Coven Ep.8

We dropped into the monorail bunk like ghosts.

The entrance was a shredded seam in the old LAX overpass—an angry, jagged rent where concrete had split and the city had forgotten to stitch it back together. Below, the corridor ran in half-light, strung with the skeletons of ductwork and the pulsing veins of exposed cable. It smelled of jet-fuel gone sour, metal dust, and a dampness that made your skin feel thin.

Juno moved first, a shadow with a tablet, her fingers conducting code like playing a piano. She never looked like a tech when she worked; she looked like someone coaxing a sleeping animal. Two Black Hearts hung to our flanks—silent, armored, the clicks of their boots muffled by scavenged padding. Maro kept to my left, his limp kept steady with a brace that hissed soft pneumatic breaths in time with the city.

"Scanners are weird," Juno whispered into my earcom as we threaded the main corridor. "Grey Line uses layered checks. EM, sonic, biometrics—and something else I can't quite parse. Old arc-signatures spliced into their manifests."

I kept my hands loose on the rifle. The runic suppressors etched along the barrel sat cold beneath my palms. For years I'd trained to compartmentalize everything that had been me into neat categories—soldier, daughter, witch—but the City was a thing that refused tidy boxes. We had to be ready for hybrid threats.

We moved on each breath between small shadows. Juno's scrambler fit like a second skin across her throat, a humming necklace of dark tech. She tapped its side and our HUDs dimmed—thermal gradients warped, heat signatures smeared into noise, archaic defenses in the area blurred on their scans as if some god pressed its palm across the sky.

"Door at fifty meters," she breathed. "Acoustic locks—pinned to a rhythm pattern. I can mime it for you if you want to dance."

Maro snorted but didn't smile. "Don't pretend I don't know that dance."

The Grey Line dock was buried under a collapsed concourse. The door itself looked like a vault scavenged from a fallen bank in the Old Age: thick alloy, a dial ringed in burn marks, and a small window that flared with digital codings. Juno's hands were nimble and certain. Her fingers drew patterns in the air and the lock sighed like a relieved animal.

We slid in.

The space inside smelled of preserved lacquer and old plastic. Crates were stacked waist-high in regimented rows—containers with reinforced labels: MED/PRIO, ARC/LOCKED, POD-3. Each crate wore a stencil the Grey Line didn't bother to hide: Vessel-9 Logistics, and a barcode stamped with an origin—coordinates drilling straight back to the Cathedral's Sub-level Archive.

My jaw knotted. Calder had been right.

Juno moved the light across a crate’s seam and the barcode peeled into streams of hex in her display. "These are sealed with Cathedral-grade hashes," she murmured. "If we break anything before we can mirror the signature, the crate will go hermetic and we will have exactly one minute before the reactive seals vaporize the contents."

"How generous," Maro muttered.

"Be generous back," I said. "Juno—get me the top crate. Maro and Black Heart two guard the exit. Black Heart one backs me."

She nodded and worked, thin scratch of fingers over touch-rail. The first latch gave with a quiet pop, like a throat clearing. We tilted the crate open.

Inside—packed with foam and relic fabric—were two things: a block of mirror-alloy that tasted like wrongness on the eye, and a core drive no bigger than a fist, wrapped in a waxed cloth stamped with a symbol that made my skin crawl.

The mirror-alloy was notched along its edge with sharp runic cuts: precise, clinical, carved by someone who knew both rune and lathe. When I drew closer, the alloy drank the light and threw it back in shards. Aunt Gene’s rune—the trilune I had tucked into my pocket like an accusation—warmed against my hip as if in answer. My fingers itched. I resisted.

"Take the drive," I told Juno. "We mirror and go."

She pulled the drive free with gloved hands and slid it into her kit. Her face was tight. "It's encrypted by Cathedral keys," she said. "I can mirror the header, but to open it I need a live handshake with someone who has access—or a decryptor."

"I don't have Cathedral creds," I said. "You don't have them either. So how do we haul a chest full of evidence out of the mouth of the beast and not get eaten?"

Maro's monitor pinged then, a soft heartbeat in his ear. "Movement outside," he rasped. "Two boots. Not Grey Line. Cathedral sentry feeders."

A shiver ran up my spine. We had known the Cathedral watched. We had not wanted them to be this close.

"Get the drive mirrored," I ordered. "Collapse the crate and leave no trace. We'll take the back corridor. Juno—once you have the mirror, burn any signature that ties it to us. Scrub the trace."

She worked like a priest on a relic, delicate and quick. Sparks of code flew across her screen. The drive clicked as she read the header—the name P. Vire scrolling across its metadata like a curse in slow light.

"P. Vire," Juno said softly. "This is their stamp. The manifest reads: ARCHIVE SUBLEVEL NODE-2. Special handling: 'For Vire: Discretionary.'"

My mouth went dry. The name we'd chased through ledgers, the ghost that authored the conveyor tokens. Vire's signature here was a splinter that matched the Cathedral ledger.

"We got what we came for," I said, but the words were brittle.

From the corridor a soft metallic hiss breathed. Bootsteps carried a crispness that suggested servitors—Cathedral sentries in chrome—plus the clack of at least two human gaiters. Someone else was moving with them, slow, deliberate. A voice—thin and amplified—rose as if from a throat coated in glass.

"Unauthorized breach detected," it sang. "Grey Line manifest compromised. Initiate containment protocol Alpha."

Bells like distant teeth clicked through the room. The lights flared red for a breath. The door we had come through began to ghost with a seam of light—hermetic protocols knitting themselves closed.

"Back!" I snapped. "Maro, with me. Black Hearts, hold the feed."

We moved like water. The Black Hearts stepped to the end of the aisle and set up, their rifles swinging through practiced arcs while shielding fields deployed with a soft mechanical hum. Maro braced at my side—his job never to be dramatic, only to be necessary.

Juno's hands flexed. "I've got a mirrored copy—partial," she said. "Header and manifest. If we can get it to Calder he can burn the shell and open the rest in a secure node."

"Calder's Echo Gate is compromised," I said. "We need immediate exit—south tunnel, the service shaft."

She pushed a thumb drive across the table. "Take this," she said. "It has the copy. I can ghost a tracer to it. If something goes wrong—" Her face hardened. "—I can patch you later."

"I don't like leaving you here," Maro said.

"You're not leaving me," she snapped. "You are moving me. I'm a tech. I move. But if I can't move, at least I take the truth with me."

We took the drive. I felt the weight of it like a promise. The room around us trembled with the low hum of locks engaging. The servitors' footsteps came closer.

Something moved in the shadow to my left, faster than an armored man should move. A figure peeled from the racks: small, coated in fabric that ate the light, eyes like polished onyx. Lenore stepped out of the darkness with that too-many-toothed smile and the fall of night about her shoulders.

"Captain," she said, as if the whole encounter had been an expected act in a play we'd all rehearsed for different reasons. "You always make such a show."

"Lenore," I said. My voice was a knife. "This isn't your party."

"It never is," she chirped. "You should have told your friends to bring more friends. Or better friends." She reached into the folds of her coat and something flashed—light and runes. A patch of nanoweave, stitched with old-world glyphs.

"She has a disruptor," Maro whispered. "Arc-runic. Those things fry implants."

Lenore's grin widened like a blade. "We all do what we must," she said, and the air in the aisle obeyed her like the sea obeys a bell.

Then everything went loud.

Sentries converged like the tide. The Black Hearts returned fire in a chorus of controlled violence. I moved with them, muscle and instinct, while Juno dragged herself under a crate and began to shove wires into a panel, sweat beading on her temple as she tried to outrun the lockout.

Lenore danced through the fighting with a cruelty that had no pretense of mercenary fairness. She struck at tech and throat with equal ease. At one point she rammed a fist against a servitor's optic and it sparked into blindness like a dying star. She laughed, and the sound was a wet, happy thing.

My rifle barked. The mirror-alloy shard in the crate caught a stray glint and threw it into my face like a signal flare. For a flash I could see my reflection—tense, streaked with dust, with a woman I both wanted to save and to crucify.

Maro went down, a heavy thump and the metal note of his armor collapsing. Someone had hit his brace. I dropped to him, wrenched the support out, and felt the hot squeeze of guilt like a rod through my ribs. "Maro!" I barked, and the world narrowed to the closeness of his breathing.

"Go," he spat. "Take the drive. Finish it."

I looked up and saw Lenore close, her face inches away. Her eyes were too bright; under their shine the runes on her sleeve came to life and unspooled like veins of light.

"Please," she murmured. "Don't make me hunt you."

The Black Hearts were outnumbered. Juno had the mirrored copy and had patched a fail into the drive, but the seals were closing. The servitors were at the doorway, and beyond them the Cathedral's reach tasted of ledger and law. Somewhere above us, someone would be noting the timecode, a white ribbon in a ledger: IZB-128 — unauthorized extraction.

I slid the drive into my palm like a hot stone. The metal warmed. Aunt Gene's cloth under my jacket pressed against it, and the rune pulsed once—soft and fierce.

"Move!" I ordered, and for the first time in a long while I stopped thinking like a soldier whose orders were writ on paper. I began to think like something else—like the child my mother had once taught to hide in shadow.

We ran.

The aisle cracked open behind us like an answer to a prayer and a sentence at once. Sirens screamed, servitors shouted, and Lenore's laughter trailed into my back like smoke. Juno swore and kicked free, a strip of cabling snagging on her ankle; someone yanked her and hauled her up.

We dove into a service shaft and the door sealed in a whine behind us. For a moment the world was just our breath and the faint humming of the mirrored drive in my fist.

Then my wrist chimed—soft, meditative, Cathedral tone. A single line pulsed on my HUD in white letters that felt like a verdict:

UNAUTHORIZED BREACH DETECTED. CORDON: CATHEDRAL SUB-LEVEL NODE 2. LOCKDOWN: TIER III.

I swallowed. The shaft reeked of metal and fear and something else I could not name. The drive thudded against my palm like a heard heartbeat. I could feel its secret moving under the skin of the city.

Somewhere behind the sealed door the Grey Line scrambled its manifests. Somewhere outside, the Cathedral would be updating its ledgers—names crossing through, outcomes recorded.

We had what we came for. We had also lit a beacon across the city.

I held the drive tighter and tasted the metallic tang of consequence on my tongue. The City closed in around us—the vaults, the watchers, the Priests and their lists—and I realized how thin the line had become between being the bridge and being the thing that everyone crossed to get to the other side.

"Keep moving," I told them, my voice small but fast. "We have one route and one chance. Calder's Echo Gate and then—then we burn the shell."

Maro grunted, Juno spat a curse, and the Black Hearts clipped their armor. We climbed into the dark with the drive like a ember at our center, and above us the Cathedral began to catalog our names for deletion.