The server hum faded to white noise as Eliyas stared at the frozen screen.
'You are not the first.'
The words coiled around his ribs like smoke. His hands moved before his mind caught up disconnecting the node drive with ritual care, fingertips brushing the warm metal as he tucked it into his coat's inner pocket. The fabric there was frayed from similar secrets.
He leaned back, chair groaning under his weight. Three days without sleep had etched itself into his body: the twitch beneath his right eye, the raw spot on his tongue where he'd been chewing absently.
*Ping.*
An alert blinked in the terminal's corner—unmarked, encrypted.
ACCESS DETECTED | ECHO PATH: LEVEL 7 | RETRO-TRACE IN PROGRESS.
TIME REMAINING: 00:03:22
Cold slithered down his spine.
Internal ops. The kind that left no records because they were the record. His hands moved faster than thought—yanking the power core, plunging the screen to black. The sudden silence rang louder than any alarm.
'Is the cafe something they are trying to hide?'
He was on his feet before the drive hit his pocket, shoving patches and backup chips into his sleeves. The corridor outside was all sterile light and synthetic air, but his boots left no sound on the polymer floors. Just another analyst moving too fast, collar turned up to hide the fresh scratch along his jawline.
No one looked.
No one ever looked.
The maintenance corridors were worse. Flickering fluorescents made shadows leap like pursuing hands. Each flicker caught the sweat at his temples, the tremor in his knuckles as he palmed the stairwell door.
Sector Six's underbelly greeted him with the reek of ozone and rust. He didn't stop to breathe until he'd hit the service tunnels, where the city's veins pulsed with cables thicker than his arms. Here, the air tasted of copper and old concrete. His jacket clung to his shoulders, damp with more than just sweat.
He wouldn't go home. Couldn't.
'My apartment's biometric lock has been glitching lately anyway.'
As he walked, the fear crystallized into something sharper. Not just dread, but recognition. The café wasn't some fluke. It had appeared across centuries, always to those who needed it.
By the time he reached the edge of the city, the skyline behind him was a dull haze, blurred by pollution and light. He stopped at the edge of the sector wall, where urban sprawl met the ruins of the old world decayed buildings overtaken by vines and dust.
A gift?
Or a trap?
The sector wall loomed ahead, its alloy surface pocked with weatherworn warnings. Beyond it, the forest waited, darker than the smog-choked sky. Eliyas vaulted the barrier, boots hitting dirt with a soft thud. His knees protested—he wasn't twenty anymore—but then he saw it.
Faint. Gold.
A light in the trees.
The café's windows glowed like a hearth in the wilderness.
Eliyas exhaled, his breath fogging in the sudden chill. The scar above his eyebrow pulsed once, twice, in time with the distant light.
Waiting.
Always waiting.