"Yo. You not even looking."
Zahir didn't move. He was lying flat on the floor of the fallback's back room—a former office turned den—arms folded behind his head, glowstrip light buzzing overhead.
"I am looking," he said. "Through my eyelids."
Elai sat cross-legged beside him, slate balanced on one knee. Its screen had a webbed crack through the center, but the diagram on it still glowed.
"Bro. I'm literally showing you how souls work."
"I know how mine works," Zahir muttered. "Broken."
"They said that about the Bloom Array too," Elai muttered, zooming in. "Then it ruptured six fault lines and changed the Field harmonics in half a zone."
Zahir cracked one eye open. "You always gotta go to the extreme?"
"Just stating facts."
Elai nudged him, then pointed at the screen—there was a crystalline shape hovering in a shaded background.
"That's the core signature structure. Soulprint, molecular layout—whatever language works. It's your spirit's alchemetric fingerprint."
Zahir tilted his head, expression twisting. "You just said a lot of words. Slow down."
"How about you keep up?" Elai grinned, glad he was at least curious. "Just think of it as a core. Once a Primer opens your Archive, the Lattice lets you see this. Map it. React with it. Everything depends on structure. Catalysts, reagents, bond potential—it's all in the layout."
Zahir stared. The shape reminded him of some kind of molecular diagram. Polygonal blocks were stacked on top of each other, with others floating around the central structure, highlighting where they may be able to interlock. There was a shaded zone behind it that looked like a grid.
"And this place around it?"
"That's the Archive. Every Innovators's got one. It's like a lab made of you, like a soul space where you develop your abilities and evolve your soul."
"So like, a workshop?"
"More like a research reactor," Elai said. "But yeah—that's a good way of thinking about it."
He dragged his finger across the screen, rotating the display.
This is where real strength comes from, Z," he said, gesturing to the model on the slate. "This is Spire in twelve dimensions. Compared to this, the shit we're doing is like throwing rocks in an alley."
Zahir stared a few more seconds, thinking of the slow days when Six would repeatedly crush him in Spire. The game was wicked hard, and it often felt like his brain couldn't hold all the configurations Six tried to teach him.
He turned back to the ceiling. "Cool story. Still doesn't help if you can't get in."
Elai paused, then tapped the screen to pause the rotating model. He looked at Zahir silently, recognizing the deflection, but knowing better than to challenge his friend's stubborn cynicism. He let the moment pass.
Zahir sat up with a groan. "I'm hungry, we got a few more paychips for food. Let's glide."
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Somewhere beyond the wall, drops of water fell in rhythm, tracing the pull of gravity through stone. In this forgotten place, it was one of the only sounds left.
The other was breath.
Shallow. Measured. Human.
Zahir sat at the heart of an ancient chamber, blood-speckled dust caking his brown skin. Freckles dotted his face like dirty constellations, eyes dark and wary, a faint trickle of blood had crusted beneath his scarred nose. His body ached, but the sharpest pain had already faded surprisingly quickly.
A mote of luminous ink hovered in front of him—trembling faintly.
He leaned closer, eyes narrowed in wary curiosity. A part of him braced, waiting for it to vanish.
Instead, more brushstrokes of light unfurled around it—slow, deliberate, ghostly-white curls shimmering softly with violet, blue, and green hues—like light bent through a prism.
What the hell is this thing?
The strokes of light wove through each other gracefully, pulling together into a ring suspended inches from his face. As it rotated slowly, a strange familiarity tugged at his memory.
Funny. It reminded him of the crosshairs on a Vega 9—one of the first burners he'd ever owned. He'd spent many nights in empty warehouses, lining up shots at barely visible targets. But now, as he watched the ring rotate gently, another memory rose clearer—breaking into an old storage safe, holding his breath as he felt for the tumblers, ears straining for that faint, satisfying click.
"No. Not a gun," Zahir whispered softly, heart thumping with sudden recognition. "A lock."
For someone like Zahir—locked out of the system since day one—breaking into things had become sort of a specialty.
Over time, he'd learned that most forms of security, no matter how complex, were built on assumptions. And assumptions could be finessed—or exploited. Once he made it into that storage locker, he had found a stack of clipped paychips someone had forgotten to scrub. Zahir cracked them one by one, flipping the whole stash into a week's worth of crypto.
Those skills had worked well for him in the past. There was no reason to stop trusting them here. Still—this was a little different than anything he'd encountered so far. Just a little.
Whatever this ring was—it moved like something alive, breathing in strokes of radiant calligraphy. Zahir watched the flow carefully, jaw tense. The luminous patterns made his skull throb like a low-grade migraine. But this wasn't his first time dancing with a lock that thought it was smarter than him.
Assume the system's trying to mislead you.
He let his eyes unfocus slightly, taking in the full motion instead of fixating on any one stroke. It was rotating, yes—but every few seconds, the pattern stuttered.
That was the opening.
He reached out, slow and deliberate. His fingers grazed the edge. The ring shimmered in response.
Zahir adjusted his breath to the pulse—slowing his inhales, syncing with the flicker rate of the ring. It wasn't perfect, but it didn't have to be.
There. A pause. Right before the ring rotated left.
He moved in, a slight nudge. Two fingers pressed into the open breath of the pattern. The touch landed.
Warmth flooded his fingers. The ring flared gently, and a shiver ran down his spine—like a gentle pull across strings stretched between bone and soul.
Then he heard a voice—low, layered, strangely harmonic. It didn't speak to his ears. It moved through him. Like someone whispering into his spine.
"Vael arik'thos elen shur khalun."
Zahir recoiled slightly, startled, heart hammering.
"Uh…what?"
Upon hearing Zahir's words, the ring paused it's rotation, then began spinning incredibly fast in the other direction.
A sharp, invisible current surged through his skull—not exactly pain, something closer to pressure, like a dam cracking behind his eyes. Light spilled across the back of his vision, carving shapes across the dark behind his eyelids—familiar in a way he couldn't explain.
Runes.
Dozens of them, suspended in the dark behind his eyes, arranged like a floating diagram. Each one was made of clean, glowing lines—curved, angular, or spiraled—none of them familiar, but all unnervingly precise.
Some looked like coiled springs. Others like overlapping circles cut by sharp diagonal strokes. A few pulsed faintly, as if reacting to his attention.
Each rune was labeled—not in words, but in embedded meaning. They weren't letters. They were functions.
Each line described a force. Each curve hinted at a specific behavior, like a pressure path or a switching mechanism. Together, they formed a system—a kind of grammar for action, movement, change.
It wasn't just for reading. It was for doing. And somehow, without being taught, Zahir understood how they worked.
Words came next.
Not in the Prime Tongue. Not anything he'd heard in the Slant, or seen on Lattice screens. And yet—he understood them.
"Written in light that never settled.
The last line scrawled before the crown touched the flame.
A breath sealed in the fracture of a name.
Just one fragment of the first word—
still trying to remember its beginning.
I am Logos."
Then—calmer, more precise:
"You, Zahir Mercer, are the question and the key. I can show you what you unlock. Do you accept?"
Zahir didn't hesitate.
Eyes wide, mouth curling into a greedy grin, he pressed a hand over his wild, beating heart.
And in a tongue older than cities, older than systems, older than even memory—he answered with his whole chest:
"Hell fucking yes."