The darkness wasn't empty. It was heavy, smelling of wet rust and ancient oil.
Lyra's hand was clamped over my mouth. Her other hand gripped my jacket so tight I could feel her knuckles trembling. We were crouched behind a slab of collapsed concrete, squeezed into a gap barely wide enough for a rat.
Clang.
Hisss.
The sound came from ten feet away. It sounded like a chainsaw trying to chew through a steel pipe.
I didn't dare breathe. My shoulder was screaming in pain, throbbing in time with my heart, but I bit my lip until I tasted copper.
A beam of red light cut through the blackness above our heads. It swept across the debris, illuminating the mountain of trash we had landed in.
Then I saw it.
It wasn't a drone. It was a nightmare built from spare parts.
It looked like a wolf, if a wolf had been skinned and replaced with hydraulic pistons and serrated scrap metal. Its eyes were mismatched camera lenses glowing a calm, murderous crimson. Its jaw was a rusted hydraulic clamp that dripped black fluid.
A Scavenger.
"Sector Zero fauna," Lyra had called them. Machines that had been discarded by the city above, glitching and rebuilding themselves in the dark, following one corrupted command: Consume.
The Scavenger prowled closer. Its metal claws scraped against the concrete floor, sending sparks skittering into the dark.
It stopped right in front of our hiding spot.
The red light swept over the concrete slab.
I felt Lyra stiffen. She squeezed her eyes shut, pressing her forehead against my chest.
Why is she so scared? I thought frantically. She fought the Obelisk agents. She took down a drone mid-air. Why is she terrified of a rust-bucket?
The Scavenger's head snapped toward us.
It let out a low, grinding growl. It sensed something.
It stepped closer, its sensors dilating. The red light washed over the crack in the concrete.
It was looking for data.
And then I realized the problem.
Lyra had an Echo. A bright, powerful, multi-threaded Echo. Even in the dark, to a machine's sensors, she must have been glowing like a flare. She was leaking data.
I, on the other hand, was a black hole.
The Scavenger lunged, its hydraulic jaw opening.
I didn't think. I moved.
I pulled Lyra deeper into the crevice, shoving her behind me. I pressed my back against the opening, shielding her body with mine. I covered her completely.
The Scavenger's red light hit my back.
I waited for the teeth. I waited for the pain.
The machine paused.
The grinding noise stopped. The red light flickered, confused. It swept up and down my spine, scanning.
"ERROR," the machine clicked. A sound like a broken hard drive. "NO DATA FOUND."
To this thing, I wasn't a human. I wasn't prey. I was just... a wall. I was just another piece of cold, dead debris.
The Scavenger chuffed—a vent of steam releasing from its side—and turned away. It lost interest instantly. It prowled off into the darkness, its metal claws clicking on the floor until the sound faded into the distance.
I let out a breath I had been holding for a minute.
Lyra pushed me forward, gasping for air. She looked at me with wide eyes in the gloom.
"It didn't see you," she whispered. "It looked right at you, and it saw nothing."
"I told you," I managed to say, clutching my shoulder. "I'm a Null."
"No," Lyra said, shaking her head. She looked at me differently now. Not as baggage. Not as a mission. "Up there, being a Null makes you a target. But down here?"
She wiped sweat from her forehead.
"Down here, Kairo... you're a ghost. You're the ultimate stealth asset."
She reached into her boot and pulled out a small medical spray canister. She hissed as she sprayed it on her side, then handed it to me for my shoulder.
"We need to move," she said, her voice strictly professional again. "That was a Scout. If it doesn't report back, the Pack will come looking."
"Where do we go?" I asked, spraying the numbing foam on my bruise. The pain subsided to a dull ache.
Lyra pointed upward. Not toward the sky-bridge, but toward a rusted catwalk clinging to the side of a half-buried skyscraper nearby.
"The Signal Tower," she said. "There's an old refugee outpost halfway up. If we can reach it, we can rest."
We moved.
This time, the dynamic was different. Lyra didn't lead.
I did.
I walked a few paces ahead, checking the corners. I was the shield. If a scanner swept the area, it would hit me first and see nothing. Lyra stayed in my shadow, dampening her Echo as much as she could.
We climbed the mountain of trash for an hour. My legs burned. The air grew thinner and colder.
Finally, we reached the rusted catwalk. It groaned under our weight, swaying over the black abyss below.
"Almost there," Lyra whispered. "Just past that vent."
We rounded the corner, expecting an empty maintenance door.
We didn't find an empty door.
We found a barricade.
Sheet metal, old car doors, and rebar had been welded together to block the path. And painted on the metal, in bright, luminescent yellow paint, was a symbol.
It wasn't the Obelisk circle. It wasn't the Government crest.
It was a jagged, smiling mouth with three eyes.
"What is that?" I asked.
Lyra stopped dead. She reached for the knife in her boot, her posture shifting from exhausted to lethal.
"That," she whispered, "is a territory marker."
"Scavengers?"
"Worse," she said, stepping back. "Scavengers just eat you. The people who painted this... they play with their food."
Click.
The sound of a gun cocking echoed from the shadows above the barricade.
A rough, human voice drifted down to us.
"Well, well," the voice rasped. "Look what the trash chute coughed up. A Ghost... and a Girl who shines too bright."
I looked up. Three figures stood on top of the barricade. They wore goggles made of circuit boards and armor made of tires. And they were aiming rifles straight at our heads.