Chapter 3: Whispers in the Code
Kellan didn't sleep.
Not really.
Sleep required the luxury of forgetting, of drifting into dreams. He had neither. What he had was the cold blue glow of data streams and the ceaseless echo of her voice in his head.
The desk in his tiny apartment was littered with empty stim-packs, half-crushed data chips, and a growing graveyard of fried input cables. He'd been jack-knifed into the city's oldest networks for hours maybe days slipping deeper into the bones of Technopolis, trawling through blacklisted forums, archived resistance logs, defunct NetSec dead-drops. Anything. Anything that might explain what he'd seen. What she'd said.
And what the pendant was.
He couldn't shake the words from his mind, each one another fracture line in the stable world he thought he knew.
Veil. Arcane. Echo Gate.
They were whispers buried deep in code strings, ghosted across corrupted message chains like warnings from people already forgotten. No context, no explanations. Just fragments and static, as if someone or something had tried to scrub the truth clean and only managed to smear it further.
He watched a feed from a cracked resistance archive grainy, decades-old footage. A masked figure stood before a massive gate of stone and light, veins of azure energy pulsing across its surface. A symbol flared to life a glyph he recognized now from the pendant itself. Then the feed collapsed into static. That same phrase flickered again.
> THE VEIL IS FRACTURING. FIND THE ECHO GATE.
He leaned back in his chair, exhaling shakily. His skin felt too tight. His mind was an exposed circuit overloaded and crackling.
Every time he closed his eyes, her voice returned.
> "The Arcane doesn't choose lightly…"
He snapped his eyes open again.
The pendant lay on the desk beside him. It was glowing softly now, like a pulse. A breath. As if it were syncing with him. Its etched symbols stirred, tiny tendrils of light weaving between them like veins. The rhythm wasn't random. It matched the thrum of his own heartbeat.
He couldn't decide if it comforted him or terrified him.
He reached out toward it and froze when a sharp knock shattered the silence.
His breath caught.
The room was suddenly far too quiet.
Then the door opened without his consent unauthorized.
"Okay, man, you've officially lost it," a familiar voice said, breaking the tension.
Dex stepped into the room, face half-covered by the high collar of his jacket, goggles perched on his forehead. He held a foil-wrapped ration packet in one hand and a steaming bottle of synth-caf in the other.
"I had to piggyback three sub-level locators just to track your signal. You didn't check in. Didn't show up for your shift. I thought the Enclave had dragged you underground and rewired your brain."
Kellan didn't respond. He just turned the holo-display so Dex could see it.
The phrase blinked, over and over.
> THE VEIL IS FRACTURING. FIND THE ECHO GATE.
Dex froze mid-step.
"…Okay," he said carefully, lowering the food like it might explode. "So we're doing the paranoid-doomsday-prophet thing now. Got it."
Kellan stood slowly. His face was pale, hollow. His eyes burned with something Dex hadn't seen before certainty.
"I'm not crazy," he said, voice low. "She was real, Dex. Aria. She wasn't some stress-induced neural ghost. And this" he gestured to the pendant, which flared faintly as if acknowledging its mention "isn't just tech. It's something else. Something… older."
Dex walked toward it, cautiously. The moment he got close, the pendant pulsed again. A ripple of light shot outward, brushing his fingertips.
He jerked his hand back. "What the hell was that?"
"It reacts to people. But only really reacts to me."
Dex shook his head. "That's not possible. Unless it's bonded tech pre-Integration era, maybe. Even then, it would need"
"A resonant signature," Kellan interrupted. "That's what the archives said."
Dex gave him a long look. "You know what this sounds like, right?"
"I do."
"And you're leaning into it anyway?"
"I am."
Dex exhaled through his teeth. "You think this thing opens a door to… what? A magical dimension?"
Kellan didn't blink. "Yes."
There was a long silence.
"…Great."
---
Later, they relocated to Dex's loft a cluttered sprawl of wires, screens, and half-functional drones suspended by gravity anchors. Here, the hum of tech was constant, like a living organism breathing around them.
Dex stood before his main console. "I hacked into an off-grid security vault. Deep-sector stuff. Pre-archive data. Most of it's corrupted beyond use, but…"
He tapped a key.
A projected map flickered into existence distorted, incomplete. It showed the layers beneath Technopolis: the Core Spire, the maintenance tunnels, and beneath that… something else. Something buried.
In glitchy script, three lines stood out:
> ECHO GATE INITIATIVE
EXILE CLASSIFIED
ACCESS: RESONANT SIGNATURE ONLY
Kellan stared at it.
"I've seen that phrase before," he whispered. "In my dreams. In her voice."
Dex frowned. "Kellan, this thing… it's not just old. It's erased. Like someone went out of their way to burn it from history."
Kellan's voice was steady. "That's where I have to go."
Before Dex could argue, a chill swept the room.
The temperature dropped several degrees. Lights dimmed. A strange pressure tightened the air.
Then the pendant flared. Not just light, but heat like a breath caught in metal. Symbols along its surface surged outward in a lattice of luminous threads that hung suspended in the air, pulsing with unfamiliar rhythms.
Kellan stumbled back as the threads spun faster, forming a rippling distortion in the room space folding in on itself, air growing heavier, crackling. Then the ripple came subtle, like a shimmer of heat in cold space.
And she stepped through.
Aria.
Cloaked in forest-dark threads, eyes burning with distant starlight. Her arrival wasn't dramatic it was inevitable, like a memory returning.
The pendant dimmed the moment she appeared, its glow settling into a slow, steady pulse… like recognition. Like relief.
"You used the pendant," she said, no trace of accusation just certainty.
"I didn't mean to," Kellan replied. "It just… responded."
She moved to the desk, her eyes scanning the pendant's glow. "Then we don't have long."
Dex edged back. "Who the hell are you?"
She turned, calm as the void. "I'm one of the last Weavers. I guard the folds in the Veil. And right now, they're unraveling."
"Who's they?" Dex asked.
"The Enclave. They've sensed the flare of resonance. They'll be coming for you."
Dex edged back, eyes wide. "Okay. Pause. Back up."
Aria turned to him, calm but alert.
"You keep saying stuff like 'Veil' and 'Weavers' and acting like that's supposed to mean something to us normals," Dex said. "So maybe you explain before we run off into some hidden corridor what exactly is going on here?"
She studied him for a beat, then nodded.
"The Veil is a boundary. Not physical. Not fully digital either. It's a membrane between layers of reality between what your world understands and what it's forgotten. Weavers are born attuned to it. We sense the fractures. We mend where we can. Move through the folds. Keep the unraveling at bay."
Dex blinked. "So you're like a magical systems admin for reality?"
Aria's lips twitched. "Closer than you think."
"And the Echo Gate?"
"A lock. Or a scar. It was sealed long ago to keep what lies beyond from bleeding through. The Enclave wants to reopen it to harness what's behind it."
Kellan held up the pendant, still pulsing. "And this?"
"A fragment of the Arcane. The last true link to what was. It seeks resonance potential. That's why it chose you. You're not just a carrier. You're a key."
Kellan felt it before he heard it a low, wrong hum. The lights in the loft stuttered, and outside the windows, the shadows moved.
Faceless figures. Cloaked. Almost formless. They didn't walk they slid. Reality warped around them like static on a dying screen.
"They're here," Aria said.
She pressed her palm to the wall. Glyphs exploded from her skin, searing into the metal. A hidden panel hissed open behind a stack of servers.
"This leads to a forgotten maintenance corridor. It'll bypass city surveillance. Take it. Now."
"What about you?" Kellan asked.
"I'll lead them away. You need to reach the Threshold. Past the grid's edge. That's where the Echo Gate lies buried."
Dex looked like he might faint. "So we're heading into the dead zones. Great. Love that for us."
Kellan took one last look at Aria. "Will I see you again?"
Her expression softened. "If you survive the crossing."
A surge of energy lit the corridor behind them blue, humming with power.
"Go," she said.
Kellan clutched the pendant and stepped through. Dex followed, muttering every curse he knew.
As the passage sealed behind them, Aria turned to the shadows. Her cloak unraveled, becoming mist and light.
Trust the Arcane, her voice whispered in Kellan's mind, long after the door closed.
It chose you for a reason.
---