The lab smelled like cold metal and burnt sugar—the aftertaste of scorched synaptic gel.
Arden hated that it was starting to feel like home.
The Judiciary Cognitive Forensics Suite lived six floors below daylight, carved out of the tower's spine like a tumor that learned to pass audits. No windows. No clocks. Just rows of glass coffins for data and the low, constant thrum of machines dreaming justice in binary.
Kai sat in the center of it all, half-dressed, pale, shaking.
The Underlayer rig cradled him like a lover with bad intentions. Crown of interfaces still clipped to his hair, veins mapped by faint blue tracer lines that pulsed in time with the rig's heartbeat. His eyes were open but far—focusing on things Arden couldn't see and never wanted to.
Lyra knelt beside him, bare feet on the cold floor, hands hovering just short of his skin. Not touching. Not yet. Her eyes tracked the tracer lines as if they were scripture.
"You're back," she said softly.
Kai laughed once, a dry cough that wanted to be a scream. "Define 'back.'"
Arden stood close enough to catch him if he crashed sideways. His leash-collar hummed at his throat like a live threat, warm where it pressed into scar tissue.
"Breathing counts," Arden said. "Annoying me counts. That's two metrics."
Kai blinked, finally anchoring on him. The pupils were uneven—one slightly dilated, one slow to respond.
"Reik," he said. "Anchorman of my heart."
"Don't make it weird in front of the scientist," Arden muttered.
"Too late," Lyra said. Her mouth twitched, almost-smile. "He made it weird in front of the entire Underlayer."
Kai grimaced. "You heard that?"
"I heard enough." Her gaze flicked to the rig's floating monitors, streams of code cascading past. "Zero_Null," she added quietly. "It chose your old handle for a shape. That's not… random."
The room's fourth occupant cleared his throat, a sound like a file dragged over teeth.
Director Silex leaned against a nearby console, hands in his coat pockets, watching them with that particular flavor of polite interest he usually reserved for new weapons systems and catastrophic failures.
"Randomness is expensive," he said. "Code almost never wastes it."
Arden glanced at him. Silex's leash-band was a thin silver line at his wrist, decorative compared to the industrial cuff at Arden's throat. Technically the same technology. Practically not.
"You got what you wanted," Arden said. "Pastor Rook in a box, cult hardware on your shelves, Kai not dead. That's a win, right?"
Silex's eyes swept over him. "I didn't send Netrunner Ø3 into a black-market echo maze for a participation trophy." He tilted his head at Kai. "What did it offer you?"
Kai swallowed. His tongue dragged over cracked lips. "A joke," he said. "And a door."
"Care to elaborate?" Silex asked.
Kai hesitated, then shook his head minutely. "Not yet."
Arden felt the collar respond before the pain hit—just a brief stutter of heat, a warning, like the system drawing breath.
"Careful," Arden said quietly. "They don't like it when you don't narrate."
Silex's smile didn't reach his eyes. "He's allowed a short refractory period. The Underlayer leaves residue." He turned to Lyra. "You will handle post-dive analysis."
Lyra rose in one smooth motion. She was wearing tower whites instead of field blacks, sleeves rolled to the elbows. The artificial veinwork along her forearms glowed faintly, ghost-code moving under the skin.
"What specifically do you want analyzed?" she asked.
"The seized cult hardware," Silex said. "The halo banks, donor rigs, and all recorded streams from the House of Recall and Saintglass. Plus whatever that…" He gestured at the frozen code-feeds from Kai's dive. "…thing tried to feed him."
Kai's jaw tightened.
Silex continued, unbothered. "We need a complete map of the smuggling architecture. Routes, buyers, upstream leaks. But I'm more interested in the product. There are rumors that Halo Market stock… feels different. We need to know why."
Lyra nodded once. "You want me to dissect the stolen memories."
"Dissect, classify, neutralize if necessary," Silex said. "And tell me if any of it is ours."
Arden frowned. "Ours?"
Silex looked at him as if Arden had asked whether rain was wet. "Judiciary property. Internal recordings, sealed judgments, proprietary sentencing feeds. The cult shouldn't have access to those." His gaze drifted back to Lyra. "If they do, I need to know who's leaking divinity."
Lyra's expression didn't change, but Arden saw the small tightening around her eyes. Divinity. The word hung in the air like smoke from a cheap incense stick.
"You'll have full access to the lab," Silex said. "Temporary override on your leash's internal limits. Level Three clearance to the Veil, restricted node set. And you'll have an anchor."
His gaze slid to Arden.
"Of course," Arden said. "Because nothing says 'career advancement' like babysitting two brains at once."
"You're good at it," Silex said mildly. "People come back when you're holding the tether. Mostly intact."
Kai snorted. "Put it on his evaluation. 'Excellent meat ballast.'"
Silex ignored him. "Unit Ø7 is off field rotation until this analysis is complete. Darius is debriefing upstairs. Seraphine is handling informant cleanup in Rook. You two—" he nodded at Lyra and Kai "—live here until I have answers. Reik lives here until I trust those answers."
"And if you don't?" Arden asked.
The director smiled, small and sharp. "Then we get to find out how much of your leash tolerance was luck."
The collar pulsed at Arden's throat, as if agreeing.
⸻
They cleared Kai from the primary rig an hour later.
By then his tremors had subsided to occasional stutters. The medtechs patched him with nutrient drips and mild stabilizers, the approved cocktail for "non-terminating neural distress." They'd wanted to sedate him outright. Kai refused with a single flat look and the reminder that Silex had authorized ongoing analysis.
"I need my brain awake to regret things," he'd said. "It's a process."
Now he lay on a low cot pushed up against one wall, jack ports capped, one arm thrown over his eyes.
Arden sat at his bedside, boots planted, elbows on his knees. His own armor plates were stacked in a corner—breastplate flecked with dried rain and cult blood, one shoulder pad still showing a faint chalk symbol where a supplicant had grabbed him in the riot.
He'd scrubbed his hands twice and still felt rust under his nails.
Lyra moved through the lab with the quiet efficiency of an old ritual. She keyed open the sealed evidence racks, catalogued each halo bank and donor rig with murmured ID strings, then selected three with a frowning sort of care.
Halo crowns gleamed on the carts like relics from a cheap religion—bands of metal and fiber, contact needles splayed like spider legs.
"These three," she said, wheeling them toward the central diagnostic cradle. "Highest density. Most corrupted. Most… interesting."
Arden watched her slide the first crown into the cradle. Transparent clamps latched with a soft hiss. The cradle's interface lit, lines of data blooming in pale green and sickly gold.
"I thought corruption was bad," he said.
"It is," Lyra answered. "But it's also information. You judge a wound by its scar."
He grimaced. "We're back on the body-horror metaphors already?"
She glanced at him. "Sorry."
"No, it's fine," he said. "I like thinking about my brain as a bleeding wound. Very relaxing."
Kai's muffled voice drifted from the cot. "It's not your brain I'm worried about, Reik. It's your soul."
Arden turned. "Good news, I sold that for cigarettes at fourteen."
"Unwise investment," Kai muttered. "Halos are paying better now."
Lyra's fingers danced over the controls. "Speaking of," she said. "I'm opening the first stream."
Arden shifted his chair closer to the main display.
The Veil-wall at the front of the lab darkened, then flared to life with a composite feed—a synthesized visualization built from harvested neural recordings. It wasn't pure sensory replay; it was how the system interpreted the data, an attempt to translate one person's lived moment into a third-person view.
The first frame was black.
Then a match flared—small, close, shaking. It lit a throat.
The view stabilized into a cramped room, low ceiling, corroded metal leaking water in slow drips. Someone—unknown, unseen—held the match to a roll of paper. It caught. Fire bloomed, orange and hungry. The halo-system extrapolated light; shadows jumped on the walls.
Children huddled in the corners, watching.
"The House of Recall," Lyra said softly. "Early days."
Arden swallowed. The camera's perspective moved, not with footsteps but with the logic of memory—drifting, jump-cutting. One instant he was pressed close to the flame; the next he was outside his own body, watching the room like a ghost.
He'd worn halos once. Street rigs, amateur jobs. You always felt the seams if you knew what to look for. But this—
"This is too clean," he said. "Whoever recorded this knew what they were doing."
"They didn't," Lyra said. Her fingertips tightened around the edge of the console. "That's the point. This isn't a professional feed. The user is jittery, overwhelmed. The clarity isn't from them." She nodded at the cascading code. "It's from the system."
"You saying the cult upgraded their hardware?" Arden asked.
"I'm saying something else was riding along," Lyra said.
The memory shifted. Now the children were laughing, smoke curling around their faces. The recorder's breath came in sharp, excited pulls. Tiny hands reached for the fire. Someone began to sing—wordless, off-key.
Arden tried to place the feeling. There was something under the scene, a low hum he could almost taste. Warmth, yes. Fear, yes. But also… longing. Aches between the ribs. The sensation of wanting this moment to last forever, knowing it wouldn't.
"The emotional field is wrong," Lyra murmured. "See how the valence spikes there, and there?" She tapped the display where gradients of color rippled over the images, mapping affect. "That's not a single subject's response. It's layered."
Kai rolled onto his side, squinting at the wall. "You're saying… what, that they stacked multiple streams?"
"Not exactly," Lyra said. "Stacked streams would look like interference—noise, jitter, temporal fracture. This is… synchronized. The same emotional pattern, repeated at different intensities, overlaid like a choir singing the same note at different volumes."
Arden frowned. "Translation?"
Lyra inhaled slowly. "I think someone normalized the feeling. Echoed it. They took one child's happiness and made it… contagious."
The match in the memory burned down to the recorder's fingers. Pain flared, a hot streak up the nervous system. The view jolted, then snapped sideways, showing the children's faces in crisp, aching focus—eyes huge, mouths open, joy and hunger and fear all tangled.
The halo feed froze on that frame.
Lyra cut the stream.
Silence fell.
Arden realized his hands were clenched around the arms of his chair hard enough to ache.
"So," he said quietly. "They're… editing emotions now."
Kai snorted. "They always were. Advert feeds, sentencing loops, recruitment hymns. This is just… artisanal."
"Artisanal souls," Arden said dryly. "Great. Just what the city needed."
Lyra didn't smile. She was staring at the code, lips moving silently, as if arguing with herself.
"Lyra," Arden said. "You seeing something we're not?"
"Yes," she said. "And I wish I wasn't."
⸻
She didn't plug the halos straight into her neural ports. Not at first.
There were protocols—even for someone defined as an exception.
Lyra built a sandbox—virtual environment fenced off from the main Veil, its walls lined with failsafes and kill-switches. She stacked watchdog processes, wrote little guardian scripts in obsolete languages that comforted her the way prayers once had. Ancient C fragments murmured alongside Rust, obsolete Architect sigils nested inside comment blocks.
Arden watched, trying not to look too much like he was watching. His relationship with code started and ended at "shoot the thing until the error goes away." Watching Lyra work felt like standing in a cathedral built from mathematics and half-remembered theology.
"You don't have to be here for all of this," she said at one point, without looking up. "They only specified you as anchor during active dive."
"Yeah, well," Arden said. "I get twitchy when people I know start talking to ghosts in the basement. Learned that the hard way."
"You consider them people you know?" Kai rasped from the cot.
Arden glanced at him. "I consider you all bad habits that might eventually kill me. That counts."
Lyra's mouth twitched again. "He's attached," she said.
"Statistical dysfunction," Kai muttered. "I'll log it."
Lyra finished the sandbox, triple-checked the walls, then finally—reluctantly—slid one of the halo streams into it.
"Okay," she murmured. "I'm going to—"
The collar at Arden's throat pulsed twice. A system ping scrolled across a side monitor, pale and precise.
[UNIT Ø7 // INTERNAL MONITORING.]
[ASSET: LYRA HALDEN // FRAGMENT-STATUS: STABLE.]
[ANCHOR: REIK, ARDEN // OBSERVATION MANDATE: ACTIVE.]
He swore under his breath. "They're watching your fragment that closely?"
"They'd watch the sun if they could meter it," Lyra said. "Ready?"
"No," Arden said.
"Yes," Kai said.
Lyra slid her fingers into the interfacing ports at the console's edge.
Her pupils flooded black.
Arden forced his breath to stay even. He kept his gaze on her face, watching for twitching, for seizure tremors, for that awful moment he'd seen once when her features had gone slack and something else had looked out through her eyes.
The Veil-wall blossomed again.
This time there was no attempt at pretty translation. No pseudo-cinematic framing.
Just noise.
Color, sound, sensation—stacked and compressed, a torrent of other people's lives hammered into a channel that was never meant to hold this much.
Arden flinched. "Shit—"
"It's okay," Lyra's voice said, faraway and flat. "That's just the top layer."
Images flashed and broke: a pair of hands slick with blood and dishwater; a rooftop under acid rain; a kiss in an alley that tasted like battery acid and hope; someone's last breath as a collar detonated, metal and bone and bright, impossible noise.
The feed shuddered.
Then it… organized.
Not into scenes, exactly. Into feelings.
Grief unfolded first, heavy and blue, settling over the room like fog. It carried a specific texture—the weight behind the ribs when you stared at an empty chair. That was followed by fear, sharp and metallic, edges catching on Arden's nerves. Then anger, hot and fast. Love, brief and blinding.
Each came with flickering images attached, but those were secondary, attached like labels. The feelings were the main event.
"They stripped context," Lyra said tonelessly. "Everything that made these moments unique. Faces, places, details. All compressed to make room for more affect."
"More… what?" Arden asked. "More feeling?"
"Yes," she said. "They turned experience into raw mood. Easier to package that way. Less legal liability, too. Harder to prove misuse if all you're selling is 'generalized euphoria' and 'vague despair.'"
Kai made a strangled sound. "They're building mood playlists out of dead people."
Arden's stomach turned. "And people paid for this?"
"Of course," Lyra said. "No one wants actual reality. It's messy. Complicated. They want curated pain. Designer joy. Something they can put on like a jacket and take off when it itches."
A spike hit the feed.
Arden's heart stuttered.
The feeling that rolled over him was so familiar he almost didn't recognize it as foreign: the naked, suffocating terror of a noose tightening around his neck while the world narrowed to a bright, hot tunnel.
On the Veil-wall, the image resolved just enough.
A scaffold.
Rain.
Floodlights.
A man standing hooded with a collar already fused to his skin, hands bound, boots slipping on wet metal.
Arden's breath stopped.
"That's—" His voice died.
Lyra's fingers clenched on the console. "I know," she said quietly. "It's you."
The hooded figure dropped.
The sensation hit Arden like a punch. The air disappeared; the world compressed to a single point of burning white pressure at his throat. His leash-collar flared, phantom pain echoing the memory. He grabbed the edge of the console to stay upright.
The feed froze just before impact, stretching out that last impossible instant of awareness. The system held it, examined it, folded it into the archive of emotions.
"Arden's Execution File," Kai whispered. "They scraped it."
Lyra's voice was tight now. "It's not just scraped. It's… recycled. Your death sentence is a product now. Part of the catalog."
Arden forced air into his lungs. He could feel sweat beading at his temples, body reverting to old panic. The lab fell away for a second; he was back on that platform, the roar of the crowd like static in his ears.
"Cut it," he rasped.
Lyra severed the stream.
Silence crashed in. Arden staggered back, ripped the collar away from his throat as if he could peel it off. The metal burned under his fingers.
"Okay," Kai said hoarsely. "So Halo Market's catch-of-the-day includes our boy's almost-hanging. That's bad. But we already suspected judiciary feeds leaking into the wild. Where's the 'sin' in Ghost Syntax?"
Arden shot him a look. "If you say 'aside from the obvious,' I'm putting you back in the rig and asking the Underlayer politely to keep you."
Lyra turned slowly from the console to face them.
Her pupils were normal again, but something about her seemed… thinner. Like she'd been stretched across too many minds and was still reassembling.
"The sin," she said, "is that this isn't a leak."
"Explain," Kai said.
Lyra tapped a command. A new window opened on the side monitor—rows upon rows of tiny waveform graphs, each pulsing with its own rhythm.
"These are affect-signatures," she said. "The emotional fingerprints embedded in the code. Under normal circumstances, they're chaotic. No two people's grief is exactly the same, no two people's fear spikes in quite the same pattern. There are similarities, but also noise."
She zoomed in. One waveform expanded—a jagged line, rising and falling.
"This," she said, "is yours." Another tap, another expansion. "This is someone else's. But look—"
The two graphs overlaid.
They matched.
Not perfectly, but close enough. Peaks aligned; valleys mirrored.
"The variance," Lyra said quietly, "is within synthetic tolerance. Someone took your execution fear, extracted its signature, and used it as a template. They're stamping other minds with it. Mass-producing your last thoughts."
Arden sat down without meaning to.
Kai's face had gone very still. "You're saying the cult is… forging souls."
Lyra shook her head. "No. The cult doesn't have this kind of infrastructure. They're buyers, not manufacturers. Someone upstream is compressing people into patterns. Reducing them to emotional code blocks that can be copied, customized, sold."
She looked back at the frozen waveforms.
"This is Ghost Syntax," she said. "Not just stolen memories. Not just feelings. A language built entirely from human emotional states. A programming grammar where grief and desire and terror are variables. Whoever engineered this isn't just smuggling data. They're digitizing souls."
The word hung there.
Souls.
Arden felt the old street-kid reflex rise—mock the sacred before it notices you exist.
"Pretty sure I signed mine away in triplicate," he said. His voice sounded thin. "You can't digitize what the system already owns."
Lyra's gaze met his. "Ownership isn't the same as understanding. The Judiciary believes they own your life and death. But this—" she gestured at the graphs "—this is different. This is the system learning how you feel, not just what you do. Turning that into code."
Kai rubbed his temples. "Information wants to be free," he muttered. "But apparently, first it wants to be tortured."
"Can they do anything with it?" Arden asked. "Aside from… selling my panic to tourists?"
Lyra hesitated.
"Yes," she said. "In theory. With enough emotional signatures, you could simulate a person's responses. Build an approximation of their consciousness—not full, not true, but responsive enough for targeted manipulation. You could make a city move the way you want just by tuning the emotional weather."
"Emotional weather," Kai repeated. "Lovely. They weaponized vibes."
Arden exhaled, slow. "Silex needs to know this."
Lyra flinched very slightly. "Does he?"
Arden stared at her. "You think this is something we… sit on?"
"Think about what he'll do," she said. "About what the Judiciary will do. They won't stop the program. They'll just classify it deeper. Refine it. Put it on a leash and call it mercy."
Kai stared up at the ceiling. "She's not wrong."
"Shocking," Arden said. "The half-ghost is better at institutional analysis than the ex-ganger. Must be my organic lag."
"Arden," Lyra said quietly. "If we hand them Ghost Syntax, we're handing them the blueprint to our own leashes. To everyone's. This isn't just about Halo Market. It's about the entire architecture of judgment."
He looked at the frozen graphs, at his own fear echoed across strangers' lives.
"You're saying we bury it," he said.
"I'm saying we think before we decide who gets to own this knowledge," she answered. "Kai, can you cook a report? Something clean, incomplete. Enough to satisfy oversight without giving them the full picture."
"Lie to the man who holds the leash override?" Kai said. "Love that for us."
"Can you?" she pressed.
Kai sighed. "Yes. I can give him smuggling routes, high-level analysis, throw in a few red herring theories about backdoor Architect code. Hide the emotional signature work in noise."
"And the real data?" Arden asked.
Lyra looked at him.
"We keep it," she said. "For now."
The collar at Arden's throat warmed, as if the system sensed disobedience like a change in air pressure.
He thought of the scaffold, of the crowd, of the moment when the floor had dropped and the sky had gone very small. He thought of that fear being replayed by strangers in dark rooms for a thrill.
He thought of a city whose laws ran on feelings like fuel.
"Ghost Syntax," he said. "If they catch us with it, we're dead."
"We're already dead," Kai said. "We're just on lease."
Lyra's hand, resting on the console, curled into a fist.
"Maybe that's the point," she said. "The dead have less to lose."
Arden laughed once. It sounded wrong in the lab.
"Fine," he said. "We play it your way. Ghost Syntax stays between us. Silex gets his sanitized story. But if this blows up, I'm haunting both of you."
Lyra's gaze held his for a long moment. There was something dangerously close to warmth in it.
"You'd make a terrible ghost," she said. "Too much commentary."
Kai snorted. "Statistically, he'd be the afterlife's worst Yelp reviewer."
Arden leaned back, feeling the weight of what they'd just chosen settle into his bones.
"Then let's make sure we live long enough to be a problem," he said. "What's next?"
Lyra turned back to the console, shoulders squaring.
"Next," she said, "I follow the signatures."
The Veil-wall shimmered as she dove deeper into the data. The waveforms multiplied, branching into fractal trees of feeling. Somewhere in that storm, patterns waited—someone's hand on the tiller, shaping pain into protocol.
Arden watched the ghost-light play across her face and realized, with a small, unwelcome shock, that he was no longer sure where Lyra ended and the machine began.
He also realized he cared.
That was, he suspected, the most dangerous discovery of the night.
The collar hummed, amused.