Games of Echoes and Bait

Rain slipped through the scaffolded ironwork of the Crimson Market's upper walkways, sizzling as it hit heat vents and rust-stained grates. Lucien leaned against the overlook, coat collar up against the wind, eyes tracking the pulse of the Market below: neon-washed stalls flickering through mist, traders cloaked in glassy shimmer-veils, and soul-bargains flaring to life in hot bursts of light, like candles snuffed in reverse. It moved like machinery. Too precise to be human.

He wasn't there to hustle. Not tonight. Tonight, he was there to feel what the hustle had cost him.

The Ledger throbbed under his wrist like a second heartbeat, except colder. Not a warning, not a command—just a steady ache, like a thought it was almost ready to say aloud. Glyphs whispered in his periphery, faint and slow.

"Your boons burn souls."

Lucien exhaled through his teeth, fog catching the air like smoke. The memory surfaced whether he wanted it or not: one father, three signatures, and a clause so clean it practically gleamed. The man had wanted protection. Offered silence in return. Not his own. His daughter's. One voice traded like currency. She'd spoken anyway, scared and small. And the Ledger had answered.

Her thoughts unraveled in front of a crowd. She couldn't remember a single name now, not even her own.

"Family paid for my win," Lucien said. It wasn't quite guilt. It was worse. It was knowing.

The Ledger didn't respond. But its ache stayed.

A rusted maintenance drone buzzed past like a bored insect. Lucien ran his gloved finger over the railing's pitted edge, rough with corrosion. Below, traders haggled over names, sins, raw memory. Others drifted toward the Veilshade stalls where nothing sold was physical. Cassian's rot ran somewhere through it all, crawling behind masks and false tokens.

Lucien flicked open the network overlay. The Ledger pulled up visual feeds, message logs, and filtered glyph records. Cassian's proxies had been moving more brazenly—sigils half-formed, timers off, mimicked phrasing that almost passed. Almost. Three bindings unraveled in two days. All bore traces of forged subclauses.

"He's getting sloppy," Lucien muttered.

The Ledger answered. "He learns."

He caught the echo, not just of observation, but of warning. The Ledger wasn't just feeding him data anymore. It was calculating stakes. Weighing outcomes.

Footsteps behind. Jyn Serra stepped out of the side hall, hoodie dripping, cracked goggles clinging to her face like a second expression.

"Market's a furnace tonight," she said, voice rough around the corners. "You picking ghosts again, Blackmoore?"

Lucien gave a tired half-smile, crooked just enough to show wear. "Weighing the blood in the ink."

Jyn set her bag on the bench and unwrapped a cloth-wrapped tablet like it was contraband. The screen flickered to life.

"Proof you wanted? I brought tangles," she said, dragging her sleeve across the interface. Names bloomed in layered glyphs. One hit him hard. A contract he hadn't seen since Sector Twelve imploded.

"He's rerouting through dead brokers," she said. "Shell chains. Ghost terminals. There are mimicry glyphs piggybacking off old Codex logic. Had to pull sigil trails from five echo layers back."

Lucien narrowed his eyes as a familiar glyph hiccupped on screen. It looked right. Until it didn't.

"Ledger echoes," he muttered. "He's stealing clause rhythm. The feel of it."

Jyn nodded. "Like he's not just copying you, he's trying to break the Ledger open from the inside."

That landed. Not as paranoia. As pattern.

The Ledger surged suddenly, not bright but cold. Like glass cracking inside his mind.

"He hunts me."

Lucien froze, shoulders tensing. The voice was clearer now, more deliberate. Less like code. More like intent.

"Pull everything he's passed through the last month," he said. "Compare clause trees. Look for drift. Look for anything that smells like pre-Codex work."

Jyn's fingers danced across the tablet. "Already on it. But the pattern's nastier than you think. He's hitting sites tied to your old contracts. The raw ones. Before we had Ledger protocol."

Lucien went still. Raw contracts were dangerous. Unfiltered, direct channel deals. They held echo residue. Sometimes more than that.

"He's targeting my origin trail," Lucien said. "Trying to corrode it."

"Or rewrite it," Jyn said. "If he taints those threads... you go with them."

The Ledger buzzed against his skin, alive with fresh movement. Icons shifted across his internal display: old client profiles reactivating, one-time contacts pinging alerts. Someone was reawakening dormant deals. Not to collect, but to infect.

"Client Marvek: clause breach initiated. Contract integrity at 62%. Secondary marker: faceless proxy."

"Contact Lira Than: glyph contamination detected. Market seal destabilized."

Lucien's jaw clenched. He rotated his wrist to let the Ledger display project. More names. More red threads.

"Build the sting," the Ledger whispered. Its voice carried finality, not suggestion.

Lucien nodded. "We need a target he can't resist. Old clause flavor. A sigil chain that feels broken but unfinished. Let him bite."

Jyn gave a slow nod. "And when he takes it?"

Lucien's eyes darkened. "We sign him into his own collapse."

Jyn started to pack up, but hesitated. "Lucien... why's the Ledger talking more now? I mean... it used to be numbers and pings. Not... this."

Lucien didn't answer right away. His gaze returned to the Market below, to the veiled traders and burning contracts.

"Maybe it's not just a system anymore," he said. "Maybe we stopped being separate a long time ago."

She didn't push it. She vanished back into the shadows, footsteps lost in the Market's ambient noise.

Lucien lingered.

The rain had settled into a quiet mist, the kind that soaked without you noticing. His coat stuck to his shoulders. The Ledger pulsed with a steady rhythm, feeding him updates even as he stood still.

"Two informants approaching breach limit. Suggest renegotiation." Then,

"Client Del Fenn: soul integrity weakening. Boon threshold at 71%." One final update pinged through. 

"Cassian's proxy net expanding into Spire Four."

Lucien ran a hand through his hair, jaw tight.

"This hustle's breaking me," he whispered.

The Ledger responded immediately. "You are bound to me."

The words weren't cruel. They were final.

Lucien let out a rough laugh that didn't reach his eyes. It was too clean, hearing truth from something that didn't flinch. Something that never pretended.

He stared into the market's neon breath as the next deal burned into the air.

Cassian wasn't just burning cities. He was unthreading Lucien's very architecture. And even if the Ledger was growing...

So was the war.

Lucien Blackmoore stood still, watching. And planning.

The next contract would sting like hell.

But it would sign just fine.