Echoes of Ash (Part 1)
The underground smelled like memory and bad coffee.
We came in through a service hatch three blocks from the crater where the gala had been. Damian moved like a man who'd rehearsed this descent a hundred times: quick, precise, and intolerant of hesitation. The night above burned with police lights and helicopters; below, the world was made of concrete echoes and fluorescent hum.
"You ever been here before?" I asked, my voice too loud in the tunnel.
He didn't answer immediately. He was watching the shadows as if they spoke. "Once," he said finally. "Years ago."
"Is this your lair?" I tried to joke, but the laugh that came back sounded brittle.
"It's one of the places I can disappear into." He kept his hand on the back of my neck, steadying me. The contact was small, everyday—an intimacy in the form of a protective gesture. It both calmed and set my nerves on edge.
The safehouse was a converted shipping bay, low-slung and lined with metal lockers and ancient wiring. A single bank of monitors glowed in the corner, showing feeds that flickered more static than picture. Two men—lean, tired—sat hunched over a table littered with maps and coffee cups. When they looked up, their faces were recognition and relief wrapped into one.
"Boss," the taller one said, standing too fast and nearly knocking his chair back. He limped; blood darkened the cuff of his sleeve. "Jesus. You took a beating."
"Same to you," Damian said. He eased me down onto a battered couch, eyes flicking to my hand—the ring hidden under a glove now. "How long?"
"Minutes. Could be hours." The man shrugged. His voice was rough around the edges. "Cops scrambled the airspace. We lost two cars on approach. One of them—" He swallowed. "—didn't make it."
I closed my eyes. It was a drip of more bad news, a tick on the ledger I wasn't ready to carry. "Do you have any idea who opened the breach?" I managed.
The other man—shorter, with a sharp nose—leaned forward. "We traced the signature. Someone used an internal device. From inside Vale Corp." He tapped the monitor, where a map lit; lines traced out like veins. "It was local. Simple. Someone flipped the switch that bridges the Veil's anchor to the surface. They used a mapped vulnerability."
Damian's jaw tightened. "Someone on the inside."
"Someone who knew where the anchor link was," the taller man added. "Not many people have that kind of access."
My stomach folded. The word betrayal felt small and casual compared to the shape of the crime. Someone had leaned over our table, lit a match, and watched the world burn.
Damian crouched in front of me, his eyes focused like a blade. "We need names. Alibis. Anything." He pulled a slim tablet from his jacket and thumbed it awake. "Get me the access logs, now."
The men moved like cogs in a machine—fast, practiced. They worked the old network the way a surgeon works a scalpel: precise, methodical. For all the supernatural madness threading through our lives, the mundane work of tracing IPs and timestamps was what would get us answers.
I felt useless, the way you do when everything you are is suddenly paperwork and survival. "What do I do?" I asked, because asking felt like action.
"You stay hidden," Damian said. "You let us handle the chessboard." He paused then, studying my face. "And you don't use your light unless you have to."
The presence inside me hummed—a low vibration like a throat clearing. > He wants to keep you small and manageable. It didn't like the order. Neither did I.
"Noted," I lied, folding my hands in my lap as if that made me trustworthy.
The short man—Martin, his name, I remembered from some file sheet—came over with a plate of cold eggs and bacon. "Eat or you'll pass out on me," he said. "We need you functional."
Food felt obscene and human, and I ate anyway. Each bite was a claim: I'm here. I'm breathing. I'm not a spark to be caged by anyone.
We mapped the night. The monitors showed grainy images of the ballroom, the balcony, the fissure, and then, crucially, the server room at Vale Corp. A timestamp blinked. Lines traced a route from an internal terminal—Room 34B—to the Veil control node.
"There are only a handful of people with access to 34B," Martin said. "Maintenance, board-level technicians, security chiefs."
"Who has motive?" I asked, and surprised myself with the thirst for detail.
Damian's eyes were a storm. "Someone who wanted you exposed. Someone who thought taking you would make them powerful." His hand brushed mine—no tenderness this time, only a map of intent. "Or someone who counted on me to rescue you, because taking you without me would be dumb."
"Either way," the taller man said, "they underestimated the consequences."
As dawn stretched thin a gray line over the city, the room hummed with a plan. Names were traded like currency. Surveillance footage was flagged. Phone pings were cross-checked. Each little bead of data was strung into a net we hoped would hold.
When the short man—Martin—mentioned 34B again, something inside me tightened. I felt, irrationally, that the number might mean something more. My mother had tucked secrets into mundane places. Maybe she liked numbers, the way some people like to leave notes in books.
"Can we access the building logs?" I asked.
"We have partial—" Damian's fingers flew across the tablet. The monitor pulled up a list of badge scans. A string of IDs jumped to the top. "There," he said. "Look."
The name that stared back at us was a calm, official one. Evelyn March. Senior Operations, Vale Corp.
A chill traveled up my spine. Evelyn March was a public face: an older woman, efficient, the sort of person who runs a building like an organism. She had always been unobtrusive in the footage—moving like a shadow only when light wanted her gone.
"Does she have motive?" I asked.
The taller man snorted. "Not in our ledger. She's been with Vale for seventeen years. Smooth. She's the kind of person who doesn't have enemies—she just has obligations." He chewed the sentence like it was a bad thing.
Damian's jaw moved. He didn't answer with words; he answered with movement. "Lock her in. Watch her. See what she touches. And pull everything we can on her financials—scrub her transactions for unusual transfers."
I wanted to ask whether she'd do something that violent for money. I didn't like the implied stakes: that a person's routine could be a cover for breaking a world. Instead, I let the machines talk and the men make plans.
We worked until the monitors blurred. At some point the safehouse's lights dimmed and a radio at the corner whispered about curfews and roadblocks. Winter was loosening the city into a brittle spring, and the air above ground smelled like ash and inquiry.
When the taller man—Jase—finally sat back, rubs of sleep under his eyes, he said what I'd been thinking and no one wanted to say aloud: "This was an inside job. Not just in the technological sense. Someone in Vale opened a gate that shouldn't be opened. Someone who knew what they were doing."
"Someone who knew how to read the anchors," Martin added. "Someone who knew your mother was important."
The air in my chest went thin. I felt the absence like a physical tug. My mother had hidden so much—names, dates, symbols—and I had believed the safest thing was to forget. That forgetting was a privilege nobody had given me.
Damian watched me, like he'd been watching me since the alley. His eyes had a question I didn't want to answer but already had: Could I trust the people who'd protected me last night? Could I trust him?
He said, softly, almost as if it were a confession: "If we're being honest, there are a few people in my company I don't trust. But Evelyn March? She's been with me longer than most of my marriages lasted."
The suggestion that someone long-entrenched could be the traitor hurt in a way I had no right to feel. Loyalty, after all, is part of the machinery that keeps empires from dissolving. If someone I'd never met had pulled the string, what did that mean for everything I thought I knew?
The presence inside me darted, displeased. > Evelyn March is neat. She will make a useful toy. It didn't like my hesitation to bruise its plans.
I was making plans of my own. Small, human things: to walk into Vale Corp dressed not as a peon but as a woman who knew how to ask precise questions. To look at Evelyn with the face of a daughter who wanted answers. To see what a lifetime of "obligations" looked like.
Damian's hand tightened around my wrist, a reminder and a warning. "Whatever you do," he said quietly, "be subtle."
The men nodded, waiting. Outside, a siren keened and then fell away. The city was still alive, and somewhere out there a press conference was already being scripted.
I closed my eyes for the smallest second and found a memory: my mother, ringing out a towel over a kitchen counter, humming a song that made the radio sound like a far-away ocean. The image tightened until it was a blade.
"Evelyn March," I repeated, letting the name roll in my mouth as if testing its weight. "Start with her."
Damian's eyes flicked. For a moment he looked like a man stunned into a new direction, then he nodded. "We'll move tomorrow night," he said. "We'll have a small team. You'll come with me."
My pulse quickened—not with fear, with a strange and private thrill. The presence hummed disapproval; it wanted me to be hidden, to let others do the dirty work. I wanted something else: to be the one who walked into the lion's den and snatched the secret from its throat.
Jase cleared his throat. "We'll need a story for Vale Corp security," he said. "A reason for you to be in 34B."
Damian's hand found my fingers, and the squeeze was both a shield and a bridle. "We'll make one," he said. "And we'll make sure Evelyn March regrets she ever logged into that node."
For the first time since I'd signed the contract and the ring had slipped into place, the plan felt like something I wasn't only being dragged through. It felt like something I could step into.
Outside, the city cleared its throat and started the day. Inside, we built a trap.