CHAPTER 6
The corridor that led to Sublevel 9 smelled of iron and old ozone, as if the prison itself had been rewired in a thunderstorm. Metal grates lined the floor—grates that whispered, hummed, and leaked static into the soles of your boots. Blackridge's breath came from beneath: something vast and mechanical moving in slow, patient circles. Every light overhead was fitted with a tiny, circular housing the size of a fist—the housings held surveillance drones when they retracted, and eyes when they deployed. They were called vultures because they moved like scavengers, and because they never blinked.
Dorian moved ahead with the silent confidence of someone who'd walked these veins a hundred times. Kade followed close, hood up, collar humming faintly against his throat. His palms still ached from the makeshift fight in E-17, and the taste of adrenaline lingered metallic on his tongue. He kept scanning—tiling the space in his mind into patterns: tile size, flush of screws, positions of the vents, cadence of the barking speakers. He cataloged movement like a man catalogues stars, and from those notes he made predictions.
"Two vultures on patrol," Dorian murmured without looking back. "North wall in fifteen, south sweep in nine. We cross during the overlap."
Kade didn't need the numbers; he felt them. He could hear the faint mechanical start-up of the north vulture before it rounded the bend—a high, thin whine, like a wasp. He counted the seconds between the whines and exhaled. Timing—always timing.
They moved like dancers. Dorian, a silent pivot; Kade, a ghost by the pipes. He had learned to use the prison's rhythm the way a composer uses bars of silence. When they reached the service alcove, Dorian slid a mag-card toward the lock panel. The breaker panel flashed a patient yellow: **ACCESS DENIED**.
"Of course," Dorian said softly. "They'd make it sting."
Kade studied the panel and the little housing above it. The vulture's path took it directly above the alcove in seven seconds. He saw the tiny seams where the housing opened and how the panel's sensor field would spike when the drone passed, blinding the sensor for exactly 4.2 seconds.
He licked his lips. "We'll make it two illusions for the vultures," he said. "I'll create a thermal ghost—an oscillation with the corridor vent. You take the panel while they scan the phantom."
"How?" Dorian asked.
Kade's fingers found a thin strip of metal near the grate, half-loosened by rust. He pried it free, exposing the hidden thermal conduit: a narrow tube that carried heated coolant. He draped two rags over it and began to press them together, making a crude dam. He whispered to Dorian, "Noise in three. Heat in five. Move in seven."
Dorian's eyes narrowed into slits—equal parts caution and admiration. He nodded.
Kade dampened the rag with the spit he didn't realize he'd collected, tamping it to shape small bursts of vapor. He struck a tiny spark against the pipe's rust to create a tiny glow—nothing to set the place aflame, only to create a heat bloom. On cue, the north vulture dipped, its lens sweeping the alcove. The drone's sensors were calibrated to detect human thermal profiles; Kade's bloom presented a shifting thermal signature that mimicked a pacing guard's silhouette—shoulders, hesitant breath, the slumped warmth of someone trying not to be seen.
The north vulture paused higher, lens tracking the illusion. The south vulture rounded the bend just after and locked onto the same patch of warped heat. Both units began an automatic higher-resolution scan, their microblades trimming air with a whisper. Their cameras recorded the phantom's micro-movements and then briefly retracted for data compression—exactly 4.2 seconds that Kade had predicted and desperately needed.
Dorian slid his hand across the panel, the stolen card singing contact with an internal relay as if it had been waiting for a lover's touch. The door blinked green. The panel released a soft click.
They were in.
The breath they had been holding exhaled all at once, but they kept moving. Sublevel 9 felt older than the rest of Blackridge: the air was dryer, the lights colder, and the hum beneath their feet had a cadence like a sleeping thing's inhalation. Passageways opened into larger rooms—glass-fronted viewing galleries where technicians observed cages and chairs. Thick, armored doors led to areas named with bureaucratic cruelty: **NEURO-DISSECTION BAY**, **COGNITIVE ISOLATION**, **MEMORY EXTRACTION**.
Kade recognized none of the medical jargon and everything about it. He had seen the names before: in classified leaks that existed only in the corners of his memory—snippets Elias once fed him over late-night calls. He'd laughed off the worst of the stories back then, called them conspiracy boilovers. He didn't laugh now.
"This is beyond interrogation," Dorian murmured. "This is harvest."
They reached the registry—an armored glass terminal sat in a niche like an altar. Dorian kept watch while Kade, fingers steady though his throat felt like sand, fed the guard card into the reader and opened the restricted database. A login prompt shivered across the glass. Kade typed the first thing that came into his head: a sequence he'd heard Elias mutter once, a mnemonic for a memory vault—**EV-27**.
The screen blinked. A list scrolled up.
**VAULT ENTRIES:
EV-27 — VANCE, ELIAS — STATUS: DECEASED — LOG DATE: 34-08-12**
**EV-27 — VANCE, ELIAS — STATUS: UNKNOWN LOCATION — CLASS: HIGH VALUE — LOG DATE: 34-08-12**
**SUBORDINATE NOTATIONS: RELOCATION: MAW NODE 03 — TRANSFER VERIFIED**
**ARCHIVE TAGS: PARENT: SVANCE (SCYLLA); PARALLAX NODE: PARTIAL**
Kade felt the world tilt the way it had the night the message was carved into his kitchen counter. *Partial.* The word scraped like a fingernail over a blackboard. Their mother's name—SVance. Scylla, the myth reborn as a program. Parallax. The architecture he and Elias had joked about in university—now a kernel label.
Dorian's breath was a soft engine beside him. "Maw Node 03," he said. "Not a pleasant address."
"What is the Maw?" Kade asked.
Dorian's fingers hovered over the screen as if it were a live wire. "Primitive euphemism for a deep extraction unit. You go in, and they don't merely ask questions; they rewrite what you answer. They use neural scaffolding to harvest associative memory. They are not interested in facts anymore—they want *truth as encoded in biology*."
Kade's throat tightened. He scrolled to the audio logs attached to Elias' entry. The first file was a two-second clip, garbled, clipped, as if a needle had jumped on an old record. He played it.
A voice—Elias' voice, ragged and thin—whispered three words through static:
**"Parallax. Burn it."**
Then the clip cut.
Kade's hands shook, not from the chill of Sublevel 9, but because someone—somewhere—had forced the sound out of Elias and left it as a brittle breadcrumb.
Dorian looked at him. "They moved him to Maw Node 03 to break the Parallax architecture out of his head."
"How many people know about Parallax?" Kade asked. His voice was small in the metallic room.
"Enough to make it dangerous," Dorian said. "Not enough to stop them."
They lingered, because there was nothing else to do but linger and think and catalog and then move. Kade downloaded everything he could on a scuffed drive Dorian produced—the kind of device that said: *I've been to the right black markets.* The list was enormous and sanitized: memos redacted, names blacked out, experiments annotated in that bureaucratic voice that made cruelty sterile.
A faint click from the corridor made them both look up.
Kade's peripheral vision caught the shutter of a vulture sled. One of the drones had descended to field level and projected a holographic signature across the registry—a circular light that scanned for unauthorized access.
They did not have long. Dorian hit a key to begin the transfer and then they ran—because running was the only thing that made your limbs not feel like cold metal in a world that wanted to silence you.
They ducked into a maintenance alcove and the transfer completed, but the drone's scan pinged the alcove door sequence with a soft, menacing chime. The scanner pinged three times and then escalated—sending a high-priority alert.
"Extraction crews," Dorian breathed. "They'll show up in ninety seconds."
Kade thought of Elias on a table, whispers in his ear not his own, of parallax nodes and maternal bloodlines. He felt an animal thud in his chest—a combination of dread and a rising, calcified anger. Pattern recognition did not help him with what to *feel*, only what to *do*. But he could do something.
He looked at the maintenance schematic and noticed the exhaust ducts: thin, long shafts that ran like veins under Vulture Bay. He estimated the drone maintenance cycle—small blind intervals when the drones returned to charge, exactly thirty-seven seconds on this schedule. He saw deadlines and windows where metal slept.
"We leave in twenty," he said.
Dorian looked at him as if seeing his brain exposed. "You're going to do what?"
Kade smiled without humor. "Not run."
"No?"
"No. We build a radiator phantom—then ride the drones to their nest."
Dorian's eyebrows rose. "You mean chain-swarm them back into the housing?"
Kade shook his head. "I mean we cram the maintenance hatch with decoys—magnetic flares, heat blooms—force the drones to return, and when they do, we throw them into confusion long enough to piggyback to the nesting bay and cut the root server."
"You'll blow the entire surveillance grid," Dorian said.
"And we'll reveal whatever they're hiding in the Maw." Kade looked at the downloaded files again. His fingers tightened around the drive. "If we don't, they'll extract Elias into someone else's vocabularies and the Parallax will die with him."
Dorian considered the risk, then nodded. He always nodded when Kade's mind folded the world into a workable thing. "Fine. But we do it clean. No body parts, no theatrics. Only the method."
They set the traps: small metal plates rigged to the exhaust vents with scavenged capacitors and the soft, sticky residue of lubricant smeared to create thermal irregularities. Kade fashioned the flares by ripping filament from old data strips and folding them into a brittle flower. When the vultures returned, dazzled by the multiple false positives Kade had sown, their cameras painted the world in fractured thermal mosaics. The drones rotated, descending in confusion, retracting toward their nests like startled birds.
Kade felt his pulse and the sound of the prison beneath him synchronize into a slow, dangerous music. He and Dorian slipped from alcove to alcove, following the confused bees to the nesting bay. When they reached the maintenance ladder, a metallic hand reached out from the dark and covered Kade's mouth.
A guard.
Close. Too close.
The light from the ladders threw a silhouette on the wall—three figures pressed against the hatch. Voices barked in the distance: **"Noncompliance. Detention team en route."**
Kade's heart slammed. He could have run. He could have detonated the flares and created a larger panic. Instead, he curled his fingers into a muscle memory trick he'd learned from Elias—an involuntary tic Elias once used to memorize long code sequences. He felt his breath in a pattern: inhale for four, hold for two, exhale for six. A simple metronome. It's what he did to stay perfectly still.
The guard's hand tightened.
Then Dorian's voice, low and urgent, whispered into Kade's ear, "Now."
Kade snapped the guard's wrist with a precise motion that broke bone without screaming. The guard slumped, unconscious. Dorian clambered up and they ducked into the ladder. The nesting bay was a cathedral of idle drones, dark and sleeping, their lenses dim like closed eyes. Wires hung like curtains. At the room's center sat a server array—an oblong beast with racks of drives humming faintly.
Kade moved toward it with the reverence of a man approaching a sacred text. He snapped the drive into the port and initiated a data siphon. The progress bar crawled like a worm under an old leaf.
Outside, an alarm screamed—short, then sharp—a different tone than the registry scanner had made. The vulture bay's outer doors sealed—a thick, hydraulicked bone closing the tomb. Red lights strobed.
Kade saw movement in his peripheral vision—figures rushing through the maintenance corridors, boots hitting metal. One figure separated from the pack and moved with a different gait: not the mechanical sway of extraction techs, but the tight, efficient step of a man who had always been in charge. The figure wore a long coat and moved with purpose to the bay's center.
He looked up.
Director Halima Arden.
She surveyed the room like a judge approaching a gallows.
Her eyes found Kade and they locked.
For a heartbeat, in a space of metal and humming electronics, they were the only two people who mattered. Everything collapsed into the point of her stare: the drive in Kade's hand, the downloaded files, the name **EV-27** on a screen, the hint of memory tape waiting to be spun.
She smiled a small, professional smile.
"You should not have come here, Mr. Vance."
Kade's mouth was dry. He smiled too, because that was what they called courage. "You should not have hidden it," he said.
She cocked her head. "What will you do when you find out what your brother became?"
Kade thought of Elias in a dark room, his voice brittle on a broken log: *Parallax. Burn it.* He thought of his mother's name, Scylla, and of blood being more than blood.
The server finished the transfer.
A single file remained on the progress bar—**CORE.ARCHIVE.PARALLAX**.
It blinked.
Kade hit the extract.
At the same moment, the bay lights flared to white.
And from the frame of the hatch, a dozen armored figures rushed in, their silhouette a black bloom against white light.
The vulture bay became a cage.
Kade tasted copper.
He had gotten the file.
He had expected capture.
He had not expected Arden's smile to feel like victory.
"We have what we came for," she said softly, and the crowd stepped forward.
Dorian's hand found Kade's sleeve with a pressure that said: *Trust me*.
Kade closed his eyes for one hard beat and listened to the pattern of his own breath. Then, in the voice of a man who would not let the Maw swallow what was left of his family's name, he opened his mouth and began to hum a quick, irritating melody—one that chopped rhythm into jagged fragments, an internal metronome Elias used to break guards' focus.
It was not a fight of fists anymore. It was a war of structure: of pattern against pattern, of memory snatching against memory saving. He began to move—not with force, but with inevitability. He had already mapped their next beats.
When Arden raised a hand to order restraint, a drone—one of the confused vultures from outside—burst the bay wall in a convulsing, reeling arc, struck a conduit, and the power hiccupped.
Small chaos is a masterstroke in a room built for precision.
Kade seized it.
He slammed the drive into his palm and ran for the service ladder.
The extraction team converged.
Dorian followed.
Blackridge roared.
They did not get far.
A net of sticky filament dropped from the rafters and wrapped around Kade like a living web; the world became muffled, and the lights went slashed to a pulsing red that painted Arden's face in theatrical crimson.
He was caught, but not broken.
He had the file.
And somewhere, in the static of his trembling hands, Elias' two words played again and again, thin and brittle:
"Parallax. Burn it."
Kade braced for whatever came next—because whatever it was, it would not be ordinary.