The dark of the sub-levels was a living thing. It pressed against my eyes, thick and cold, but it was no longer silent. Through the new, terrifying sense granted by the pact, I could hear the darkness. It hummed with the residual echoes of a century of fear, pain, and sterile indifference. The walls themselves seemed to whisper of forgotten experiments, of muted screams absorbed by stone.
We ran, a discordant pair. My human lungs burned, each gasp scraping like sandpaper. Kaito flowed beside me, his movements a pained, liquid grace. His silver glow was deliberately dimmed to a faint moon-shimmer, just enough for my purely human eyes to see the outlines of pipes and archways. His tangled tails, a cumbersome burden, rustled against the floor like a retreating tide.
The memory of the servant's pass was a ghost-light in my mind, but it was fading, overwhelmed by the adrenal scream of the present. Which junction? Left? The memory showed a left, but the corridor before us forked three ways.
"Kaito—!"
"Left, then immediate right behind the flow-pipe," his voice was a strained thread in my mind, not through my ears. The bond. He was navigating, pulling from older, deeper spatial memories of this prison's construction. "They are close. Four. Resonances are sharp. Angry."
I swerved left, my shoulder brushing against a warm, vibrating pipe that thrummed with a low, mechanical echo. The right turn was there, a narrow gap almost hidden by the pipe's bulk. We squeezed through, my grey dress catching and tearing on a rusted bolt.
The sound of booted feet, methodical and spreading out, echoed in the main corridor behind us. They were splitting up. Hunting.
"This leads to a waste-ventilation shaft," Kaito's thought came, laced with distaste. "It will be… unpleasant."
"Unpleasant is alive," I thought back, the mental speech still a strange, involuntary reflex. The shaft's access hatch was a rusted wheel set in the wall. I grabbed it, my bare hands slipping. The metal screamed a memory of neglect and slow decay into my palms—a decade of dripping water, of being ignored. I gritted my teeth, shoved the echo aside, and heaved. It didn't budge.
A silver-furred arm reached past me. Kaito's clawed hand, elegant and powerful, closed over the wheel. With a sharp twist and a groan of protesting metal, it spun. He pulled the hatch open. A gust of air hit us, warm, damp, and carrying a cocktail of smells that made my eyes water: chemical waste, organic decay, and the ozone-tang of old magic.
"In," he commanded.
I scrambled into the cylindrical shaft, feet landing on a grating slick with unnameable residue. Kaito followed, folding his large form and massive tails into the space with surprising contortion. He pulled the hatch shut behind us, plunging us into a blackness so complete even his glow seemed smothered. The only light came from faint, sickly green bioluminescent fungi spotting the walls—nature's grim rebellion in this manufactured hell.
We stood frozen, listening. The sounds of pursuit passed our junction, faded. The immediate terror receded, leaving in its wake a trembling exhaustion so profound my knees threatened to buckle. The aftermath of the memory dive, the bond, the run—it was a cascade of trauma. I slumped against the slimy wall, shuddering.
"The cloak is holding," Kaito's mental voice was softer now, a murmur in the shared dark. "Your new resonance is muffled within mine. But the effort… is significant. For both of us."
I could feel it. A drain, a constant low-grade pull at the core of my being, like I was donating a steady stream of my own life force to maintain the psychic camouflage. And from him, I sensed a greater strain—the monumental effort of containing his own storm while enveloping me in it. He was a dam holding back an ocean, and he'd just carved a new channel.
"How long can you keep it up?" I asked, my mental voice thin.
"Long enough to get beyond the Steppes. Not much longer. We need shelter. A place to let the guard down. The Warrens."
Rylan. The Vesper Gearwright. The memory fragment of sonic agony and self-imposed exile surfaced. "Will he help?"
"He has no love for the Concordat. And he owes me a debt, for knowledge I once gave him on sound-dampening alloys." Kaito's thought was edged with grim certainty. "Whether he will help you is another question. Humans are not welcome in the Warrens."
I let out a shaky breath that was almost a laugh. "I'm not exactly just human anymore, am I?"
A pulse of something—not quite agreement, not quite pity—came down the bond. "No. You are something new. A hybrid echo. That may frighten him more."
We began to move through the shaft, a slow, careful procession. The way was treacherous, the grating loose in places. The fungal light glistened on strange, slow drips from above. My senses, hyper-alert, were assaulted. Every drip carried a faint, dying echo—a drop of solvent that once dissolved a beastman's binding, a trace of medicinal tonic, the salt of a forgotten tear. I was walking through a river of spectral pain, and without my mental wards, I was absorbing it all like a sponge.
A whimper escaped me as a particularly potent echo hit—a fragment of pure, animal terror from a creature being dragged down this shaft years ago.
Stop. The command was gentle but firm, from Kaito. You must learn to filter. To let the river flow past the stone. You are the stone. Your core is your own. Let the echoes be water.
I tried. I visualized the smooth marble walls, but they were gone, dissolved by the pact. Instead, I imagined a keystone, solid and unmoving in the centre of my mind. The terror-echo washed against it, and though I felt its chill, it did not flood me. I gasped in relief.
Good, his thought held a thread of approval. You learn fast, little wraith. A survival trait.
After what felt like hours, the shaft began to slope upwards. The air grew slightly cooler, less foul. A new sound intruded—a distant, rhythmic, mechanical thrum, felt more through the grating than heard.
"The perimeter pumps," Kaito supplied. "We are near the edge of the Archive grounds. The Warrens lie in the fissures beneath the Parchment Steppes. We must surface and cross a stretch of open land. It is the most dangerous part."
The shaft terminated in another hatch, this one looking out, according to Kaito, onto a scrub-filled ditch at the border of the cultivated zone. He listened for a long moment, his great ears swivelling minutely. I felt him extend his senses through the bond, a ripple of focused attention.
"No immediate resonant signatures. The search is concentrated closer to the Archive. Now."
He opened the hatch. Cold, clean night air rushed in, so shockingly fresh after the cloying darkness it made me dizzy. A sliver of a moon cast the world in monochrome blue. We clambered out into a ditch choked with brittle, colourless grass—the engineered flora of the Steppes, designed for zero resonant leakage.
Before us stretched the Parchment Steppes. It was a vast, flat expanse under the enormous sky, eerily beautiful and utterly silent. No insect hum, no rustle of wildlife. The silence was a physical pressure on my new senses. It was a Hollow—a place where echoes had been systematically scrubbed. The emptiness was an ache.
"Stay close," Kaito murmured aloud, his voice a bare whisper. "The silence is disorienting. Keep your focus on the bond. It will be your compass."
We set out across the open plain. It was like moving through a ghost of a world. Our footsteps were muffled by the dry soil. Kaito's glow was completely extinguished now; we were two shadows under the indifferent stars. The bond between us felt like a taut, warm wire in the centre of that consuming silence, the only proof I wasn't alone in a dead universe.
Halfway across, I felt it. A probing, discordant vibration at the edge of my new awareness. It was like a sour musical note, searching, scanning.
Hounds, Kaito's thought was sharp with alarm. Resonance Hounds. They're sweeping the Steppes. Do not move.
We froze, melting into the shadows of a low, crumbling wall that might have been a farm boundary a century ago. The probing vibration grew closer. I could almost see it in my mind's eye—a pulsing, jagged wave of intent, designed to detect aberrant echoes. The cloak of Kaito's storm should hide us… but if it flickered…
The vibration passed over us. I held my breath. The bond thrummed with Kaito's immense, concentrated effort. The Hound's resonance lingered, puzzled. It had detected… something. A density in the silence. A shadow in the void. But not a clear signature.
After an eternity, it moved on, continuing its methodical sweep.
Now. Run.
We ran. The final stretch to the line of low, rocky hills that marked the end of the Steppes was a blur of terror and burning muscles. I fell once, scraping my palms on the abrasive soil. Kaito hauled me up without breaking stride, his claws gentle but firm.
We reached the relative cover of the rocks just as a distant, keening howl split the night—a sound both mechanical and organic. The Hound had called others. The hunt was officially up.
"Here," Kaito panted, leading me to a fissure in the rock face so narrow I had to turn sideways. "The entrance is concealed."
We squeezed into the crack. It opened after a few meters into a downward-sloping tunnel, but this was no smooth, human-made shaft. The walls were organic, striated, like the inside of a gigantic fossil. The air was warm, dry, and carried a new, complex scent: ozone, hot metal, oil, and the faint, musky smell of a communal den.
The thrum was louder here, a deep, vibrational heartbeat coming from below. Light was provided by more of the fungi, but these glowed in a steady, soft amber, not the sickly green of the archives.
We had entered the Chitin Warrens.
"Stay directly behind me," Kaito instructed, his voice low and tense. "Do not speak. Do not make sudden movements. The Vesper are… territorial."
We descended. The tunnel network branched, a complex, three-dimensional hive. I saw signs of habitation—polished sections of wall, neatly bundled cables of unknown material, the occasional discarded tool of bizarre design. The place was a masterpiece of resonant engineering; the very walls seemed to absorb sound, creating pockets of profound quiet.
Then, we turned a corner and found our way blocked.
Not by a door, but by a figure.
He stood in the centre of the tunnel, silhouetted against an amber glow from a chamber beyond. He was tall, though not as tall as Kaito, and lean where the Kitsune was draped in elegant fur. He wore practical, close-fitting gear of dark leather and dull metal, stained with oil and soot. Tools and pouches hung from a complex harness.
But it was his head that caught and held my fear. He had the face of a man, sharp-featured and pale, but framed by a high, stiff collar that extended up behind his skull. From that collar, two enormous, intricately structured ears swept back—bat ears, delicate membranes veined with fine lines, twitching with minute adjustments. His eyes were hidden behind a pair of multi-lensed goggles, currently opaque. When he turned his head slightly, I saw the lower half of his face was covered by a respirator mask.
In one gloved hand, he held not a weapon, but a complex, tuning-fork-like device that hummed with a quiet, clear frequency.
"Kitsune," the figure said, his voice filtered through the respirator, flat and toneless. "You are far from your cage. And you bring… pollution." The goggled lenses fixed on me.
"Rylan," Kaito said, his tone carefully neutral. "The cage is broken. The pollution, as you call it, is the reason. We need sanctuary."
Rylan didn't move. The tuning fork in his hand shifted its pitch slightly, and I felt a brief, intrusive ping against the cloak of Kaito's resonance. He was scanning us.
"Sanctuary is not offered to humans. Her resonance is… anomalous. A hybrid screech buried in your storm. Unclean."
"She is under my protection. By pact."
That made Rylan go perfectly still. The great ears flattened slightly against his collar. "A pact." The word was a curse. "You linked your mind to a human scribe? Have centuries in the dark truly driven you mad, old fox?"
"She carries a shard of the Truth, Vesper. The one you have been seeking. The source of the Ghost-Noise that plagues your people."
Another stillness, deeper than the first. The humming fork lowered a fraction. "Proof."
"I cannot show you without dropping the cloak. The Hounds are on the Steppes. Give us shelter, and I will give you proof. And in return, you will help me reach the Thyrsian."
Rylan seemed to consider. His head tilted, ears swivelling like satellite dishes. He was listening to frequencies I couldn't imagine. "The Hounds are circling. Their scan-pattern suggests they lost you at the fissure. They will not enter the Warrens; the sonic baffles confuse their instruments." He took a step back. "Follow. One wrong step, one misplaced sound, and I dissolve the agreement. The human stays silent."
He turned and led us into the amber-lit chamber. It was a workshop, but like nothing I'd ever seen. Workbenches lined the walls, covered in delicate tools, disassembled devices, and sheets of strange, metallic foil. In the centre stood a larger apparatus: a spherical framework of copper wire and crystal rods, suspended in mid-air by a low hum. Diagrams were etched directly onto the smooth chitin walls, complex equations of sound and resonance.
It was the workshop of a sonic savant. And it was immaculate. The order was severe, a bulwark against chaos.
Rylan pointed to a corner where a pile of worn but clean mats lay. "There. Do not touch anything."
Kaito sank onto a mat with a groan of relief, his tails arranging themselves around him like a battered silver cloak. The moment he settled, I felt the immense tension in the bond ease slightly. The cloak was still up, but the strain lessened by a crucial degree.
I sat beside him, knees drawn to my chest, trying to make myself small in this alien, ordered space. My eyes were glued to Rylan as he moved to a workbench, his movements efficient and silent. He removed his goggles and respirator, placing them neatly on a stand.
His face was younger than I expected, perhaps in his late twenties, but etched with deep lines of chronic pain and concentration. His eyes were a pale, almost colourless grey, and hypersensitive; they blinked rapidly in the amber light. Without the mask, I saw a fine tracery of scars around his mouth and jaw—the aftermath of the biotic amplifier surgery, I realized with a lurch of horror.
He turned those pale eyes on me, and his gaze was a physical pressure. "The proof. Now."
Kaito looked at me. "The memory of the Citadel's fall. The source of the Ghost-Noise. Show him the moment of the sonic weapon's activation."
My blood went cold. Relive that? Purposefully? "I… I don't know how to show it. I only know how to drown in it."
"The pact is a channel," Kaito said, his mental voice patient. "You hold the memory. I hold the amplification. Give me the thread, and I will project the echo. A surface-skim, for him alone."
It was an act of trust more intimate than anything before. I had to open the raw, bleeding wound of that memory and hand him the reins. I met his star-filled eyes and saw no deception, only necessity.
I closed my eyes. I found the black, dense knot of the Citadel's fall within me. Carefully, like handling a live nerve, I pulled on the single thread of the sonic weapon's activation—the sight of the flint-eyed Hale raising the crystalline device, the building charge, the silent, concussive rip.
I offered that thread to the bond.
Kaito took it. I felt his power—vaster and more controlled than I'd imagined—wrap around the memory, not to experience it, but to broadcast it.
In the centre of the workshop, the air shimmered. A hazy, silent image flickered into being: the Great Hall, the raised device, the look of predatory triumph on Gideon Hale's face. And then, not the full agony, but the resonant signature of the weapon's discharge—a complex, devastating frequency pattern that was the progenitor of all the Ghost-Noise that now plagued the Vesper enclaves.
Rylan stared. Every muscle in his body locked. His pale eyes widened, then screwed shut in a spasm of pain. His hands flew up to his ears, though the memory was silent. He felt it. In his bones, in his altered nervous system, he felt the birth-cry of the weapon that had haunted his people for a century.
The image vanished. Kaito sagged, the effort costing him.
Rylan slowly lowered his hands. He was breathing hard, his scarred jaw clenched. When he opened his eyes, they were no longer just pained. They were burning with a cold, focused fury.
"That," he said, his voice a stripped wire, "is the frequency. The root algorithm of our torment." He turned that fury on me. "And you… you carry this inside you?"
"She is the only living record of its origin," Kaito said, his voice weary but firm. "The Concordat erased it. She is the proof. And she is the key to finding