Ava's workshop pulsed with low light and the quiet whir of machines. The sync key rotated inside a containment field, held steady by four magnetic clamps. Streams of data flickered across multiple monitors, most of it encrypted legacy code that hadn't seen daylight in over fifty years.
Noel leaned against the far wall, arms crossed tightly, trying not to pace.
"You're twitchy," Ava muttered without turning. "That a side effect of sharing a skull with Jack, or are you always this patient?"
"Both. Neither. Just... keep going."
Ava snorted and adjusted her goggles. "You know, back when he was flesh and blood, Jack used to mutter at the hardware like it would listen. Looks like the habit lives on."
The sync key let out a low hum. Symbols surfaced along its crystal edges—complex, nested resonance glyphs.
"Got something," Ava said, more to herself than Noel. "Not the core pattern, but secondary metadata—routing logs, timestamp fragments... This thing wasn't made to store data. It was made to grant access."
Noel stepped forward. "Access to what?"
Ava expanded a side screen, highlighting lines of code. "Encrypted domain. Mid-tier relay hub, dormant since the Collapse. Coordinates are partial, but it pings near the coast. You ever hear of a place called Selmoor Reach?"
Noel blinked. "That's... old reclamation ground. Nothing there but fog and broken towers."
"Apparently one of those towers has teeth. Whoever used this key last was trying to open something underneath it. You want answers, that's your next step."
Noel nodded, the weight of the decision settling in. She turned to leave.
"Hey," Ava said. "Be careful. Just because Spectra's quiet doesn't mean they're blind. You trip another echo like you did at Crestmont, and they'll come hunting."
Noel gave a tight smile. "Then I'll make sure they're looking in the wrong place."
.....
Noel didn't stop for long after leaving Ava's bunker.
The streets above were beginning to thin out—shops closing, streetcars quieter, the city folding in on itself as night deepened. She moved with purpose, her steps unhurried but deliberate, hood drawn low to hide the thoughtful urgency burning in her gaze.
Jack was quiet, but not absent. She could feel him like pressure behind her ribs. Waiting.
The coordinates Ava had extracted weren't a direct address—more like a spatial tether encoded into the sync key's locking sequence. But it was enough. A place name had floated up alongside the frequency pattern: Selmoor Reach.
She pulled up the map on her wristband again. Selmoor wasn't a city. It was a stretch of ridgeline forest an hour outside the main grid, along the southern border, mostly uninhabited. The kind of place people used to talk about when they wanted to disappear.
Or hide something.
"You ever hear of Selmoor in your time?" she asked aloud as she turned down a stairwell toward the transit hub.
Jack's voice came slow. Thoughtful. "Not by that name. Could've changed over the years. But I remember the topography. There were facilities out that way. Abandoned when Spectra centralized everything."
Noel nodded. "Then it's worth a look."
She caught the next outbound rail before it closed for the night, scanning in with a borrowed keycard. The car was empty. Good. She needed the quiet.
As the train began to hum beneath her, her mind slipped into rhythm with the motion. The landscape blurred past—first industrial zones, then greener fields, then rising dark where the city lights no longer reached. Her fingers drifted to the crystal shard around her neck. Then to the satchel. Still warm from Ava's scans.
"You think whatever's out there is another fragment?" she asked softly.
"It's possible," Jack answered. "Or something built around one."
Noel looked out at the dark trees now beginning to cluster along the tracks.
"Then let's hope whoever left it behind isn't still guarding it."
.....
Ava sat alone, back in her bunker, eyes glued to the rotating display of the sync key's decoding interface. Lines of fragmented code pulsed across the screen—irregular, but not random. Like someone had tried to erase something, then left the scar tissue behind.
She tapped a key. Ran the sequence again.
Encrypted directives scrolled past:
> ENTRY LOG 117: // authorized via Sequence Echo [J.] TARGET SITE: [REDACTED] — Coordinates verified [Selmoor Reach perimeter] CLASSIFICATION: Vaulted fragment containment. Layered shielding required.
INACTIVE SINCE: …[corrupted]
Ava leaned forward.
"Vaulted fragment containment," she whispered.
And right underneath, a final line began to surface—part of the deeper fail-safe Jack had warned her about.
> If accessed: Flag legacy code // awaken protocol (1 dormant link remaining)
Her hands froze.
This wasn't just a storage node.
It was a trigger.
She reached for her comm interface, opening a secure line Noel could check later if she didn't respond immediately.
"Whatever's waiting out there," she muttered, "it's not just another shard. Be careful."
....
The train only got her so far. After that, it was footpaths and an old freight bike scavenged from a tunnel lockup. Noel followed the trace Ava had extracted, cross-checking the map with resonance activity Jack helped her sense—twitches in the air, faint glimmers of energy that didn't belong.
She rode further, following the map overlay Ava had generated.
"Feels quiet," she whispered.
Jack's voice was faint. "Not quiet. Guarded."
Noel slowed.
Selmoor Reach was a windswept ruin on the edge of the city's forgotten zones. Half-drowned towers leaned like broken teeth from a sea of ash-colored fog. Steel beams jutted from the ground like ribs. It smelled of rust and silence.
"Definitely Spectra," Jack said softly. "That fog? It's not weather. It's containment."
Noel dismounted and crouched beside a fallen pillar, running her fingers along a half-sunk console. Drawing a faint light from her wristband and scanning the area, faint shimmer crawled across its surface.
"There's something under us," she murmured. "Deep. Hidden."
She closed her eyes and reached inward—toward Jack, toward the shards humming inside her satchel.
A pulse answered. Faint. Then stronger. Not a shard this time.
A signal.
From something waiting below.
"Another anchor?" she asked.
"No," Jack replied. "A conduit. Probably a relay node for whatever the sync key was meant to activate."
Noel scanned the ruins, then slipped into a crumbled stairwell leading downward, deeper into the mist.
Behind her, high above, a ripple passed through the fog.
Not natural. Not unnoticed.
And somewhere beneath the ruins, something stirred awake.