The coordinate tracker Feron had lent her pulsed softly in her palm, reluctant but obedient. She owed him a week of favours for it.
He hadn't argued. He rarely did, when curiosity pointed somewhere inconvenient.
"Useful." Mara muttered under her breath. It was as close to gratitude as she allowed herself.
The route led her through a stretch of the city she didn't recognize — not unfamiliar, exactly, but unclaimed. Service corridors bled into alleys. Alleys narrowed into passages that pretended they'd always been there.
She moved carefully. Not fast. Not slow. Hiding in dim alleyways occasionally to evade any unwanted eyes. The kind of pace that didn't attract attention.
Being unnoticed wasn't a preference. It was a necessary condition.
The city carried on around her, precise and incurious. Vendors called prices. A transit drone corrected its course. Nothing acknowledged her passage. Nothing corrected it either. This alone was surprising.
As she walked, something tugged at her awareness — not a thought, but the absence of one. The space beside her felt wrong. Too open and lonely. Like a conversation that had stopped mid-sentence.
Sene should have been there.
Talking too loudly. Slipping her hand into Mara's without asking, like it had always belonged over it.
The walk stretched longer than it should have.
Mara adjusted her pace automatically — the habit of matching someone else still lodged in her body. She slowed, then realized why, and corrected herself with irritation.
Sene used to complain when Mara walked like that.
"Do you always move like you're about to disappear?" she'd asked once, tugging Mara's arm back. "People are gonna think you're haunted."
Mara snorted at the memory and kept going.
The city smelled the same as always: oil, dust, overheated wiring. What was missing stood out more than anything present.
Sene had never let herself smell like this.
She went to the public baths near the transit hub — poorly maintained, barely regulated — and came back drenched in citrus and lemon perfume, like she was trying to overwrite the city with something older and cleaner.
"Old people love it," she'd said proudly. "Makes them nostalgic for things they can't explain."
Mara had rolled her eyes. "You're wasting money."
"And You're wasting potential," Sene shot back, uncapping the bottle and spraying Mara
with the perfume without warning.
Mara grimaced now, lifting her collar and catching the faintest echo of that scent where it
didn't belong.
She hadn't showered in days.
Sene would have complained. Loudly. "You smell like stale air. I cannot allow it".
Then she would've fixed it — dragged Mara to the baths, forced soap into her hands, stood guard like it was a matter of dignity.
"You could be pretty," she'd said once, arms crossed, expression serious. "If you'd stop pretending you don't exist."
Mara hadn't answered. If it hadn't been for Sene's cleanliness - A rare quality to come by in the city, Mara would have been living surrounded by cables and other filth which did not belong.
She still didn't understand why Sene had stayed. Why she'd cared. Why she'd filled space so
insistently when Mara had spent years learning how to leave none.
It was as if a higher being felt pity at Mara's state and sent down an angel to help.
Mara personally, was one to not bother about looks or self care. She sometimes got compliments about her hair due to it's peculiar purple colour accented with a dull yellow however she did not really feel anything about it.
Whether it was the city that had made her this way or herself due to her inherent nature, she frankly, did not give a damn, which is what she would usually say to Sene as well when pestered too much.
"Sene...I'll bring you back to me soon." Mara whispered, like a prayer. Nobody heard it.
Mara stopped walking.
She pressed her lips together, grounding herself in the present. The tracker blinked patiently. The keepsong rested against her chest, warm but quiet.
She started moving again.
The city's name surfaced unbidden as she crossed into the service district.
Canteros.
A name that sounded brighter than the place deserved. She had called it home once.
The word felt provisional now. At first,
The coordinates led nowhere.
38.22.114.7 In hub nine, deposited Mara into a service district the city no longer bothered to name.
Storage units slouched against each other like tired animals. Old conduits threaded overhead, their hum uneven, as if they were arguing about whether to stay awake.
A transit substation crouched behind a fence that had rusted into compliance rather than decay.
Nothing here announced itself as important. Mara walked past the marker once.
Then again.
Slowly, her steps started sounding wrong — not louder, not quieter — delayed. Each footfall arrived a fraction of a second after her weight had already shifted, like the ground was waiting to be certain she meant it.
"That's strange...I swear it feels like I hear my own noise a second or two late...It's different from an echo"
She stopped.
The city kept going.
Traffic murmured somewhere above. A public board cycled an advertisement that didn't apply to anyone standing nearby. The keepsong rested cool against her chest, inert enough to be forgotten.
Mara turned in a slow circle searching for a clue. That was when the sound occurred.
Not a broadcast. Not music. A tone.
It was thin and exact, sharp enough to slice a moment cleanly in two. The air did not carry it. Her ears didn't ring. Instead, the sensation arrived behind her eyes, like pressure equalizing somewhere too deep to touch.
She felt a sharp ache in her skull as though her brain would explode. She grasped her head between her hands tightly closing her ears. It did not help
Mara's vision blurred and distorted. She felt nauseous. It felt like Her brain was being ripped apart and taped back into place.
Mara felt the space around her change. She was in too much cognitive pain to understand what was happening but her senses were seasoned enough to know that something was.
It was as if the world did not tilt — distance did.
The fence she had passed twice before leaned closer, its angle subtly incorrect. The space between buildings compressed, then relaxed, like a lung testing breath. The shadows beneath the conduits thickened, darkening into something that suggested depth where none should exist.
Her scar flared.
For a second, Mara could not remember herself why she had come here.
"What is happening. Where am I... Who am I..I..."
The thought of Sene drifted just out of reach, like a word she could almost pronounce. Panic fluttered, thin and directionless.
"Sene...Sene...Hub nine"
She tried to anchor herself to reality.
For a moment the visions from her dreams flashed before her. She pressed a hand to her chest.
The keepsong pulsed. Once. Deep. Anchoring.
The tone sounded again — longer this time — and the city misaligned.
Where the fence had been, a stairwell now descended. Not newly revealed. Not emerging. A signboard read,
--------
Sublevel-B
--------
As if it had always been there and everything else had been pretending.