The lift descended deeper than any of them had ever gone. Every meter down felt heavier. Thicker. Like the City itself was compressing around them, folding inward on its own forgotten infrastructure.
The hum of old machinery rattled through the cage floor, but the deeper they sank, the more that sound thinned into silence.
A silence that watched.
They were seven inside the rusting metal coffin, slowly lowered into a place older than history and buried on purpose. No one spoke for the first few minutes—until Gearjunk couldn't take it anymore.
"Thirty creds says Cathex starts screaming before we hit bottom."
Cathex, twitching, masked in mirrored glass, tilted her head but said nothing—just let out a soft clicking sound in the back of her throat like a countdown. Her long fingers traced invisible lines in the air, sparks dancing between her fingertips.
Vash smirked. "Does it count if she's already humming in binary?"
Gearjunk grunted a laugh. "I'll take that as a maybe."
Then came a low rasp from the corner, where Dogend sat half-shrouded in shadow, leaning against the bars of the cage.
"Why did I decide to do this..."
His voice was dry as gravel, scraped raw from years behind that fused gas mask. He didn't move, didn't look at them—just existed like a reminder that not every survivor was intact.
From across the lift, Ink stood statuesque, their body a shifting patchwork of animated sigils. One of the glyphs peeled off their arm and reformed midair.
THIS IS ALREADY A MISTAKE.
Gearjunk turned toward them. "You say that every mission."
Ink's torso flickered and responded with new words.
THAT'S BECAUSE YOU'RE ALWAYS THERE.
Tessera ignored them all, her pale fingers dancing across her data-slate. Her crystal earrings swayed with the vibration of the lift, glinting like surveillance lenses. Her voice broke through the noise, calm and surgical.
"We're passing through infrastructure too deep to be cataloged. This shaft bypasses six sealed corridors and a known Singularity fracture. Once we hit base level, there's no real-time backup."
Lyra, standing beside her, nodded without turning. "Mapping stops after floor -53. We'll be moving blind."
Vash cracked his neck. "Sounds like home."
Then, the lights in the shaft stuttered. Once. Twice.
And died.
Complete darkness swallowed the cage. The hum stopped. The air grew still, wrong.
No one said a word.
Then the lift jolted. Not down—sideways.
The cage slid silently along a different track. A shift in axis. Not built by any public metro design. They weren't descending anymore. They were being rerouted.
Cathex finally spoke.
"Paths rewritten. Our fates are unauthorized."
Ink's chest sigils pulsed.
SOMETHING IS EXPECTING US.
The lift stopped with a long, soft hiss. Then silence.
A metal door unlatched ahead. Pale green light poured in from a cracked corridor—blinking emergency strips along the floor, weak and inconsistent. A trail of static-filled air drifted through.
Lyra moved first.
The corridor smelled of scorched wiring and old blood. As they entered, they saw the first signs of something wrong. Not threatening—yet—but undeniably disturbed.
The walls had been torn open. Machinery yanked out by brute force. Thick cables dangled like veins torn from flesh. On the ground ahead, a mechanic implant—still fused to pieces of organic matter—lay crumpled, twitching faintly, long dead.
Vash knelt next to it, running his hand over the casing.
"This is R-Wing grade tech. Fifteen years out of date. What the hell is it doing down here?"
Tessera scanned it. "All ID tags stripped. This wasn't discarded. It was silenced."
Gearjunk loomed behind them, visor flashing.
"I'm guessing whatever did this didn't like company."
The hall opened into a larger chamber—a kind of service bay, though nothing here had been serviced in decades. Tables lay overturned. Tools rusted to the floor. Display terminals looped ancient error codes.
And in the center of the room sat a maintenance robot.
It was small. Rounded. Obsolete. The plating had been torn away in jagged chunks. One of its optic lenses hung by a wire. The arms twitched, caught in an endless recalibration loop.
As they approached, it activated.
"MAINTENANCE… ROUTINE… FIVE… B… completed…"
The voicebox sputtered. Then played again, this time more distorted.
"Routine…error. error. Repeating task. Task repeating. Repeating task. Please… stand by for…"
It jerked violently, let out a low keening sound like metal crying.
Cathex twitched. "It remembers. But not why."
Dogend raised his blade. "It's corrupted. Let me put it down."
"No," Lyra said sharply. "It's the only thing still running. Let it speak."
The robot turned slowly toward the sound of her voice.
"Supervisor level not recognized… Please report… anomalies… anomaly detected. Anomaly detected. Anomal—"
It sparked violently and shut down.
Ink stepped forward. Their skin pulsed.
SOMETHING HURT THIS PLACE. AND LEFT IT ALIVE ON PURPOSE.
Tessera muttered, "Or forgot to finish the job."
Vash looked around at the chamber—at the claw marks in the metal, the half-melted doors, the air still thick with residual energy.
"We're standing in a post-mortem. This place isn't active. It's a scar."
Lyra stepped toward the far end of the chamber, where the corridor bent downward into deeper dark.
"This isn't the Godspine. Not yet. But something led us here. Something wants us to see what was left behind."
Gearjunk checked his weapon, sighing.
"Then let's keep walking."
The door at the far end hissed open without a sound. No power. No motor noise. Just pressure releasing—like whatever was behind it had been waiting for them to arrive.
They stepped through.
The hall beyond dipped into a lower angle, part corridor, part spillway—walls slick with condensation, veins of dark coolant or worse trailing down the metal like oil tears. The lighting here had died decades ago. Only their gear lit the path—phosphor glows, filtered HUDs, the cold gleam of Lyra's phase torch scanning ahead like a surgeon's scalpel.
They moved in silence for several minutes, the kind that wasn't just quiet, but listening.
Then Cathex twitched.
Her head snapped toward the ceiling as she whispered, "The dark's folding over us. Memory's closing in."
Gearjunk muttered, "Don't start now, Cathex. This place is already giving me the spine itch."
Cathex's mask tilted. "That's not your spine. That's your history."
Ink walked behind them, unnervingly still. Their sigils flickered in intervals—like a heartbeat. Across their back, one pulsed slowly into text:
DO NOT TRUST THE WALLS.
Lyra's hand went up. Halt.
A sound echoed ahead—metal dragging against stone. Deliberate. Rhythmic.
Vash moved up beside her, gauntlet humming low. "What's the call?"
She didn't answer with words—just moved forward again, bow drawn, eyes cutting through the dark.
The corridor ended in a yawning vault. Old blast doors had been peeled open from the inside. Claw marks. Not tools. Whatever forced them apart wasn't manufactured—it was born.
Inside the vault, the walls were lined with racks—empty harness stations where mechanical implants had once been mounted like weapons. Everything was stripped. Scraped. Gutted.
Dogend stepped into the middle of the room, shoulders tense beneath his torn coat.
"This was a reinforcement chamber. I've seen ones like it back during the Smokes. Soldiers came here for upgrades. For overrides."
Tessera looked around, scanning the damage. "No signs of resistance. No blood. Just absence."
Ink peeled a glyph from their chest and let it float.
NO FIGHT. ONLY UNMAKING.
A sound behind them.
The team spun.
The maintenance bot had followed.
Its left tread sparked with each movement. One optic still blinked. It stopped at the edge of the vault and spoke again, more broken this time, voice deeper, distorted:
"Supervisor detected… Maintenance complete… The error has… grown legs."
It lifted one clawed hand and pointed toward the vault's far wall—where an embedded panel was twitching, half-open. Not a door. A passage.
Behind it, something moved.
"Proximity confirmed," the bot wheezed. "The spine will see you now."
The room dimmed. Not from loss of light—but something else. Weight. Pressure. Like the air had suddenly gained intent.
Lyra's bow lit with fresh charge. "It's guiding us."
Vash looked at the dark tunnel beyond the twitching panel. "So what's the game plan? Keep walking until it decides to eat us?"
"No," Lyra said. "We walk until it decides to speak."
Cathex was already laughing softly, her fingers drawing loops in the air.
"It already is. We're just not old enough to hear it yet."
Gearjunk loaded another round into his mag-driver. "Then someone better grow up fast."
Dogend exhaled slow and long, hand tightening around the grip of his right scatterblade. "If it wants to talk, I want it to scream first."
The bot let out a final whine of corrupted audio, then collapsed mid-sentence, sparking out across the floor in a heap of melted memory.
Tessera looked down at it and murmured, "Whatever this thing was maintaining… it gave up a long time ago."
Lyra didn't speak. She turned and stepped into the panel gap, into the dark beyond.
Vash followed without hesitation.
One by one, they passed through the threshold. Past empty racks. Past claw-torn steel. Past forgotten systems that still breathed in silence.
None of them spoke as they entered the deeper hall.
But every one of them, in their own quiet way, understood the same thing.
They hadn't found the Godspine yet.
It had already found them.