The Vestige occupied a converted water treatment facility in Sublevel 9, accessible only through maintenance tunnels marked with symbols that meant nothing to corporate surveillance but everything to the desperate. Bataar followed Origami's directions—three lefts past the fungal farms, down through the broken gravity well where you had to pull yourself along handrails, then through the chamber where failed enhancement subjects lived, their bodies twisted by black-market augmentations that had gone wrong.
One of them reached for Bataar with an arm that branched into three malformed appendages, each tipped with fingers that didn't quite understand what fingers were supposed to be. "Help," the thing whispered. "Please. They said I'd be strong. They said—"
Bataar kept walking. The subcity was full of people who'd gambled on cheap enhancement and lost. Prosperity Heights didn't have safety regulations in the depths. You paid your money, took your chances, and if the gene therapy turned your skeleton to calcium slush or the neural implant made you experience time backwards, that was your problem.
The Vestige's entrance was a pressure door marked with a red cross that predated the corporate era—ancient medical symbol from when healing was about saving lives instead of maximizing shareholder value. Bataar pressed the access panel. A camera swiveled, focusing on him with organic smoothness. Someone had built a bio-synthetic security system, which meant real money and serious paranoia.
"State your business." The voice came from speakers, but also seemed to emanate from the walls themselves. Biological neural network integrated into the structure.
"I'm a timeline refugee. Cascade Event zeta-7. I need stabilization treatment for quantum degradation."
Silence. Then: "Remove your jacket. Show your ports."
Bataar complied. His biosignature port gleamed dully in the emergency lighting—original equipment from his erased timeline, analog technology that marked him as primitive compared to the digital neural stacks everyone else had.
"You're not wearing corporate tracking markers. Unusual."
"I can't afford them."
"Good answer." The door hissed open. "Enter slowly. Hands visible. Any weapons will be detected and you'll be neutralized before you register pain."
Bataar entered into a surprisingly clean medical facility. The walls were some kind of bio-synthetic material that actively filtered air—he could see the surface undulating slightly, processing the subcity's toxic atmosphere into something breathable. Medical equipment lined the walls, mixture of corporate-grade diagnostic machines and improvised devices built from scavenged components.
A woman stood in the center of the room, wearing surgical scrubs that had been patched so many times they were more patch than original fabric. Her age was impossible to determine—she had the smooth skin of genetic enhancement, but her eyes held the exhaustion of someone who'd seen too much. Neural ports studded her temples, but they were medical-grade precision work, nothing like Yesui's patchwork augmentations.
"Doctor Sarangerel?" Bataar asked.
"That's what they call me now. Used to be Lead Geneticist at Helios Clinics, Prosperity Heights branch. Now I'm unlicensed criminal providing medical care to people the system wants to disappear." She gestured to an examination table. "Sit. Let me scan you."
Bataar sat. Sarangerel pulled a handheld scanner from her coat, ran it over him with professional efficiency. The device beeped and hummed, its display showing biosignature patterns that made her frown.
"You're degrading faster than standard refugee rates. How long since you jumped timelines?"
"Six months."
"You should be stable by now. Instead, your quantum coherence is dropping weekly. You're experiencing cellular decoherence, aren't you? Memory gaps? Moments where your hand doesn't feel like it's yours?"
Bataar had noticed. Sometimes he'd look at his reflection and swear his face wasn't quite right, like reality couldn't decide which version of him belonged in this timeline. "It's manageable."
"It's terminal. Another eight months, maybe ten, you'll start phasing. Consciousness will remain but body will become probabilistic—you'll exist in quantum superposition, partially here and partially nowhere. Eventually you'll decohere completely." She set down the scanner. "I can stabilize you. Gene therapy to anchor your cellular structure to this timeline's quantum field. But it's expensive, and it's going to hurt like hell."
"How expensive?"
"Sixty thousand scrip. Or equivalent barter if you have skills I need."
Bataar had fifty thousand from Skovgaard. Not enough. "What kind of skills?"
Sarangerel studied him. "Origami says you're asking questions about the Anchors. That you took corporate job hunting people who shouldn't exist." Her expression hardened. "I treat timeline refugees here. People the corporations tried to erase. You understand what would happen if Kronos Solutions found this place?"
"I understand."
"Do you? Let me be explicit. I have forty-three patients in this facility right now. People pulled from pruned timelines seconds before deletion. They're alive because someone broke every corporate law to save them. If you're working for Kronos, if you're here to gather intelligence, I need to know now. Because I have protocols in place. You won't leave. Your body will go into the reclamation system, and your consciousness will be fragmented across so many encrypted partitions that even quantum reconstruction won't put you back together."
Bataar met her eyes. "I'm not here for Kronos. Not anymore."
"Then why are you here?"
Good question. Bataar thought about the fifty thousand scrip in his account. Thought about Skovgaard's forty-eight hour deadline. Thought about the faces of sixteen people who shouldn't exist, and the anonymous caller who said you're one of us.
"Because my timeline got erased for corporate profit. Seventy million people. I survived because I was lucky and connected. Everyone else—my parents, my neighbors, people who'd never heard of quantum patents or timeline stability—they're gone. And I've spent six months telling myself it was legal. It was necessary. It was just the way the system works." He paused. "I don't want to believe that anymore."
Sarangerel's expression softened slightly. "Belief doesn't change reality. The system is what it is. Corporations own timelines the same way they own genetics, consciousness, and spacetime itself. Fighting them is suicide."
"Then why do you do this?"
She was quiet for a moment. Then she walked to a partition at the far end of the facility and pulled it back. Behind it, medical pods lined the walls—twelve of them, each containing a patient in induced coma, their bodies surrounded by shimmering fields that looked like localized reality stabilization.
"My daughter was seventeen," Sarangerel said quietly. "Branch timeline, three years ago. Her branch developed alternative energy technology that threatened Axiom Dynamics' atomic power monopoly. The branch was classified as economic threat and pruned. Standard corporate genocide. I had displacement authorization because I was senior executive. She was on school trip, wrong place, wrong time. No authorization."
Sarangerel's voice remained clinical, but her hands trembled. "I tried to get her out. Filed emergency requests. Called in favors. Axiom Dynamics said no—too much liability, too much scrutiny. Policy was policy. So I watched my daughter's timeline get erased while I stood in baseline reality, safe and employed and complicit."
She gestured to the pods. "These people are someone's daughters. Someone's parents. Someone's friends. The Anchors pull them from dying timelines, and I keep them alive long enough to integrate into baseline reality. It doesn't change what happened to my daughter. But it's something."
Bataar approached the pods. Inside, he could see the patients—a teenage boy, an elderly woman, a middle-aged man with working-class calluses on his hands. Their bodies flickered occasionally, like badly tuned holos, reality struggling to accept their existence.
"How long do they stay in pods?"
"Depends on their quantum coherence. Some stabilize in weeks. Others..." She touched one pod containing a young woman whose body was almost transparent. "This one has been here four months. Her timeline was erased while she was mid-consciousness upload—she's stuck between digital and physical existence. I'm trying to anchor her, but it's fifty-fifty whether she solidifies or dissipates completely."
"And if she dissipates?"
"Then she joins the seventy million from your timeline and the billions from others. Erased. Not dead—worse. Never-existed."
Bataar stared at the flickering woman. She looked about twenty-five, with features that suggested East Asian heritage, though quantum decoherence made details uncertain. Her eyes moved beneath closed lids, consciousness dreaming in the space between existence and void.
"What was her name?"
"She doesn't remember. Timeline erasure corrupted her memory engrams. We call her Echo." Sarangerel checked the pod's readouts. "If she stabilizes, she'll need new identity anyway. The Anchors will give her one. New name, new history, new biosignature. She'll be someone else. It's the only way to survive."
Bataar thought about that. Erased from your original timeline, then erasing yourself again to hide from the corporations that killed your reality. Double non-existence.
"I need to meet the Anchors."
Sarangerel turned sharply. "Why?"
"Because I'm supposed to hunt them for Kronos Solutions. Because I took money to deliver them to erasure. Because—" He stopped. "Because I need to choose which ghost I want to be."
"And if I believe you're still working for Kronos? If I think you're infiltrating to gather intelligence?"
"Then do what you said. Fragment my consciousness and dump my body in reclamation. But I don't think you will. Because you need people like me. Timeline refugees who understand both sides. People who've seen corporate power from inside and outside."
Sarangerel studied him for long moment. Then she pulled out a handheld device—not standard comm, something improvised from scavenged components.
"I'm going to make a call. The Anchors will decide whether to meet you. If they say no, you leave this facility and never come back. If they say yes..." She paused. "Then you're committing to being enemy of the most powerful entities in existence. There's no walking away from that. No redemption. No second chances. You'll be ghost forever."
"I'm already ghost."
"No. Right now you're ghost who might fade back into the system. Might get legal citizenship, neural stack, genetic optimization. Might become real person again." She activated the device. "After this, you're ghost deliberately. That's different kind of non-existence."
Bataar thought about the fifty thousand scrip. About Skovgaard's deadline. About the sixteen faces and the millions more who'd been erased.
"Make the call."
Sarangerel spoke into the device, words in language Bataar didn't recognize—some kind of code or constructed tongue. The conversation lasted thirty seconds. Then she closed the device.
"They'll meet you. But not here. Too dangerous." She pulled out an old-style paper note, handwritten. "These are coordinates in Sublevel 14. Abandoned temporal research facility. Go tonight, 0300 hours. Come alone. If you're followed, the meeting is off and you're marked as hostile."
Bataar took the note. The coordinates were written in careful hand, anachronistic in age of digital everything.
"One more thing," Sarangerel said. "When you meet them, they're going to test you. They'll want proof you're not corporate asset. You need to demonstrate commitment."
"What kind of proof?"
"The kind that can't be faked. The kind that burns bridges." She returned to her medical station. "Your stabilization treatment will cost sixty thousand scrip, but I'll offer discount. Fifty thousand. Same amount Kronos paid you."
Bataar understood. Transfer the money to her, prove he'd abandoned the corporate contract. Burn the bridge.
He pulled out his comm, accessed his banking app. The fifty thousand scrip sat in his account. Enough for gene therapy. Enough to stop degrading. Enough to survive a few more months while he figured out how to become real person again.
He initiated transfer to Sarangerel's encrypted account.
Watched the balance drop to zero.
"Done."
Sarangerel checked her own device, confirmed receipt. "I'll begin your treatment after you meet with the Anchors. If you survive."
"If I don't?"
"Then I keep the money and use it to help the next ghost." She gestured toward the exit. "Get some rest. The Anchors don't tolerate weakness, and Sublevel 14 is dangerous even by subcity standards. People who go down that deep don't always come back."
Bataar left the Vestige and made his way back through the maintenance tunnels. The failed enhancement subjects were quieter now, some asleep, others simply staring at nothing with eyes that had stopped understanding what they were supposed to see.
His wrist port buzzed. Message from Skovgaard: "Status report overdue. Respond within one hour or I activate alternatives."
Bataar stared at the message. He could respond, lie, buy more time. Could try to play both sides, gather intelligence while pretending to help the Anchors.
Instead, he blocked Skovgaard's contact.
Blocked Origami too, for good measure.
Deleted his banking app—the empty account wasn't worth keeping track of.
In his converted storage unit apartment, Bataar lay on his bunk and stared at the ceiling where condensation gathered in permanent stains. His body felt strange, quantum decoherence making his edges uncertain. His left hand looked slightly transparent in the dim light.
Eight to ten months, Sarangerel had said. Then he'd start phasing. Consciousness without body. Ghost in the most literal sense.
The paper note with coordinates sat on his chest.Sublevel 14. 0300 hours. Alone.
Meeting people who saved refugees from corporate genocide.
People he'd been hired to hunt.
People who might be humanity's only resistance against timeline tyranny.
Or might be dangerous criminals destabilizing causality for ideology.
Bataar didn't know which.
But he knew he'd spent six months being ghost who played by corporate rules, hoping for permission to exist.
And he was tired of asking permission.
His alarm was set for 0200 hours. Three hours from now.
Enough time to rest.
Not enough time to change his mind.
In the subcity's perpetual gloom, surrounded by the desperate and the enhanced and the discarded, Bataar Khulan closed his eyes and waited for the moment when he'd stop being ghost running from erasure and start being ghost fighting back.
The ceiling dripped condensation like slow rain.
The sublevel lights flickered their amber warning.
And in Sublevel 14, in an abandoned facility where time itself had once been corporate property, the Anchors waited to judge whether one more refugee was worth saving.
Or worth erasing themselves.