Coven Ep.7

The briefing was a map of bones.

Serah's files gave me coordinates over a honeycomb of shipping lanes and ghostly transit lines. Pod-3's name reappeared like a ghost in different registries—medical research, atmospheric remediation, legacy artifact restoration—phrases that dressed sterile intentions in warm words.

Calder's network was present with a tidy signature: outgoing credits, shadow-logged transport manifests, and a barcoded notation that matched the mirror-shard in the Gallery. Someone with access to Cathedral conveyors had moved it into black market circulation. Someone who had the authority to route Centurion convoys without additional logs.

"Who authorized that routing?" I asked.

Serah tapped the ledger. "A clearance token from within Cathedral Seven. Location origin: Sub-level Archive, Node 2. Authorized by credential: 'P. Vire'."

The name stuck like a burr. I did not know the Priest Vire, but in the Cathedral ranks the initials meant a person with pulsed in secrecy.

"Pull everything on Vire," I said. "Now."

She did, fingers slicing through menus like thread. The logs came back with a clean pattern of denials and reroutes. It was as if the records themselves were being defended.

Amy sat across from me with her hands steepled, watchful. "We've scrambled what we could," she said. "But the Cathedral's archival nodes are sacred. Even I can't get full unsandboxed access without Council approval."

"Then we'll get Council approval," I said, and found with a jolt that I was tired of asking permission. "Or we'll find another way."

"Another way," Amy repeated, and the phrase carried the same weary thrill as mutiny.

We left the Gallery together and walked through corridors that smelled of machine oil and old prayers. The Cathedral hummed with a technology that believed in salvation through observation. In the depths, however, there were people like Calder moving in the undercurrent.

Outside, Maro waited, still limping from the Ferryman run. He looked older, as if killing had aged him beyond the calendar. His jaw was tight; he was a man broken in battle and had the detached huanted look that comes with understanding how easily even steel can fail.

"You coming?" he asked.

"Yes," I said. "We're going to find the shard and whoever cleared it."

"Calder?" He looked skeptical. "He'll sell you a queen if you let him."

"He'll also tell us where Pod-3 takes its mail," I said. "We need that."

Maro's eyes went to the Cathedral, then to me. "And Gene?"

"I have a rune," I said. "And a hunch." I swallowed the absurdity of such small things holding so much. "She walked at the Echo Gate. She said the Cathedral listens. She said they build vaults."

Maro snorted. "Vaults. That's comforting."

We assembled a small team—two trusted Black Hearts with arch scramblers, a tech named Juno who owed me a favor in the form of a fast out, and Lieutenant Maro. The plan was improvised and thin. We would go to Calder, trade for the shard’s route map, and then use what he gave us to find Pod-3’s dispatch node. If the Cathedral was involved on both ends, we would walk into a net. If it wasn't, we might find a lead, or something worse.

Calder's Echo Gate doors opened like a mouth. The room inside smelled of ozone and coffee gone sour. He grinned like a man who had the cheekbones of both charm and threat.

"To what do I owe the pleasure?" he said, hands folded in mock-salute.

"You tell me where Pod-3 moves its mail," I said without ceremony. "You tell me who they trade with, and I deliver you the shard's origin: the Sub-level Archive manifest. You know it was routed through Cathedral conveyors. That routing is your ticket."

His smile didn't break. "And if I refuse?"

I watched him for a long beat. "Then we assume you were part of the network and we treat you like a field acknowledgment—unredeemable."

He laughed, a sound that held no ease. "Brave," he said, and then narrowed his eyes. "Aren't you worried?"

"About what?" I asked.

"That whatever you find in Pod-3 isn't something that wants to be used by friendly hands," he said. "That it's the sort of thing a God would ask for and then realize the bill was due the next morning."

His words trailed off like a gauntlet thrown down. I had a simple readiness in me then—a soldier's hunger for one enemy at a time.

"Tell me," I said.

He toyed with a shard of metal between his fingers. "Fine," he said. "Pod-3 moves its sensitive materials through a daytime courier sect called the Grey Line. They use a shell corporation—Vessel-9 Logistics. Their drop node is a reactivated medical bunker under the old LAX terminals. There—" He named coordinates, and I saw the map in my head snap into sharper focus. "But you'll have to make it past their scanners. And you'll have to get there before someone pries the data open."

"How fast?" Maro asked.

"Fast enough that you won't have to choose whether to shoot or to beg."

Calder's eyes watched me with something less than sympathy. "One last piece," he said. "If you want to go into Pod-3's mouth, you'll need someone who can read the locks: an old archivist, a witch? Someone with a wound that remembers the world before this one. I know where she hides. But her price isn't mere credits."

I thought of Aunt Gene, of the rune and the cloth. "I'll pay."

He smiled, the sort of smile that meant the deal had been struck.

We left Calder with the coordinates and an uneasy alliance stitched out of equal parts necessity and danger. The city outside was the same city at dusk: ash-colored and hungry. The Cathedral shone above the rubble. It's light reflected in the broken glass of a broken world. The Xcult's fortresses were a distant glowing haze from the top of the blackened San Gabriel mountains. Somewhere inside the tower, the Priests would be watching our movements and noting them down into their ledgers, trying to fold us into their calculus.

I slid Aunt Gene’s cloth from my pocket and pressed the rune between my fingers. The stitches were warm. I thought of my mother's face in the cell and the way she had spoken to me in that low, pained voice.

"You're doing this for her," Maro said quietly as we moved. "Or are you doing it for yourself?"

"For both," I answered. It felt true and futile at once. We were not instruments of any single will. We were people dragging stitches across a torn tapestry, trying to decide whether the weave would hold.

As we prepared to move toward the Grey Line drop, a siren cut through the evening—sharp, measured. A Cathedral alert. Varric’s voice came over the outer channels, clipped and official: All units—secure the perimeter. Active surveillance: breach in Echo Gate timeline. The word breach tasted like blood.

Amy's orders flicked into my wrist band, terse: Do not engage Cathedral assets without clearance.

I looked at the map. I saw the coordinates Calder had named and then the pulsing tag at the Echo Gate that still hummed in my memory. Pod-3 had noticed something. They were closing doors.

We had a choice then: wait for clearance and maybe watch Pod-3 swallow its loot into a vault labeled future, or move now and hope our hasty crawl into the dark would not be the one that made us more instrument than bridge.

I picked up my rifle, felt its weight like a promise, and looked at my team. There was a quiet look between us that meant the decision had been made.

“We move,” I said.

Maro's nod was slow. “For Monique?” he asked.

“For Monique,” I said. “And for the bridge they keep trying to make of us.”

We stepped into the night with the air tasting of ozone and the faint metallic afterburn of the Cathedral’s watch. Somewhere above us, on the gray stone and steel spires of the Tower, robotic sentries hummed in their sleep. Somewhere below, a vault was waiting. And somewhere, watching, bent over us as if cataloguing a specimen, the Priests updated their ledgers.

We were not the only ones who had learned how to be observed. But we would, that night, try to be the ones who watched back.

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