hand, the other clutching my head, as the world dissolves into jagged, white static.
From the depths of my pain, the whisper stirs. Weak, frayed, but desperate.
Hide.
"I know," I breathe, the words a wet gasp.
Gritting my teeth against the nausea and the blinding pain, I press my palm flat against the slime-covered tunnel wall. I don't summon the shadow fully—I haven't the strength, and the burst would be a beacon. Instead, I let it bleed. A thin, controlled seep of that otherness. It leaks from my pores, from my palm, into the cracks and capillaries of the concrete. It doesn't create darkness; it devours the invasive white light just enough, creating a zone of blurred sensor returns, of conflicting data. It's not invisibility. It's confusion.
The searching resonance pulse hesitates. It hits my patch of corrupted wall and stutters. Its clean data stream is muddied, reporting back a localized energy drain, a sensor ghost, a possible malfunction in the tunnel's own aging infrastructure.
For three endless seconds, the city's omnipotent gaze wavers. It blinks.
That's all I need.
I lunge forward, not standing, but crawling, then scrambling to my feet. I see a black mouth of a side passage—an overflow channel, perhaps—and throw myself into it. I don't stop until I'm deep within, collapsing behind the massive, rusted hulk of a dead filtration unit. The metal is cold against my back. I press into it, trying to become another piece of scrap.
The blinding white light in the main tunnel dims, then winks out. The oppressive hum of the resonance scan recedes, moving on, continuing its methodical sweep. The hunt has passed by. For now.
I'm still alive.
Barely.
Tremors wrack my body, a combination of adrenaline crash and magical expenditure. I look down at my hands, still braced on my knees. Beneath the skin, for a fleeting second, a network of fine, black lines appears—like veins filled with ink. They writhe and fade, leaving only a deep, bruised ache in the bones. Another cost. Another line item in the terrible ledger of my existence. The magic doesn't just use energy; it rewrites the user, cell by cell. Each time, the changes go deeper.
So this is how it starts, I think, the realization a cold stone in my gut. Not with a bang, but with a tremor in the system. I was so careful. A specter. A fault in the data-stream. Just another courier in a city of ten million ghosts. But I twitched. I left a fingerprint on the windowpane of reality. And now the Corporates have an unanswered question in a sector that was supposed to be quiet. A blip that resisted categorization.
Echelon doesn't tolerate unanswered questions. It dissects them.
My breathing finally begins to slow, the hammering in my chest subsiding to a dull, weary thud. The immediate danger has passed. The delivery. I still have a job to do. The thought is almost laughable. I reach under my coat, my fingers numb, and pull the package free.
It's warm.
The realization cuts through the lingering fog in my mind. That shouldn't be possible. The triple-layer composite casing is designed for total energy isolation—thermal, electronic, psychic. Nothing in, nothing out. Yet against my palm, through the treated material, a distinct, low heat pulses, a slow, living rhythm.
My eyes, now adjusted to the deep gloom, scan its surface. There, beneath the matte-black finish, almost invisible unless caught at the exact angle by a stray gleam of distant light, is an etching. It's not a serial number or a corporate logo. It's a symbol, woven into the material itself at the molecular level. A series of intersecting arcs and a single, stark line cutting through a circle.
A sigil.
A focus. A beacon. A name, written in the language of magic.
Ice floods my veins anew, colder than before. This isn't just a corporate drop. This isn't data or prototype tech or blackmail material. This is a deliberate artifact. Someone commissioned a courier—a courier with a hidden, illegal talent—to carry a magical object deep into the surveillance-blind under-levels. The anomaly wasn't an accident. It was a trigger. The scan, the drones, the hunt… they weren't just chasing me.
They were following the package.
My stomach twists into a knot of pure dread. The warmth in my hand feels like a heartbeat.
Whatever I'm carrying…
it was never meant to stay hidden.
It was meant to be found. And in delivering it, in being the hand that carried the spark into the tinder-dry darkness…
Neither was I.