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Maven looks past me, to where Kang has vanished. “What the fuck was that?”
I shake my head. “I have no idea.”
But I do. It’s the start of something, and that’s always more dangerous than the end. The day is just beginning, but already, the world feels like it’s spinning faster, hotter, more alive.
I never intended to let the morning go to waste, but Maven made it clear they preferred their heroics in the dark, and Captain Kang ran on a schedule that made most clocks seem lazy. It was high sun—white, sickly, a disc of pure headache—by the time the three of us stood outside Maven’s hut, bags packed, radiological nightmares prepped for the journey. My curiosity had been sparked days before when I stumbled upon a map at Maven’s place, and I couldn’t resist pestering them about taking me to the facility.
Maven finally caved in with annoyance after my relentless questioning. Captain Kang, having overheard my conversations with Maven, insisted on joining us, despite knowing we shouldn’t be doing it. He was well aware that my stubborn arse would end up going either way. Maven triple-checked their satchel. Kang just watched, the analytic deadness in his eyes undercut by a twitch of nostril every time Maven got too close to me.
“I’m not a guide service,” Maven said, shifting weight from foot to foot. “My business is in this settlement, not in the Deadlands, and not for free.”
“You owe me,” I said, watching the way the blue of my pendant went almost glassy in the harsh light. “I could’ve kept the data, sold you out to the Authority, or just left you to the Ghouls.”
Maven shot a glance at Kang. “Authority’s going to be the least of our problems if we keep running the fence line with soldiers in tow.”
“I’m here for security,” Kang said. “Nothing more.”
“Yeah. Sure. Bet you say that to all the desperate civilians.”
He looked at me then, his gaze the temperature of dry ice. “You want to find your Echo Complex, you’ll need someone who knows how to keep you alive.”
Maven snorted. “Or finish you off if you turn out to be a sleeper. What a comfort.”
I interrupted, “We’re burning daylight.”
Maven exhaled, like they’d been holding their breath for a week. “All right, Doc. You want to chase your ghosts, we’ll chase them. But when we hit the perimeter, you listen to me. You don’t touch anything that hums, glows, or wiggles without checking with me first. Understood?”
I nodded. Kang just smiled, thin as paper.
The path east was a scar, nothing like the gentle trails of last night. The surface alternated between fused glass and mud so black it seemed to eat the sun. With every step, my pendant would register a pulse—a blink of blue, sometimes green, once or twice a sickly orange. I cataloged the readings, not out of habit but because it felt like the only thing separating me from the Ghouls that had haunted us the night before.
At the first collapsed overpass, Maven stopped. “We take the low route,” they said, gesturing at the tangle of rebar and obsidian-slash slabs that had once been freeway. “Less risk of attention. Ghouls prefer the high ground.”
Kang took point. Even without a rifle drawn, his posture screamed readiness: back straight, every muscle coiled, eyes scanning not just for monsters but for traps, for Maven, maybe for me. I wondered how many times he’d run this same escort, how many scientists had trusted him with their secrets, and how many had made it back.
Maven motioned me forward. “Watch the left. That’s where the sun scours the glass, so it’ll be sharper. Watch the right for sinkholes—if you see steam, go around.”
I followed, boots crunching on a substance somewhere between sugar and sandpaper. Underfoot, I saw inclusions—bubbles of ancient air, or maybe the residue of old chemical spills. In places, the glass was clear enough to see layers of the pre-war world: a child’s toy, a coil of wire, the husk of a rat in perfect silhouette. Kang’s voice, low: “There’s movement at two o’clock. Small, low to the ground. Probably not Ghoul.”
Maven grinned, showing the edge of a yellowed canine. “Scavver rats. If they’re running, we’re clear for another hundred meters. The real problem is if they stop.”
We moved on, following the path as it cut through the carcass of an old city park, the trees stripped to their steel cores, the ground alternating between chemical ice and brittle stalks of something that might once have been grass. Kang’s uniform—standard Authority gray, but patched and personalized with ink and microstitch—stayed clean, even as mine went to shit within a kilometer. Maven just walked like they’d never known another life.
At the next checkpoint, Kang paused, surveying the horizon. “We’re being tracked. Not close, but persistent.” I didn’t ask how he knew. Maven just shrugged. “If they were going to hit us, they’d do it at the bridge.”
“That’s where we’re going,” I pointed out.
Maven nodded. “The only way to the Complex is through the channel. Unless you can fly.” The bridge, when we reached it, was a brutalist slab of concrete still mostly intact, but covered over with a mat of lichen and strange, glassy vines. The air buzzed—literal, audible, and not entirely electromagnetic.
I raised my pendant. The pulse went blue, then cyan, then a color I didn’t have a name for. “We’re in a node,” I said. “There’s a Sphere nearby.”
Kang shot me a look. “Are you sure?”
I nodded, and Maven started scanning the edges of the bridge, looking for the telltale glimmer of the tech. I found it first: a grapefruit-sized orb half-buried in a pillar of glass, its surface crawling with hexagonal patterns that seemed to move when you weren’t looking.
“Don’t touch it,” Maven warned, but my hand was already out, fingers brushing the shell.
There was a snap, and then the world went quiet—no buzz, no wind, not even the scrape of our own breathing. In the silence, I felt it: a pulse in my bones, the echo of a hundred voices all saying the same thing, too fast and layered to pick apart. Data. Memory. A signal so dense it hurt to process. I ripped my hand back, swallowing bile.
