The psych-evaluation was less an interrogation and more a sensory bombardment. Dan sat in a neutral-grey room while harmless-seeming patterns swirled on the walls, designed to trigger subconscious psychic leakage. A monitor displayed his biometrics: heart rate variability, pupillary response, galvanic skin response. Commander Vyas observed from behind a mirror, her presence a silent pressure.
The technician, a man with a kind face and unreadable eyes, spoke in a soothing monotone. "Just relax, Officer Singh. We're mapping any anomalous residues. The Echo was a Class-9 empathic imprint. Proximity exposure, even with dampening gear, requires assessment."
Dan focused on his breathing. In. Out. He thought of the mission parameters, the tactical layout of the pumping station. He carefully walled off the memory of Kiran's hand on his wrist, her voice—You blame yourself. He compartmentalized the dream of his stone hands. This was a skill as vital as marksmanship: the architecture of his own unknowing.
After an hour, the technician nodded. "Residual empathic signature is within acceptable bounds. Minor synaptic flare in the anterior cingulate cortex—the empathy center—but it's fading. You're clear, Officer."
As Dan stood to leave, the technician added, almost as an afterthought, "You may experience some… heightened oneiric activity. Vivid dreams. It's a normal purge process. Report any that feel intrusive."
Intrusive. The word clung to him as he walked the sterile halls back to his quarters. His dream of becoming stone didn't feel like a purge. It felt like an insertion.
He needed to move. To act. Static waiting was corrosive. He headed for the Site's small gym, a concrete box with basic equipment. He was halfway through a set of punishing pull-ups, the burn in his muscles a welcome, tangible reality, when the feeling struck.
It was a pull. A subtle, magnetic tug behind his navel, drawing his attention westward. It was the same sensation he'd felt upon waking, but stronger now, clarified by physical exertion. He dropped from the bar, landing silently, and closed his eyes. It wasn't a thought. It was a direction. An instinctive, unwanted compass point.
The Custodian is searching.
The thought wasn't his own. It arrived fully formed, cold and certain. It was the hook. The Echo hadn't just left empathy; it had left a trace of its own nature—a connection to the memory it once was. And if the Custodian was, as Kiran said, an "architect" who built with memories, then that trace might be a two-way street.
Dan showered quickly, the water failing to scrub away the psychic unease. Dressed, he made a decision. He needed to see the source. He needed to see the Echo.
Containment for an object of that grade was in Sub-level 3. His clearance got him through the first two biometric checkpoints. The third was a sealed bulkhead door outside the actual vault, manned by a guard named Ravi, a veteran with scars peeking from his collar.
"Officer Singh," Ravi said, his tone respectful but firm. "Vault's on environmental quarantine. Full diagnostic sweep."
"Understood. I just need visual confirmation for my after-action report. Commander Vyas's orders." The lie was smooth. The I.O. trained you to lie to everyone, sometimes even to yourself.
Ravi studied him for a beat, then shrugged. He tapped a code into a pad, and a small, thick viewport irised open in the center of the door. "One minute. Don't touch the comms."
Dan leaned in. The vault was a spherical chamber lined with copper and inscribed with concentric rings of Gurmukhi scripture that glowed with a soft, blue light. In the center, on a pedestal of etched crystal, sat the resonator. Inside it, the Echo churned.
It wasn't golden and peaceful anymore. It was agitated. A storm of light and shadow in the small crystal, flickering between the saint's profound forgiveness and jagged bolts of the fear, anger, and greed it had absorbed in the pumping station—the mercenary's remorse, Dan's own hardened resolve, the Custodian's hunger. It was learning. It was contaminated.
And the pull in Dan's gut spiked into a sharp, painful twist. He gasped, his hand going to his abdomen.
Here. You are here.
The voice was inside his skull, dry as forgotten bones. It was the same grinding stone quality from the pumping station, but now it was a whisper, carried along the psychic hook the Echo had embedded in him.
The viewport suddenly went black, not from the outside, but as if an inky tide had risen within the vault, swallowing the glowing scripts. The temperature at the door plummeted. Frost spiderwebbed across the metal.
Ravi swore, grabbing his sidearm. "Breach! Psychic backtrace breach!"
Alarms exploded into life, a deafening, pulsating shriek. Crimson light bathed the corridor.
But the Custodian wasn't here, not physically. It was projecting. Using Dan's connection to the Echo as a lifeline, a filament it could send its consciousness along. The blackness in the viewport coalesced into a familiar shape—the reflection of two pure, obsidian eyes.
YOU ARE THE CONDUIT. YOU TOUCHED THE CORNERSTONE. YOU WILL BRING IT TO ME.
The voice was a drill in Dan's mind. He stumbled back, clapping his hands over his ears, a useless gesture. He felt a cold, alien will pressing against his own, not to control, but to map. To find the route back to its prize.
"Singh! What's happening?" Ravi yelled, aiming his weapon uncertainly at the frosted door.
Dan couldn't answer. He was fighting a war inside his own head. He threw up every mental barrier he knew—visualizing steel walls, reciting I.O. cryptographic codes, focusing on the physical pain of his own fingernails digging into his palms. The pressure receded, but the cold presence lingered, a parasite on the edge of his awareness.
With a final, silent surge, the blackness vanished from the viewport. The frost receded, turning to droplets of water. The alarms cut off, leaving a ringing silence. The Echo in its vault resumed its agitated churn, now pulsing in a slow, rhythmic pattern that matched Dan's pounding heartbeat.
Ravi stared at him, weapon still raised, breath fogging in the chilled air. "Officer… your eyes."
Dan turned to a polished metal panel on the wall. Reflected back at him was his own face, pale and strained. But for a fleeting second, as the last of the psychic pressure faded, the edges of his irises held a faint, smoky black corona, like ink dispersing in water.
It was gone in a blink. But Ravi had seen it.
Footsteps pounded down the corridor. Vyas arrived with a security team. Her gaze went from the dripping door, to Ravi's shocked face, to Dan.
"Report," she commanded, her voice cutting through the tension.
"Psychic intrusion, Commander," Ravi said, his voice tight. "Backtrace via the asset. It… it spoke. Through Officer Singh."
All eyes turned to Dan. He felt the hook in his gut, now a constant, dull throb. A compass. A leash.
"It used me," Dan said, his voice raw. He met Vyas's eyes, no point in hiding it now. "The Echo left a connection. The Custodian can feel it. It knows the Echo is here. And it knows I'm attached."
Vyas's face was granite. The implications were catastrophic. Site Gurdwara was compromised. Dan was compromised. He was no longer just an officer. He was a beacon.
"Quarantine Officer Singh," Vyas ordered, her voice devoid of all emotion. "Full isolation suite. No external contact. And prepare the Echo for immediate transport to Site Khalasa. We're moving it."
As two security officers stepped towards him, Dan didn't resist. The drama of the alarm was over, replaced by the cold, clinical horror of his new reality. The fantasy of being the hunter was gone. The action had come to him. The romance of a connection had become a vulnerability.
He was the uninvited guest in his own mind. And the true owner of the hook in his soul was now listening.