The image of the woman, Ilya, burned on the crystalline panel. Her defiance was a stark contrast to Aris's sorrow. She wasn't clinging to a cherished past; she was guarding a dangerous present. A secret.
The Echo's plea echoed in the silence it had left behind. She remembers the truth.
The Archivist's cold lesson warred with the ghost of Aris's hollowed-out gaze. Obedience meant survival. It meant becoming the precise, emotionless tool the Council wanted. But the cost was Ilya's memory, a piece of the city's hidden history. The truth.
Kaelen made his decision.
He would perform the extraction. But he would not deliver the memory to the Council.
The obsidian door hissed open. The same female Guard—he'd overheard her name was Valeria—stood there. Her grey eyes assessed him, looking for cracks.
"The seditionist," she stated. "Her resolve is strong. This will test your control. Do not fail."
She led him to a different wing, where the cells were more fortified. The air hummed with a higher frequency of dampening fields. Inside cell 12-D, Ilya sat perfectly still on her cot. She didn't look up as he entered.
"Another ghost-catcher?" she said, her voice low and rough. "Come to pick my bones before they toss me in the grinder?"
She held up her hand. Clutched in it was a small, smooth, river-worn stone. Her anchor point.
"They think my secret is a meeting place. A list of names," she continued, finally looking at him. Her eyes were the colour of flint, and just as hard. "They're wrong. The memory is a question. The right question. And you will not take it from me."
Kaelen didn't sit. He didn't try to be gentle. He adopted the cold demeanour the Archivist had demanded.
"The Cleansing Vats will take it," he replied, his voice flat. "They will shatter your mind to get it. The process is… messy. What I do is clean. The memory remains intact, just… relocated."
Ilya smirked, a bitter, knowing twist of her lips. "Relocated to a fuel cell to power the lies. No thank you."
"Not necessarily," Kaelen whispered, taking a calculated risk. He took a step closer. "What if it was relocated to a library?"
Her smirk vanished. Her eyes narrowed, searching his face for the trap. "There are no libraries in Aethelgard. Only ledgers."
"There is one," Kaelen said, holding her gaze. He let a sliver of his own defiance show. "And I am its librarian."
The silence in the cell was profound. Ilya studied him, her hardened expression shifting to one of intense calculation. She was weighing his truthfulness against certain death.
"The Remnants speak of an Anchor," she murmured, almost to herself. "A myth. A person who could not just hold memories, but shape them." Her eyes locked onto his. "You would preserve it? Not feed it to their machines?"
"I would," Kaelen vowed. "On the memory of my own life, I swear it."
It was the only oath he had left.
Ilya's shoulders relaxed a fraction. The defiance was still there, but it was now partnered with a desperate, wild hope. She looked at the stone in her hand.
"The question is this," she said, her voice dropping so low he could barely hear it. "What happened to the stars?"
Before he could process the strange query, she held out the stone. "Take it. Quickly."
This time, the extraction was different. There was no gentle flow, no collaborative surrender. It was a swift, precise transfer, like a surgeon excising a tumour. He focused, standing on the shore as the Archivist had instructed, and pulled the memory-thread from her mind into the stone.
It was not a long, narrative memory. It was a single, powerful moment. Ilya, standing on a high rooftop at night, looking up at a sky that was not a hazy, orange dome, but a vast, black canvas. And on that canvas were points of light. Stars. A concept so foreign it felt like a dream. And with the sight of them came the overwhelming, revolutionary question: What happened to the stars?
The memory slammed into the river stone, and Ilya gasped, her body going rigid for a second before slumping forward. When she looked up, the fire was gone. The knowledge was gone. She looked confused, tired.
"Is it over?" she asked, her voice dull.
"It's over," Kaelen said, his fist closing around the now-warm stone in his pocket. He had done it. He had stolen from the thieves.
Back in his room, he didn't place the stone on the shelf. He hid it under his thin mattress. He had just committed an unpardonable crime. He had preserved a seditious memory.
He waited for the panel to chime with his next directive. Or his death sentence.
Instead, a new message appeared, this one from the Archivist himself.
[Your efficiency is improving. The subject Ilya is scheduled for processing. You have one hour of rest. Use it to meditate on emotional detachment. The next subject is a high-priority target from the Aetherium Syndicate. His memories are volatile. Do not engage with them. Merely extract.]
They didn't know. His deception had worked.
A slow, grim sense of power began to kindle within him, cutting through the guilt and fear. He was not just a prisoner. He was a spy in the heart of the enemy's fortress. A librarian, yes, but one who was now secretly curating a forbidden section.
As he sat on his cot, the weight of the hidden stone a secret comfort beneath him, The Echo's voice returned. It was no longer a chorus of whispers, but a single, clear, satisfied tone that resonated deep in his bones.
...welcome, brother...