"Keep talking," Max said again, quieter.
Lucy swallowed and sent a careful probe into the deck — nothing risky, just a polite knock. Her fingers shook, but she kept her voice steady. "Who are you? Why the seam?"
The reply came slow, like something pulled up from deep water. Not full sentences, just sounds and images: metal rubbing, breath, the clack of an old railcar.
Seamkeeper. Wake seams. Find seams. Close seams.
Max breathed out. "Coordinates," he said.
The deck spat out numbers and landmarks. Lucy matched them to the city map in her head: Mile Marker 4, the maintenance splice under the river bridge — the same detour they'd used to trap the convoy. An old service seam where power and fiber crossed, the kind of place people ignore.
"Of course it points to where we were already messing," V said, tossing a cigarette into the sink. She'd been at the doorway, pistol at her hip. "You think it's trying to help us?"
Max didn't answer in words. He ran through the checklist in his head: routes, exits, comm blackout windows. "We go in pairs," he said finally. "Lucy and I check it on foot. V stays above with the van ready. If it's a trap, we leave. No heroics."
Lucy wanted to argue and stay behind to clean tracks. But curiosity pulled at her. "I go with you," she said. "If it can crawl through my deck, it can tell a person from a signal. If it wants the seam, it might react differently to a live interface."
Max nodded. Calm, small movements. "Fine. Cut all links. No live uplinks to base. You run on a burnt line from a battery pack, no wireless. Analog audio loop. If it reaches in, you cut power and we bolt."
They moved fast. Dawn was gray; the city smelled of diesel and fried oil. They slipped through back alleys without lights or chatter. Max kept the bike ready; V watched like a shadow; Lucy held her deck under her jacket, connected only to a battered external battery.
At the bridge, the place looked forgotten. Rust and graffiti, a sagging maintenance gate, the river sluggish below. Max scanned underpasses while V idled the van two streets away, engine hot but off.
The seam was ugly: a square access hatch near a drainage grate, a patchwork plate welded over old fixes. Next to it, an old terminal with exposed wiring and a faded plate older than the city's councils.
Lucy crouched and wiped the grime from the plate. She found an old maintenance port — a mechanical keyway and a stamped serial that matched the coordinates. It felt almost analogue, a relic.
"Old systems don't die," Max said. "They get reused. If something hides, it hides here."
She hooked her deck to the battery, watching the street through the hatch slit. The connection was crude: a thick cable, exposed copper that smelled faintly of river salt. The deck hummed and played a low mechanical chord that felt older than everything around them.
The voice came back, closer and less like rust: "Seam awake. Seam open."
Lucy smelled wet iron and battery. The deck showed shapes, not code — the same circle she'd seen before, now nested like a wheel inside a wheel.
"Can you tell what it wants?" Max asked, one knee down beside her, rifle loose but ready. He stayed calm, not showing it, planning how to handle whatever came next.
Lucy thought through answers and chose honesty. "It wants the seam open." She paused. "But it also says 'close.' Maybe it wants the seam active, then shut. Maybe it's testing."
"Testing us," V said from the tunnel mouth. "Or testing on us."
They let that sit. Max checked the street again. No drones. No lights. For a second everything sounded normal — a delivery bike above, the river below.
Lucy sent one clean handshake: something any interface could see but not replay. The seam answered with a dry chirp, and the hatch loosened. The bolts sighed; one slipped like an old jaw.
They froze.
Max felt the hatch vibration beneath his thumb. "We open slow," he said. "You watch the feed. If it leans into you — cut."
Lucy hovered her hand over the kill switch. She thought of networks as maps, ledgers, and traps. She thought of the whisper and the circle that had told them to wake seams. She thought, with a mix of fear and curiosity, how much of the city was built on seams no one stitched.
She nodded. "Open."
Max lifted the hatch. Cold air spilled up, smelling of old cables and river algae. The maintenance duct sloped down into dark, and a faint electrical thrum pulsed below — older than their gear.
Lucy lowered the deck into the seam. The screen filled with the circle and a new image: rows of servers like old teeth, blue lights dim under grime. Not modern racks — hand-built boxes with patched firmware and careful soldering.
Something rippled in the shadowed rack. The deck hissed and the voice spoke, neither male nor female, carrying the cadence of someone telling a secret.
"Wake complete," it said. "Seam open. We remember."
The words hit them like a stone.
Lucy looked at Max. His face stayed flat. V's hand tightened on the pistol and relaxed, as if she had to remind herself it was there. None of them moved for a long breath.
Then, from the dark under the rack, came a single metallic click — like a lock on the other side of a door opening.
Lucy's heart raced. "We should go," she whispered.
Max didn't look away from the seam. "Not yet," he said. He kept calm, showing nothing, already planning how to play it. "We need to know why it wanted us here."
Lucy's palms were slick, though the air was cold. The static from the deck hummed against her fingertips like a warning, like the kind of vibration you felt before machinery spun up.
"Max…" she whispered, her throat dry. "This thing isn't just old code. It feels… alive. Like it's been waiting."
Max didn't shift. He crouched by the hatch, rifle balanced, optics dim but steady. "Good," he said flatly. "Things that wait usually want something. That means they'll talk before they bite."
The voice came again — layered, quiet, but not random. "We remember… the seams… the gates. You wake them… you close them… you hold the city together."
***
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