Chapter 8 · Make the City Remember

The echo of Silas Morn’s voice reverberated through the underground archive vault so deeply that dust showered from the rusted iron rafters, sticking to the blood crusted on Noa Vey’s cheek. Her name—her real name, the one she’d spent twelve years digging for like a shard of glass in her own throat—hung in the air like static, and the stone walls hummed in answer, as if the city itself had been waiting to hear it too. The golden, foil-like shards of Silas’s projection curled and blackened at the edges, drifting down to land on tattered parchment scrolls stacked waist-high on every shelf. He’d dropped his bomb—you designed the first Rift, Noa, you didn’t die in it, you hid from it—and left them to burn with the fallout.

Her fingers curled so tight around the childhood contract they’d bled to activate that her nails broke through the skin of her palms, mixing fresh blood with the faded brown handprints of two seven-year-old girls. The scar on her chest, the one she’d woken up with twelve years ago with no memory of how she got it, throbbed like it was trying to tear itself open.