The summons came at dawn.
A small silver envelope, slipped under his door, sealed with a symbol that pulsed like a heartbeat.
AUDIT NOTICE: RESONANCE ANOMALY DETECTED.
Report to Hall of Compliance within one cycle.
The paper hummed faintly in his hand, like it was waiting for an answer.
He folded it once, twice, then burned it over the sink.
The ash rearranged itself midair into perfect lines of text before fading out completely.
> "You've been seen," Ashveil murmured. "They can smell thought."
"I know," Cael said quietly. "That's why we're not going there."
---
Lioren was already packing when he reached the Den.
Jars dimmed one by one as she shut down the echo vaults. The sound of faint laughter, whispers, memories — all snuffed out like candles.
"They've quarantined C-Null," she said. "Every sector below the main grid's being scrubbed. If we stay, we're data."
"Then where?"
"The Thread Tunnels. Old infrastructure from before the first Reset. The Order doesn't scan there; it messes with their frequency alignment."
She stopped moving suddenly, staring at him.
"You're humming."
"What?"
"Listen."
He did — and there it was.
A faint resonance coming from him, too rhythmic to be heartbeat.
A pattern repeating itself in slow, perfect intervals.
"Your field's active," she said. "You're broadcasting."
"Broadcasting what?"
She met his eyes. "Memory."
---
The city changed around them as they moved.
Above, drones flew in triangular formations, their beams sweeping the streets. Every time a beam passed, the world flickered — colors inverted, shapes blurred, people momentarily froze like frames in a film reel.
The Order called it a Reality Alignment Pass.
To everyone else, it was called cleansing.
Each sweep erased anomalies: graffiti, stray echoes, sometimes entire buildings.
By the time the light faded, it was as if those things had never existed.
Cael whispered, "They're deleting people."
Lioren didn't answer. She was watching her reflection in a storefront window.
It didn't move when she did.
---
They reached the Thread Tunnels just as the alarms began.
A deep, mechanical tone echoed through Vaelith, resonating in bones and glass.
People dropped to their knees in the street, eyes blank, repeating the same words:
> "Audit complete. Compliance verified."
Lioren's voice was a whisper. "That's the Audit Command. It wipes surface memories—everyone forgets the last twenty hours. Efficient, isn't it?"
"Does it work on you?"
She smiled faintly. "Not anymore."
---
In the tunnels, the air tasted like rust and ink.
Thick cables ran along the ceiling, pulsing with faint blue light — old neural lines, remnants of the first world-net that had recorded human consciousness before the Resets began.
Lioren placed her hand on one. "These still hum," she said. "They remember voices the Order tried to silence."
Cael touched the cable too — and flinched.
Instantly, sound flooded his head: hundreds of overlapping whispers, fragments of thoughts, unfinished sentences.
> don't let them name you—
the sea remembers—
we were gods once—
He jerked his hand away. "They're still alive in there."
"Alive isn't the word," Lioren said. "They're archived. Frozen at the moment of erasure. The Order calls it mercy."
"Mercy," Cael repeated bitterly. "That's one word for it."
---
A vibration rolled through the tunnel.
The lights flickered.
Then, without warning, the walls rippled — like heat through glass — and a white shape stepped out of the distortion.
It wore no face. Just a mask of polished chrome and a symbol etched across the forehead:
O-Δ. Audit Unit.
Lioren drew her sigil, but the thing was faster. Its arm extended, fracturing into dozens of needle-like strands that pierced the floor.
Reality warped around it — the tunnel straightened, smoothed, rewrote itself.
> "They're flattening memory," Ashveil hissed. "Run."
Cael didn't move. His mark pulsed. The hum in his body rose, syncing with the machine's tone.
He could feel it—reading him, trying to file him under " anomaly," trying to erase the record of his existence.
But resonance works both ways.
He took a breath.
And remembered.
The Bloom. The glass. The voices that refused silence.
"Remember," he said aloud.
The tunnel cracked like ice. Every whisper in the cables screamed at once, flooding the air with noise. The Audit Unit staggered, its shape glitching — too many memories, too many truths forced into its code.
Then it imploded, folding inward into nothing.
When the echoes faded, Lioren stared at him, face pale.
"You just turned memory into a weapon."
He shook his head. "No. I just reminded it it was alive."
---
They kept walking until the tunnel split into darkness.
Above them, the city's lights flickered — brief, synchronized blinks, like Vaelith was holding its breath.
Then, far away, something answered back.
Another hum.
Deeper. Older.
Lioren looked up. "That's not the city."
"No," Cael said quietly. "That's the world waking up."
---