Chapter 25: Freight and Flame

The industrial ruins beyond the freight line no longer belonged to Novara.

Whatever name the city had once etched into this place had eroded with the concrete and blown away with the ash. The buildings stood like broken teeth, charred by time, hollowed by flame. Vines clung to their rusted bones, wrapping through shattered windows and spilling down walls streaked with old rain and older decay. Freight tracks crisscrossed the ground in a rusted maze, half-swallowed by cracked concrete and thick moss, like veins feeding a corpse long abandoned.

Kazi stepped carefully between them, the pulse disc from Temba held tightly in her palm. It was cool, but alive, thrumming softly in rhythm with her heartbeat. The closer she moved to the blinking point on its screen, the more insistent its pulse became.

By the time they reached the perimeter of the signal, the sky had dimmed. Thick gray clouds churned above them, dragging static across the horizon. Thunder murmured faintly in the distance, like a growl waiting to find its teeth.

"So," Dakarai said, eyeing the skeletal remains of a collapsed tower twisted in ivy and rust, "this is the place we're just... walking straight into it, huh?"

"Not just walking," Kazi said, her eyes fixed ahead. "We're hunting."

Rhazir crouched by the old rail line, running two fingers along one of the steel tracks that vanished into an open loading yard. A dark scorch mark, circular and precise, had been burned into the concrete, like a wound left behind by something that had never fully healed.

"Hey, stop! This is it," he said. "This is where the rift was forced open."

Kazi stepped up beside him, stopping just short of the mark. Her own began to glow faintly beneath her sleeve, not flaring, but responding. There was a subtle tug beneath her skin, like her body remembered something her mind hadn't seen. A whisper just beyond reach.

Dakarai crouched near the shell of a rusted generator, fingers brushing over fractured cables and dust-caked control panels. "There was power moving through here. A lot of it. This was an old infrastructure, probably linked to the resonance grid before it collapsed. It's dead now… but whatever it fed, it left a footprint."

Kazi looked at Rhazir. "Can the pulse disc open it again?"

"Not exactly," he said. "But it can trigger a residual echo and give us a something to track on this side of it."

Without hesitation or a second thought, Kazi activated the disc.

A low hum filled the air as a shimming ripple spread across the concrete like heat off metal. This caused the air to warp, edges blurring, then sharpened into a ghostly echo. Three figures materialized, indistinct and flickering, one of them clutching something tight to their chest. Then, a sudden rupture, causing a violent jagged black tear in space. The figures stepped through it, then vanished.

Kazi let out a shaky breath. "That was her. That had to be Luma."

"She wasn't resisting," Rhazir murmured, frowning.

"Because she didn't know," Kazi snapped. "She… she… she probably thought one of them was me."

The silence that followed was sharp, the only sound the soft dying beep of the disc.

"They moved fast," Dakarai said. "Whoever pulled this off, they cleaned up after themselves."

"But they left the torched spot on the floor," Rhazir added. "That tells us more than they wanted."

Kazi stared at the spot where the portal had bloomed and vanished. Her heart was pounding now. The mark on her arm pulsed again, insistent. Urging her to push forward.

She stepped closer. Something shifted beneath her feet, a subtle give in the concrete.

She knelt, brushing away dust and debris until a thin seam emerged. It was a hatch, hidden beneath the debris.

Dakarai leaned in. "Maintenance access?"

"No," Rhazir said, voice low. "This was sealed after the portal was used. It could be t… "

Kazi didn't wait for Rhazir to finish. She found the edge and pried it open. There she saw a narrow stairwell descending into darkness, its walls etched with the same scorched pattern she'd seen once before, in her own apartment.

A cold, unnatural draft came up from below. The mark on her arm pulsed once.

"Whatever they left behind," she said, her voice steady now, "it's still down there."

They exchanged looks. Then, one by one, they descended into the dark.