Glass City

Chapter 5

The shriek of the alarm tore through the ruins like a blade, followed by the metallic whir of approaching drones. Lyra didn't hesitate. She tucked the memory core into her jacket's hidden pocket, drew her pulse-blade, and turned to Kael.

"East access tunnel," he said quickly. "Still stable if we move fast."

Elias was already on the comms, fingers flying across his wristpad. "I'm jamming their first tier signals. Won't last more than sixty seconds."

"That's all we need," Kael growled.

The three of them sprinted from the amphitheater stage as the air shimmered—an Index assault drone phased through the ceiling, scanning. Lyra flung a shiv of code from her implant; the drone stuttered mid-air, sparks blooming like electric flowers before it dropped, twitching, to the ground.

The tunnel beyond was cramped and foul with decades-old rot. Kael led the way, torchlight slicing ahead, while Lyra brought up the rear, adrenaline sharpening her senses. She could feel the memory core pulsing against her chest, like a second heartbeat.

They emerged into a long-forgotten maintenance corridor, long since blacklisted by the city grid. Elias sealed the entry behind them with a neural lock.

"You okay?" he asked, eyeing her.

Lyra nodded, but her mind was reeling. The fragment had given her more than just Kael—it had given her intent. The woman she'd once been hadn't acted blindly. She had chosen to erase herself, to break her bond with Kael and betray the rebellion, for a reason.

But what?

She'd felt it—buried under the surge of returned emotion—an unspoken warning in the memory's final frame.

"You were protecting something," Elias said quietly, as if reading her thoughts.

She looked at him sharply. "What?"

He hesitated. "I don't know. But I saw your eyes. You weren't afraid. You were sure."

Lyra sat on the metal floor, chest rising and falling.

"I need the next core."

Kael folded his arms. "You still think these memories will redeem you?"

"No," she said. "I think they'll explain me. And right now, I don't know if I'm the hero in this story or the one who ends it."

Elias looked between them. "So where's the next one?"

Lyra looked up.

"Where they broke me the first time. The Index Citadel."

Kael swore. "That place is a fortress."

Lyra's voice turned cold. "So was I."

Outside the corridor, the city stirred—glass and steel watching, always watching. But for the first time in years, Lyra felt something that reached deeper than survival.

Purpose.

And she would chase it into the lion's den if she had to.

⸻

Kael unrolled a dust-smeared map of the inner districts across the cold floor. The lines of the Index Citadel sprawled across the page like veins around a poisoned heart. Lyra leaned over it, eyes narrowing as she traced a path through the underlayers—maintenance shafts, service routes, forgotten surveillance crawlways.

"This is outdated," Elias said. "They've restructured the security lattice since the lockdowns. There's no way through this without triggering the thermals."

"Unless we go beneath," Kael said, tapping the substructure. "There's a hydro-channel—dry since the water rations were rerouted. It leads to one of the cryo-memory vaults."

Lyra frowned. "Cryo-vaults are deep-tier. Only used for blacklisted memories—high-risk fragments from subjects too unstable to keep online."

Kael looked at her. "Sound familiar?"

She didn't answer. Because he was right.

Some part of her—her past self—had hidden something in a place designed to be forgotten. If the next core was there, it wasn't just important. It was dangerous.

Elias leaned back, eyes flicking between them. "You're talking about breaking into the most secure part of the most paranoid building in the city... to retrieve a memory that you buried because you feared what it would do."

Lyra met his gaze. "Yes."

He let out a breath. "Okay. I'm in."

Kael raised a brow. "Just like that?"

"I didn't come this far to play safe," Elias said. "Besides, I'm starting to think you're both the kind of stupid I admire."

Lyra allowed herself the ghost of a smile. It vanished as quickly as it came.

"We go in at cycle shift," she said. "That's when they rotate the deep vault sentries. We'll have a window of eighteen minutes."

Kael folded the map. "What's the extraction plan?"

Lyra hesitated. "We won't need one. If this memory is what I think it is—"

She glanced toward the city above them, its walls gleaming with cold surveillance light.

"—then we won't be running. We'll be burning the truth through the heart of the Index."

For a moment, neither man spoke.

Then Kael grinned. "That's the Lyra I remember."

And for the first time, she didn't flinch when he said it.

⸻

They moved at cycle shift.

The city above had fallen into its illusion of sleep—lights dimmed, drones withdrawn, Index officers swapping shifts with bleary indifference. But beneath that calm, the Citadel breathed like a creature watching through closed eyes.

Lyra, Kael, and Elias wove through the understructure of Glass City, cloaked in pulse-dampening rigs scavenged from the black market. The hydro-channel, once a vital artery of water, now lay dry and bone-pale beneath the city's skin. Their boots echoed softly against the ancient concrete.

"This place smells like rust and regret," Elias muttered.

"It's where they bury both," Kael said.

As they moved deeper, Lyra felt the familiar press of the Citadel's presence—like stepping into a cathedral where the gods were algorithms and judgment was cold and absolute. She remembered flashes now: being dragged down these tunnels, blood in her mouth, her name stripped from her file and replaced with a number.

They reached the cryo-vault access point: a circular hatch sealed with layered biometric encryptions. Kael crouched beside it and pulled a thin black strip from his belt. It unfurled into a web of cracking code.

"Give me thirty seconds," he said.

Elias scanned the corridor. "Thirty is generous. Patrol's scheduled in twenty."

Kael grunted. "Then you'll love this."

He slotted the codeweb into the hatch.

It pulsed—once, twice—then split apart with a hiss of freezing air.

Inside, rows of frozen data cores lined the walls like glass organs suspended in time. Each one glowing faintly with pulses of ancient memories, tagged and sealed.

Lyra stepped inside, drawn by instinct. She passed histories of rebels, warlords, broken children, failed leaders—flickers of pain suspended in stillness.

Then she saw it.

A core unlike the others—black-glass, laced with veins of crimson. Its tag was gone, erased even from the system's archive.

"Found you," she whispered.

As she reached for it, the vault's temperature dropped sharply. A silent alarm.

Elias swore. "They know."

Kael drew his weapon. "We fight our way out?"

Lyra turned, core in hand, eyes blazing.

"No," she said. "We show them what they've buried."

Then she cracked the seal on the memory.

The vault trembled.

A burst of red light flooded the chamber, and the core unraveled—flooding her mind with a scream she hadn't known she'd been holding back for years.

Kael caught her before she collapsed.

"Lyra!"

She gasped, eyes wide with horror.

"I didn't betray the rebellion," she choked out. "I saved it."

Behind her, the cryo-vaults began to unlock—one by one.

And above them, the Citadel began to wake.