Clock’s ticking.

Feeling the pressure of the invisible timetable Cal set, I manage to find a single tunnel out of the warehouse that isn’t fully blocked by rubble. There’s enough room for me to squeeze through without needing to draw on my ki. With some finessing, at least. I wriggle through the small gap headfirst and drape my upper body out the other side, clearing the next hall with upside-down vision. Nothing leaps out of the dark at me. Not wasting time, I twist my hips to the side and squeeze through the crevice, rotating nimbly to land on my feet.

Another JOY scan confirms I chose right. A damascene signal pings back from somewhere ahead. Not that I needed the extra confirmation. I already know I’m on the right track.

I’m in a place that doesn’t belong. This hall and the rooms that split off from it, they’re subtly wrong in a way I can’t put my finger on. It’s too tall for the Vents in here. Too thin to be comfortable for humans. Old stone, not concrete or metal, makes up the bulk of the superstructure. Doorways meld flush to the ceiling, yet have small stumbling blocks along the bottom of the frame. Like the whole tower was built upside-down.

I didn’t think my body had it to feel even more apprehension, yet it manages to surprise me. I have to force myself to take the first step forward into the dark. Force myself to ignore the weird ways my handheld light catches on the rubble and the corners, ignore the click-clack echoes of rubble stirred by the city above. It’s just the paranoia playing tricks. The shadows are only terrifying because the imaginations it spawns aren’t bounded by reason.

Still. I peer cautiously around every corner as I follow the thin halls deeper inside, forcing open old hydraulic-powered blast hatches by hand when I must. This place is a maze. And a stronghold of some kind, going by the number of dust-coated crates of munitions and expired food my light reveals in the rooms I pass. There’s more skeletons, long decayed, no smell, just fallen across the halls where they were shot down or slashed apart. My lips tighten as I step over them.

My JOY’s connection to the outside world fully gives out just as the two-note ringtone reaches its quickest intensity. I’m standing outside a thin doorway barred by a half-stuck blast sheathe. A thin gap lets me peer through into the dark. Some kind of office is on the other side, and the source of the damascene signal is in there. My JOY is going berserk. Wincing at the noise it’s making, I shut off the scanning mode and shove the sphere away before firming my fingers inside the door’s gap.

I reach within and tentatively prod my battered soul, grimacing at the electric shock pain that crackles through my nerves. Wisps of black ki sizzle and leak from my pores. Desperate to form an aura just above my skin. Pulsing through my veins, pushing at my fingertips, hungry to be released. I only let the tiniest flow escape through my real hand as I wrench the door open with a colossal burst of strength only possible with a microinfusion of ki. The door squeals apart. A red-hot handprint burns on the metal, the skin of my palm singed a darker shade.

Behind the door is an office of plain, utilitarian style not unlike the cramped space Cal has spent so many nights working in during our time at the shooting range. A mural of children’s handprints spans the long right wall and dusty shelves of books the left. Up a small set of stairs, there’s a large desk backed by a shattered triangular window that would normally look out over the next block over, but now holds only a view of the dark necropolis. An ammunition cylinder for a hi-tech revolver lies on the floor behind the desk. I step carefully over it as I wander around, looking for anything amiss. My palm light’s cone sweeps from the desk to a tousled little bed tucked into a corner by the window, then back to the centerpiece of the room. I hit paydirt once I start rifling through the drawers.

Data wafers. Small holodiscs for storing messages in the palm of a hand. No Relic, though. Cal said they always look like jewelry. Maybe there’s a clue in the electronics. While I focus on brute-forcing one of the more stubborn drawers, I activate one of the holodiscs and toss it atop the desk so it has room to project. A fountain of blue light splays outwards from the disc, slowly tightening into the conical base of the projection.

Snowflakes and distortion warble through the electric-blue light as the device chokes from a lack of power. Still has a little juice, though. The pixels gradually tighten towards a humanoid shape. Audio coughs and catches. I jerk open the troublesome drawer.

“I always thought I’d be the last person to see this place.”

A voice raw with static stops me on the spot.

It speaks so close to my ears that for a moment I’m transported to my home. To a crackling hearth and the smell of rain in his hair. My head whips up and I jerk away from the desk, back pressing against the shattered window. Eyes wide with fear and disbelief as the all-too-real projection of a martial human takes a tired seat right on the edge of the desk.

My heart hammers inside my chest, desperate to flee. I try to think of something to say. Anything at all.

In the end, only one desperate word shakes itself out of me.

“…Dad?”

He’s everything I remember. Broad in shoulders, wide in smiles, and wearing that faintly amused grin I remember so well. All of him is rendered ion-blue in the projection, but I can still picture every color of his being, from the shades of crimson in his hair to the scar tissue on his hands. He’s happy in this cruel image. Leaning back in casual repose, searching the darkness for something. Not speaking back to me.

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I creep hesitantly around the desk, circling the wavering image of my father. Still he does not react. I see more details of him now that I’m closer. His face is younger than the one I remember best. His body is lighter. Less wrapped in the heavy muscle that he built in his later years. His voice is the same, though. That’s all that matters. So real and clear I break at hearing it for the first time since the day he left me.

I stand in front of him, vision glassing over with sudden wetness. My hand reaches out to try and touch his face on reflex, bringing a horrible noise I can’t fully choke down.

“If you’ve come all the way down here, that means someone’s finally done a better job cleaning up the Vents than I could. Or you already know what you’re looking for.” Dad pauses and looks solemnly at the mural of handprints. “I was searching for something too. I still don’t know if I found it. Maybe that’s for the best. If I’ve learned one truth out in the world, it’s that some things are buried for a reason.” He smiles wistfully to himself, looks down at his hands. “Of course, there’s always things you have to see anyways. Even if you know they’re going to hurt. This was one of them.”

He hops off the desk then. The disc still manages to capture his movement. He must have recorded it right here in this room, sometime in the distant past.

Dad slips his hands in his pockets and wanders briefly, trailing an ethereal finger across the edge of the desk. Holographic dust clings to his fingertip. I sink to my knees in front of him as he sinks to sit on the steps leading up to the desk. He shoots a sad smile at the space he must have thought another person would be sitting, just a few inches above the top of my hair.

I would give anything to let him reach out and ruffle it one last time.

“Emmy told me I wouldn’t like what I found here,” Dad says. “It’s funny. You spend so long getting to know someone in every moment of their life from the quietest to the busiest, but even after years together, you’re still learning new things about them. For the longest time I’ve only known who she is. But who she was is important too. Her past is as much of her life as I am.” He rests his chin behind steepled hands, elbows on his knees. “She was right, in a way. I didn’t like what I found here. But I do understand it. It doesn’t make me love her any less. It makes me love her more. The Vents is a cruel place, but it’s people like her who have to suffer in it. This was her home. And now…”

I glance at the window and shiver.

“...now it’s just ash,” Dad sighs. “There’s a lot of good and a lot of evil that’s happened here. A lot of dreams. A lot of love. A lot of anger. A lot of righted wrongs. This room is the price for not breaking the cycle the Creators put us in. Someone has to do it. Someone has to step up before-”

He winks out of existence, scattering into static and embers.

“Don’t go!”

The cry rips out of my chest as I scramble forward, clutching at the fading particles that flit through the air like fireflies. Every one of them slips between my fingers before evaporating into shadow. I sit there on my knees for a moment, trembling as the silence and dark closes back in. Still trying to summon back the image in my head.

“Don’t…” I gasp, nails grinding against the stone. “Don’t leave me, Dad…”

He was so close. So real I could almost touch him. I swear loudly and slam a hand against the floor, listening to the gurgling sound of sparks and melting silica from up on the desk as the holoprojector breathes its last.

I rise, shuddering out a breath, and wipe a hand across my face. Sniffle loudly. Just a stupid, taunting machine. That’s all it was. He’s gone. It was just a video, a fake hope that wasn’t even meant for me.

I turn and put him behind me. Bitter as the wind that moans through the shattered window as I start to search the rest of the room.

I stop three steps from where I started, ears twitching at some subliminal sensation. The rest of my body listens and freezes. Shock-still, I peer into the shallow shadows of the office, seeing no reason to be suspicious, nothing to be afraid of. My mind finally catches up and tries to dismiss the twitch as imagination. Something to fill the silence.

My instincts disagree.

Heat flushes my skinsuit as my aura throbs towards ignition, manifesting in a single drop of sweat that trickles down my jaw. I zip down my collar. Let the heat vent. Let my chest contract as I breathe out and tentatively extend my weakened kinetic sense into the halls outside the office.

There’s nothing. No movement, no lights of other creatures, not even an insect.

Plop.

My ears twitch again. A second drop of liquid slaps into the carpet beside me, fainter than a rat’s pawprint.

Plop.

On instinct, I look down. Then left, right, behind. Up.

I see the fangs slavering in the darkness.

And shadows made manifest surge down at me, clawing at my throat.