The cage had been a physical thing, once. Ferrocrete and an energy barrier, a predictable hum that defined the edge of the world. Now, the cage was more subtle. It was the routines, the roll calls, the ration lines, the crushing weight of the Enclave's monolithic bureaucracy. Kael had a map to a lost world, a truth that could rewrite history humming from a forbidden slate, but he was still just a number on a duty roster, a ghost haunting the barracks Jax had assigned him to.
Survival was no longer the primary objective. It had been supplanted by a heavier, colder purpose. But purpose was useless without a path, and every path west was blocked by the very walls that had once kept them safe.
He and Maya had fallen into a new routine, one born of shared secrets and quiet desperation. Every evening, they'd make their way to the Enclave's public archives. It wasn't a library. There were no books, no scrolls, none of the romanticized relics Kael had once imagined the Ancients reading. It was a utilitarian dungeon, a cramped, windowless room in the deepest sector of the Enclave, smelling of hot plastek, ozone, and the faint, bitter scent of decaying data-preservatives. Rows of dull-grey terminals stood in silent, functional ranks. It was a place where history went to be filed and forgotten. It was the perfect place to hide.
"Anything?" Maya's voice was a whisper, a sound that barely disturbed the low hum of the servers. She sat at the terminal next to his, not looking at the data, but at the room, her senses a quiet perimeter against any unwanted curiosity.
"Just requisitions for nutrient paste and filtration parts for the last six months," Kael murmured, his eyes scanning lines of monotonous code. "Sector Gamma's water recyclers are running at seventy percent efficiency. Again."
It was his old life, a ghost on a screen. For a week, they had combed through the digital detritus of Enclave 7. Mission logs, patrol schedules, supply manifests. It was a mountain of mundane data, a monument to the grinding, day-to-day reality of keeping ten thousand souls alive. And it was all useless. Every patrol was short-range. Every supply run was local. The Enclave looked inward, its gaze fixed on the familiar, blighted landscape of the Scar.
He felt a familiar frustration prickle at him. He had the Stalker's cold, conceptual awareness coiled in his soul, the Hound's predatory instincts leashed beside it. He could feel the very stress-fractures in the walls around them, could map the flow of energy in the conduits beneath the floor. And all that impossible power was being used to read shipping invoices.
"We can't just walk out," Maya stated, not for the first time. It had become their mantra, the anchor that kept them from doing something stupid. "They'd post our signatures on the bounty boards before we even cleared the outer perimeter. We'd be hunted."
"I know," Kael sighed, running a hand through his hair. He leaned back, the cheap chair groaning in protest. He looked at her, at the quiet resolve in her eyes. The medical brace was gone, but she still favored her leg, a slight limp she was trying to train away. A permanent reminder of the price of knowledge. He owed it to her, to that pain, to be smarter than this.
He closed his eyes. Think like a technician. Jax's words. You don't punch a machine. You understand how it works. The Enclave was a machine. A vast, inefficient, and deeply flawed one. Its operating system was a mess of patched-together protocols and legacy code. But it had to have connections to the outside. It couldn't be a closed system.
"We're looking at the wrong thing," he said, his eyes snapping open. "We're looking at Enclave 7's output. Patrols, local runs. This is a frontier fort. It doesn't send things out. It takes things in."
Maya's gaze sharpened. She understood immediately. "So we look at the long-haul logs. Inbound traffic from the core enclaves."
"Exactly." Kael leaned forward, his fingers flying across the surface of his terminal. His old skills, the ones that had made him a scavenger-technician, felt more natural than any weapon he'd ever held. He wasn't just reading the files; he was navigating the system's architecture. He bypassed the standard user interface, diving into the raw logs, the back-end directories where the system's true memory was stored.
The screen filled with a new kind of data. Not Enclave 7's neat, orderly reports, but a chaotic stream of manifests from other, larger settlements. Enclave 3. Enclave 5. Names that were just legends to most people in 7, central hubs of power and technology. It was like looking at the heart of the machine from one of its furthest, rustiest limbs. For hours, they worked in silence, the only sound the soft tap of their fingers and the low hum of the machines. Kael sifted through the data, pulling anything that looked like a recurring, long-distance transport. Maya cross-referenced them with pre-Fall cartography slates, trying to map the ancient, decaying trade routes.
It was Maya who found it.
"Kael," she whispered, her voice tight with a new energy. "Look at this."
He switched his terminal to mirror hers. It was a transport schedule, a monthly high-priority convoy from Enclave 3. The manifest was heavily encrypted, but the designation was clear: "Critical Technology Shipment." It wasn't a food run. It was something important.
"It's a return route," Kael realized, his own heart starting to beat faster. "They bring the tech, and then they have to go back. Empty."
"Not empty," Maya corrected. She pulled up another file, a scrawled maintenance request from Enclave 7's own tech division. "They're sending back a shipment of refined crystalline catalysts. Stuff we mine and process here. It's a trade."
There it was. A scheduled transport leaving Enclave 7 within the month. A high-stakes mission that would require a veteran escort. A long-haul convoy heading east, deep into the continent.
"The route," Kael breathed, pulling up the map from Thorne's data slate. The ghostly blue lines of the Ancient world overlaid the crude, modern map of the wastes. He traced the convoy's projected path. It was a meandering, careful route that hugged the least corrupted territories. It passed through the Petrified Forests, skirted the edge of the Glass Canyons, and headed directly for the massive geological depression marked on the Ancient map.
It passed within fifty miles of the Sunken City.
The silence in the room was no longer stale. It was electric. This was it. Not a vague hope, but a concrete plan. A path. It was a terrible, dangerous path, one that would require them to earn a place on a mission far above their rank, to lie, to deceive, and to eventually desert. But it was a path.
Kael looked at Maya. The weight of what they were about to do settled between them—the lies they would have to tell, the risks they would have to take. It was a pilgrimage, he realized. A journey to the heart of their world's oldest sin. And they had just found their pretext, a bureaucratic permission slip to go and stare into the abyss.