The subway node was colder than the city above.
Not in temperature—Leo couldn't feel that anymore—but in presence. The light here was thin and gray, stretched across old digital scaffolding that mimicked the shape of a long-abandoned underground station. Cracked tile textures lined the walls, their patterns looping imperfectly where the rendering engine had given up on precision.
Maya crouched beside a rusted-looking terminal near the edge of the platform, her device already tethered to the node's access port. Streams of pale code flowed across the air in front of her, each line flickering with the faint lag of outdated infrastructure.
"This place is ancient," she muttered. "Forever Cloud hasn't updated this node in years. That's good for hiding. Bad for stability."
Leo hovered a few feet away, watching the tunnel entrance where they'd come in. The glow of Neon Spire City leaked through the cracked edges of the display, the outside world pressing against this forgotten pocket of the network like a tide against a decaying seawall.
"How long can we stay here?" he asked.
Maya didn't look up. "Minutes. Maybe less. The Data Police can't see inside yet, but they can triangulate the blind spot. Once they do, they'll flood the entrance with probes until something sticks."
"Comforting," Leo said. He tried to smile and failed.
Maya finally glanced at him. "Hey. You did great back there. Service tunnels eat ghosts for breakfast. The fact that you're still… you? That's not nothing."
Her words warmed something in him he hadn't realized had gone cold.
"Thanks," he said quietly.
She turned back to her work. "Okay. I'm pulling surface data from the Level-Black facility. We can't go inside the main layer—not without tripping alarms that'll bring the entire system down on us—but we might be able to peek at the outer ring."
The air shimmered as a three-dimensional map unfolded between them. A massive structure resolved in glowing lines—a tower of layered security zones wrapped around a dense, pulsing core.
"That's the lab?" Leo asked.
"That's one of them," Maya said. "Forever Cloud has multiple Level-Black facilities scattered across the city. Think of them like… vaults inside vaults. Each one stores or processes data they don't want anyone to see."
Leo's gaze fixed on the pulsing core. "My body is in there."
"Most likely," she said. "If you were forcibly uploaded, they'd keep your physical body sedated and hidden. It's easier to control a secret if the source can't talk."
The thought made Leo's chest tighten. His body—his real body—lying somewhere in that glowing maze, silent and helpless.
"Can you see anything about it?" he asked.
Maya zoomed the map in, her fingers dancing through layers of security protocols. "The outer ring shows activity logs. Let's see…"
Lines of data streamed past. Access times. Authorized personnel IDs. Automated system checks. Then something else caught her eye.
"That's weird," she murmured.
"What?" Leo leaned closer.
"There's a quarantine sector inside the facility," she said. "It's been active nonstop for the last… three weeks."
"Quarantine?" Leo echoed. "Like… for diseases?"
"Not biological ones," Maya said. "Digital containment. When something inside the system becomes unstable, they isolate it so it can't spread."
Leo's pulse quickened. "Unstable… like corrupted ghosts?"
"Like corrupted ghosts," she confirmed. "But this quarantine isn't for a ghost. It's for… something else."
She brought up a restricted access tag. The symbol on the quarantine sector made Leo's breath hitch.
A spiral.
An eye.
"That's the symbol I saw," he whispered. "On the door in my memory."
Maya's face went pale in the glow of the map. "Level-Black Quarantine. That's… bad. Whatever they're keeping in there isn't just illegal. It's dangerous enough that they're willing to lock down part of their own facility to contain it."
Leo's mind raced. "What if… what if that's what I saw? Whatever's inside there?"
Maya hesitated. "Then that's probably why you're here."
The subway node shuddered.
Fine cracks of static crept across the far wall, the light flickering as the dead infrastructure strained under external pressure.
"They're pushing probes into the node," Maya said sharply. "We're running out of time."
Leo's timer pulsed in his vision, the numbers ticking down another second.
"Can we get closer to the lab?" he asked. "If I can… slip into the outer ring—"
"You'll light up every alarm they have," Maya cut in. "The moment you touch that network, they'll know exactly where you are."
He clenched his glowing fists. "Then how do we find out what's in quarantine? How do we find my body?"
Maya stared at the glowing map, jaw tight.
"There might be another way," she said slowly. "If we can hijack a maintenance packet from inside the facility—something the system already trusts—we can piggyback your signal on it. It's risky, and it'll only give us a narrow window before the alarms go off."
Leo didn't hesitate. "Do it."
She met his gaze, searching his face for doubt. Finding none, she nodded.
"Okay," she said. "But once you're in that outer ring, you'll feel things more strongly. The security layers aren't just firewalls. They're designed to… press back. If your memory's already fragile, this could shake loose more fragments."
"I want them," Leo said. "Even the bad ones."
Maya exhaled slowly. "All right. Let's wake the Level-Black facility."
She rerouted her device's connection, the code around them shifting into sharper, more aggressive patterns. The map of the facility brightened, the outer ring pulsing as Maya's hack brushed against its perimeter.
The subway node trembled harder now, the cracks in the walls spreading.
From the tunnel entrance, a faint blue glow began to seep through.
The Data Police were finding the blind spot.