She left the Observatory at dawn. Alone, again. The moss didn’t speak, and the Archivist no longer watched. Only Echo followed, silent as ash. But it wasn’t aimless. Before departure, a message flickered through its neural lattice, silent and encrypted. Apex had spoken, barely a whisper, barely a signal, and fed Echo the route. Not a map. A pattern. The safest descent through the ruins.

Beyond the wild edge of Zone 3, past the broken districts where memories rot in plastic bags and neon still flickers in puddles, Vesper walked. She moved like a glitch in the system, smooth, confident, entirely out of place. The air grew thicker with every step west. The skyline collapsed into choking wires and forgotten architecture. Somewhere beneath it all was St. Mary, but the city would not make it easy. A shadow of iron and breath followed her.

In alleys lined with scavengers and static, they watched. Not Grid agents, not enforcers, just survivors. Bodies wrapped in scrap and whispers, eyes tracking her like heat signatures. No one spoke. No one stopped her. She passed unnoticed, but not unseen. Then came the old entrance. Hidden in cracked asphalt and overgrown by bonevine and fungal moss, the tunnel gaped like a wound. Echo paused, scanning, something had passed through recently. More than rats.

The city swallowed her.

She found the door beneath a crumbling overpass, nearly swallowed by moss, rust, and decades of forgetting. APEX had guided her here, not with a map, but a whisper. Vesper’s bare fingers brushed against the corroded metal. The door resisted, then relented with a guttural groan. The opening exhaled a breath of stale air, thick with oil, dust, and time. She stepped inside. The space beyond was vast, silent, industrial, a maintenance complex buried beneath London’s bones. Metal ribs arched overhead. Catwalks hung at crooked angles. Rust clung to every surface like dried blood.

She began to descend. Echo moved first, a silent streak of black across the broken floor. His movement was fluid, almost reverent. Then he froze. No sound, no signal, only the stillness of instinct. A moment later, Vesper felt it, a sudden visual stream from Echo flashed in her mind, linked to her through the Aether that connected them. Warning. She stopped and looked. At first, just flickers. Then green. Dozens of small, glowing eyes blinked open in the dark. They were watching her. Not rats. Not anymore. Twisted, bloated things, mutated beyond biology, shaped by exposure, time, or worse. Claws scraped against piping. Bodies heaved between ducts. They moved like one. So far, they hadn’t moved toward her. Yet. Her breath slowed. Bodysuit tight as liquid shadow, she slipped between beams, down one level at a time.

At the bottom, the architecture changed. The tunnels widened, became arteries, veins of forgotten infrastructure. And deep in the gloom, a new sound stirred. Something larger. One of the drones was waking. It rose from a maintenance cradle, limbs unfolding, sensors adjusting. Grotesque in scale and function, its core blinked with artificial life. It hadn’t seen her. Not yet. But like the rats, it would.

There was no other way. Vesper crawled into the maintenance drone, half-submerged in bio-waste and twitching vermin limbs. The walls pulsed with decay, humming softly with internal motion. She wasn’t meant to be cargo, yet there she was, drowning in the rot of Grid’s harvest. As the drone slid beneath Zone 2 through shadow-choked arteries, the Grid stirred. It sniffed. It scanned. It searched. Vesper felt its gaze not on her skin, but in her mind. An Aether-threaded pressure, cold and vast. She coiled inward, compressing her soul’s signature to a whisper. It passed. Barely.

She emerged near St Mary, and something was wrong. The church brooded behind quarantine walls, shrouded in silence and fog, encircled by a cemetery too large for memory. And something had changed. Whispers laced her Aether. Not voices in the air, but fragments of memory, jostling to speak. She couldn’t parse them. Only feel their urgency. They were calling her. She must enter. But how?

Echo found a collapsed drainage tunnel beneath the old grounds. Cracked and buried, yet passable, barely. But roots twist through it now, roots that pulse with something green and alive. Something watching. Something waiting. In the mist of the tunnel, movement stirs.

Vesper paused at the tunnel’s mouth, the air thick with the scent of damp earth and something cloyingly sweet, like decay and fervent growth intertwined. The roots pulsed with an insistent rhythm, their inner green light a grotesque mimicry of living veins. She felt their pull, an almost intimate resonance with the Aether beneath her nanosuit, a silent beckoning into the deep, dark heart of St. Mary. The sensation was not unlike the lure of a dangerous secret, a forbidden truth waiting to be unearthed.

The alternative loomed behind her, a path across the cemetery itself. She turned, her gaze sweeping over the consecrated ground that no longer slept. Graves lay shattered from below, the earth ruptured as though death had reversed its course, spitting out its unquiet dead. The fog here clung too long, thick and possessive, swirling around the broken headstones like an unwelcome shroud. Even Echo, a creature of shadow and instinct, refused to step further without her lead, his sleek form a dark counterpoint to the restless spectral mist. He sensed the awareness of the place, the unsettling consciousness that permeated the very soil. The dead were not alone. Here, the echoes of forgotten lives were not merely whispers; they were a presence, a weight in the air, a cold breath on her skin.

To choose the cemetery was to invite confrontation, a dance with the restless, shattered spirits that haunted its broken grounds. It was to gamble on her ability to navigate a landscape where reality itself seemed to fray at the edges, where the veil between worlds was thin and torn. But to choose the tunnel was to descend into an unknown, organic labyrinth, where the very essence of life and decay had merged, where the city’s forgotten pulse beat with an eerie, plant-like sentience. Both paths promised passage, both promised danger, and both, she knew, would demand a price.

Her decision hardened, not with reckless abandon, but with the cold, precise calculation of a master strategist. She had to reach the roots beneath the chapel, in the catacombs hidden under its crypt. That was where the fragment of Mirelle’s memory lay, waiting to be claimed. And to claim it, she must choose. The roots pulsed again, a silent invitation, or a final warning.