"Grief is what remembers. Love is what refuses to forget."
---
Running.
Boots hammering pavement slick with rain. Lungs clawing, ribs aching. Every breath cuts deeper than the last—but pain's not what matters. What matters is the corner just ahead.
Under the flickering streetlamps, the runner cuts a silhouette sharp against the night, medium height and lean in that way hunger carves into a body. A dark hood shadows his face, trimmed in the quilted bulk of a weatherproof coat, patched and repatched. Rain glints off caramel-brown skin. Freckles flash across high cheekbones—scattered like a constellation, half-erased by speed. A pale scar slices across the bridge of his nose. Old. Faint. Permanent.
His lips are split—fresh hit, still bleeding. Big, almond eyes burn beneath busy eyebrows, locked forward with the kind of focus only desperation delivers. He's not just running. He's reading the street. Mapping angles. Looking for his opening.
He's not afraid.
This is Zahir Mercer. Slum-born. Trouble-taught. There are Black Quarters Pact assholes on his heels—faster, stronger, better-equipped. Doesn't matter. Zahir knows lower Calvessan. He knows it in his bones like a bitter lullaby.
He cuts hard left—foot slamming through a puddle—into a narrow side street soaked in shadow and electric noise. Shuttered shops line the strip: a laundro-clinic with cracked siding, a stim-patch kiosk gutted for parts, a bodega lit by glitching full-body drink ads flickering in its doorway.
Neon-pink letters jittered against yellow static, cut with pulses of melon-green so bright they felt radioactive.
!!!DRANKO TO THE MAX!!!
!!!NOW IN ANGEL MELON!!!
!!!SUPERGOOD!!!
Security gates rattled in the breeze, half-jammed or rust-eaten. A busted public Lattice platform flickered dimly at the corner—its concentric rings fractured midair like broken glass, frozen halfway through a ghosted projection.
He bolts through the phantom drinks, veering for the bodega. There's an old freezer crawlspace out front that never locked right. Hidden behind the gate, just enough space to—
Something moves.
Then—impact. A shadow, a blur, a burst of pressure behind his ear—
—and the world goes sideways.
He hits the concrete hard. Pain flares white-hot as something cracks in his shoulder—sharp, sudden, final.
His arm is dislocated or worse.
His vision blurs, colors swirling into noise. He grits his teeth, breath stuttering.
They were waiting for him.
Whether they outmaneuvered him or just got lucky doesn't matter. BQP doesn't leave their debts to chance.
"Still think you're clever, Mercer?" a voice sneers.
Then Zahir feels fingers—if you could still call them that—wrap around his throat. They're dense. Cold. Like someone had laced metal through bone. His boots scrape the ground as he's lifted, throat clenched in a grip that didn't feel human.
He's not hallucinating. The guy's an Innovator—low-rank, maybe, but still ranked. Still enough to fold a normal man in half with one hand.
Which is exactly what he seems to be weighing.
---
Innovators.
People throw that word around like it explains something. Like it makes you special. Like the system sees you and says: Yes, you count.
But most folks? Their souls just hum in the background—unnoticed. Latent.
A few? They crystallize. Something sharp locks into place.
That's when the Field starts to change.
That's when a Signature wakes up.
A Signature isn't a power.
It's a _state._ A change in what you are, not just what you can do.
When it kicks in, everything shifts. The body runs hotter. The instincts sharpen. And the Field?
It stops being a backdrop. It starts responding.
Every Signature starts as a base-state—some core substance your soul aligns with.
Some echo real-world elements: iron, carbon, mercury. That kind of thing. Others are rarer—abstract. Forces, not materials. Entropy. Inertia. Recursion.
Doesn't matter what you call it. Once it forms, it leaves its fingerprint on everything—your body, your instincts, your impact on the world.
But awakening's just the threshold.
A Signature isn't static. It evolves—reacts to catalysts, stress, strange exposures. Sometimes it grows by design. Sometimes by accident.
And when it does? The rules change again. You're not just alive—you're an equation in motion.
Synthesis. Transmutation. Fusion.
Signatures react like chemicals—touch the right catalyst, and something shifts. Hit the wrong one, and something breaks. Sometimes it's a rare reagent. Sometimes it's surviving the kind of moment that should've killed you.
These aren't spells. They're formulas—laws, etched deep. Alchemy written into your bones.
The Field's where it all happens.
Not just energy or magic or code—something in between. It runs through everything. A network. A medium. A pressure system.
That's how Signatures touch the world. They don't just act—they rewrite. Bend matter. Disrupt energy. Tear open doors to places that shouldn't exist.
The deeper you go, the stranger it gets.
Even a low-tier Base-rank, like the one throttling Zahir right now, can punch a grown man through a wall.
And Zahir?
Even as latent trash, Zahir's Signature doesn't even register.
Not to the Lattice. Not to scans. Not to sensing tech or perception-enhancing Signatures. To the system, he's a blank. A glitch.
It's not that the Field ignores him. It's worse.
It gets things wrong.
---
His name's Kasik—Zahir remembers now. One of BQP's lieutenants.
Kasik slams him into the wall hard enough to make his vision go white. Metallic fingers tightening around his throat—pressure pinching against his arteries, his vision narrowing to a pinpoint.
Then—something slips.
A flicker. Not in the air. Not in Kasik's grip. In the thread.
The invisible one that tethers his wrist implant to the Lattice—some cheap node for threat readouts or tactical overlays.
The Field around them wrinkles, almost imperceptibly, like reality itself stutters and catches its breath.
A faint buzz hums from Kasik's wrist. A blink of static. He doesn't notice.
Zahir does.
They think he's powerless. But error is its own kind of weapon.
"You know why Dross tolerates you?" Kasik mutters, pressing closer. "He's bored. You're the first idiot in years to show up thinking you can negotiate. You're a novelty."
Kasik tilted his head, voice dropping like he was explaining something important.
"You don't get it, Mercer. You're not in the game. You're a lesson. Proof that any path but ours leads nowhere."
Zahir didn't answer.
Blood ran from his lip. His throat pulsed where Kasik's grip had pressed too long.
But his eyes—black, burning—never broke.
"If you ask me," Kasik said, voice tightening, "he never should've given you a contract. Should've let you rot."
Zahir never technically signed the contract. To do that he would have access to the Lattice, which he categorically did not have. But BQP didn't care. They flagged him as a dependent one someone else's with a few extra clauses.
Kasik sneered. "Now you're late on payment, short on pull, and I'm out here like some glorified babysitter—wasting my talents on a mistake."
Zahir forced a crooked smirk of his own, blood on his teeth.
"If Dross sent you to chase me down… maybe I'm not the one he's testing."
Kasik's face twitched.
Then came the punch—buried deep in Zahir's diaphragm.
Air vanished from his lungs. His knees buckled midair. Mouth open, but no sound came out—just the dry-heave silence of a body forgetting how to breathe.
Three ribs. Minimum.
Kasik held him there, just long enough to watch the fight drain out.
"Big talker," he said. "Where's that getting you now?"
Zahir couldn't answer. Could barely breathe.
Kasik held on until his eyes dimmed—just long enough to flirt with blackout. Then he let go.
Zahir hit the ground coughing, ribs screaming, body crumpled like dropped scrap.
Kasik looked down at him, eyes gleaming with casual disgust.
"You've got two days. Two hundred K, plus fifteen percent handling. If the ledger doesn't ping…"
A shrug.
"Maybe your district does better with new owners."
Zahir coughed into the pavement—iron in his throat, fire in his ribs.
But it was the number that hit hardest.
Two hundred K. Plus handling.
Louder than the pain.
Kasik straightened his coat, turned, and gave a sharp whistle. The rest of his crew started moving again, walking leisurely back towards the main road.
Kasik paused at the edge of the alley. Looked back.
"You got balls, Mercer. I'll give you that."
A beat.
"But tribute's blood. You either pay it… or we take it."
Then he was gone.
Zahir lay still until their footsteps faded. Only then did he move—slow, steady, one elbow at a time—rolling onto his side with a low grunt.
The pain stayed sharp. His ribs howled. One eye throbbed where Kasik's knuckles had split the bone just beneath it. But he'd survived worse.
He reached for the wall and pulled himself upright, boot slipping once on the wet concrete before he found his stance. Every breath lit him up from the inside, but he stayed on his feet.
His own wrist node blinked. Dead, like always. No Lattice feed. No ping. Just a glitched-out relic clinging to his skin like it might one day wake up.
He touched the side of his coat and felt the old analog patch-beeper stitched into the lining—Elai's idea. It buzzed twice, short and sharp.
Zahir dug it out and pressed the speaker tab.
"You get it?" he rasped.
There was a pause, static on the line.
Then Brin's voice came through. Low. Tight. Triumphant.
"Yeah. All of it."
Zahir exhaled through his nose, jaw clenching against the pain.
"Then we're still in the game. Meet me at the fallback. Phase two."
He killed the line and tucked the beeper away. Rain started again—thin and sharp, like the city spitting on him for daring to play out of his league.
He turned toward the alley's mouth. The phantom drink ads still flickered behind him.
!!!SUPERGOOD!!! BUY NOW PAY LATER!!! ANGEL MELON BACK IN STOCK!!!
Zahir didn't look back.
He limped into the dark, ribs aching, mind already calculating.
They thought tribute was blood?
Fine.
He'd start with theirs.