The faded ink on the plaster wall felt colder than the surrounding concrete.
Arkan crossed the threshold of the director's office, his right hand instantly dropping from Ela's wrist to clamp over the stiff, frozen fabric of his left sleeve. He didn't want them looking at his arm. He didn't want them looking at the slight tremor in his knees, either. His eyes remained locked on the old topographical map pinned above the ruined wooden desk, where three thick, crimson grease-pencil marks circled the perimeter of Novara Advanced Academy like target reticles.
"Don't touch anything," Arkan muttered, his voice sharp and dismissive as he stepped deeper into the dust. "The structural integrity of this room is garbage. Bhas, check the window frames. See if the damp sealed them shut."
Bhas didn't look at the map immediately. He kept his grip on the heavy iron pipe, his sharp eyes moving from the broken window pane across the floorboards to verify the stability of the support beams. "The wood is rotten, but the iron locks are holding. We're clear from the eastern lens array, but if anyone walks down the central rail line, they'll have a straight line of sight." He tossed the pipe onto a deflated leather sofa, causing a small explosion of grey mold spores. "Your dad really knew how to pick a workspace, Kan. It's a perfect box for a funeral."
Chan slid through the doorway behind them, his boots dragging loudly across the gritty linoleum. He didn't even look for a chair; he simply dropped his back against the wall, letting his knees slide up into his oversized navy jumpsuit until his chin was buried in the collar. "A funeral box is great. Love that. At least a funeral box doesn't have a giant cable knot trying to eat people through a ceiling mesh." He pulled his orange beanie entirely over his eyes. "I'm not looking at the map. If I look at that map, I'm going to find out that my house is also circled in red, and I'm just not emotionally ready for that configuration."
Ela drifted toward the broken desk, his feet hovering an inch above the scattered ledger sheets. The pale silver light vibrating from his skin had settled into a low, quiet hum, but his face remained unusually pale. He reached out a translucent hand, letting his fingers slide straight through the glass screen of the dead pre-integration monitor.
"The dates on the files downstairs..." Ela's dual-layered voice vibrated through the small room, sounding hollow and detached. "The harvester was trying to close a loop from October 2024, Arkan. That's... that's three weeks before the school board announced the expansion project. The one where they built the new science block over the old gardens."
"I told you to stop auditing the history, Kir," Arkan snapped, his tsundere armor flaring up as he stepped between the ghost boy and the faded map. He grabbed the edge of the desk with his functional right hand, his knuckles turning white as he forced himself to ignore the freezing, pinpoint ache beneath his wristwatch. "My dad was a bankrupt textbook printer. He probably drew those circles to figure out which school accounts he could overcharge for logistics delivery. It's basic accounting, not a conspiracy."
Bhas let out a short, dry bark of laughter from the window frame. "Right. Because every mid-tier printer maps out the underground municipal drainage channels just to drop off a shipment of algebra books. Keep telling yourself that, master coder. Maybe the network servers will believe you."
Before Arkan could fire back an insult, a soft, electronic chirp echoed from the floorboards beneath the desk.
It wasn't the loud, high-frequency alert of the school tower, but the tiny, rhythmic ping of a local proximity beacon waking up.
The electronic chirp was thin and metallic, buried deep beneath the layers of damp insulation and dry dust.
Chan scrambled backward so fast his boots slammed against the base of the metal lockers, the sound ringing out like a gunshot in the cramped office. "It's a bomb," he squeaked, his fingers digging into the wool of his orange beanie until his knuckles turned gray. "Arkan, your dad left a proximity landmine under his desk. I knew it. We survived the giant cable knot just to get blown into confetti."
"Shut up, Chan, it's not a bomb," Arkan hissed, though he didn't move from his position by the corner of the wooden desk.
His right hand clamped harder over his left coat pocket, pinning his dead arm against his ribs as a cold, electric prickle surged through his paralyzed wrist. Across his vision, the quiet grey registry lines flickered, a tiny yellow icon shaped like an uncalibrated radio terminal pulsing in the bottom left corner.
[LOCAL BEACON DETECTED: UNREGISTERED FIXED NODE]
[FREQUENCY: 433 MHZ — LEGACY TELEMETRY]
Bhas walked over from the window, his expression tight and pragmatic as he kicked a pile of yellowed ledger sheets away with the toe of his boot. He dropped to one knee, leaning his shoulder against the rotting desk frame to peer into the dark footwell. "It's coming from behind the bottom drawer. The locking track is bent." He looked up at Arkan, his sharp eyes hard. "Looks like someone shoved it in there in a hurry. Hand me that pipe."
"Don't touch it," Arkan muttered, his tsundere walls slamming down as he forced his legs forward. He didn't want Bhas pulling his father's secrets out of the woodwork. He didn't want to see what else was hidden in the dark. He reached down with his functional right hand, his fingers catching the lip of the bent metal drawer, and yanked it outward with a harsh, splintering screech.
The drawer didn't just slide out; the entire rotted tracks tore free from the particle board, spilling old receipts, rusted paperclips, and a small, rectangular plastic case onto the linoleum floor.
The case was no larger than a deck of cards, its gray casing scuffed and discolored by old oil stains. On its face, a single amber LED light blinked once every three seconds, cast from a tiny lithium battery that had somehow managed to preserve its residual charge for two years in the damp dark.
Ela drifted closer, his silver silhouette casting a faint, pale luminescence over the plastic box. He dropped his head, his wide silver eyes fixed on a strip of faded white tape stuck to the back of the case. "There's a name on it, Arkan," his dual-layered voice vibrated, dropping into that thin, hollow frequency that made the dust motes in the air dance. "It's not corporate stock. It says... Property of Department 04. Underneath... there's a signature."
Arkan knelt down, his right hand shaking slightly as he flipped the small device over. The handwriting on the tape was hurried, scrawled in thick, black permanent marker that had begun to bleed into the adhesive.
It didn't belong to his father. The signature read: Suryadharma.
Chan's breath hitched from the corner. "Wait... Suryadharma? As in... Kir's family? Arkan, why would Kir's dad leave a tracking beacon in your father's printing shop?"
The name on the faded white tape seemed to draw the remaining warmth right out of the room.
Arkan stared at the black ink, his fingers freezing against the edges of the plastic case. Suryadharma. The letters were slightly jagged, written with the heavy, uniform downward strokes that marked the elder Suryadharma's academic journals—the same journals Arkan had sneaked looks at when he used to visit Kir's house after school.
"He didn't leave it," Arkan said, his voice flat, dropping like a lead weight onto the concrete. He forced his right hand to snap the drawer track back into the dark footwell, his tsundere walls rising up like concrete barricades. "Kir's dad was a senior systems architect for the municipal transport grid before the integration. He probably dropped this terminal node during the 2024 logistics audit. It's an old telemetry tracker. They used them to monitor battery life on regional supply trucks."
"Yeah, except your dad's company didn't use regional supply trucks, Kan," Bhas said, his voice completely level as he leaned his hip against the edge of the rotten desk. He reached down, his blunt fingers catching the corner of the small gray device and turning it over to inspect the flashing amber LED. "They used local courier vans. And last time I checked, a transport architect doesn't code telemetry nodes to a fixed 433 megahertz frequency unless he's trying to build a localized, off-network relay."
Chan let out a low, shaky breath from his corner, his fingers tightening around his knees. "So... Kir's dad and Arkan's dad knew each other? Like, secretly? Before everything went bad? Before... before Kir..." He stopped, his eyes darting toward the silver boy hovering near the broken window.
Ela didn't look back at them. His silver form was perfectly still, his translucent fingers lightly touching the edge of the scuffed plastic case where the name was written. The gray, pixelated haze around his shoulders had completely vanished, replaced by a strange, glassy clarity that made his dual-layered voice sound even more fragile than before.
"He was looking for something," Ela whispered, his eyes wide and unfocused as he stared through the floorboards toward the sealed basement below. "My dad... he didn't come here for the books, Arkan. He came here because the drainage map on the wall matches the old blueprints he kept in the locked study. The ones he told me never to look at because they were 'corrupted files'."
"Your dad was an engineer, Kir. Engineers map things," Arkan growled, his jaw tightening as he stood up, his right hand forcibly shoving the small plastic case deep into his coat pocket alongside his paralyzed left hand. The cold needle beneath his wristwatch flared with a sudden, vicious throb, but his face remained a stubborn, frozen mask. "We aren't digging up old family projects. We're waiting out the perimeter sweep. Bhas, get the plastic sheeting from the supply closet. We need to block the gap under the main door before the switching yard lenses cycle back toward this block."
Bhas didn't move immediately. He kept his sharp eyes on Arkan's pale face, his mouth setting into a hard, critical line. "The sweep isn't the only thing we're waiting out, Kan. Look at your eye."
Arkan blinked, and the quiet grey text in his peripheral vision suddenly fractured, a single line of corrupted orange code forced its way through the baseline registry.
[LOCAL NODE ACTIVE: TELEMETRY_LINK_ESTABLISHED]
[INCOMING ROUTING SIGNAL: DATA_PACKET_STREAMING...]
The orange code cut across Arkan's vision like a hot wire, dropping lines of raw hexadecimal strings down the left margin of his retinas. The amber LED on the device inside his coat pocket wasn't just blinking anymore—it had locked into a solid, frantic flicker, vibrating right against his numb thigh.
"Kan, your eye," Bhas repeated, his voice low and sharp as he stepped closer, his heavy build instantly blocking Chan's view of Arkan's face. He didn't ask questions; he just reached out and gripped Arkan's right shoulder, anchoring the MC before his legs could buckle from the sudden data surge. "Shut it down. Whatever that thing is streaming, it's overloading the local buffer."
"I can't... shut it down," Arkan ground out through his teeth, his jaw locking so tight the tendons in his neck strained against his coat collar. He forced his right hand into his pocket, his fingers wrapping around the hot plastic casing of the telemetry node. The cold needle in his left wrist had flared into an absolute furnace of static, traveling straight up his frozen arm to fuse with the network logic behind his eyes. "It's a forced handshake. The node... it's using a legacy override key."
[PACKET DECRYPTION: 14%]
[HEADER: COR_SYS_LOG_2024_10_12]
[REDUNDANT STORAGE ACTIVE]
Chan pulled his orange beanie even lower, his small frame trembling against the metal storage lockers. "Why is it orange? Arkan, why are the letters orange? The school tower text is always red or grey. Orange means... orange means systemic failure, right? Like when the central server at the net cafe melted down last year?"
"It's an external ledger, Chan. Stop talking," Bhas barked without looking back, his grip on Arkan's shoulder tightening until the thick canvas of the coat groaned. "Kan, look at the wall. Don't focus on the script. Read the map."
Arkan forced his eyes away from the floating data strings, his sharp, defensive gaze dragging itself toward the faded topographical chart pinned to the plaster. As he focused on the three thick, crimson grease-pencil marks circling the academy, the orange text in his peripheral vision suddenly shifted, aligning its geometric coordinates with the physical circles on the paper.
"It's a synchronization sequence," Ela whispered. The silver boy had drifted until he was standing directly between Arkan and the wall, his translucent form completely casting a soft, pale halo over the target areas. His dual-layered voice had lost its childish ring entirely, replaced by a rhythmic, mechanical frequency that hummed in perfect time with the blinking amber LED. "My dad didn't build a relay to watch the trucks, Arkan. He built it to intercept the regional transit logs before they could be uploaded to the central mainframe. The circles... those aren't locations. Those are the physical drop points where the data cables from the old garden lab intersect with the municipal drainage system."
"Your dad was an administrator, Kir. He didn't have access to the garden lab," Arkan snarled, his tsundere armor flaring through the blinding pain in his head as he tried to push Ela away with his right arm. He didn't want the ghost boy reading the files. He didn't want to know what happened three weeks before the science block was built. "Get away from the desk. Both of you."
Before he could pull the device out of his pocket to smash it against the linoleum, the streaming data suddenly reached a dead stop. The orange lines vanished from his retinas, replaced by a single, clean prompt that made his breath lock in his throat.
[DECRYPTION COMPLETE]
[FILE NAME: PROJECT_ELA_PHASE_01_MANIFEST.DAT]
[STATUS: UNREAD]
The single line of text remained burned into Arkan's retinas, glowing with a cold, clinical permanence that made the dust-choked room feel entirely hollow.
PROJECT_ELA_PHASE_01_MANIFEST.DAT.
"Kan," Bhas muttered, his voice dropping an octave as his grip on Arkan's shoulder tightened, his knuckles digging through the thick canvas of the coat. "Whatever just finished compiling, bury it. We don't have the bandwidth for a system crash right now."
Arkan didn't answer. He couldn't. His right hand remained locked around the small plastic casing inside his pocket, the heat from the device bleeding through the fabric until it felt like a brand against his skin. He forced his jaw to set, his tsundere armor hardening into a rigid, defensive wall to block out the frantic beating of his own pulse. A manifest. It wasn't a ledger or a transit log. It was a production list.
Chan slowly lowered his hands from his orange beanie, his small frame still pressed flat against the metal storage lockers as he looked between Arkan and the faded map. "Is the orange text gone? Arkan, please tell me the orange text is gone. I can handle the grey lines, I can even handle the red alerts if I close my eyes, but the orange looks like... it looks like the entire world is about to delete itself."
"It's gone, Chan. Shut up," Arkan rasped, his voice rough and uneven as he forced his eyes away from the floating prompt. He didn't open the file. He didn't touch the interface layout. With a brutal, deliberate movement of his thoughts, he jammed the incoming stream into an isolated directory behind his retinas, masking it under a layer of routine system noise until the grey baseline registry lines snapped back into place.
[LOCAL NODE: ISOLATED]
[FILE CACHED: DIRECTORY_UNMAPPED_04]
[STATUS: HIDDEN]
Ela didn't move from his position by the desk. His silver form remained translucent, his large eyes fixed on the scuffed plastic case hidden inside Arkan's pocket. The soft, mechanical hum in his dual-layered voice had faded, returning to that familiar, fragile ring that always made Arkan's chest tighten with a sharp spike of irritation. "Arkan... Phase One means there are more, doesn't it? If I'm a manifest... what did they do with the rest of the files?"
"I told you to drop it, Kir," Arkan snapped, his voice sharp and dismissive as he turned his back on the ghost boy, his right hand pulling his wool watch cap down until it nearly touched his brow. He couldn't let them see how much his hand was shaking. He couldn't let them see the dread freezing his throat. "My dad was a bankrupt printer and your dad was a municipal engineer who liked to keep sloppy backups. That's it. We're here to survive the sector sweep, not to audit a two-year-old corporate filing error."
Bhas let out a low, slow breath through his nose, his hand finally releasing Arkan's shoulder as he stepped toward the heavy wooden door. He didn't push the matter, but his sharp eyes lingered on Arkan's rigid profile for a second too long. "The western switching yard lenses are rotating toward the perimeter fence in three minutes, Kan. If we're building a defensive blind spot in this office, we need to move the filing cabinets now."
"Then stop standing around and lift them," Arkan muttered, his tone cold and biting as he walked toward the high, arched window, using his functional right side to shield his paralyzed left arm from view.
Outside, through the grimy, cracked glass pane, the grey Novara morning was completely silent. The rusted rail lines stretched out into the distance like a grid of old iron wires, perfectly still under the pale dawn. But as Arkan looked down at the switching yard, a sudden, heavy thud echoed from the floorboards directly beneath their feet.
It wasn't the lift shaft this time. It was the sound of a heavy, manual deadbolt sliding into place on the administrative corridor doors behind them—locking them inside from the outside.