The world below wasn't a city. It was the exposed, rotting corpse of one.
From their vantage on the ridge, the Sunken City was a masterpiece of dead ambition, a wound in the world that had refused to heal. Skeletal skyscrapers, grander than anything Kael had dared to imagine, clawed at the bruised twilight, their steel bones weeping rust into the black water that had claimed their foundations. A sickly, phosphorescent mist, green and unsettling, coiled around the bases of the drowned towers like a shroud. The silence was the most terrifying part. It wasn't an absence of sound; it was a presence, a heavy, oppressive blanket that smothered the air and drank the light.
"Gods," Maya whispered, the word a puff of white in the frigid air. It wasn't a prayer. It was an epitaph.
Kael didn't answer. He was too busy recalibrating his entire understanding of scale. Enclave 7 was a hovel. The Scar was a backyard. This… this had been the world. He felt the Hound's Echo in his soul go quiet, a predator sensing it had wandered into the boneyard of a far greater hunter. The air tasted of wet decay and ancient metal.
His quest for truth had felt like an abstract thing, a ghost story pieced together from a dead man's whispers. But this was real. The sheer, undeniable reality of it was a physical weight. He wasn't just chasing a secret. He was performing an archeological dig on a fresh grave.
"The map puts PR-3 at the base of the central spire," he said, his voice sounding small and inadequate. "The one with the collapsed peak."
He pointed, and Maya nodded, her gaze sweeping the treacherous landscape between them and their goal. A five-mile trek through black, sucking marsh and the tangled wreckage of a fallen age.
"Let's get this over with," she said, her voice tight. The unspoken part hung between them: before something finds us.
The descent was a slow, sucking battle. The ground wasn't soil; it was a slurry of mud, grit, and the decomposed ghosts of a billion forgotten things. They moved in the language of silence they had perfected. Kael led, his senses split. The Hound's Echo mapped the terrain in vectors of sound and scent, a living sonar pinging off the dead world. He felt the hollow ground before his boot found it, smelled the pockets of stagnant, toxic water before they saw them. But it was the Stalker's Echo he relied on most. It didn't sense life. It sensed wrongness. And this whole place was a symphony of it.
Maya was a whisper behind him, her Glimmer Moth Echo a subtle distortion of the air, a delicate lie that bent the gloomy light around their forms. She was his anchor to the physical world, a hand on his back that kept him from getting lost in the ghostly static of his other senses.
They encountered their first native. It slithered from the oily water beside the rusted chassis of a mag-lev carriage, a horror of fused flesh and crystal. It was long and serpentine, its body a mottled green-black, but its head was a jagged cluster of quartz that pulsed with a faint, swamp-gas light. A Marsh-Lurker. Kael didn't need the bestiary file to know its purpose. They froze, melting into the shadows. Kael felt the creature's Aethel signature, a lazy, sluggish thing, and sent a silent signal to Maya. Low threat. Dormant. The Lurker slid past, its passage leaving a slick, oily trail on the water, and disappeared. It wasn't hunting. It was just part of the decay.
The real challenge was the city itself. Collapsed overpasses formed impassable canyons of twisted ferrocrete and rebar. Streets had become deep, unwelcoming canals of black water. Twice, they reached a dead end, a chasm too wide to jump, a wall too sheer to climb.
The second time, there was no way around. A massive administrative building had collapsed, its entire facade slumping into the street and creating a solid wall of fused plastek and stone.
"No way through," Maya stated, her breath misting.
Kael stared at the wall, his mind a frantic diagnostic. He remembered the blinding pain in the Forge, the feeling of his arm bonded to concrete. He remembered Jax's brutal lesson. You're the damn chassis. You decide which one gets the fuel.
"Maybe," he said, his own voice sounding distant. He met Maya's worried gaze. "Stay here. Watch my back."
He walked to the wall, placing a hand on its cold, grimy surface. It was solid. Real. A fact of the world. He closed his eyes. Click. He disengaged the Hound and the Scuttler. He let the Stalker's cold, quiet potential fill him. The world of sensory detail vanished, replaced by a blueprint. He saw his own body as a collection of particles. He saw the wall as the same. He just had to convince them they didn't have to occupy the same space.
This part of me… does not exist here.
The sensation was dizzying, a vertiginous plunge into a state of pure concept. He felt his body go thin, his own atoms humming with a dissonant frequency. He took a step.
His foot sank into the wall.
There was no resistance. Just a profound cold and the nauseating, intimate feeling of his own matter passing through something else. He didn't hesitate. He didn't think. He just walked, a ghost taking a stroll through a gravestone. He emerged on the other side, gasping, the world rushing back in with a roar. He stumbled, leaning against the wall he had just violated, his Frame screaming in protest at the sheer, fundamental wrongness of it. It was draining. Every use of it felt like it was shaving a thin layer from his soul.
He waved Maya through a gap in the rubble fifty yards down. They regrouped, the unspoken question of how hanging between them. Kael just shook his head. He didn't have an answer.
They found it an hour later. The central spire was a titan of a building, a monument to an age that had tried to touch the sky. Its top third was gone, sheared off in some ancient cataclysm, but its base was a fortress. And at that base, half-submerged in the black marsh, Kael felt it. A structured energy. Weak. Fading. But clean. It was the whisper of a machine in a world of screaming ghosts.
"PR-3," he breathed.
It wasn't a grand entrance. It was a reinforced plasteel hatch, the kind used for utility access, set into the spire's foundation. It was sealed, and a faint, blue light flickered around its edges. An energy barrier. Ancient, but still alive.
Zane would have tried to kick it down. Ryker would have called for explosives. Kael, the technician, saw a lock. He knelt, placing his palm flat against the cold metal. He didn't push. He listened. Through the Hound's senses, he could feel the low, steady hum of the barrier's power source. Through the Stalker's, he could perceive its frequency, a simple, repeating wave of energy.
He remembered the slate. ...disrupting extant Aethel fields... requires a sympathetic... Aethel Resonance...
He wasn't trying to disrupt it. He was trying to talk to it.
He closed his eyes, finding his own Core. He let his Flow seep into his hand, not as a force, but as a signal. He didn't try to match the barrier's power; he tried to match its song. He modulated his own Aethel frequency, a delicate, mentally taxing process, turning the chaotic hum of his own power into a single, clean, resonant note.
He felt it connect. It wasn't a jolt. It was a click, a soft, profound sense of two systems achieving a handshake across two hundred years of silence.
A deep, grinding thud echoed from within the hatch, the sound of ancient tumblers, long dormant, finally moving. A soft hiss followed, and the blue light around the seal died.
With a low groan of tortured metal, the hatch swung open a few inches, releasing a puff of air.
It was the driest, most sterile air Kael had ever smelled. It held no hint of the swamp's decay, no tang of the Scar's grit. It was the dead, preserved air of a tomb. Air that had not been breathed, had not been touched by the living world, for centuries.
They had found the door to the past. And Kael had the terrible, certain feeling that whatever was inside was not meant to be woken up.