The Nomad archives weren't a library. They were a graveyard. A chaotic boneyard of dead data, where the ghosts of forgotten corporations and fallen military projects lay buried under layers of digital dust. It was a physical space deep in the bowels of Terminus, a cavernous chamber crammed with mismatched server racks that hummed a dissonant, off-key symphony. The air was thick with the scent of hot metal, ozone, and the faint, bitter tang of decaying plastek. Cables, thick as pythons and thin as veins, snaked across the floor and ceiling, a testament to a hundred years of desperate, ad-hoc engineering.
This was Kael's new Forge. His new Scar. For weeks, it had been his entire world.
He sat before a cobbled-together terminal, the ghostly blue light of a data slate painting his face in the colours of the past. The silence here was different from the tombs he'd visited. It wasn't empty. It was crowded, filled with the faint, electronic whispers of a million dead voices. He'd barely slept, his meals were the nutrient packs Maya left by his side, and his dreams were a swirling chaos of corrupted code and the serene, elegant horror of Dr. Thorne's theories.
He was hunting. But his prey wasn't a beast of crystal and rage. It was a ghost made of names and numbers, a phantom hiding in the static between the lines of history. The Director. The Alpha Project.
"This is a fool's errand," he muttered, rubbing his burning eyes. He was sifting through fragments of a pre-Fall corporate log, salvaged from a transport wreck in the southern wastes. It was useless. Quarterly profit reports, executive memos about improving synergy, a corrupted file that seemed to be a jingle for a soft drink.
The ghosts in his soul were restless in this cage of a city. The Hound, Lyra, paced the confines of his Frame, agitated by the thrum of so many lives packed so closely together. The Scuttler was a constant, low-grade thrum of anxiety, seeing only walls and no cracks to hide in. But the Stalker… the Stalker was fascinated. It saw Terminus not as a city, but as a system. A chaotic, inefficient, but beautiful Rube Goldberg machine of survival. And here, in this archive, it was in its element.
It was the Stalker that saw the pattern. Not in the content of the corporate log, but in its encoding. A faint, almost imperceptible watermark. A military-grade encryption wrapper on a civilian file.
Why?
His fingers, moving with a speed and confidence that felt both alien and innate, danced across the console. He wasn't just a technician anymore; he was a different kind of scavenger, one who picked through the bones of dead information. He isolated the watermark's signature. It was a dead end. A key for a lock that no longer existed.
He leaned back, the cheap metal chair groaning in protest. Frustration, hot and sharp, coiled in his gut.
"You're thinking so loud you're vibrating the floor."
Maya's voice was a low anchor in the storm of his thoughts. She stood in the doorway, a tray with two nutrient packs and a canteen of water in her hands. She didn't ask if he'd found anything. She just saw him. The dark circles under his eyes, the feverish intensity of his gaze.
"You need to sleep, Kae," she said, her tone leaving no room for argument. She set the tray down on a rare patch of uncluttered floor. "The ghosts will still be here in the morning."
"They're not ghosts, Maya," he said, his voice a dry rasp. "They're variables in an equation we don't understand." He ran a hand through his greasy hair. "I found something. A military encryption on a corporate log. It makes no sense."
"Then it's the right track," she said, her logic as clean and sharp as ever. "Nothing about this makes sense."
She was right. He looked from the cryptic watermark to the other slate—the one from the Sunken Cathedral. The Director's journal. It was a different kind of data, not a corporate file, but a personal log, protected by a different kind of lock. One of ego and authority. He'd been trying to connect them, to find a shared word, a shared project name. It was the wrong approach. He wasn't looking for a word. He was looking for a system.
He let his Flow, now a deep, steady river thanks to the Bell-Warden's influence, seep into the terminal. He didn't just read the two files. He let the Stalker in his soul perceive them. Not as data, but as artifacts. Two different pieces of a shattered machine, built by two different factions. One, a corporate entity with military contracts. The other, a clandestine project so secret it had its own internal classification. The Director.
The connection, when it came, was not a word. It was a number. A project designation prefix. XP-. A prefix from the corporate log, attached to a redacted weapons development program. And the same prefix, buried deep in the metadata of the Director's slate, tied to a series of logistical requests.
A new search. A new hunt. He wasn't looking for 'Alpha Project.' He was looking for XP-9.
The archive, that vast, chaotic graveyard, churned. For a long, agonizing minute, it returned nothing but corrupted files and dead ends. He was about to give up, to admit the trail had gone cold, when a single file flickered into existence on the screen. It wasn't from a corporate or scientific source. It was a manifest. A dry, boring piece of military logistics, salvaged from a border garrison that had fallen two hundred years ago. It was the most beautiful thing Kael had ever seen.
The file was heavily corrupted, a ghost of a ghost. But as he fed it his own Aethel, his Flow acting as a temporary bridge for its broken circuits, words began to resolve from the static.
SHIPPING MANIFEST 77-B. ORIGIN: TTM-LOGISTICS BASE. DESTINATION: …SITE…ZERO.
The words hung in the air, cold and absolute. Site Zero. A name that felt like a final answer and a terrifying new question.
CARGO: …ALPHA-GRADE CRYO-CONTAINMENT UNITS (4)…
Kael's blood went cold. It was real. Not a theory, not a madman's dream. It was hardware. Four units. Shipped from a military base to a place that didn't officially exist.
"Maya," he whispered, the name a prayer.
She was by his side in an instant, her eyes tracing the glowing, ghostly text. He saw the same shock, the same dawning horror he felt in his own gut.
The final fragment of the manifest solidified. It wasn't a description. It was a warning.
…ASSET SENTIENCE CONFIRMED. …EXTREME…CAUTION…WILL OF THE DIRECTOR…
The Director wasn't just a name on a slate. He was a commander. He had a project, a site, and a military logistics chain. He had built his monsters, and then he had shipped them somewhere.
Kael looked at Maya. The hunt was no longer about the past. It wasn't about finding out what the Ancients had done. It was about finding what The Director had left behind. They had a name for the tomb. Site Zero. And now, thanks to a forgotten shipping manifest from a dead garrison, they had a name for the man who held the key. They had to find the TTM-Logistics Base.
The trail was no longer cold. It was a live wire, and it led directly into the heart of a storm that had been gathering for centuries.