Vaults Beneath the Bone

Greyspire faded behind me, swallowed by the endless sprawl of Altaran's industrial graveyard. I kept to the old rail lines — rusted tracks buried beneath debris and chemical runoff, forgotten by the Consortium's official maps. Every step pulled me closer to the one place even the Order whispered about:

Sector Thirteen.

A district buried under a thousand lockdowns. No civilians. No trade. No sanctioned memory brokers. Just reinforced barricades, collapsed infrastructure, and whatever experiments the Solis family didn't want bleeding into the upper wards.

That's where she was. Vesper. A ghost threaded through the fractures of my lost memories — hidden behind vault doors and classified archives, her voice cutting clean through the static of my erased past:

"Run, Ilyas — don't look back."

I didn't remember her, not truly. But the shard resonance didn't lie. The closer I got to Sector Thirteen, the more the fragments hummed under my skin — like tuning forks drawn to the same fractured frequency.

Altaran's edges blurred the deeper I pushed — neon replaced by decayed concrete, the chemical tang in the air thick enough to sting the back of my throat. Old caution signs littered the chain-link fences:

BIO-LOCKDOWN — CONSORTIUM RESEARCH ZONE

AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY — VIOLATORS ERASED

Standard scare tactics. Effective on anyone without my scars.

I reached the perimeter checkpoint by nightfall — jagged metal gates twisted beneath storm-flood debris, half-collapsed from time and neglect. But the Consortium's tech still hummed faint behind the rubble — motion sensors buried in the skeletal infrastructure, drones coasting overhead like mechanical carrion birds.

I stayed low, cutting through the skeletal remains of an old mag-rail terminal — beams rusted, support columns fractured with age, every surface stained in grease and forgotten blood.

The plan was simple:

Get inside. Find the archive. Trace the shard resonance to Vesper's location. Don't die.

Easier said than done when the city itself wanted to skin you alive.

The vault lay buried beneath the district's old industrial spine — what used to be the Solis Cryo-Lab Complex, before the lockdown. The blueprints Ghost fed me showed sub-level access tunnels running beneath the bone of the city, sealed after the Order's clean-slate initiative.

I ghosted along the access routes, pulse steady, every step measured.

Almost there.

But something rippled at the edges of my senses — faint, sharp.

A presence.

I ducked behind a cracked turbine casing, eyes scanning the gloom.

Footsteps. Light. Controlled.

Not Consortium. Too quiet for military sweep teams. Not drone signatures either — organic, practiced.

A lone figure moved along the opposite catwalk — tall, cloaked, the edges of their silhouette blurred by light-refracting fabric.

The same one who trailed me in the Vein.

I clenched my jaw, tracking their movements. They weren't chasing — just… observing. Testing.

Good. I didn't have time for more hunters.

The old maintenance hatch to the lower levels sat half-concealed behind rust-choked piping. I worked the lock, fingers quick on the override panel Ghost encoded. The door hissed open, stale air rushing up to meet me — damp, metallic, laced with something colder.

I slipped inside, hatch sealing behind me.

The descent into the sub-levels stretched like a throat of shadows — metal grating creaking underfoot, condensation beading along the low ceilings. Every faded Consortium symbol, every stripped biometric scanner — it all whispered of a facility abandoned in a hurry.

But they didn't clear everything.

Not when the hum of active power nodes still pulsed faint along the walls.

Not when the shard resonance sang sharper with every step.

I reached the vault's primary chamber — a circular hub carved into reinforced steel and concrete. The door loomed ahead — nine inches thick, Consortium-locked, etched with faded sigils of neural containment.

The kind of door designed to bury memories — or the people who carried them.

The resonance peaked. The shards in my coat throbbed hard enough to ache against my ribs.

Vesper was here.

I stepped toward the vault, palm pressing to the biometric pad.

Nothing.

Of course. Even erased, the Order's paranoia ran deep.

I traced the access panel, fingers working fast — bypassing outdated protocols, feeding Ghost's override scripts into the system. The pad flickered, protested, then fell dark.

The door groaned.

And then — a faint hiss. Movement behind me.

I pivoted, blade in hand.

The cloaked figure stood at the far end of the chamber — mask veiled, stance measured.

They raised their hand, palm open, unarmed.

A voice cut through the tense quiet — distorted, but unmistakable:

"You're late, Varin."

Recognition slammed into my skull — not from the memory shard, but raw instinct.

The masked hunter wasn't Consortium. Wasn't Order.

They were here for the same reason I was.

The vault door's locks disengaged, gears grinding open — and inside, a pulse of cold blue light bled into the dark.

The final barrier between me and the next truth fractured open.

The figure tilted their head, voice laced with warning:

"You're not ready for what's in there."

I exhaled slow, pulse steady, every scarred instinct screaming otherwise.

"Neither are they."

I stepped into the vault.

The resonance screamed.

And the past I thought erased… began to bleed through.