>SOLIS ACCESS ONLY – UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY PUNISHABLE BY BURN
The air tasted like dry dust and decayed ozone, every step a crunch of glass and metal shavings, sending a jolt up my spine and through the last remnants of stabilizer Vex had pumped into me.
My HUD reminded me I couldn’t regulate my body temp:
[CORE TEMP: 729 K → 742 K]
[STABILIZER RESIDUAL: 0.3%]
[BRAND ACTIVITY: ↑]
[WARNING: LEGACY FIELD – ANCHOR RESONANCE POSSIBLE]
My left hand was twitching again, fingers curling on their own before I forced them straight.
“More haunted real estate,” I muttered.
“Less haunted,” Dax said, moving ahead with precision. “More scrubbed.”
He jerked his chin toward the invisible surface above us, “Nothing up there admits this place still exists. That’s why I like it.”
“Love that you ‘like’ the place the Towers wanted gone so bad they pretended it never happened.”
He didn’t answer, just stopped.
The bulkhead door was sunken into the base of a rail support; it was steel, pitted and flaking, old hazard stripes barely visible under fading gang tags and Ash icons. Someone had painted a crude version of the Spire burning in phosphorescent paint. It glowed faintly, toxic green.
Dax holstered his gun and pulled a physical key from a loop on his belt. Ugly thing, heavy iron, jagged teeth cut in a pattern no normal lock would accept. He shoved it into some invisible slot. I could have stared at the wall for an hour and never seen the keyhole. He twisted until it caught, then punched a code into a corroded keypad.
The mechanism groaned and strained but did not open.
He glanced back at me like he had a secret, then leaned in, lips almost touching the metal, and spoke:
Auth-lock, Solis-zero...
It was HighBorn...the ever so smooth, yet grinding, court-clean dialect of the Towers. The words scraped down my nerves instantly.
...Aethel-gard. Omnis. Te-ara.
My arm lit up like he’d wired the sound straight into the Brand.
It didn’t flare out – it dropped inward, folding heat into itself like a lung inhaling. This time my hand flexed completely out, my fingers running away from my palm.
[BRAND RESPONSE: TRIGGER-PHRASE RECOGNIZED]
[ACCESS: GRANTED // LEGACY LAYER]
Locks slammed back in the walls with gunshot bangs, dust raining down from the frame. The door shuddered, then dragged itself aside with a shriek of long-dormant metal grinding on metal.
A gust of air rolled out, cold, dry, and stale, a combination that screamed expired.
“In,” Dax said. “Before the sensors change their mind.”
He led me through, the door sealing behind us, and cutting off the last of Sector 9’s noise with a final hydraulic sigh and crunch.
The interior opened into what resembled the nave of a church. There were rows of chairs bolted to the floor, heavy, industrial monsters with wrist and ankle restraints and headrests wired for data-spikes. It was clear the congregation hadn’t been volunteers.
Most were empty.
Some weren’t.
Dark stains marked the leather where skulls used to be.
Faded holographic diagrams flickered on the walls, powered by whatever backup grid refused to die...human silhouettes overlaid with heat maps – glowing centers in the chest, skull, and arms.
Labels ghosted through the static:
>ANCHOR COHORTS
>COMPLIANCE RATINGS
>BURN FAILURE TREES
I drifted toward a wall of etched plates. No names. Just prints and outcomes.
>PRINT ID: 773-ALPHA — RESULT: SCRAPPED
>PRINT ID: 773-BETA — RESULT: UNSTABLE
>PRINT ID: 774-KILO — RESULT: REMOVED FROM CYCLE
My HUD tinged the last line in red:
[SYSTEM ALERT: PARTIAL MATCH]
[DETAILS: REDACTED BY ORDER: SOLIS CORE]
“It’s a factory.”
“It was,” Dax said, eyes moving over corners and shadow lines. “Now it’s a graveyard.”
I let the weight of it sit for a moment, recognizing the connection to the reactor inside, but not knowing what it all meant.
As we moved deeper, the ruin woke up.
It started as a vibration underfoot, a low, almost subsonic hum that crawled up my body. A console on my left coughed, then flickered to life as I passed, its screen crackling into amber text.
[PROXIMITY ALERT]
[ANCHOR DETECTED]
[WELCOME BACK, ASSET]
I flinched away, hands up.
“I didn’t touch it,” I said.
“You didn’t have to,” Dax answered. He nodded at my sleeve. “You’re a beacon. Dead Anchors don’t carry handshake protocols. You do.”
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
And like just that, I didn’t just see the room anymore. I could feel it. A heat map unfolded inside my skull:
Cold chambers behind that wall.
Dead server stacks below us.
A tangle of frozen lines above.
Every dormant system was a pressure point waiting to light up if I got too close.
My HUD was lighting up with activity:
[BRAND STATUS: ACTIVE LINK]
[LOCAL NETWORK: DETECTED (LEGACY)]
[CONNECTION STRENGTH: 47% → 59%]
“Uhhh, Dax,” I said quietly. “The system is trying to connect...to me.”
“Then we don’t let it.” Dax punched a code into an inner door. “Through here. My stash is shielded – should block the signal.”
It was a safe room in the middle of a Tower science fair project. The walls were lined with copper mesh, corners bracketed by grounded rods. An EMP cage. Dax Morne was full of surprises.
It wasn’t luxurious, or even comfortable, but it was functional. The fold-out cot bolted to the floor was utilitarian and only built for one. It was the closest thing I’d seen to a doomsday shelter: stacked crates of water and nutrient bricks, a recycler humming in the corner, a weapon rack bristling with ugly, practical hardware, and a small desk, a dead-looking wall console, a nest of cables leading into a screened alcove of gear.
Dax dropped his coat on a crate and turned to me.
“Rules,” he said, raising three fingers. “One: you don’t wander the ruin alone. There are levels even I won’t step foot in. Two: you don’t interface with anything in here unless I clear it. If it hums, be suspicious. Three: if that Brand starts screaming, you wake me. You don’t ride it out. You don’t experiment. Clear?”
“Was that do or don’t wander the ruin?” I said, feeling a little more comfortable joking in that bunker.
He side-eyed me as he slid into the chair by the desk.
“Hmmmmmm,” I smiled. “What if it’s me humming? No interfacing?”
“Lexi!” He looked to the ceiling for relief. “Just...just sit down and rest.”
I scrunched my face. There was still one rule I hadn’t poked yet, but I thought better. I plopped down on the cot, and it tried to eject me with a springy creak. I leaned back and stared at the ceiling.
The second I stopped moving, my HUD pounced:
[FULL BODY SCAN: RUNNING…]
[ADAPTATION LOAD: 100%+ (QUEUED)]
[LEVEL ADVANCE → 4: ELIGIBLE]
A feeling washed over me...possibility? My muscles tightened in anticipation, senses sharpening around the edges, the whole system bracing for a step up...
...and then the red came.
[ERROR: EXTERNAL LOCK DETECTED]
[LEVEL UP OVERRIDDEN — SOURCE: UNKNOWN (BRAND SIGNAL)]
I exhaled slowly. “It blocked me. Again.”
Dax was up again, digging through a crate of med packs and bricks. “The HUD or the thing in your arm?”
“The thing in my arm,” I said. “HUD’s waving pom-poms. Brand slapped the upgrade out of my mouth.”
“Then the Brand’s the smarter of the two. You want context or comfort first?”
“Context. I can hate you later.”
“TEAR-class,” he said. “You saw the plates. The failures. Towers wanted Anchors that didn’t need the grid. Put the keys in the flesh instead of the servers. Soldiers who kept fighting if the lights went out.”
“Sure,” I said. “What could go wrong?”
“It turns out,” he said. “If you put the key in the meat, you can’t revoke it. Can’t flip the switch from the Tower and say ‘stop.’ So, they built pyres to burn the keys out. Solis Protocol isn’t about clean execution, Lexi. It’s a delete function. This place is where they pushed the edges.”
He pointed his chin toward the door, “Cohorts. Burn curves. Compliance scores. Everything they needed to know about what the fire couldn’t erase.”
“And me?”
He studied me, human eye and red optic, both unnervingly steady.
“You’re acting like a TEAR prototype that survived a full burn with the key still in place,” he said. “Cleaner than anything those plates hint at. Which means one of two things: either the project didn’t actually die here, or someone rebuilt it off-grid and used you as proof.”
“Proof?”
“Maybe someone wanted to revive the project,” he rocked his head back and forth, considering. “Or expose it.”
“I’m not a prototype,” I said. It came out quieter than I wanted. “I’m a person.”
He rocked his back and forth again.
“Fuck you,” I was pissed. Why do I have to defend my humanity?
“You were,” he said softly. “Still can be...if you fight hard enough. But right now? You’re also a question the Towers don’t want the city asking.”
I was still pissed, but before I could decide whether to punch him or agree with him, the Brand moved.
Warmth slid along the fracture, a slow, deliberate roll. My vision narrowed; the edges of the HUD bled violet. Diagrams from the exterior room – those ghosted silhouettes and burn curves – floated over my sight, sharper than they’d been on the actual wall.
The voice rode in on the wave.
Not the scream from the pyre. Not the hunger from the Labs alley.
This was quieter, clinical...a woman dictating notes she never expected anyone like me to hear.
...cohort three failed...burn curve too shallow...you were an exception...
The HUD tried to classify it:
[PYRE SIGNAL: ACTIVE]
[LAYER: DESIGN LOG // ACCESS TIER: RESTRICTED]
I tried to repeat her exactly. The moment my tongue shaped the first word, my throat locked, my jaw muscles seizing. My stomach flipped, butterflies, but with razors for wings.
[PYRE ECHO: REJECTION REFLEX]
[VOCALIZATION: DENIED]
I gagged, a dry cough, causing my eyes to water.
“Lexi?” Dax was up and across the room before I finished choking. His hand landed on my shoulder, steady and heavy. “Talk.”
“She’s...remembering,” I rasped. “Not to me. Just...out loud. Cohorts. Burns. And me. At least, I think she was talking about me...”
He swore under his breath in that ugly HighBorn snarl and went to the wall monitors. He keyed in a sequence that brought three of them sputtering to life, lines of static and fractured feeds from topside.
“We don’t have time for this,” he said. “The Order’s moving.”
One feed showed Sector 9’s perimeter: drones swarmed like gnats and armored transports blocked intersections.
HUD tags popped over the mess:
[ORDER TRAFFIC: ELEVATED]
[PALADIN ACTIVITY: STAGING]
[BOUNTY STATUS: UPDATED]
A notice crawled across the bottom of the feed.
>ANOMALY CLASS UPLIFT: THERMAL GLITCH → PROTOCOL-SHROUD CONSIDERED
“Protocol Shroud?” I asked.
“Means they stop swabbing the haystack and start burning it,” Dax said. “Contaminated sectors, block evacs, full clean sweep. Bounty or no bounty.”
“You said we had a few days.”
He didn’t look at me. “I managed your panic. Panic raises your temperature. Raised temperature gets us dead.”
Before I could throw something at his head, a sharp ping echoed through the room...
...not from the monitors...from beneath us.
Dax stiffened. “That’s not me.”
I rolled my eyes, “You don’t say.”
He glided across the room and ripped a low panel off the wall. Behind it, cable bundles and an old relay node pulsed with faint red light.
“Legacy Anchor link,” he said, face going hard. “It just sniffed the grid and decided to say hi.”
The ping sped up – rhythmic, insistent. My Brand pulsed in sync.
I could feel it now, a hot, bright point under the floor, flaring every time the node tried to handshake with the Order network.
“It woke up because I’m here,” I said.
“Congratulations,” Dax snapped. “You’re the battery and the antenna. If that handshake completes, we send them a perfect invitation with a map attached. X marks the spot.”
He jammed a knife into the cable nest, looking for something he could sever. The plastic hissed; the blade skidded off hardened shielding.
“Cables are fused,” he hissed. “I can’t cut this fast enough.”
The ping climbed toward a frantic, continuous whine. My senses narrowed to it, the node’s presence burning behind my eyes.
Stop.
I thought it, and heat rolled out of me, eager to answer. The node drank it, surged brighter.
Wrong direction.
The memory snapped into place: spine slamming into a cryoline pipe, Dax counting, the heat being torn out of me instead of dumped.
I dropped to my knees, palm on the concrete above the pulse.
“Quiet,” I said to the Brand more than the node. Maybe to the world.
I focused...not venting, pulling. I pictured the fracture as a gravity well, a black mouth, sucking instead of screaming.
[BRAND CHANNELING…]
[THERMAL FLOW: INVERTED]
[TARGET: LEGACY NODE]
The world went white.
Pain tore up my arm, sharp and cold, barbed wire rolling around inside my skin. The heat streaming toward the relay snapped direction mid-flow, ripped backward through my nerves, and slammed into the Brand.
Blood gushed from my nose, hot over my lip and chin. My fingers went numb.
The ping cut off mid-beat.
The hum in the floor died.
[NODE STATUS: ONLINE → OFFLINE (FORCED COOL)]
[CORE TEMP: 742 K → 693 K (DROP)]
[NEURAL LOAD: 81%]
[CASCADE: AVOIDED]
I slumped forward, out of the cot and onto the floor, my head slowly sinking until I kissed the floor.
Dax stared into the open panel. Frost bloomed over the relay casing, spiderwebbing across the cables he was about to carve. The node lights were dark. Dead quiet.
“You didn’t short it out,” he said. His voice sounded far away. “You froze it...”
I wiped my nose. My hand came away, smeared black-red.
“It was too loud,” I muttered.
I made it shut up.
My HUD flickered:
[LEGACY ANCHOR NETWORK: OVERRIDE GRANTED]
[CURRENT ANCHOR OF RECORD: LEXI LEIGH (UNAUTHORIZED)]
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means,” Dax said slowly, “that instead of them owning this ruin, you do. At least for now.”
He shut the panel gently, like he was afraid it might wake back up. Then he offered me a hand.
I took it. His grip was steady, careful. Not pity.
“Get on the cot,” he said. “You just muted a city-grade relay with your nervous system. You’re done for the night.”
The room’s lights dimmed a notch as the ruin settled back into its half-sleep, the hum now matching the slow, stubborn beat of my heart.
Dax checked the perimeter one more time, adjusting some jury-rigged tech, then dragged the chair closer to the door.
“I’ll take first watch,” he said. “You sleep –“
I think I was out before he finished the command.
The last thing I saw in the waking world was my HUD, softened around the edges:
[REST RECOMMENDED: 06:00 HRS]
[ADAPTATION LOAD: HELD IN QUEUE (LOCKED)]
[EXTERNAL SIGNAL: IDLE // OBSERVING]
Sleep came in jagged pieces:
Flashes of the ruin, cleaner, brighter.
Rows of full chairs.
A woman’s hands adjusting a headrest.
A voice echoing, “Cycle complete. Result...acceptable.”
Heat columns.
Burn curves.
My own file, stamped in invisible ink.
I jerked awake once, breath caught, hand clamped over my arm.
The Brand was pulsing slow and steady under my skin, a violet glow just visible through the fabric.
Not screaming.
Not calm.
Waiting.
Tomorrow, the Paladins would come down into the dark, looking for a ghost the Towers couldn’t delete.
