Coven Ep. 5

The archive they led me into was called the Gallery of Lost Things, and the name fit. It was a room the size of a small cathedral, stacked with artifacts that smelled of oil, paper, and old grief. Each item had a card: a microchip salvaged from a sunken satellite, a child's drawing faded into latticework, a vial of black ink still sticky with a formula. The Science Priests had cataloged the world’s remains and called them relics.

Amaranth moved among them with easy grace. "You will find your answers in the places people forget," she said. "Or the places they force others to forget."

We stopped in front of a display case. Inside was a cylindrical object no bigger than my forearm: a shard of mirror-coated alloy that hummed when I breathed close to it. There were runic burn marks across its face.

"This came from Pod-3. Packaging indicates it left the Research Wards twelve years ago. It should not be in the open market," Amy said. "Do you recognize the rune?"

I couldn't help the answer. "Yes."

"This," Amy said, tapping the glass, "was black market until yesterday. Someone in high registry moved it through Cathedral Seven's conveyor system. Which means someone with access to both the Priests and the underground circuits has been trafficking arc-tech."

"Meaning someone in the Priests is working with someone in the coven."

Amy's jaw moved. "Not exactly. It means there is ideological overlap. There are people in power who think the old divisions—science vs. magick—are artificial. They think merging them will grant control. The Science Priesthood used to put down that idea as heresy. Now? Some factions whisper otherwise."

"Control," I said. "Of what exactly?"

"Of the future," she said. "If you can control the magickal genome and program it through old tech, you can dominate both armies."

The thought sat in my chest like a second heart. "Who would do that?"

Amy's expression went distant. "There are names," she said. "The Cathedral is an old priesthood, but I am young and time hasn't yet taught me to believe in coincidences. Monique is not the only one rebuilding the old gene breakers. There are labs beneath the Xcult congregations where data from the third age is being recompiled. I suspect outreach efforts. Test beds. A controlled evolution."

"I was a test bed," I said. It came out softer than I intended.

Amy's eyes did something then. They softened and hardened at once, as if someone had taught her to do both on command. "Then you know what it costs," she said.

"You want me to find Pod-3," I said, because playacting around words was how we avoided stabbing. "I get it."

"No," she said. "I want you to find the person who is supplying the pods and then find Monique's end of the pipe. Find connections. Interrogate the traders. Burn the bridges that lead to the exchange."

"And if they lead to the priests?"

"Then you burn closer to home," she said.

There was a beat where I saw something in Amy I hadn't seen before—an exhausted, terrifying deliberation, like a surgeon deciding which organ to amputate. There was something in her decision that didn't ask permission of anyone else.

"One more thing," she said. " Your Aunt Gene—if she is alive—has carved her rune into the Ferryman Quarter. That means she left a breadcrumb. Find those crumbs before the coven does. If she is alive, you'll know." She looked at me long enough that I felt the question without language: can you be trusted not to use that knowledge to save your mother at the cost of the plan?

I nodded. "I can be trusted," I lied.

****

We moved at dawn to the fed market under the sodium glow of a ruined stadium. Traders lined the broken concourse and war scorched field under tarps. Black market tech, rune-ink, blood vials—everything exchanged hands in the language of fear and favor. I played the part of an interested buyer and caught more than a few eyes. I had the advantage of a face people recognized: Captain Sloan, Black Heart, someone whose presence meant both a price and protection.

A woman sold me a map for a handful of ration chips. It was an ugly thing, tacked together with scraps and a smell of salt. The map highlighted a building out on the edge of an old transit yard. Someone had scrawled in the margin: Echo Gate.

Echo Gate: a name I knew from childhood fright stories—an old research portal designed to echo data through time, a relic of the pre-war experiments in temporal networking. It had been declared a tomb after the fourth anomaly, but rumor persisted. We were desperate enough for rumors to count as leads.

"Pod-3 registry?" I asked, watching the woman's hands.

She smiled through cracked lips. "Why do you want to know?"

"Curiosity," I said. "And because you never want to sell something once the priests start asking about it."

She laughed, a brittle sound. "Careful, Captain. The priests are the ones buying now. And they pay with promises, not credits."

I left her without the map and took a wrong alley on purpose. I needed to test the market. My information feed—Amy's net, my team's cached eyes—was quiet. Too quiet. Someone was wiping prints.

At the Echo Gate building the palms of my hands went slick. It was a squat structure of reinforced glass and concrete, half-sunken into the ground where the transit tubes had been cleaved. The door had been patched with sheets of metal blackened with marks of arc-energy. There was a small rune, new and sharp, cut into the steel.

I touched it. The rune warmed under my fingers like a living thing. I felt a jitter at the bones of my neck, a resonance that was not unlike recognition. Then the door opened before I could knock. A man stood in the light, coat flaring behind him. He had the air of someone who had never been forced to choose between the easy lie and the hard truth.

"Captain Sloan," he said with a smile that predated courtesy. "You're braver than your reputation."

"Or more foolish," I countered. "Who are you?"

"Names are currency," he said. "But since you're in a position to pay, call me Calder."

"Calder," I echoed. The name tasted like political leverage.

He invited me inside. The Echo Gate hummed with old servers stacked like tombstones. Screens flickered with ghost-code. There were faces in the dark, watching. People who had been told that time would tell them their debts.

"You want pod leads," Calder said. "We can trade. But it isn't cheap."

"What do you want?" I asked.

He looked at me like he was measuring how much I would unbalance if he took the scales off. "I want you to deliver me something your mother took: a shard. A shard from the Cathedral labs. If you bring it to me, I tell you where Pod-3 moves its mail. And I tell you how the coven has been patching implants."

My gut folded into a familiar ache. The shard he asked for—something that had to do with the suspension unit, with the same sort of mirror-alloy I'd seen in the Gallery. It meant access to the priests.

"I don't trade in my mother's things."

"Then I trade in your future," Calder said. "Because if Monique has the shard, Pod-3 will know exactly how to rebuild the Echo Gate for their needs. You want to stop the merging. You want to keep the priests from handing the covens keys. Help me, Captain Sloan."

I could have left. I could have charged the room and torn the servers in two, made the whole place a charred memory. But the world had long since stopped letting me choose simple options.

"Fine," I said. The word cost me nothing and everything. "I will get your shard."

He smiled then in a way that said he believed me. "We'll start tomorrow," he said. "Bring a friend. Bring someone who is not so easy to break."

I thought of Amy and how she had just given me the friend she'd chosen. I thought of Lieutenant Maro and the way his implant had flickered dead. I thought of Aunt Gene's rune beating like a secret under my skin.

Tomorrow was a long bridge. Tonight, the city breathed.

Outside the Echo Gate a shadow detached from a pile of broken piping and followed me until I noticed. Its stride was easy—human enough. When it stepped into the light, I felt like the air had tightened.

She was smaller than I remembered. She smelled of lavender and iron. "Izabella," she said.

"Aunt Gene," I breathed, scent catching on an old lullaby I hadn't given permission to be remembered. Her eyes were older, stitched with scars I hadn't seen before. Her hands trembled a little when she reached out. "You shouldn't be here."

"You shouldn't be anywhere," I replied, and laughed, which came out thin and surprising. "If you've been watching, why the rune? Why not a message?"

She looked at me like someone who had been trying to tell a story and couldn't find the right language. Her voice came out low and urgent. "Because not all messages want to be read the same way. Because sometimes you have to be found."

"Found by whom?" My question was cheap and brittle. I had been found by everyone recently: by covens, by priests, by Calder in the Echo Gate.

"By yourself," she said. "You have pieces that are not yours. Monique did not simply breed you. She used stitches older than blood. You were meant to be a bridge. You can choose what kind of bridge to be."

"Why tell me this now?" I asked. "Why when they are about to tear the world into orders?"

"Because they're listening," she said. "Because some of us said no." Her gaze landed on the Echo Gate like a blade. "Because if you are going to burn what they are building, you must know what holds it up."

She hesitated as if thinking about whether a person like Aunt Gene should exist in a world like this. Finally she reached into her jacket and pulled out a small envelope folded in black cloth. "This is permission," she said. "Not a key, but a testimony. Keep it. When you are ready, it will open more than a door."

I took it. The cloth smelled like book glue and rain. The rune sewn into it was the same trilune, fractured then sewn together. There was a quickness to her movement that made me think of the old nights when she stole me from closets and put me on the floor to read me things that didn't make sense until I was grown.

"Why did you leave me?" I asked, the question burning hotter than the cold.

She set her hand on mine, a small proof of warmth. "Because some battles are not for children, Izzie. Because Monique had claws that didn't break easily. Because you needed a later teacher."

I wanted to ask who that later teacher was. I wanted to ask why Aunt Gene had been gone. I wanted to push for confessions.

"Aunt Gene," I hazard a guess instead, "if you wanted me to do something, you could have told Amy."

Aunt Gene's eyes flickered, like someone reading the air. "Amy is an organ in the machine. I am a stitch in the seam. Both are necessary. One day you will choose which to love." She stood, and the shadow retook her like a cloak.

"One more thing," she said over her shoulder. "They are not only building bridges. They are building vaults."

The word landed like ice. Vaults for what I didn't know, but the implication was all teeth and shuttered doors.

She was gone then. The world had swallowed her down to seed and shadow without warning.

I looked at the piece of cloth folded in my hand and felt the weight of an old story on a new map. The future was no longer a line. It had become a weave and I couldn't read the pattern. Yet.

Outside the Echo Gate the market continued to trade in rumors. I put the cloth away and walked back toward the Cathedral lines. Maro watched me approach like a man who had lost someone and wanted to know whether he could still rage against it.

"Did you find anything?" he asked.

"Maybe," I said. "Maybe a thing that will make tomorrow easier."

He didn't look convinced. None of us were convinced. We were all too tired to be convinced. We were survivors in a city that couldn't decide whether to be a ruin or a battlefield.

Amy met me at the Cathedral gate. She looked at me like a woman who had expected more from a child returned from a storm. She didn't ask about the cloth or Aunt Gene. She asked something else.

"Are you still loyal?" she asked.

The question was simple and a kind of clean cruelty. I thought about loyalty like a thread, and about all the hands that had tried to pull it taut.

"I am," I said.

She didn't smile. "Then rest," she said. "Because you will need it." And then she turned and walked away like a woman who couldn't afford a single indulgence more.

I held the cloth in my fist until the seam warmed and then slid it into the pocket where my vial sat like a sleeping thing. I didn't sleep that night. I walked the perimeter and listened to the city breathe. Somewhere in the dark a choir of voices began to sing in a pattern that was almost human. It could have been a prayer, or a curse. Either way, the next day promised to be louder.