Chapter 10: Echoes Beyond

  The tunnel narrowed the farther they went, until Jin and Kael were nearly crawling. Walls groaned with the weight of forgotten systems above, and the air grew stale—choked with metallic dust and residual charge from long-dead circuits.

  But the Cipher Breaker kept pulsing, guiding them forward.

  “Where does this lead?” Jin asked, ducking under a low-hanging pipe.

  Kael’s voice was tight, like she was measuring her words. “Up. Zone Breaker routes. Not official exits, but emergency failsafes. Built before everything went to hell.”

  He frowned. “Failsafes. Always nice to know they pnned for failure.”

  “They didn’t. This wasn’t for people like us. This was for the ones who knew what was coming.”

  That silenced him.

  After another stretch of silent crawling, the tunnel finally widened into a rusted lift shaft, its mechanism long dead. Kael clipped a repelling wire to a corroded rail and handed Jin the other harness.

  “You sure this holds?” he asked, eyeing the drop.

  “No,” she said, then smirked. “But we’ll make it.”

  The descent was slow, jerky. Echoes of movement rippled in the depths below, like ghosts clinging to the st echoes of purpose. Jin tried not to look down. Instead, he studied the Cipher Breaker’s interface, still active, but… calmer now. Less aggressive.

  Whatever had triggered the Ghost Protocol alert had lost their trail.

  For now.

  At the bottom of the shaft, Kael forced open a maintenance door. Warm air rushed in—fresher than anything Jin had breathed inside Echelon’s core yers. It smelled like rain. And dust. And something else… real.

  They stepped through into a forgotten tram station, half-swallowed by time. Moss crept along the walls, and water dripped from broken light fixtures. But above them, at the far end of the ptform, was an ancient elevator—manual, crank-based, a design abandoned generations ago.

  Kael approached the crank and began working it slowly. Jin assisted, muscles burning. The cage creaked upward, groaning against rust and age. As it rose, faint light began to spill through the sts above. Not artificial. Not simuted.

  Daylight.

  The cage shuddered to a halt, revealing a shattered rooftop overlooking a ruined city—one foot still inside the shell of Echelon, the other just barely touching the outside world.

  Jin stepped out, blinking against the grey sky. It wasn’t beautiful. It was harsh, overcast, filled with dust and remnants of what once was. But it was honest in a way Echelon never had been.

  And it was quiet.

  Kael climbed out behind him, stretching like someone who hadn’t seen the sky in years.

  “Congratutions,” she said, her voice tinged with irony. “You’ve officially crossed the threshold.”

  Jin turned in a slow circle. The city outside looked gutted. Buildings stood like broken teeth. Roads were swallowed by overgrowth. A few drones hovered far above, scanning aimlessly. He didn’t see any people.

  “Where is everyone?”

  Kael’s expression hardened. “Depends on the zone. Some migrated into surface colonies, others never made it out. And some…” She trailed off, then gestured toward a distant tower, still intact, its bck windows blinking faintly. “…Never left Echelon. Not really.”

  “You mean they’re still connected?”

  “Some by choice. Others because they had nowhere else to go.”

  Jin’s hand moved instinctively to the device at his belt. The Cipher Breaker—his key—felt heavier here. As if even in the open air, Echelon’s grip hadn’t quite let go.

  “What now?” he asked quietly.

  Kael pulled out a small device and checked a pulsing red dot on its screen. “Now we head east. There’s someone in the Free Commune—an ex-architect. He helped design some of Echelon’s earliest frameworks before they were militarized.”

  Jin gnced back at the broken lift shaft. “And he’ll help us?”

  Kael paused, then shrugged. “He might. If he’s still alive.”

  Jin gave a short ugh, tired. “That’s the best pn we have?”

  “It’s the only one that doesn’t end with you dissected by Echelon security or sold to a private faction for what’s in your head.”

  He sobered.

  They stood there a moment longer, the wind tugging at their clothes. In the distance, thunder rolled low across the sky, and far below, the city groaned like something alive and dying at once.

  Jin looked at Kael. “Why are you helping me, really?”

  She didn’t answer right away.

  “Because,” she said finally, “someone helped me once. And I wasted it. You’ve still got a chance to make something out of this. A chance to decide what kind of world comes next.”

  Jin didn’t speak, but the words sat heavy in his chest.

  He looked out again across the ruined skyline, the weight of the Cipher Breaker, the memory node, and the choices ahead pressing on him like gravity.

  And in that moment, standing between two worlds—one artificial, one broken—he made a silent promise:

  He was going to find out the truth behind Echelon.

  No matter what it cost.

  End of Act I