The apartment exhaled when the door sealed shut behind them.
Gloved fingertips grazed the countertop—not searching, just confirming. Cold laminate. A single coffee mug sat abandoned near the sink, its ceramic still whispering warmth against synthetic-sheathed skin. One of them lifted it, tilting the rim toward the sterile light. A faint smudge of Elias's chapstick marked where he'd taken his last sip.
*He left in a hurry.*
The data pad's glow painted their visors in liquid blue. Movement logs cascaded—train transfers with unnatural gaps between stations, a keycard ping at the Archive's service entrance, the exact thirty-seven seconds of camera blind spots he'd used to slip deeper into restricted sectors.
"He went dark." The vocoder flattened the words into something neither human nor machine.
The second agent didn't answer. Their attention locked on the terminal playback hovering above the desk—Eliyas's hands moving with uncharacteristic precision as he severed the retro-trace. A clean cut. Nearly professional.
*Nearly.*
The playback froze on his reflection in the dead screen: pupils dilated, sweat gleaming along his hairline. The scar above his eyebrow stood out like a fresh wound.
"Should we send a recon unit to the fringe?"
Silence. Then—a tilt of the helmet, that eerie pause as unseen channels buzzed between them and something *else*. The first agent's glove tightened around the mug.
"No." They set it down with deliberate care, aligning the handle to match the ghost of Elias's grip. "He's off the net now. Let him come back up for air."
A glance at the coat slouched over the couch arm—threadbare elbows, a pine needle caught in the lining.
"He will. They always do."
The door sighed shut behind them.
In the hollow quiet, the apartment's ambient systems hummed a half-tone higher than usual. The climate control vent exhaled a breath that ruffled the coat's collar.
As if testing the shape of the absence.
Eliyas stepped through the trees like a man walking out of his own skin.
The cold had seeped into his joints—knees stiff from crouching in surveillance blind spots, shoulders tight from hours of tense driving. But here, under the café's lantern light, the warmth reached him before the scent of coffee did. It loosened something between his ribs, letting him breathe fully for the first time since the archive.
The bell chimed.
The owner didn't turn. Steam curled around his wrists as he poured tea, the tendons in his hands standing out like bridge cables under skin. He'd aged since Eliyas last saw him. Or maybe he hadn't. Maybe it was the light.
Eliyas sat, his jacket creaking as he settled onto the stool. The counter's wood bore knife marks and water rings, a topography of use. He traced one with a fingertip—his nail still blackened from prying open the service tunnel grate.
The tea appeared before him. No saucer. Just a chipped ceramic cup, its glaze cracked like desert earth.
"…You disappeared," Eliyas said. His voice came out rougher than he'd intended, scraped raw by filtered air and too many cigarettes.
The owner's eyes lifted. Dark. Depthless. The kind of eyes that had watched cities rise and burn.
"Not everything meant to be found wants to stay found." The words hung between them, weighted. Then, softer: "But you remembered the way back. That matters."
The tea tasted of pine resin and something older—iron, maybe, or the memory of it. Eliyas cradled the cup, letting the heat bleed into his palms. His left pinky twitched, the nerve damage from an old wiring job flaring up in the silence.
When the owner stood, Eliyas followed without question.
The corridor stretched impossibly long, walls narrowing then widening like a throat. His shoulder brushed against shelves of jars—contents unidentifiable in the low light. Something glinted inside one, metallic and sharp. He didn't ask.
Then—the house.
It shouldn't have fit in the forest. Shouldn't have fit *behind* the café. And yet there it was: stone and timber fused with the land, moss stitching the roof to the trees. A forge stood cold but ready, its anvil pitted with centuries of strikes. Through the window, Eliyas glimpsed shelves bowed under books, their spines cracked with use.
"This is where I live," the owner said. His boot scuffed a worn groove in the threshold. "The café is the lantern. This is the flame."
Eliyas's breath fogged the air. His fingertips ached with the urge to touch everything—the tools, the doorframe's carvings, the oil painting of a bridge that looked suspiciously like the one in those faded photographs.
"…Why show me this?"
The compass hit his palm before he'd finished speaking. Cold brass, its surface pocked with age. The needle spun wildly for three heartbeats before snapping north with unnatural precision.
"There are things beneath the city," the owner murmured. Up close, his scent was startlingly human—woodsmoke and lye soap. "Truths no system wants remembered."
Eliyas curled his fingers around the compass. The needle trembled against his lifeline.
Outside, an owl cried. Or maybe it was something else.