The silence of the Nomad safe house was a different vintage from the tombs Kael was used to. It wasn't the dead, sterile quiet of an Ancient ruin, nor the oppressive, waiting silence of the Scar. It was a lived-in quiet, smelling of metal polish, cheap nutrient broth, and the faint, ever-present hum of a power grid that worked a little too hard. It was the sound of survivors who knew the value of not being noticed. It was the sound of a good lie.
Kael stood by the room's single, grime-streaked viewport, looking out not at the sky, but at the tiered, neon-drenched flank of the adjacent residential spire. A city so vast it had replaced the horizon. He ran a hand through his hair, the gesture doing nothing to calm the dissonant hum of the three souls caged within his own. The Exodus was decided. The deal was done. They were ghosts again, just waiting for the sun to set so they could slip out of a side door.
But it felt wrong. Incomplete. A diagnostic left half-run.
"You're pacing," Maya said from her cot. She wasn't looking at him, her attention focused on re-calibrating the energy conduits in a singed combat gauntlet—Sil's gauntlet. The methodical, repetitive work was a form of meditation for her, a way to impose order on a small corner of a chaotic world.
Kael stopped, realizing he had been wearing a path in the small space between their beds. "Just thinking."
"About him," she said. It wasn't a question.
He didn't have to ask who she meant. There was only one loose thread left connecting him to the life he was about to abandon. One anchor. "He deserves to know," Kael said, his voice quiet. "Not everything. But something. I can't just… vanish."
Anya looked up from the far corner of the room, where she'd been field-stripping her twin energy pistols with the clean, economical grace of a predator. "A long-range transmission out of Enclave 3 is a flare in the dark, Kael. Valerius, Thorne… they monitor everything. It's a risk. A big one."
Her pragmatism was a physical force, a wall of cold, hard logic. But Kael had learned a thing or two about walls.
"The broker who got us passage on the caravan. You trust her?" he asked.
"Kirra? I trust her to be good at her job. Which is moving things—and people—discreetly. Her network is her life. She protects it."
"Does her network include secure comms?"
Anya's hands stilled. Her grey eyes, sharp as fractured crystal, met his. She saw the set of his jaw, the stubborn line of his shoulders. She wasn't looking at a subordinate asking for permission. She was looking at a partner stating an intention. "It's not cheap," she said, the words a concession. "And it's not perfectly safe. Nothing is."
"It's necessary," Kael replied. It was the truth. It felt like a betrayal to leave without a word, to let the man who had pulled him from the wreckage believe he had simply run, or died, or forgotten. It was a debt that had nothing to do with credits or favors, but with the simple, brutal fact that Jax had seen a drowning boy and thrown him a line.
The comms terminal wasn't in a sterile data-hub. It was in the back of a soup stall in the lower market, a place thick with the smell of synthetic noodles and desperation. Kirra, the broker with the prosthetic arm, led them through a beaded curtain into a space no bigger than a coffin. The air was hot and close, humming with the contained energy of a dozen different scavenged, jury-rigged machines.
The terminal was a monster of mismatched parts. An Enclave 3 console, stripped of its pristine shell, was bolted to the chassis of a pre-Fall server rack. Its screen glowed with a custom, Nomad-coded interface, a chaotic scrawl of text that was an art form of its own. It was ugly. It was dangerous. And it was beautiful.
"Encrypted relay through six dead-drop servers in three different enclaves," Kirra rasped, tapping a sequence on the keyboard. Her metallic fingers moved with a speed that belied their bulk. "Signal gets bounced, shredded, and reassembled. To anyone watching, it'll look like background static. A ghost in the data stream. You have ten minutes. Don't waste them." She turned and left them in the suffocating dark.
Kael stood before the machine. This was his language. He let his fingers rest on the worn, smooth keys. He wasn't just typing a message. He was performing a complex act of Synthesis. He reached inward, past the snarling, restless energy of the Hound, past the chittering anxiety of the Scuttler. He found the Stalker. The cold, quiet ghost of pure logic.
He didn't need its nihilism. He needed its understanding of systems.
He let his own Flow, now clean and steady under the Bell-Warden's influence, seep into the terminal. He felt the machine's chaotic energy, its patchwork of borrowed power and desperate code. He didn't fight it. He harmonized with it, weaving his own Aethel signature into the encryption Kirra had provided, adding a layer of personal, kinetic resonance that would make the message nearly impossible to decipher without the key. And the key was Jax's own Aethel signature, a frequency Kael had memorized in the Forge, the deep, steady, and weary hum of a mountain.
The screen went blank, waiting. He began to type.
Jax,
He paused. The name felt strange, a relic from a life that was already a memory.
I'm out. Had to move. Can't say where. Can't risk it.
I'm writing because you were right. The official history is a lie. All of it. The Fall wasn't just hubris. The Chimeras aren't just monsters. They're a project. A failed one. They were a weapon built by the Ancients to fight something else. Something they called an Exo-Threat. They were afraid.
The words felt small, inadequate. How could he explain the horror of the lab, the agony of Lyra's creation, the cold, pragmatic evil of The Director? He couldn't. He could only give a warning.
There's more to it. The project didn't just fail. It succeeded in a different way. There are things out here, Jax. Things from their work that aren't just mindless beasts. Something worse. I'm hunting it. I have to.
He thought of the look on Jax's face in the Forge, the moment the veteran had realized what Kael could do. The flicker of shock, and then the deeper, colder look of a man seeing a new, more dangerous kind of weapon. He had to honor that.
My… abilities. The thing I did in the ruins. It's called Synthesis. It's an old science. The key to all this. It's why I have to go. It's dangerous. Not the power itself. The knowledge. The Houses know something is different. Valerius knows. They're hunting for it. Be careful. They don't see people. They see assets and threats.
He looked at the words, a cold, clinical summary of a world turned inside out. It wasn't enough. There was one more thing he had to say. A final piece of the boy he used to be, offered to the man who had forged him into what he was now.
You taught me to think like a technician. To find the flaw in the machine. The machine is bigger than we thought. And it's not just broken. It was designed to fail. Thank you. For everything.
He signed off not with his name, but with the only title that felt true anymore.
The Anomaly.
He hit send. The terminal whined, a surge of power running through its stressed circuits. The message, a ghost wrapped in a whisper, dissolved into the data stream of the city. For a moment, Kael felt the connection, a thin, impossibly fragile thread stretching across the wastes, from one broken man in a back room to another in a frontier fort. Then, the connection broke. The thread was cut.
The silence that filled the small, hot room was absolute. It was the silence of a bridge burned, a door sealed forever. He was adrift now, truly. The last link to the shore was gone.
He turned to Maya. She hadn't moved. She had stood guard, a silent sentinel, his anchor to the real world while he talked to ghosts. She met his gaze, and in her eyes, he saw no questions. Only a shared, quiet understanding of the weight of what he'd just done.
They walked out of the noodle stall and back into the chaotic, indifferent river of the lower market. The air was still thick with steam and lies, but it felt different now. Lighter. He had honored his debt. He had said his goodbye. His past was finally just that. The past.
The path west was all that remained. And for the first time, it didn't feel like running away. It felt like walking toward something.