Sleep was a fractured thing, haunted by the silent scream of static and a plain of stars that felt less like a vision and more like a memory. Kaelen woke with a jolt, the phantom taste of ozone and something else—something cold and vast—clinging to the back of his throat.
The shard was still on the floor where he'd dropped it. It looked like a piece of common junk now, just a sliver of dark, smooth crystal. He eyed it with the wariness of a stray animal looking at a trap. He considered jettisoning it, tossing it into the nearest waste chute and pretending the last day never happened.
But he couldn't. Hemlock's words echoed. A ghost can go places a man can't. And the vision… the vision promised a place no one should ever go.
Before his courage could fail, he snatched it up, the crystal cool against his skin. No vision this time. Just a profound, unsettling silence from his Null-Sense, as if the shard was absorbing the very concept of flawlessness from the space around it.
He had to know more. And that meant a risk he hated more than anything: dealing with other people.
The Bazaar was the throbbing, chaotic heart of the outer sectors. A sprawling, multi-leveled cacophony of shouted deals, the sizzle of black-market tech, and the ever-present thrum of illicit Code-weaving. Here, the Syntax Lords' control was a thin veneer, enforced by bribes and occasional, brutal examples.
Kaelen moved through the crowds like a ghost already, his hood pulled low. His destination was a stall tucked away in a reeking corner, behind a vendor selling suspiciously fresh-looking synth-meat. The stall was a mess of salvaged components and flickering holoscreens, presided over by a woman named Zara. If it had a data-stream running through it, Zara could find it, trace it, or kill it—for a price.
"Kaelen," she said, not looking up from the gutted scanner she was soldering. "You look like a man who's seen a ghost. Or become one. The patrols have your description circulating. 'Unregistered Null causing sensor anomalies.' Very poetic."
Of course she knew. Zara knew everything. It was why she was still breathing.
"I need a read on something," he said, his voice low. "No logs. No traces."
"That's the only kind of read I do." She finally looked up, her eyes sharp and calculating. She held out a grease-stained hand.
Hesitating for only a second, Kaelen placed the shard in her palm.
The change was instantaneous. The casual confidence drained from her face, replaced by a look of pure, unadulterated shock. She nearly dropped it.
"Where did you get this?" she whispered, her voice tight.
"Does it matter?"
"It might be the only thing that does." She held it up to the flickering light. "This… this isn't code, Kaelen. This is a seed. A kernel. I've only ever seen fragments of data about things like this in the deepest, most encrypted archives. It's not a program. It's a concept rendered into physical form."
"What concept?" Kaelen asked, a cold knot tightening in his stomach.
Before she could answer, the ambient noise of the Bazaar shifted. The frantic haggling died down, replaced by a wary silence. A path cleared through the crowd.
Syntax Enforcers. Four of them. And they weren't the bored grunts from the ruins. These were armed with heavier Code-weapons, their armor gleaming with active defensive Scripts. And they were walking with a purpose. Straight towards him.
Impossible. He'd been careful. No one followed him.
Zara's eyes widened in panic. She shoved the shard back into his hand. "They're not here for a bribe. They're here for that. Go. Now."
But it was too late. The lead Enforcer, a woman with a severe face and a scar cutting through her lip, pointed a gauntleted finger directly at Kaelen. "You. Null. You will come with us for questioning regarding unauthorized data acquisition and interference with sovereign systems."
The crowd melted away, leaving Kaelen exposed. His mind raced, a torrent of panic and cold calculation. He couldn't fight. He couldn't run. They'd tag him with a tracer Script before he took two steps.
The shard felt like a brand in his palm. A concept. A seed.
The Enforcer took a step forward, her hand extending, a //RESTRAINT Script already forming a cage of visible, hard-light energy around her fingers. "Do not resist."
An unregistered variable, he thought, the words rising from some deep, instinctual place. A ghost. A system-level failure.
He didn't try to run. He didn't try to fight. He closed his hand around the shard and did the only thing he could. He stopped trying to be a person in the system. He focused every ounce of his will on being an error. A //NULL_POINTER_EXCEPTION. A divide-by-zero in the reality of the Bazaar.
He pushed the shard's "wrongness" outwards, not as a shield, but as an infection.
The lead Enforcer's //RESTRAINT Script flickered and died. The hard-light cage dissolved into harmless motes. Her wrist-scanner fizzed, then went black. The other Enforcers stumbled, their own systems glitching, their HUDs spitting garbage data.
"What is this?" the lead Enforcer snarled, shaking her arm. "Some kind of Null-field? Suppress him!"
But they couldn't. To their sensors, he was blinking in and out of existence, a corrupted file their systems couldn't parse, let alone target.
Kaelen didn't wait. He turned and ran, not with the speed of a man, but with the unnerving suddenness of a dropped connection. He vanished into the warren of back alleys, the sounds of confused and furious Enforcers fading behind him.
He didn't stop until he was three levels down, deep in the dripping, unmonitored sub-basements, his back against a cold, moist wall, his heart trying to beat its way out of his chest.
They hadn't just been looking for him. They had been looking for the shard. Zara was right. It wasn't just a piece of tech. It was something they knew about. Something they feared.
He looked at the innocuous sliver of crystal in his trembling hand. It was no longer a key or a window.
It was a warrant for his execution.
And he was now well and truly in the game.
To be continued...