Lamia knelt and picked it up, holding it between two fingers like it might vanish.
Even Gary went quiet. Because for once, even he could not joke.
It was frayed at the laces, burned slightly along the edge, as if it had been dragged across a ruptured glyph line. Definitely not regulation. And far too small for any personnel.
The silence that followed stretched thick in the vault chamber. Even the low drone of the magitech pods seemed to hush around them.
Behind her, Dr. Ekra Chang cleared her throat softly.
"That might've belonged to one of the researchers," she said, her voice careful, too careful and hesitent, each word cut clean, weighted but shaking. "Some staff brought family here. A few... rotations weren't strictly monitored."
Gary frowned. "You mean someone brought their kid into a facility lined with arcane prison tech?"
Ekra's eyes flicked to the upper wall, a tiny red light blinked once, then again.
An orb. Watching.
She shrugged, far too tightly. "Sometimes protocols were... overlooked."
Lamia didn't say anything. But her fingers clenched around the shoe.
Gary tilted his head, watching her. He didn't speak either, but she could tell his thoughts mirrored her own. You didn't overlook bringing a child into a sealed Dominion site buried ten floors beneath classified magitech infrastructure. And if this had just been about weapons testing or enchantment calibration, there wouldn't have been containment glyphs on cribs.
No one said it aloud.
Because saying it meant someone else would hear it. And in places like this, thoughts got you silenced faster than threats.
They moved on, deeper into the final chamber, a narrowing tunnel of scorched stone and half-melted sigils. The air was colder here. Older. The walls vibrated with echoes Lamia could feel in her bones.
In the center of the room, a binding circle had been burned into the floor. The glyphs were warped, slagged into molten metal. This wasn't a clean breach. This was a violent release.
Gary stepped towards the edge of the scorched ring, squinting at the shattered data console near the far wall. "Looks like someone wiped most of this. What they didn't, the blast finished."
He pressed one of the cracked glyph pads. Static hissed.
Then a low hum emerged. Like a heartbeat submerged in water. A pulse of resonance too deep to track with ears alone.
Lamia stepped into the heart of the room, very carefully and precisely. Her boots clicked over the sigil-lines, and the air thickened.
She opened her palm.
A thin crimson glow coiled along her skin, the trace of bloodsense, but finer, more exact. She'd carved the sigil across her own collarbone that morning, a temporary tether, designed to catch a single thread:
Residual soul-patterns. Her blood whispered. Not fresh. But close. And somewhat familiar.
"I have it," she murmured. "The trace we're chasing, it passed through here."
Gary stepped toward her, voice lower now. "The one tied to Vale?"
"Stronger. More volatile. The second trace." She lifted her head. "Whoever it was, they didn't just pass through, they bled here."
Ekra, who had remained near the doorway, flinched. It was subtle. But Lamia noticed.
"Doctor," she said, too evenly. "You said you weren't assigned to containment?"
Ekra didn't look at her. "That's correct."
"But you knew resonance. And you read pulse data."
"I wasn't cleared for raw access," she replied. "Just secondary monitoring."
Her eyes darted, again, towards the orb overhead. It was watching and recording.
Gary raised his brow. "And you didn't think to mention that containment breaches might've involved living vessels?"
Ekra's jaw tensed. She adjusted her gloves with deliberate calm.
"I'm not at liberty to extrapolate off-record conclusions in an active investigation," she said.
Lamia stepped back from the scorched circle. But she didn't break eye contact. Because now she saw the signs. The too-careful responses. The measured silences. The doctor wasn't just hiding something.
She was choosing not to speak, and not for her own sake.
Lamia knelt at the circle's edge and pulled a blackened slip of parchment from beneath the debris. The ink was smeared. But a single line remained:
Subject resonance unstable.
Memory imprint incomplete.
Proceeding with extraction.
She handed it to Gary. He read it. And said nothing. Neither did Lamia.
Because if they did, if they asked the questions now uncoiling behind their tongues, they'd be erased before they reached the next hallway.
Instead, Gary looked at her, whispering in a dry voice.
"Any guesses what this place was really for?"
"Just one," Lamia muttered.
He tilted his head.
"Prayers that don't work anymore."
They passed the vaults.
Past shattered containment pods, scattered runes half-melted into slag. Past the scorched circle and the faint remnants of resonance still trembling in the floor like a memory refusing to die.
But Lamia wasn't finished.
"There's something else," she said, turning back through the main corridor. "The breach point. They didn't come in through the primary access, did they? She looked at Ekra.
"It was a service lift." Ekra moved.
Lamia followed her, dragging her blood-sense along the air like a needle through silk.
They found it two chambers back, a narrow hallway lined with old Dominion wiring, mostly dormant. Near the end, a sealed maintenance elevator, which wasn't sealed anymore. The runes on its face were not standard, someone had etched over them. Sloppy, but effective.
"This one wasn't on the blueprint," Gary muttered.
Lamia crouched, running two fingers along the edge of the door. Her blood-sense flared softly.
Resonant static.
Different from the containment signature. Fresher. Hotter. Unstable.
"The second trace," she murmured.
She closed her eyes.
Two energy patterns. One fractured. One muted, but strong.
And faint echoes of something colder, not power, but presence.
A third being. Not like the others.
She stood slowly.
Later, when they turned to leave the containment chamber, just before the hallway narrowed into the direct elevator shaft, Gary slowed in front of a sealed door along the right wall.It wasn't exactly a door but was hidden, camoflaged just as the wall.
Gary pressed a hand near the frame, not touching, just close enough for proximity sigils to ping.
Nothing.
But the faintest hum, like breath, stirred beneath it.
"What's back here?" he asked, glancing back toward Ekra.
For the first time, her calm cracked.
Not visibly.
Just a twitch. A shift in her posture. A pause too long before she replied.
"That section's sealed," she said. "Private archive storage. You weren't cleared to investigate it."
Gary raised an eyebrow. "We weren't cleared to see half of this place."
Ekra took a step forward, voice low.
"You were sent to trace the energy signatures from the breach. You've done that. You should go."
Lamia stepped beside Gary.
She didn't say anything.
But she looked at the door long enough to remember it.
When they turned to leave the chamber, Ekra followed silently behind them.
But Lamia noticed her gloved hand tremble, just once, as they passed beneath the surveillance orb's red blink.
As they emerged from the chamber, neither spoke for a long time. The only sound was the hum of power running beneath the floor, deeper still, to places neither of them were cleared to go.
Lamia's blood-sense whispered. There was something still down here, curled in the corners of old corridors. Not alive. But not dead either.
It knew she'd walked its halls.
The lights in the chamber flickered once, dimming to a sickly orange as Dr. Ekra Chang stepped ahead of them, her coat trailing behind like a shadow too precise to be natural.
"This way," she said, her voice calm, composed. "There's a direct return elevator on this floor. It bypasses the upper checkpoints and takes you straight to the surface."
She didn't look at them as she walked. Didn't slow. Just moved through the still, humming vault like someone who had memorized every step years ago, and learned to stop thinking about them long before that.
Lamia and Gary followed in silence.
They passed under one last surveillance orb, its red eye blinking, slowly scanning them as they moved.
The walls narrowed into a final corridor. The air grew warmer, heavier, filled with the subtle static charge of a magelift chamber coming online. Somewhere above, machinery stirred. Echoes of grinding metal and arcane gears shifting in tandem rattled through the floor.
The elevator doors stood ahead, brushed steel polished to a false shine.
Just before Lamia stepped inside, Ekra stopped beside her, just for a moment.
She didn't speak.
Didn't look her in the eye.
But as Lamia passed her, she felt it, the soft press of something into her hand. It was smooth, flat and cold.
A drive shard.
Small enough to hide beneath a cuff. Heavy enough to mean secrets.
Ekra kept walking, vanishing behind the shadowed arch near the elevator's threshold.
No words.
Only intent.
The doors hissed closed.
Inside the elevator, Lamia stood motionless beside Gary, her fist clenched around the object. The red surveillance rune on the panel blinked once.
Gary said nothing. Neither did she.
They ascended in silence, the hum of old machinery swallowing even breath.
But Lamia's heart thudded, slow and deliberate. Her blood-sense still itched faintly from the ruined sigils below. And the cold weight in her hand wasn't just data. It was a confession sealed in steel.
It was a risk, a choice, and a warning.
The doors opened with a shudder.The outside wind met them, harsh and heavy with the scent of rusted rails, scorched copper, and engine oil.
The guards didn't ask questions.
And Lamia didn't look back. Because she knew something watched them from that place still. And it wasn't finished.
The surface was quiet at this hour. A Dominion security rail hummed low in the distance, barely visible beyond the skeletal remains of distant overpasses.
Their vehicle, an armored, rune-etched inspector-class transport, waited near the road's edge, black and dust-slicked.
They didn't speak until they were inside.
Only once the doors sealed shut and the hum of the outside almost died did Lamia breathe properly.
She exhaled loudly. "She knows."
Lamia uncurled her fingers and held up the drive. It glinted faint silver in the console light.
"She wants us to know too," she said. "Just not down there."
Gary rubbed his face. "How long do you think those orbs have been patched?"
"Before we got here."
"Which means someone expected us to dig."
Lamia slid the drive into her coat's inner pocket. "We don't dig here. Not now."
Gary's eyes met hers. "Then where?"
Lamia started the engine.
"Somewhere they don't see."
The road ahead split into two, one toward the central Obsidian highway, the other deeper into the forgotten fringe.
She turned the wheel.
And drove toward the dark.