Elias ran.Not blindly, never blindly, but with the city’s rhythms beating against his bones. He cut left where foot traffic thickened, right where sound overlapped sound, choosing chaos the way a swimmer chooses waves. Order was what hunted him. Noise was shelter.The pressure screamed, not words this time, just raw insistence, a needle behind his eyes pushing him faster than fear could. He vaulted a waist-high barrier and nearly slipped on rain-slick concrete, caught himself, kept moving. Sirens wailed somewhere distant. Not for him. Not yet.He ducked down a stairwell into the underground market the city pretended not to see.Heat hit him first. Then smell, oil, spice, metal, old water. Stalls pressed close, tarps sagging, voices layered in a dozen languages. Screens flickered with pirated feeds. The system tolerated places like this because they were messy, because they refused to be indexed cleanly.Elias slowed. Forced himself to breathe.Do not run forever, he told himself. Run

The woman didn’t look back to see if Elias followed.That alone told him everything.They moved through the city side by side but not together, separated by three deliberate steps, like strangers pretending not to know each other. The streetlights buzzed overhead, casting broken shadows that stretched and shrank as they walked. Elias noticed how she avoided the brighter paths, choosing streets where the light failed more often than it worked.“You always walk like this?” Elias asked quietly.“Like someone who knows better,” she replied.They turned into a narrow alley that smelled of rain and rust. Elias slowed instinctively. His wrist tingled, not with warning this time, but awareness. The system wasn’t protesting.It was observing.The woman stopped beneath a flickering lamp and finally faced him fully. Up close, Elias saw the details he’d missed before, faint scars along her knuckles, the way her posture never fully relaxed, eyes that scanned even when she stood still.“Name’s Mara

The symbols in the air refused to settle.They twisted slowly, rearranging themselves like fragments of a language that hadn’t decided what it wanted to be yet. Elias felt them more than he saw them, each shape pressed against his awareness, heavy with meaning he couldn’t access.The others felt it too.A man with a shaved head rubbed his temples, breathing hard. A young woman in a hoodie hugged herself tightly, eyes darting from symbol to symbol as if expecting one of them to strike.Only the calm man remained still.“Don’t try to read it,” he said. “You’ll just give yourself a headache.”Elias tore his gaze away. “Then what are we supposed to do?”“Listen,” the man replied. “It always explains itself. Eventually.”As if summoned by the word, the pressure in the room deepened. The hum of the machinery beneath the floor synchronized, rising and falling in a slow, deliberate rhythm.INITIALIZATION PHASE COMPLETE.The symbols snapped into alignment.Not into words but into intent.Elias

The passage opened into light.Not the warm kind, no sun, no comfort, but a flat, clinical brightness that erased shadows and made every surface look unfinished. Elias squinted as he stepped through, his senses still buzzing from the zone behind them.Four of them now.Jonah walked ahead, posture loose but alert. The shaved-head man, his name was Rafe, Elias had caught it earlier kept glancing over his shoulder as if expecting the floor to collapse again. The woman stayed close to the wall, arms wrapped tightly around herself.And Elias felt… different.Not stronger.Sharper.The system hummed beneath his awareness, no longer an intruder but a presence that adjusted itself around his thoughts.ADAPTATION RATE: ABOVE BASELINE.He exhaled slowly. “I didn’t ask for that.”REQUEST NOT REQUIRED.Jonah glanced back. “It talking again?”“Commenting,” Elias replied.Jonah grimaced. “That’s how it starts.”They reached a wide chamber that looked like a control room stripped of its purpose. Dea

The path Elias chose did not announce itself.There was no visible fork, no dramatic shift in terrain. One moment they were walking together, and the next the air itself felt different, thicker, resistant, as though each step required a decision the others were not making.Jonah noticed first.“You feel that,” he said quietly.Elias nodded. “It’s pushing back.”Rafe did not. He walked easily, almost lightly, humming under his breath. The woman followed him, uncertain but relieved, as if glad for anything that felt simple again.The corridor narrowed.The walls here were not smooth like before. They were uneven, faintly textured, marked with shallow impressions that looked almost like fingerprints, thousands of them, overlapping, pressing inward.Elias slowed.“Don’t touch them,” Jonah warned.Too late.Elias’s sleeve brushed the wall.The reaction was immediate.A sharp pressure snapped through his arm and into his chest, not painful, but invasive, like a question forced into his bloo