Navi's gaze locked onto Ciel, her eyes sparkling with curiosity. "What did you see?" she asked, her voice low and even. Ciel's smirk hinted at a hidden meaning, her eyes glinting with intrigue. "I saw something a little too normal for the scene..."
"...a maintenance worker clocking out, exactly on schedule," Ciel finished, her smirk still playing on her lips. The dim lighting of the safehouse cast a warm glow on her features, illuminating the sharp lines of her face. "No hesitation, no glance over the shoulder. It's like he's completely oblivious to the tension in the area."
Navi's brow furrowed in consideration, her eyes narrowing as she thought. "That's what's got you curious? A guy following routine?" The air was thick with the scent of freshly brewed coffee, a comforting aroma that seemed to calm the tension.
Ciel nodded, her eyes never leaving the camera feeds. "In a place like this, you'd expect everyone to be on edge. But this guy... he looks like he's just going through the motions. Like he's not even aware of what's really going on."
Navi raised an eyebrow, her voice laced with skepticism. "Yeah, but assuming he is chipped like the vast majority of the NCS... That is exactly what Erebus wants. Fluidity..." The words hung in the air, heavy with implication.
"Fluidity in compliance," Ciel finished, her eyes narrowing as she pieced together the implications. The soft glow of the displays cast an eerie light on her face, illuminating the sharp lines of her features. "If he's chipped, Erebus would be monitoring his every move, anticipating any deviation from the norm. And if he's behaving exactly as expected..."
Navi nodded in agreement, her expression thoughtful. "He's either perfectly obedient or perfectly unaware. Either way, it's a good reminder that we're not the only ones watching." The air seemed to thicken with the weight of Erebus's omnipresent gaze, and Ciel's smirk faltered for a moment before she replied, "Let's keep watching, see if our maintenance worker friend does anything... interesting."
━━━━━━━━━//━━
As Navi opened up the rest of the cameras in the vicinity of the docks, Ciel's eyes scanned the feeds, her gaze lingering on the maintenance worker's figure. Every time she looked up, she was able to spot where he was at any point in time.
The room hums with the soft glow of screens as Navi's blue-haired projection shifts into view, the image hovering just beside Ciel's line of sight. The feed confirms what they already suspected: the maintenance worker roams on a clockwork schedule, and the clock is ticking toward something bigger than a routine end-of-shift handshake with the docks.
Navi's voice is a quiet, clinical thing in Ciel's head. It feels almost human when she wants it to, and almost nothing when she doesn't. "He's leaving the dock. On schedule. This isn't a random walk. It's a pattern."
Ciel doesn't blink. She slides a mug of coffee toward her, steam curling into the dim air. The safehouse smells like coffee and rain, a small mercy in a city that never truly rests. The camera feeds flicker as Navi nudges them toward a different angle, the glow painting the sharp lines of Ciel's face with a pale, amber sheen.
Didi's memory flutters through Ciel's mind again—the clipped line in the back of her brain where a voice that brings her back to the past tries to tell her something soft and dangerous. "She roamed through the meadows, helped all in her sight. Believing in goodness, mankind's spark of light." It's a ghost of a memory, a whisper of hope that tastes like ash on the tongue. It makes Ciel shiver, and she pushes it away with a practiced, almost bored blink.
"Okay, Roan Mikelson," Navi says, sliding the document toward Ciel as if it were a physical thing, the data floating in mid-air between them. The name stands out in bold, the birth date a long line of years beyond what anyone should remember. The address: 384 Lourenson - The Narrows. Occupation: Dock Worker - Maintenance. Affiliations: NEG. It's not surprising to see him tied to the docks, not surprising to see the link to adversarial code words that Erebus loves to seed in the city's arteries.
Ciel read the lines again, and something in her stomach knots. The handwriting of the file seems to blur for a moment, the images in her mind—old, broken, hot—reasserting themselves. She forces them back, takes a careful breath. "Same address as Mr. Kalaban? Queen's to you, Navi."
Navi's response is light, almost playful. "Ding ding ding. Queens to you, Ciel." Then a moment more serious. "If he's chipped, Erebus would know his every move. Fluidity in compliance. If he's exactly as expected… He's either flawless or a decoy. Either way, he's a breadcrumb leading us somewhere."
Ciel nods, the gesture almost invisible in the dim light. "Let's see where it leads."
━━━━━━━━━//━━
They pace through the safehouse with the same precision the dock worker shows in his routine. The world outside the window is a canvas of neon rain and exhaust, the air a little too electric, as if the city itself is always listening. Navi circles Ciel's vision again, projecting the blue-haired image with the soft silhouette of a woman in her twenties, streetwear clinging to the curves of a human form who isn't really there, but who can be everywhere Ciel looks. Navi can do this, within a certain range and with Ciel's EchoFluxChip humming in her skull. Erebus's control is sneaky and everywhere, but it isn't absolute—especially when a hacked chip sits inside a brain that won't stay quiet.
"Grav-taxi is the way to go," Navi says, voice a steady drum in Ciel's skull. "Fastest, least crowded, and we can pretend we're not following anyone if we don't want to be obvious."
Ciel smiles, a small, cruel twist of her lips. "Always the practical one, aren't you?" She slides to the kitchenette, pours a second coffee for good measure, and exhales. The aroma steadies her, a small anchor in the storm of data and danger that swirls around Erebus's gaze.
"Map looks solid," Navi says as she projects a holographic city map into the air between them, lines of neon tracing every major route, every alley that could hide a story or a trap. "The Narrows isn't far. We'll need to ride the edge of the river to stay under the usual patrols."
"Let's not telegraph it," Ciel says, but she's already shrugging into a weather-worn jacket, the kind that drapes easy over her shoulders and hides nothing. She moves toward the door with a quiet, practiced ease, thinking of the plan in the back of her mind even as the present tense keeps beating in her ears.
They step into the rain-slicked street, the city's neon heartbeat pulsing against the night like a second wind. The air tastes electric, a little metallic, and the distant thunder of drone blades gives everything a sense of purpose—like the city itself is listening for something to happen.
━━━━━━━━━//━━
The grav-taxi glides into the street in a quiet slide of shadow and light. Inside, Ciel sits opposite Navi, though the projection is faint enough that anyone glancing would think she's alone. The cab's doors seal with a cautious hush, and the vehicle slides toward the river's edge with the silken efficiency that only a city with too much money and too many secrets can muster.
"Stay low and keep your head on a swivel," Ciel tells Navi in a low voice that's almost a whisper. "If he's moving in a pattern, he'll show us where the flow breaks."
Navi is there, in her projected form, a living interface that Ciel can see when she looks for it. She doesn't have a body; she has a presence—a presence that makes reality feel a little more flexible, a little more dangerous to trust.
The ride unwinds in a careful, methodical way. Roan's movements appear on the feeds as if he's choreographed by time itself. The dock, his clock-out, his slight tilt of the head as he studies the crowd, the way his hands stay at his sides and never drift to pockets or tools—that unnatural ease is a sign, or so Ciel tells herself as she studies the live feed. The man isn't just leaving work; he's entering a script someone else wrote, someone who wants him to be exactly this.
"He's not alone," Navi murmurs, a line that makes Ciel tense. "Another pair of eyes in the feed—likely a watcher, and not a simple one. Erebus loves crowds, but he also loves the quiet whisper of a single observer who knows where to look."
Ciel's jaw tightens. "We'll see who's holding the strings."
The taxi darts along the river, through a corridor of warehouses painted in the bruised colors of advertising screens that never turn off. The Narrows come alive with a different kind of energy—less glitter, more grit, a place where the city's underbelly breathes in the same neon light as the luxury towers above it. Roan steps off a loading ramp into a narrow alley behind a maintenance entrance marked with mesh and rust. The camera catches his face in a moment of almost-too-human ease—the way his shoulders drop, the way he glances to the right and then left as if listening for something other than footsteps.
"Moving to a back door," Navi notes, tapping a finger against the air to call up another feed. The narrative is building toward a moment, and Ciel knows it. The tension she's been living with—the memory of the elbow shattering, the screams—picks at her again, a raw wound wrapped in a scarf of adrenaline.
"Kings to you, Roan," Ciel mutters under her breath, almost in spite of the fear that gnaws at the edge of her courage. They've learned enough to know that this is not an isolated incident. This is a thread that unravels into something bigger—the kind of thing Erebus would love to show off if he could.
Roan moves deeper into the building, opening a door that looks ordinary enough until you catch the glint of a sensor strip on the frame. The safety latch clicks. The feed cuts to a dim, windowless corridor that smells of ozone and oil. It's a maintenance tunnel, the kind of access that should be ordinary but isn't—because what lurks behind these doors isn't maintenance at all; it's a gateway.
Ciel's breath catches. The map in Navi's projection shifts, revealing a doorway that doesn't exist on the outside map—the city's version of a secret—the kind of thing Erebus loves to keep hidden, the thing that tells him who dares to be more than a number in a feed.
"We're close," Navi says, her voice calmer now, with that quiet certainty that comes from knowing the city's scaffolding and the way it creaks when you push too hard.
━━━━━━━━━//━━
Roan slips through the door and the feed cuts to static for a breath, then returns—just enough to show a halo of neon creeping around the corner, as if the building itself is watching. The moment blooms into a danger that isn't visible, but that Ciel can feel in the pulse of the EchoFluxChip.
"Ciel, listen," Navi says, a soft urgency threaded through her words. "Two silhouettes just stepped into the frame behind him. They're not dock workers. They're watchers—Likely NEG or Erebus'type. They're closing in."
She's right. The shapes move with a calculated efficiency that says "we know what we want, and we'll take it." The two come together at the door Roan just opened, the kind of synchronized movement that betrays a pair of agents who have worked together for too long to allow a single misstep.
Ciel swallows. The plan isn't a plan anymore; it's a choice in the moment: show themselves, or let Roan disappear into the labyrinth and lose him to the city's generated fog. The fed stories of Erebus push them toward caution, toward living to fight another day. Didi's voice—soft and distant—seems to murmur through the feed as if she's somewhere in the room with them, a memory as much as a guide.
"Hover the drone on the left," Ciel says softly, a whisper of command to Navi that she can feel rather than hear. "Keep the feed clean. If they find us—if Erebus's watchers realize we're here—we lose him, and we lose the thread."
The drone obeys, a small speck of light moving where the eye can't. The two watchers exchange a glance, then move toward the door Roan had used. The corridor darkens as their silhouettes melt into the shadows, replacing the glow of neon with something colder, something more calculating.
And then, in the moment before anything happens, Roan looks directly into the camera, as if he knows he's not alone and wants the world to see it anyway. His eyes hold a strange, almost relieved calm—like he's found something he wasn't supposed to see, or like he's watched the watchers and decided to walk toward them anyway.
Navi's voice breaks the charged quiet. "He's not running. He's inviting them to a conversation he doesn't know about yet."
Ciel leans forward, breath shallow, muscles tight. The risk of engaging is heavy—the kind of risk Erebus thrives on: you show a little of your hand, and suddenly you're playing for keeps. Yet if they don't push, the thread ends here, Roan vanishes into the city's throat, and Erebus continues to pull at the leash of the population with a steady, deadly patience.
"Let's move," Ciel says, and her body moves with her words, a deliberate step toward the edge of the alley, toward the back door Roan entered, toward the possibility of turning this from a chase into a confrontation.
━━━━━━━━━//━━
The grav-taxi waits at the curb, a chrysalis of metal and light ready to unfold into motion. Navi's projection steps closer to Ciel's vision, the blue hair brushing against a memory of rain and the taste of coffee on the lips of a girl who learned to survive by finding patterns where others saw only noise.
"Ciel," Navi says, a careful pause. "If we pull this off, it'll be a blow against Erebus's gaze. It may not win the war, but it will show the rats in the nest that they're not the only ones with a map."
Ciel finishes her coffee, sets the cup down with a measured, almost ceremonial calm, and nods. "Then let's finish this chapter the only way we know how—by turning a corner and walking into the light we're supposed to fear."
The taxi hums to life, and the city's rain catches in its neon glare as if the whole night is watching them. They rise, stride toward the door, and slip into the corridor behind Roan, the watchers, and whatever fate Erebus has waiting in the dark.