The flame vanished So did Elena.
Not in the mystical sense—but tactical. Calculated. Precise.
One moment she was there, framed in the smoldering orange halo of the burning wreck, her eyes locked on Luca's. The next, nothing—just scorched air and the faint scent of old magic cut with ozone and dust.
Adrian stood frozen for a heartbeat, gripping the smoking relic disk that had burst open in his hands. Its inner core had burned out entirely, the strange alloy twisting and fracturing under the strain of its own encryption. The blinking red coordinates that now glowed across its cracked surface pulsed like a warning beacon—or a trap. Maybe both.
A digital signature flickered weakly inside: *DONNETTA*. Not a name. A codename.
A location.
Ayla leaned in, eyes narrowing as she parsed the embedded metadata bleeding from the shard. "The Ember Cradle," she whispered, almost to herself. "That's not a temple. It's a blacksite. Deep vault. Council-made. Disavowed after the Syndicate Treaty."
Her voice trembled at the edges—not with fear, but fury. The kind of fury born from betrayal by systems once sworn to protect.
Maris crouched low beside Adrian, her voice colder than winter steel. "A testing ground," she said, brushing ash from the edges of the relic. "Where they turned orphans into operatives. Where they buried ghosts—and secrets—like Elena's father."
Luca didn't speak at first. His breath came in short, sharp bursts. A gash just above his brow leaked a slow ribbon of blood that trickled down his cheek, but he didn't wipe it away. Didn't feel it. All he could see was the flash of light as Elena vanished—and the emptiness she left behind.
"She's not gone," he said finally, voice low and heavy. "They took her. And we go now."
Adrian looked up, uncertain. "No comms, no support, no air cover. We go in blind, Luca. That place eats ghosts."
"Better blind than broken," Luca replied.
His gaze drifted to the children—those they'd rescued from the wreckage—huddled near the ruins of the transport skimmer. Eyes wide. Too wide for faces so young. Their small frames shook in silence, unaware of the politics, of the old wars, of the coded messages still hanging in the air like smoke.
Maris sealed the fragment in a field box and snapped it shut. The locking mechanism hissed as it closed—final, deliberate. "Then we follow the web," she said. "Right into its center."
Luca stepped forward, taking one last look at the crash site—the twisted wreckage, the charred ground, the air still humming with residual energy. Something had happened here, and it wasn't chance.
"She didn't just fall into the fire," he said. "She was pulled into it. Someone *knew* we'd crash. This was staged. A setup."
Ayla's eyes snapped to his. "Then someone tipped the Don.
Silence fell. Thick. Uncomfortable.Luca's eyes narrowed. "You mean... Castello?"
Adrian stood, his expression unreadable. "No," he said quietly. "Worse."
He tapped a sequence on his wrist interface. The display shimmered to life, projecting a grainy holographic signal—the one transmitted the exact moment the relic disk fractured. It had gone unnoticed during the chaos, buried deep in the transmission logs, masked behind a firewall of obsolete Council code.
But now it spoke, clear and unmistakable:
"The Prophet Awaits Beneath Donnetta Vault."*
A chill passed through them all like a shadow moving beneath skin.
This wasn't just about a kidnapping.
This had been preordained.
Planned.
Elena wasn't just taken.
She had been *expected*.
And the Prophet—whoever or *whatever* he truly was—had opened the door with bait made of fire and memory. He'd sent the invitation in blood and ruin, calling them not just to Donnetta... but *into* it. Into the belly of the thing they had all tried to forget.
"Son of a bitch," Ayla whispered. "He wants us there."
"He built the vault to keep things out," Maris said. "Now he's letting something in."
Adrian nodded grimly. "Us."
Luca didn't flinch. His jaw was set like iron. "Then we go."
He took one last look at the shattered relic in the box, and at the blank sky above—the signal still echoing somewhere in the ether, the words repeating like a whisper from something ancient and watching.
They would descend into the vault.
And whatever waited at the bottom—whatever truth had been buried with Elena's father, with the Syndicate, with the Council's sins—it would no longer stay hidden the Prophet had invited them into the dark.
Now, they would answer.
Not as victims.
As fire.
The transport that had brought them here was nothing but scrap now, still smoldering in the dunes, casting black smoke like a pyre. Ayla was already rerouting power from the downed comms array, trying to patch together a short-range signal.
"We've got one window," she said, glancing up. "A maintenance skiff docked 60 klicks from Donnetta. Civilian registry, unarmed, old Council maintenance codes. If we move fast, we can intercept it before it hits the exclusion zone."
Adrian checked the terrain overlay on his interface, nodding. "We'd have to cross the salt basin on foot for the first 12 klicks. No shelter. No cover. They'll see us coming."
"Then we don't give them time to look," Luca said.
He turned to the children—five of them, maybe six. Malnourished. Dirty. But alive.
"We leave them with the local caretakers at Ridgefall Station," Maris said, reading his thoughts. "Encrypted ID tags will keep them safe. We can't bring them where we're going."
Luca crouched beside the youngest—a girl no older than Elena had been when her father disappeared. Her eyes shimmered with quiet terror. But she nodded. She understood, somehow, in a way that went beyond words. Maybe kids always did.
He touched her shoulder gently, then stood.
Adrian slung the field box over his shoulder. "We've got six hours until the skiff passes into the Donnetta perimeter. We miss that, we're walking straight into a minefield."
"No second chances," Maris said.
No more surprises," Ayla added.
But they all knew that was a lie.
The desert stretched before them like an open wound, pale and shimmering with heat, hiding things just beneath its surface. Ghosts. Machines. Memories. The kind of things the Council had spent decades trying to erase.
Luca tightened the strap on his gear, his eyes never leaving the blinking coordinates etched in red across the relic fragment's last transmission.
Donnetta wasn't just a vault.
It was a grave.
And they were walking into it—uninvited.
But the Prophet had made one mistake.
He thought they were walking in blind.
He forgot they were hunters.
And this time, they weren't just coming for Elena.
They were coming for him
Not in the poetic sense—dead like history or forgotten kingdoms—but truly lifeless. A wide, blistered expanse of cracked salt flats and scorched bedrock, where even the wind seemed to forget how to move. No birds. No insects. Not even the low hum of distant engines. Just silence. Heavy. Absolute.
They moved fast, pushing through the first klicks in a tight diamond formation. Ayla scouted ahead, eyes behind polarized lenses, rifle slung tight. Adrian handled navigation, feeding path corrections into everyone's wrist interface. Maris walked rear guard, her senses sharp as glass, hand never far from her pulse blade. Luca moved in the center—silent, contained, a storm waiting for permission.
Heat shimmered up from the ground, warping the horizon into molten mirages. But none of them slowed.
Every minute that passed, the coordinates on the relic pulsed brighter on Adrian's interface. The Donnetta Vault was waiting.
"This place wasn't always a blacksite,"* Ayla said after an hour, breaking the silence. "Before the war, Donnetta was a science colony. Climate research. Terraforming tech. Council stripped it bare once they learned what was underneath."
"What was underneath?" Luca asked.
No one answered.
They crested a dune—and there it was.
A break in the flats.
From this distance, it looked like a scar—a massive black circle of collapsed architecture sunken into the salt. Old ferrocrete walls jutted out at strange angles, buried in ash and time. Above it, a thin column of smoke twisted into the sky.
The Donnetta Vault.
Or what was left of it.
"Skiff'll pass the eastern ridge in 20 minutes," Adrian said. "That's our ride down. Once we board, no turning back."
Maris turned to Luca. "You sure you want to do this?"
"No," he said. "But I *need* to."
He looked at the vault again—and something inside him shifted. A pull. Not physical. Not even psychic. Something older.
*An invitation.*
"Let's go."
They descended the ridge without a word.
And behind them, far in the distance, something ancient stirred beneath the surface of Donnetta.
Waiting.
Watching.
Welcoming them home.