"The Old Quarter dissolves," the woman repeated, tightening her grip on the heavy iron wrench. "So unless you want to turn into mist, step away from the chair."
Lyric looked at the sleeping old man, then back at the woman. The static in Lyric's head was buzzing in rhythm with the ticking clocks.
"We aren't here to hurt him," Lyric said, slowly lowering the ceramic sword but not sheathing it yet. "We just escaped the City. The Spire is gone. The Fog is coming in."
"I know," the woman snapped. "Why do you think he's asleep? The moment the Isolation Protocol fell, the entropy pressure spiked. Janus had to go into a deep dive just to keep the streets solid. He's basically a living dam right now."
"He's a Wi-Fi router made of meat?" Rook whispered to Valerius.
"Crude," Valerius muttered. "But accurate."
The woman narrowed her eyes at Rook. She looked tired—grease smudges under her eyes, her overalls patched with duct tape. "I'm Mira. I keep the machinery running while he keeps the reality running. Who are you, and how did you get past the gears?"
"We solved the riddle," Valerius said. "I'm Valerius. This is Rook. And the one with the sword is Lyric."
Mira's eyes flicked to Lyric again. She paused, looking at the bandage on Lyric's hand, the torn clothes, and the intense, hollow look in Lyric's eyes.
"Lyric," Mira repeated. She lowered the wrench. "Janus talks about you."
Lyric froze. "He does?"
"In his sleep," Mira said. "He mutters. 'Unit 7'. 'The Variable'. ' The Child who forgot'." She walked over to a workbench covered in gears and set the wrench down. "He's been waiting for you for a long time."
"Well, I'm here," Lyric said. "Wake him up."
"I told you, I can't," Mira said, grabbing a rag to wipe her hands. "If I wake him, his concentration breaks. The Fog swallows this tower in seconds. We all die."
"So we're trapped," Rook said, looking around at the ticking clocks. "Outside, there are mud-monsters trying to eat us. Inside, we have a sleeping wizard we can't touch. Great. Fantastic."
"We need to talk to him," Valerius said, stepping forward. "We need to know how to stabilize the city permanently. If we can't wake him… can we go in?"
Mira stopped wiping her hands. She looked at Valerius.
"Go in?" she asked.
"Into the projection," Valerius said. "He's an Architect. He's building a construct in his mind to hold back the Fog. If it's a construct, it has an interface."
Mira hesitated. She looked at the old man, Janus, his chest rising and falling rhythmically under the heavy book.
"There is a way," Mira admitted. "But it's dangerous. It's a Sync-Link. Old tech. Pre-Guild."
She pointed to the silver pendant around Janus's neck.
"That's an Anchor," she said. "It grounds his consciousness so he doesn't get lost in the entropy. If you want to enter his mind, you need a matching frequency. You need another Anchor."
Lyric felt a cold pit in their stomach.
"I had one," Lyric said quietly. "Identical to that. I threw it in a sewer."
Mira stared at Lyric. "You threw away an Anchor? Do you have any idea how rare those are? That's pure stabilized memory metal. It's priceless."
"I had to," Lyric said. "The Guild was tracking it."
"Well," Mira sighed, rubbing her temples. "Without an Anchor, if you try to sync with him, the entropy will tear your mind apart. You'll become an Echo."
"Wait," Valerius said. He looked at Lyric. "Lyric doesn't need an Anchor."
"Why not?" Mira asked.
"Because Lyric is a Void," Valerius said. "The entropy eats memories. It eats data. Lyric… doesn't have any. Lyric erased their own past. There's nothing for the Fog to grab onto."
Mira looked skeptical. She walked up to Lyric, pulling a jeweler's loupe from her pocket. She peered into Lyric's eyes.
"Gray," she murmured. "No spark. No static feedback." She pulled back. "You really are empty."
"Is that a yes?" Lyric asked.
"It's a 'maybe you won't die immediately'," Mira said. "If you touch the pendant, I can tune the resonance to pull you in. But once you're in his head… I can't help you. His mind is… cluttered. It's fifty years of blueprints and regrets."
"I'll find him," Lyric said.
"And Lyric," Valerius added, his voice serious. "Don't erase anything inside. If you erase a memory in there, you might lobotomize him. And then the Fog wins."
"Don't touch anything. Got it."
Lyric walked up to the chair.
Janus looked peaceful. He looked like a grandfather taking a nap after Sunday dinner. But the air around him hummed with immense pressure.
"Ready?" Mira asked. She placed her hand on a brass dial on the side of the chair.
"Ready," Lyric said.
"Rook, watch the door," Lyric ordered. "If those things break in…"
"I'll throw a clock at them," Rook promised, gripping his laser cutter.
Lyric reached out.
The silver pendant on Janus's chest seemed to vibrate as Lyric's hand got closer.
Lyric touched it.
SNAP.
The room vanished.
The ticking clocks vanished. The smell of oil vanished.
Lyric was falling.
Not down a shaft, but through colors. Blue blueprints, red warning signs, flashes of faces, buildings that folded in on themselves.
Then, impact.
Lyric hit solid ground.
Lyric stood up and looked around.
It wasn't a room. It was a field. But the grass was made of green glass, and the sky was a grid of white lines on black.
In the distance, a house stood. It was a simple, wooden farmhouse with a porch. It looked completely out of place in the digital landscape.
"Janus?" Lyric called out.
The voice didn't echo. It just drifted away.
Lyric walked toward the house. As they got closer, the scenery flickered. For a second, the glass grass turned into mud, and the black sky turned into the gray Fog. Then it snapped back to the idyllic farmhouse.
He's struggling, Lyric realized. The Fog is pressing in.
Lyric stepped onto the porch. A rocking chair sat there, empty.
The front door was open.
Lyric walked inside.
The interior wasn't a house. It was a library. Infinite shelves stretched up into darkness, filled with glowing blue books.
And there, standing by a table covered in maps, was Janus.
But not the old man from the chair. This version of Janus was young—maybe thirty. He wore a sharp suit and looked energetic, focused.
He was drawing a line on a map with a fountain pen.
"The vector is wrong," Janus muttered to himself, ignoring Lyric. "If I curve the wall here, the pressure collapses the Low-Light district. But if I don't, the Fog gets in."
"Janus," Lyric said.
The man didn't look up. "Busy. The calculations are drifting."
"I'm not a calculation," Lyric said. "I'm Lyric."
Janus paused. The pen stopped moving.
Slowly, he looked up. His eyes were the same piercing blue as the pendant's glow.
"Lyric," he said. A smile spread across his face—warm, but sad. "You're late. I expected you twenty years ago."
"I was… detained," Lyric said. "We need your help. The Spire is gone. The wall is down."
"I know," Janus said, putting the pen down. "I felt the snap. That's why I'm holding the door shut." He gestured to the walls of the library. "But my arms are getting tired, kid. I can't hold the ocean back forever."
"Valerius said you know how to fix it," Lyric said. "Permanently."
"Fix it?" Janus laughed. He walked around the table. "You can't fix a lie, Lyric. You can only tell the truth. And the truth is… this city shouldn't exist."
He waved his hand. The library shelves shifted. Books flew off and opened, projecting images into the air.
Images of a burning world. A sun that was too bright. Oceans that were dried up.
"The Real World," Janus said softly. "The world before Mnemos. It died, Lyric. We broke it. So we built this… this simulation. A dome of memory over a graveyard of ash."
Lyric watched the images. "So the Fog… isn't entropy? It's just the outside?"
"The Fog is the nothingness between the lie and the truth," Janus said. "We needed an Anchor to hold the illusion in place. A First Memory to build the foundation on."
He looked at Lyric intently.
"Do you know what the Anchor is, Lyric?"
"A heart," Lyric said, remembering the dream. "A glass heart."
"A human heart," Janus corrected. "Encased in stasis. But a heart can't beat forever without a body."
Janus stepped closer. He looked at Lyric with a mixture of pity and hope.
"Why do you think you have a Void, Lyric? Why can you erase things?"
Lyric shook their head. "I don't know."
"Because you were the prototype," Janus said. "Before we built the Anchor… we tried to build a Vessel. Someone who could hold the First Memory inside them and walk around. A living Anchor."
Lyric took a step back. "Me?"
"You rejected the graft," Janus said. "Your immune system… your soul… rejected the weight of the world. It didn't fill you up; it hollowed you out. It made you a Void. So the Guild cast you out. They wiped you and threw you away, and they built the Spire instead."
Lyric looked at their hands. The power to erase. It wasn't a weapon. It was an emptiness where the world was supposed to be.
"So I'm a failed experiment," Lyric whispered.
"No," Janus said. "You're the backup plan."
The library shook. A crack appeared in the ceiling, leaking gray fog.
"I can't hold it much longer," Janus said, his form flickering, aging rapidly from thirty to eighty and back again. "The Guild is gone. The illusion is failing. If you want to save the people… you can't just rebuild the wall. You have to finish the job."
"How?"
"You have to find the Anchor Point," Janus said. "It's hidden beneath the city. In the Roots. You have to go there, Lyric. And you have to decide."
"Decide what?"
"Whether to let the Anchor die and let reality crash in," Janus said. "Or to take the burden yourself. To become the Vessel you were meant to be."
CRACK.
The wall of the library shattered. A massive tentacle of gray fog lashed in.
"Wake up!" Janus shouted, shoving Lyric backward. "Go to the Roots! Find the Heart!"
Lyric flew backward, out of the library, out of the farmhouse, falling back into the dark.
Lyric gasped, eyes snapping open.
The smell of oil and clocks returned instantly.
"Lyric!" Rook was shaking them.
Lyric was back in the chair, hand clutching the pendant on the old man's chest.
"I saw him," Lyric gasped, letting go. "I saw… everything."
"Good," Mira shouted from the door. She was bracing it with her shoulder. BANG. BANG. The Echoes were slamming against the gears. "Because we have company!"
"Did he tell you how to stop the Fog?" Valerius asked, helping Lyric stand.
"Not stop it," Lyric said, finding their balance. The static was back, but now it had a direction. A pull. "We have to go deeper. Beneath the Underground. To the Roots."
"The Roots?" Rook looked pale. "That's a myth. That's where the water filtration intake is."
"It's where the Anchor is," Lyric said. "And we have to get there before the city dissolves."
SCREECH.
The gear-door buckled. A gray hand reached through a gap.
"We're leaving," Lyric said, drawing the sword. "Mira, is there a back door?"
Mira grabbed a heavy bag of tools. "There's a coal chute. It drops into the sub-basement. But it's one-way."
"Story of my life," Rook muttered.
"Janus stays here," Mira said, looking at the sleeping old man. "He's holding the line. I go with you."
"Let's go," Lyric said.
They ran for the coal chute.