The walk from my room was the longest of my life. Lyra glided in front of me, a silent, perfect guide, her placid expression now feeling less like a personality quirk and more like a mask of impenetrable, corporate loyalty. I had been summoned. Immediately. The word echoed in my head with the finality of a judge's gavel.
My mind was a raging, chaotic storm, but on the outside, I was calm. The cold resolve I'd felt after Silas's death, the defiant anger I'd discovered in the alley, it was all hardening within me. The Kael who had been terrified of his own shadow in the spire was gone. I was a man with a stolen blueprint fragment in his pocket and a child who shouldn't exist in his care. I had, I realized, become a problem. And the system was now calling that problem in for a performance review.
They know. The thought was a steady, cold drumbeat. The acolyte had talked. Of course he had. He was terrified. Or Lyra, in her silent, all-seeing way, had simply observed my transgression in the archive. It didn't matter. The secret was out.
Fine, I thought, my fist clenching at my side. Let them. Let them ask. Let them try to explain why they're letting an entire district of their own people rot in the dark.
Lyra didn't lead me to the dining hall or the archives. She led me to the heavy, reinforced door at the very back of the headquarters, the one I had only ever entered once before. The one that led to Krauss's personal workshop.
She opened the door and gestured for me to enter. This time, she did not follow. She simply watched me cross the threshold, her amber eyes unreadable, and then pulled the heavy door shut, the thud of its closing echoing in the sudden, vast silence.
The workshop was not the same.
Before, it had been a place of quiet, solitary work. Now, it felt like a war room. Or an execution chamber.
Krauss was at his main desk, as he had been before. But he was not alone. The summons were here. All of them.
Fen stood near the entrance, his arms crossed, his muscular form a silent, immovable boulder. Valerius was at the far wall, polishing his massive obsidian shield, his movements slow and deliberate, his gaze fixed on the metal. Elara was perched on a high stool near a humming data-slate, her violet eyes closed, her presence a cold, quiet hum of analytical energy. They weren't working. They were waiting. They were an audience. A jury.
Their collective presence was an immediate, overwhelming show of force. This was not a friendly chat. This was an interrogation.
I walked to the center of the room, the blueprint fragment in my pocket feeling like a burning coal against my leg. I stopped a few feet from the Builder's desk.
Krauss didn't look up. He continued to sketch a complex schematic on a fresh piece of parchment, his sharp, focused movements the only sound in the room. He let the silence stretch, letting the weight of the summons, the weight of the room, press down on me. It was a classic, brutal power move. He was reminding me of my place.
Finally, after a minute that felt like an hour, he set his quill down. He raised his head, and his sharp, unreadable eyes met mine.
"You have been busy," he stated. His voice was a low, flat rumble, devoid of any emotion.
"I was doing my job," I countered, my voice surprisingly steady. "The job you gave me."
"Your job," Krauss replied, "was to conduct a structural survey. It was not to access restricted files in the archives. It was not to interrogate a faction acolyte. And it was not to begin an unsanctioned investigation into municipal history."
He knew. He knew everything.
"I found a child," I said, my voice hardening, my new, defiant anger rising to meet his cold authority. "In a place you left to die. A place that's dark and crumbling, where people are left to prey on each other. I found a little girl who was about to be... and you're angry that I looked at a map?"
Valerius's polishing movements stopped. Fen's head tilted, his wolf-like ears twitching. Elara's eyes snapped open. I had just talked back to the Master.
"You do not understand what you are meddling with," Krauss said, his voice dropping, a note of warning, like the first distant rumble of an earthquake.
"Then tell me!" I shot back, taking a step closer. "Tell me why. Why is the Neutral Sector a rot-hole? Why is it dark? Why are there no guards, no rules, no hope? Why did you, the Master Builder, abandon an entire section of your own city?"
Krauss stared at me, his gaze as heavy as a mountain. I had expected him to be angry. I had expected him to order Valerius to put me in my place. I had expected anything but the deep, profound weariness that suddenly settled over his features. He looked, for a moment, like a man bearing the weight of an entire, broken world.
"You speak of things you cannot comprehend," he said, his voice low. "You see a dark, neglected place. I see a necessary sacrifice. You see a flaw. I see a scar that has kept the rest of the body alive."
"What does that mean?" I pressed.
"It means," Krauss said, his gaze turning to the wall, as if looking at a ghost, "that ten years ago, the West Wall fell. The 'big wall' your new charge spoke of."
My blood ran cold. He even knew what she'd said.
"It was not a monster," Krauss continued, his voice a grim, historical record. "It was... a blight. A corruption. A sentient data-virus that manifested in the western sector. It spread through the data-lines, through the very code of the stone, even through the residents themselves. It was an infection, and it was consuming the city from the inside out."
He looked at me, his eyes now holding a cold, hard, pragmatic light. "We had to make a choice. We could not stop it. So, we contained it. I cut the power. I severed the data-grid. And I collapsed the primary containment wall, sealing off the entire Neutral Sector. I sacrificed one part of the city to save the other three."
The horrifying, pragmatic logic of it hit me. It was the trolley problem, on a city-wide scale. He had amputated a limb to save the life of the patient.
"And the sterilization?" I whispered, the acolyte's terrified words coming back to me. "The 'no new births'?"
"A necessary quarantine," Krauss said, his voice devoid of all remorse. "The blight was known to propagate through new data-forms. Births. A newborn child was a new, clean host. To allow the population to grow was to risk the virus finding a new foothold. We sealed the registry. The sector was declared sterile. A slow, quiet, but necessary end, to ensure the blight would starve and die."
I stood there, horrified, but... I understood. It was a monstrous choice. It was the kind of choice only a Founder, a being responsible for thousands of lives, could make.
But one piece didn't fit. The one piece of evidence that disproved his entire, cold, logical, and monstrous equation.
"But you're wrong," I said. "Your quarantine failed. Nara... she exists. She's seven. She's alive. Your records are wrong."
Krauss's expression didn't change. "The records are not wrong, Kael. There have been no new births in the Neutral Sector for ten years. The sterilization protocol was 100% effective."
A chilling, impossible paradox hung in the air. "Then what is she?" I demanded. "How is she alive?"
Krauss didn't answer. Instead, his hand moved across his desk, and a holographic display flickered to life above it. It was a blueprint. But it was the one I had in my pocket. The image of the complex, circular sigil. The Core Foundation.
"The acolyte reported your presence," he said, his voice flat. "Lyra reported your theft of this fragment. You believe this is the city's heart. Its power source." He shook his head. "You are wrong."
He tapped a rune, and the image zoomed in, shifting, becoming a three-dimensional model.
"It is not a foundation," Krauss said, his voice dropping to a cold, dark whisper. "It is a prison. The true heart of the city is the Core. But the Foundation... the Foundation is the containment cell we built beneath it."
He looked me dead in the eye, and delivered the final, devastating truth.
"We did not destroy the blight. We could not. We captured it. The sentient, raging data-virus that nearly destroyed our world... we sealed it in the dark, miles beneath our feet. It is the city's dark secret, and its ultimate power source, all in one."
My mind was screaming, refusing to make the final, terrible connection.
"Nara..." I whispered, the name tasting like ash. "What does this have to do with Nara?"
"She is not a child, Kael," Krauss said, his voice absolute. "She is not a miracle. She is not an impossibility. She is an echo. A fragment. A piece of that imprisoned, sentient virus that has somehow, after ten years, learned to break a piece of itself free."
He pointed a steady, unyielding finger at me.
"The girl you have brought into my home, the child you are protecting... she is the plague, wearing the face of an innocent."
The world tilted. The girl I had played with. The child whose laughter had echoed in the stone hall. A monster. The monster.
"Your job as a scout is over," Krauss said, his voice leaving no room for argument. "Your new job is simple. You, who have proven a unique ability to synchronize with chaotic, Founder-class data, will be our weapon."
He stood up, his full, imposing height casting a shadow over me.
"You will take us to her. And you will help us delete her."