The alley stank of rust and old synth-oil.
Kael adjusted the scarf around his mouth as he moved between the rusted bulk of two collapsed district rigs. Towering walls of ancient machinery rose like broken teeth on either side — long-forgotten, long-unfixed.
Perfect cover.
No spectators.
No streamers.
No Council probes.
The gate anomaly was barely ranked: a C-tier crack pulsing along the edge of the subgrid, blinking slow like a wounded eye.
"Simple fix. No drama."
He was lying to himself again.
Kael knelt near the crack and pressed his hand to the stone. The glyphs began to form beneath his palm, curving naturally — not quite glowing, but alive with tension. The rhythm was… familiar now.
Too familiar.
He didn't notice the figure behind him until the air shifted.
A breath. A cough. Not threatening. Not hidden.
Kael stood in one motion.
"You came," the stranger said.
Young. Mid-twenties maybe. Hooded. No weapon.
Kael's stance didn't change.
"You're not guild," he said.
"No."
"Then get lost."
The man didn't move. Didn't flinch.
He smiled instead. Something about it made Kael's skin crawl.
"The Choir sent me to see you," he said.
Kael didn't blink.
"I don't do sermons."
"It's not a sermon," the man replied. "It's a recognition."
He took one step forward.
Kael's fingers flexed. The half-finished glyph behind him sparked.
"We've watched the glitches," the man whispered, voice reverent. "The skipped frames. The loops you hide. We know what you are."
"You don't know a damn thing."
"You patch the world." The man spread his hands. "You fix what the gods break. You are the Corruptor of Balance — the one who unravels the lie."
Kael lunged.
But the man didn't run. Didn't raise a hand. He just smiled… and said:
"We only want to see you do it again."
Then his body snapped — not from Kael's hit, but from something else.
Something invisible.
A black line split his chest — not blood, but silence pouring from the wound.
The man collapsed, eyes wide in awe even as life left him.
Kael stopped mid-stride.
A shadow moved behind the fog — tall, indistinct. No body. Just presence.
A Reaper trace.
For one second, the air behind the corpse shimmered.
Something was watching.
Then it was gone.
Kael looked down.
The man's face was still smiling.
Dead.
And grateful.
Kael didn't touch the body.
Not immediately.
He stared at it — at the expression of rapture frozen on the man's face, the serene curve of lips, the pale light flickering from the dead glyph pendant still clutched in one hand.
It was still warm.
Whatever killed him hadn't left a mark Kael understood.
Just that one clean split, chest to hip — and the silence it poured.
Not blood.
Silence.
Kael turned to the anomaly.
It was still pulsing — thin and sickly now, like it had witnessed something it couldn't digest.
He raised a hand and summoned the collapse pattern.
"No trace," he muttered. "Lock the echoes. Seal the gate. Burn the glitch."
A simple three-stroke patch.
One he'd run a dozen times.
The glyph shimmered to life, white lines rotating outward like nested teeth. The moment it connected to the subgrid, something went wrong.
The feedback spiked.
His head snapped back.
—
⛓️ [TRACE ERROR]
⛓️ [ECHO MEMORY CANNOT BE ERASED]
⛓️ [OBSERVER PRESENT]
—
Kael's glyph arm flared without his command — flickers running down past his elbow, out of rhythm.
The shadows in the alley twitched.
Not moved.
Twitched.
As though held in place by something that had just… blinked.
Then he heard it.
A sound like glass humming in reverse.
It came from the wall. From the cracks. From inside the air.
Not real. Not mechanical.
Something else.
The Reaper trace.
Kael canceled the patch.
Immediately.
The lines burned red and fizzled out — refusing to collapse the scene, refusing to unsee what had happened.
This wasn't just a death.
It was a witnessing.
And someone — something — had filed it away.
He turned.
The body hadn't changed.
Still smiling.
Still still.
But the light from the nearby gate anomaly had darkened by a single shade.
A glyph of watching.
Somewhere.
Invisible.
Kael could feel it now. Not looking at the scene.
Looking at him.
And the worst part?
It wasn't hostile.
Just curious.
Kael sat in the dark.
No lights.
No sound.
Just his datapad, flickering dim beside his wrist.
He'd disabled all outgoing signal beacons.
Masked his IP via a shallow loop.
Isolated the system cache to an offline sandbox.
There should have been nothing left from the alley.
No logs.
No echoes.
No memory.
But the glyph arm had twitched the moment he stepped through the threshold of his apartment. That was enough.
Something had followed.
The cache fragment was embedded in his last patch sequence — a four-second audio-visual tag, flagged unclassified by the system.
Unauthorized. Untraceable.
The file name:
ECHO_Δ.OriginNull.01
He tapped it open.
No hesitation.
Just cold resolve.
Video feed activated.
Low-resolution.
Washed in the haze of failing memory.
Gritty. Green-filtered.
The kind of clip the system usually scrubs.
The Choir acolyte appeared first.
Same place. Same angle.
Collapsed in the alley. Chest split. Eyes closed.
Exactly as Kael had seen him.
For three seconds, nothing happened.
Then the man's eyes opened.
Wide. Glassy.
He didn't move. Didn't breathe.
But his mouth formed a single phrase.
No sound.
Just a whisper Kael could only read, not hear.
"She sees it too."
Then the feed cut.
Kael stared at the frozen frame.
Zoomed in.
Ran an ID overlay.
No audio track.
No log trail.
No timestamp.
Just… those four words. Etched in the echo like they were meant for him and him alone.
"She sees it too."
His hand tightened on the pad.
There was only one she that could mean.
From the hallway, he heard a soft voice.
Senna's.
"Papa?"
He turned too fast — guilt and fear colliding behind his eyes.
She stood there barefoot, holding her notebook against her chest.
"Are you working again?"
"No," he said too fast. "Just—"
"You're glowing again," she said softly.
Kael's arm was pulsing.
Not bright. Not unstable.
Just… active.
Alive.
Like it had heard the echo too.
Kael sat in the dark.
No lights.
No sound.
Just his datapad, flickering dim beside his wrist.
He'd disabled all outgoing signal beacons.
Masked his IP via a shallow loop.
Isolated the system cache to an offline sandbox.
There should have been nothing left from the alley.
No logs.
No echoes.
No memory.
But the glyph arm had twitched the moment he stepped through the threshold of his apartment. That was enough.
Something had followed.
The cache fragment was embedded in his last patch sequence — a four-second audio-visual tag, flagged unclassified by the system.
Unauthorized. Untraceable.
The file name:
ECHO_Δ.OriginNull.01
He tapped it open.
No hesitation.
Just cold resolve.
Video feed activated.
Low-resolution.
Washed in the haze of failing memory.
Gritty. Green-filtered.
The kind of clip the system usually scrubs.
The Choir acolyte appeared first.
Same place. Same angle.
Collapsed in the alley. Chest split. Eyes closed.
Exactly as Kael had seen him.
For three seconds, nothing happened.
Then the man's eyes opened.
Wide. Glassy.
He didn't move. Didn't breathe.
But his mouth formed a single phrase.
No sound.
Just a whisper Kael could only read, not hear.
"She sees it too."
Then the feed cut.
Kael stared at the frozen frame.
Zoomed in.
Ran an ID overlay.
No audio track.
No log trail.
No timestamp.
Just… those four words. Etched in the echo like they were meant for him and him alone.
"She sees it too."
His hand tightened on the pad.
There was only one she that could mean.
From the hallway, he heard a soft voice.
Senna's.
"Papa?"
He turned too fast — guilt and fear colliding behind his eyes.
She stood there barefoot, holding her notebook against her chest.
"Are you working again?"
"No," he said too fast. "Just—"
"You're glowing again," she said softly.
Kael's arm was pulsing.
Not bright. Not unstable.
Just… active.
Alive.
Like it had heard the echo too.
The envelope was thinner than guild regs allowed.
No digital tag. No crystal seal. No trackable ink.
Just a folded slip of synthpaper tucked into a plain shell, handed to Senna by a teenage runner who vanished before Kael even heard the knock.
Kael opened it with a practiced hand.
The message was written in Aria's shorthand — clean strokes, pressure slanted left, fast and impatient.
He'd read hundreds like it during their shared time under Eclipse Dominion.
This one wasn't normal.
"Eastside ruins. Skele-grid mark: C. Partial breach. No guild response. No reporters. No teams.
Send someone who glitches clean.
Someone who knows when not to report.
This isn't for normals."
—A.
Kael reread it three times.
He didn't question the message.
Not really.
He questioned why now — after the alley, after the glyph echo, after the letter with the word "soon" — Aria would break every protocol they swore to uphold and hand-pick him.
Liora stood beside him at the table, arms crossed, watching.
She'd seen Aria's writing before.
She didn't ask what it meant.
She just asked:
"What's she really sending you into?"
Kael folded the paper.
"Doesn't say."
"Doesn't need to," Liora said. "She chose you. Alone. That means it's not a mission."
She leaned closer, lowering her voice.
"It's a test."
Kael didn't respond.
He strapped his armguard on, slid his patchband into the lock rig, and stepped toward the door.
Senna looked up from her drawing without lifting her head.
"Will it glow this time?" she asked.
Kael froze.
"What?"
"The lines. The ones on your arm. They're darker now. I was wondering if they'd glow again."
He didn't answer.
Didn't move for a beat too long.
Then he ruffled her hair softly, nodded to Liora, and stepped into the fog.
The ruins loomed.
Not the majestic kind — no collapsing temples, no towering gates of forgotten gods.
Just old factory bones.
Concrete ribcages. Rusting steel girders. Windows shattered like paper-thin ice across every floor.
The kind of place Kael had seen twenty times in a career. The kind of raid site you sent B-tier squads to clean and forget.
Except this one was wrong before he even stepped inside.
The spatial pulse hit him first.
Soft. Erratic.
Not unstable — just recent.
Kael tapped his patchband, scanning for previous glyph residue.
Nothing.
No trail markers. No class tags.
Just static where metadata should be.
That meant one of three things:
The raid team scrubbed their records before leaving.
The guild deleted it post-facto.
Or someone activated rollback without using the system at all.
That third possibility shouldn't exist.
But lately, a lot of things shouldn't.
He moved deeper into the shell of the building.
The walls still shimmered with residual feedback — heat traces like ghost shadows painted across each panel.
The kind you only got after a rollback surge.
Someone had reversed a field-state here.
Not patched.
Rewritten.
He reached the center chamber.
Cracked floor. Bleached light from overhead. A chill that wasn't weather.
Kael knelt down.
That's when he saw it.
White chalk. Smudged.
Drawn in wide strokes like a child's hand.
Looping shapes. Some incomplete glyphs. Others meaningless symbols.
And in the middle of the spiral, written backwards — not by accident, but like someone had mirrored it deliberately:
SENNA
Kael's heart went still.
He didn't move. Didn't breathe.
His first instinct wasn't panic.
It was recognition.
She'd drawn that loop before.
In the hallway. In her sketchbook.
Playing, she'd called it.
Copying what she saw on his arm. Practicing.
And now, here it was.
Drawn at the heart of a dead zone with no enemy, no damage, and no glyph trail.
Just a rollback ripple… and her name, written by a ghost.
Kael stood, slower than usual.
The chalk circle remained behind him.
It wasn't a warning.
It was a message.
From something — or someone — who was learning to write back.
Kael entered the apartment in silence.
The lights were low. Not dimmed by choice — flickering, intermittent. Like the system itself didn't want to be noticed tonight.
He locked the door manually.
No voice command.
No glyph access.
Just his hand.
Liora wasn't waiting at the table.
No argument. No embrace.
Just quiet.
And that quiet was worse.
It meant she knew something followed him back.
Senna was curled up on the couch.
Barefoot, one arm hanging off the cushion, the other clutching her sketchbook to her chest.
Her breathing was soft. Too soft.
Like she'd fallen asleep mid-doodle.
Kael approached slowly.
He didn't touch her.
He touched the book.
The page was open.
One of the center sheets, not torn out — fresh paper, not crumpled or smeared.
No childlike loops this time. No messy mimicry.
Just a single glyph.
Clean.
Precise.
And glowing.
Not bright.
Not dangerous.
But unmistakable.
The lines spiraled inward, not outward.
A rollback shellform — one he'd seen years ago during experimental raids Eclipse Dominion buried under guild blacklists.
He'd never drawn it himself.
Never taught it.
Never even used it.
And yet… here it was.
Etched in pencil.
Glowing with faint resonance.
Like it bloomed when he entered the room.
He flipped to the next page.
Nothing.
Back again — the glyph still shimmered.
And now it was humming, too softly for most to hear.
But Kael wasn't most.
He traced it with one finger.
Not patching.
Just feeling.
"Where did you see this, Senna?" he whispered.
She didn't stir.
But a moment later, still asleep, she murmured:
"It was watching me, Papa."
Kael froze.
"What was?"
Her lips parted slightly, still dreaming.
"The dark thing in the mirror. It showed me the spiral."
The glow vanished.
Gone.
Just graphite now.
A child's drawing again.
But Kael's glyph arm twitched — reacting not to fear, but to recognition.
It was nearly 3 a.m. when Kael triggered the diagnostic.
He waited until Liora was asleep in the other room, curled around Senna's smaller frame like a mother shielding her from the void.
Kael sat in the living room with only the soft blue glow of his glyph arm casting shadows across the walls.
He didn't cast a light.
Didn't need one.
What he was looking for didn't live in light.
The diagnostic chip hummed as he slotted it into the side of his band.
A hidden command sequence — ten digits, no failsafes.
A patchmode echo-scan.
Outlawed by the Dominion.
Used only during guild blacksite raids and rollback failure events.
Kael had stolen the protocol after his first debt surge nearly killed his squad.
He had never used it inside his own home.
Until now.
The scan rippled through the room.
Slow. Silent.
Mapping memory signatures. Reading time residue.
Pulling fragments of interaction between space and glyph.
When the log came back, it was corrupted. Not damaged — filtered.
Like something had tampered with the memory itself.
Kael bypassed the corruption manually.
Frame by frame.
He didn't expect to find anything.
He found everything.
The log showed the room exactly as it was two hours ago.
Senna, asleep on the couch.
The notebook on her lap, glyph active.
Nothing strange yet.
Then the mirror.
In the far left corner of the playback, just behind Kael's chair, the hallway mirror shimmered.
Not cracked.
Not broken.
Alive.
The glass rippled like water under breath.
And in it, a shape.
Tall. Thin. Slightly hunched forward.
Flickering — just on the edge of presence.
A Reaper.
But not full-formed.
Not crossing.
Just watching.
And then—
It nodded.
Not at the glyph.
Not at the room.
At Senna.
Kael slammed the scan shut.
The echo flickered and died.
He stared at the mirror, breath caught.
This wasn't a haunt.
This wasn't a surveillance breach.
It was recognition.
And it wasn't him the Reaper acknowledged.
It was her.
Morning light filtered through the blinds like streaks of broken glass.
Kael sat at the breakfast table, mug in hand, barely sipping.
Liora had left early with a quiet kiss and a worried look. She didn't ask about the scan. Didn't mention the glyph. She didn't have to.
She'd seen how still Kael had gone. How long he'd stared at the mirror afterward.
Senna sat across from him now, legs swinging beneath the table, humming softly to herself.
Crayons out. Notebook open.
Not the one from last night — a fresh one.
The glyph wasn't there.
But Kael's question was.
"Hey," he said gently.
She looked up, eyes curious.
"Do you remember the rules I gave you about mirrors?"
She nodded without hesitation.
"Yup. Three rules. Easy."
Kael forced a small smile. "Say them for me."
Senna didn't even pause to think.
She held up her fingers and began counting off.
"One — never look in a mirror after dark without the light on."
"Two — if your reflection moves wrong, don't say anything. Just walk away."
"Three — never draw glyphs near glass. It confuses the lines."
Kael nodded slowly. Relief tried to settle—but didn't.
Then Senna tilted her head.
"And four," she said brightly, "if it moves first, I don't blink."
Kael froze.
His mug didn't move. His breath didn't move.
"What?"
Senna smiled, as if pleased she remembered so well.
"You told me that one too. I asked what to do if it moves before I do. You said I shouldn't blink. That it might take that as a sign."
Kael's mouth opened.
But no sound came out.
He never told her that.
Not ever.
Not even as a joke.
Senna returned to her drawing.
Just quiet humming again.
As if nothing had happened.
Kael's glyph arm ached without reason.
And across the apartment, the hallway mirror sat in still silence—
—for now.
The hallway was quiet.
No sound but the low hum of old wiring buried in the walls.
Kael stood in front of the mirror barefoot, the chalk clutched in his left hand, his glyph arm faintly dimmed — not active, not dormant. Just… listening.
He'd waited until the house was asleep.
Liora had turned off the lights.
Senna had curled into her bed, the "new" sketchbook resting safely beside her pillow.
The page with the rollback spiral had been gently torn out by Kael himself.
He burned it in the kitchen sink.
But he could still feel the lines on his skin.
Kael touched the glass.
Cold. Solid.
Just a mirror.
Until it wasn't.
With deliberate care, he began to draw.
One line at a time.
The loop inward.
The spiraling angle.
The mirrored sigil.
Every mark exactly as it had appeared in Senna's glyph.
His hand didn't tremble.
But his breath slowed.
A half-step before the glyph finished, the mirror shimmered.
It didn't break.
Didn't ripple.
It just… lagged.
Kael blinked once — only once — and caught the delay.
His hand moved up to finish the spiral.
But the reflection stayed a half-beat behind.
Like it was waiting.
Or choosing.
Kael stared at his own eyes.
They didn't blink when he did.
They blinked after.
He backed away.
Fast. Controlled.
No panic. Not yet.
He scanned the surface with a burst of glyphlight — a silent flicker across the glass.
No enemies. No breach.
Just... permission.
The mirror had let him see it.
And chosen not to strike.
Why?
He already knew the answer.
It wasn't after him.
It wasn't waiting for him to blink.
It was waiting for her.