Ghost Codes

The canals ran black through Altaran's industrial sprawl, rippling with chemical slick and reflected neon, carving the city into fractured veins. I kept to the shadows, cutting across forgotten bridges and narrow access routes few dared use after dark.

Two shards pulsed steady in my coat — crystalline fragments pressing against my ribs like reminders that my past wasn't entirely erased… just buried deep enough to bleed.

The encounter in Lathrin's Vein still echoed behind my eyes — that second voice in the fragmented memory, sharp with urgency:

"Run, Ilyas—don't look back."

Who was she? An ally? A memory trap? Or someone the Order missed when they tried to wipe me clean?

The question tangled with every step.

I reached the outer district an hour before dawn — Greyspire, where the sky hung low and choked with smog, and rusted skeletal towers stabbed upward like broken ribs. Greyspire wasn't mapped — too volatile, too gutted by old Consortium experiments gone wrong. Which made it perfect for vanishing off-grid.

My contact here wasn't a memory forger. He was worse.

They called him Ghost, an architect of backdoor networks, data leaks, and ghost-code infections designed to bypass Consortium safeguards. He built digital shadows for people like me — people who couldn't afford to be found.

The safehouse waited beneath an old comms relay — a rust-locked hatch half-concealed beneath debris and tangled cabling. I keyed in the code Ravel had burned into my stabilizer.

The hatch hissed open.

Cold, recycled air slapped my face as I descended into the bunker.

Ghost's lair wasn't much — walls lined with hollowed-out server cores, data ports flickering with old-world tech, cables snaking across cracked concrete like veins. A soft green luminescence bled from holoscreens scattered across the room, projections of code peeling apart Altaran's security net in real time.

And in the center — him.

Ghost moved with the weary precision of someone who'd seen too many system failures. His skin was drawn tight, eyes cybernetically enhanced with pale-blue data nodes flickering behind his irises. Half his face was etched with subtle circuitry tattoos — old war scars disguised as ornamentation.

"You took your time," he rasped without turning, fingers dancing across a floating holo-interface.

"Didn't realize we were on a schedule," I shot back, stepping fully into the bunker.

He finally faced me — gaze dissecting, mechanical.

"Two fragments recovered already." His voice held a hint of surprise. "They underestimated you."

"They tend to."

Ghost's fingers twitched, pulling new schematics onto the screen — maps of Altaran, data grids, encrypted transmission logs.

"They're watching everything now. Solis. The Consortium. You're triggering alarms every time you breathe wrong."

I dropped the twin shards onto the metal table. Their glow cast dim reflections across his lenses.

"I need access," I told him. "If I'm going to find the rest, I need eyes off-grid. Movement without pings. Hidden channels."

Ghost examined the shards, whistling low under his breath.

"These are clean," he muttered, scanning the neural glass surfaces. "No tracking signatures. But…" His gaze sharpened. "The resonance — it's changing."

I stilled. "Changing how?"

"They're syncing." His tone darkened. "Two pieces of the same system reconnecting. Once enough link… they'll rewrite you."

I exhaled slow. Memory reconstruction — it wasn't just fragments returning. It was identity reconfiguring itself, stitching over the manufactured gaps.

"How long?" I asked.

Ghost shrugged. "Depends how fast you recover them. And how much of the old you wants to wake up."

The words settled like lead in my gut.

Outside, distant sirens echoed — climbing. The city shifting.

Ghost's fingers never paused, pulling new data streams across the display. Surveillance feeds. Reports. Names.

One paused me cold.

A face — blurry, partial — logged under restricted files. Female. No identifier. Just a codename: Subject Vesper.

She stood in the corner of a frame — dark coat, hood shadowing her face, but the shape of her jaw, the defiant set of her shoulders — recognition flickered through me, fast and gut-punch sharp.

The memory.

"Run, Ilyas—don't look back."

I pointed to the screen. "Where was that captured?"

Ghost's gaze narrowed. "Old Solis vault archive. Level Seven clearance. Deep storage facility outside Sector Thirteen."

The location hit me. She wasn't street-level noise. She was buried deep within their own infrastructure — protected, controlled, or maybe hidden.

Ghost's expression turned clinical. "You know her?"

"Not yet," I muttered, pulse ticking hard. "But I will."

The second shard hummed soft against my chest, the resonance shifting, like a key turning one step closer to the lock.

Twelve shards. Ten missing. But the memories weren't passive. They were evolving, weaving new fractures in the fabric of my mind — rebuilding something the Consortium tried to annihilate.

I pocketed the fragments, voice steady. "Prep the system. I'm going after the third."

Ghost's lenses flickered sharp blue, code bleeding across their surface. "You won't be the only one."

"Let them try."

Outside, Altaran groaned beneath the weight of its own forgotten sins.

The game wasn't memory recovery anymore.

It was war.

And I was done losing.