The room in the Outer Ring Domiciles was a perfect, sterile box. It smelled of recycled air and the faint, chemical tang of industrial-grade sanitizer, a scent that promised cleanliness but offered no comfort. It was a space designed for transient components, not for people. After the raw, organic decay of the Sunken City and the honest grit of the Scar, the sheer, featureless perfection of Enclave 3 felt more alien than any Chimera.
Kael sat on the edge of the thin mattress, the data slate a slab of impossible cold in his hands. It was the only thing in the room that felt real. Maya was a quiet presence by the room's single, reinforced viewport, a viewport that looked out not onto a sky, but onto the tiered, neon-drenched flank of the next residential spire. She wasn't looking out; she was watching the corridor, her body angled in a way that was both casual and a perfect defensive posture. A habit learned in blood and terror.
He let a thread of his Flow, thin and precise as a surgeon's wire, touch the contact stud on the slate. The ghostly blue light bloomed, painting his face in the colours of the past. He wasn't just looking at text. He was looking at a blueprint for a new soul. His soul.
Synthesis Prerequisites.
Dr. Thorne's shopping list. A litany of monstrous parts for a machine that had never been built. Kael's mind, the technician's mind that was his only true sanctuary, latched onto the logic. The instability of raw Synthesis, the violent rejection that had shattered Zane's Frame, wasn't a flaw in the theory. It was an engineering problem. You couldn't just weld two different engine types together. You needed a mounting bracket. A harmonic dampener. A stabilizing agent.
"Find anything?" Maya's voice was low, not much more than a breath, but it cut through the oppressive hum of the city.
"A component," Kael murmured, his eyes tracing the elegant, horrifying script. Designation: Adamant Tortoise (Tier-2). Echo Profile: [Inertial Locus]. Properties: Extreme energy signature stability. "It's a stabilizer. Thorne theorized its Echo could act as a… a lattice. A framework to contain and shape more volatile Echoes."
He looked up from the slate, his own internal senses a chaotic mess. The Hound, Lyra, was a restless predator, pacing the cage of his mind, agitated by the ten thousand heartbeats thrumming through the spire's walls. The Scuttler was a knot of pure anxiety, overwhelmed by the lack of cracks to hide in. And the Stalker… the Stalker was fascinated. It saw Enclave 3 not as a city, but as a complex system of interlocking, predictable parts. It saw the patterns in the flow of people, the logic of the power grid, the weakness in the social architecture. It was the most dangerous of the three, he was learning, because it thought like he did.
"An Adamant Tortoise," Maya said, turning from the window. "I saw that on the public bestiary. Valerius-controlled territory. The Obsidian Fields."
Of course it was. The Houses, the tribes Kael had seen in the commons, they didn't just hold power. They owned the very ingredients of evolution.
"We need it," Kael said, the words feeling heavy and final. "It's the first ingredient."
The Enclave 3 Administration Hub was a temple to bureaucratic indifference. Vast, cold, and echoing, it was a place where hope went to be filed in triplicate and then forgotten. Throngs of people moved in orderly queues, their faces stamped with a familiar, weary patience. It was a different kind of survival than the one Kael knew, a slower, more grinding one.
The clerk behind the reinforced plastek screen didn't even look up. He was a young man with a tired face and an immaculate uniform, his own Aethel Frame a dull, disciplined thrum of someone who had never seen a real monster. He tapped at his console, his expression a mask of profound boredom.
"Hunting permit, Tier-2," he recited, his voice a monotone drone. "Faction affiliation?"
"Independent," Kael said. "From Enclave 7."
That made the clerk look up. His eyes, flat and grey, did a quick, dismissive sweep of Kael's worn combat suit and Maya's quiet, unassuming presence. He saw provincials. Scrappers from the frontier.
"Enclave 7?" He almost smirked. "Don't you people just hunt whatever wanders up to your mud walls?"
"We need a permit for the Obsidian Fields," Kael pressed, ignoring the jibe. The Hound in his soul wanted to snarl. He forced it down.
The clerk laughed, a short, ugly bark. "The Obsidian Fields. That's Valerius Prime territory. You need a House sponsorship, a Class-4 User rating, and a damn good reason. You have a provisional rating and you're from… Enclave 7." He said the name like it was a disease. "Request denied. Next."
He looked past them, his attention already gone. They were dismissed. A system error, easily corrected.
They tried three more counters. The response was the same, a chorus of polite, unyielding rejection. They were outsiders. The wrong components for this machine. Frustration, hot and bitter, began to coil in Kael's gut. He had the knowledge to rewrite the laws of nature, a secret that could save the world from the ghosts of its past, and he was being blocked by a series of clerks who couldn't see past his zip code. It was a new kind of powerlessness, more infuriating than any physical cage.
As they stood in the echoing hall, adrift in a sea of strangers, Maya put a hand on his arm. "This isn't working," she said, her voice a low anchor. "This is a wall. You don't smash a wall if you can find the door."
"There is no door, Maya. They own it all."
"No," she said, her gaze sweeping the room, analytical and sharp. "They manage it. And managers can be… persuaded." She looked at a clerk at the far end of the hall, a woman who looked younger than the others, her movements harried, her expression a mix of stress and exhaustion. A small cog in a vast, uncaring machine. "Let me try."
Kael watched as Maya approached the counter alone. She didn't project strength. She projected weariness. She leaned on her good leg, the faint limp a story of hardship. She spoke to the clerk, her voice too low for Kael to hear, but her posture was one of quiet, humble supplication.
He edged closer, using the Hound's senses to listen.
"…it's for a research project," Maya was saying. "A private one. My partner… he's trying to develop a new kind of Aethel-regulator. For… burnouts." She let the word hang in the air. She glanced back at Kael, a fleeting, worried look. "Our friend… he wasn't so lucky."
The clerk's expression softened, just a fraction. Every User knew someone who'd burned out. It was the great, unspoken fear that underpinned their entire society.
"Even so," the clerk said, her voice less harsh now. "The Obsidian Fields… it's a Valerius-only permit. My console won't even accept the authorization without a Prime-level clearance."
"We have our mission pay," Maya said softly. She slid their debriefing credit-slate onto the counter. It wasn't a bribe. It was a statement. A story. It detailed their mission, their hazard rating, and the significant bonus they'd received for surviving the unsurvivable. It spoke of desperation and high risk. "It's a single-use permit. Just one specimen. For the research."
The clerk looked at the slate. Her eyes widened almost imperceptibly as she saw the numbers. It was more than she likely made in a year. She looked at Maya's tired face, at Kael standing a few feet away, looking for all the world like a ghost haunted by his own power. She looked back at her console, at the endless queue of requests she still had to process.
Her fingers tapped at the console. A flicker of indecision. Then, a quiet calculation.
"There is… a priority processing fee," the clerk said, her voice barely a whisper. She didn't look at Maya. She looked at her screen. "For… special circumstances. Non-standard requests from outer-rim enclaves. It's… significant."
"We understand," Maya said.
The clerk's fingers moved, a blur of motion. She overrode a protocol, backdated a form, assigned a temporary clearance using a discretionary code that would be buried in a thousand other transactions by the end of the day. A small, untraceable act of corruption in a system built on them. She slid the credit-slate back, its balance significantly lighter. A moment later, a thin, flimsy sheet of printed film slid from a dispenser.
The clerk pushed it through the slot without a word.
Maya picked it up. She gave the clerk a small, grateful nod and walked back to Kael.
She handed it to him. It felt like nothing, a piece of trash. But on it, in cold, official script, were the words: Permit Granted. Target: Adamant Tortoise. Duration: 24 Hours.
It wasn't a grand victory. It was a back-alley deal, a transaction made in a world of shadows and lies. They had their key, but they had bought it with the currency of the very system they sought to transcend.
Kael looked at the flimsy permit, then at the sprawling, indifferent city around them. The hunt for the first ingredient had begun. And he was already learning that the monsters in the wastes were far, far simpler than the ones who lived behind walls.