What if the things you can't explain are precisely the ones worth listening to?
In the heights of Skyward, silence did not exist.
Everything vibrated at a carefully controlled frequency: translucent screens, streams of data, layers of surveillance networks stacked one upon another, invisible to the eye. Even the air itself seemed filtered, calibrated, optimized.
Nothing stood out. Nothing overflowed. And yet… Something was missing.
Kaissa could feel it.
Standing before the panoramic window, she watched the city stretching beneath her, its levels stacked with almost perfect precision : Skyward, Groundward and the Wall.
And beyond… Everything that refused to obey. She barely blinked.
"Report."
The holographic silhouette of her deputy appeared behind her, sharp and silent.
"No active signal matching Neris Valdor. The biometric sensors detect no compatible activity. The drones have found no trace of her since her departure."
Silence.
"Impossible," Kaissa said simply.
"The data is conclusive."
"Then the data is faulty."
A brief pause.
"She's clever. A little genius with her drones."
Her gaze remained fixed on the city.
"What has she come up with this time?"
The hologram hesitated for a fraction of a second.
"We cross-checked every network. There are no internal anomalies."
Kaissa closed her eyes for a moment.
Then it's external.
Her fingers brushed the console. A map unfolded before her, dividing the city into active surveillance zones. One point blinked… Then disappeared.
"Replay it."
The sequence appeared again with a weak signature, unstable and outside the grid.
Then… Nothing.
"She passed near the fracture."
"That's her last probable location."
"And after that?"
The deputy lowered her eyes.
"After that..."
"...nothing."
The word lingered in the air.
Nothing.
In Kaissa's world, such a thing did not exist. Everything left a trace. Always. She drew a slow breath.
"Increase drone frequency around the outer sectors. Double the thermal sweeps."
"That risks attracting attention," her deputy replied.
"Do it."
A pause.
"And activate the simulation protocols."
"You want us to release a controlled version?"
"No."
Kaissa turned around. Her gaze was precise and sharp.
"I want to create noise."
Silence settled between them.
"If she's cut herself off from the system..."
"...then she's listening to something else."
She rested one hand on the console.
"So we'll speak to her."
Far below, in a windowless operations room, screens came to life. Reconstructed images took shape : fragments of reality, synthetic spirits, distorted and amplified.
"Inject them into the secondary public feeds."
Her deputy nodded.
"In successive layers."
"Objective?"
"Disturb the system..."
She paused.
"...and observe what responds."
The hologram remained where it was.
"There is another lead," the deputy added.
Kaissa said nothing. Her silence was permission enough.
"Neris had been visiting a place irregularly. She was always discreet about it."
The deputy enlarged a section of the map.
"It may have been a safe point."
She hesitated.
"Or perhaps a contact point."
Kaissa's eyes shifted toward the projection.
"Where?"
A small area lit up deep within Below the Sky.
"A hybrid establishment."
She zoomed in.
"Officially, it's a café. Unofficially...it's more complicated."
Kaissa studied the location without speaking.
"Did she keep going back?"
"Frequently. Especially over the past few months."
"Then that's where we begin."
She looked up.
"And forget my first idea."
"Intervention?"
"No."
She straightened slightly.
"Observation. And no show of force."
"Not yet."
"Understood."
The hologram vanished. Kaissa remained alone. The reflection of the city merged with her own in the glass.
"Neris..."
Her voice barely trembled.
"You still don't understand."
She rested her hand against the cold surface.
"Everything I do is to preserve the balance. Your balance."
For an instant, an image crossed her mind. A little girl with her hair tied back. A burst of laughter. Then… Nothing.
"You'll come back."
Her reflection stared back at her.
"Because there is nothing outside the system."
An hour later, far below the city, where the official networks lost their sharpness and the light was no longer calibrated but chosen, Groundward breathed differently.
Here, the streets seemed built to escape the eye. The neon lights were never white. They glowed violet, pink, or deep blue, and the signs blinked without any apparent logic.
Every façade refused to fit into a common pattern, as though the city itself had decided...to stop being readable.
Pulse-9 looked ordinary enough with low tables and wall-mounted screens and with soft music drifting through the café, inviting people more to slow down than to celebrate.
But beneath the surface… The floor pulsed with a deep, steady beat, like a heart no one had ever managed to silence.
A sliding door, hidden behind a curtain of tiny lights, opened onto rooms that were warmer, denser, more alive. Bodies brushed past one another without suspicion. Laughter rose freely. Eyes met without asking permission.
Here, identities were not filtered. They emerged. Answered one another. Searched for one another. Sometimes affirmed themselves with a quiet certainty that would have seemed almost unsettling to anyone from Skyward.
"Heavy attendance," one of the agents murmured.
In her office, Kaissa watched the live feeds. Bodies crossing paths with direct glances, hands touching without hesitation, without authorization, without fear.
She lingered on one scene a second too long, then looked away.
"Continue."
Her deputy stepped forward. Behind the bar, someone with a striking face raised their eyes with no smile and no tension. Only a calm, unwavering presence.
"Busy tonight," the deputy said.
"It happens."
"We're looking for someone."
The person behind the bar barely reacted.
"Do you often look for people in cafés?"
"Only when they matter."
"Our customers don't come here to be archived."
"Everyone archives something."
The deputy's voice remained perfectly calm.
"The question is... for whom."
Standing a few steps behind, one of the agents slowly swept the room with his camera ; the walls, the exits, the counter. Everything looked improvised, repurposed, but yet nothing felt accidental. The wiring disappeared too cleanly.
"Are your security systems local," the deputy asked, gesturing toward a half-hidden console, or official?"
"That depends who's asking."
The silence lasted a fraction too long. The second agent stepped forward ever so slightly.
"We're not here to shut the place down," the deputy said, her tone still composed.
"We'd simply like to review last week's recordings."
A pause.
"Someone may have come through here. Someone we're looking for."
This time… It was the word looking that caused something to shift.
Not fear.
Only the slightest tightening at the corner of the bartender's mouth as though that word had already been used too many times… Against the wrong people.
Meanwhile, one of the agents noticed a secondary data junction beneath the counter. There was indeed a hidden storage loop. Without attracting attention, he brushed the sensor on his wrist.
On Kaissa's screen, a signal lit up.
"Probable access," he murmured. I need forty seconds."
"You have twenty," Kaissa replied without hesitation.
Back in the café, the deputy still held the bartender's gaze.
"You protect a lot of people here?"
The answer came without the slightest trace of anger.
"More than you've ever understood."
The words landed softly without emphasis.
Yet on Kaissa's monitors, the live transcription froze for the briefest instant.
"Connection established," the agent announced.
"Partial extraction."
Images began appearing across the control wall. At first blurry and fragmented, interrupted by digital artifacts, then, little by little, the system reconstructed the missing pieces.
Pulse-9 at different hours, with different lights, sometimes nearly empty, sometimes overflowing with people : faces, conversations, brief gestures. Too fleeting to mean anything on their own. Nothing useful at first glance.
Then… in a recording dated six days earlier… A familiar silhouette entered the frame. Kaissa straightened almost imperceptibly.
"Stop."
Her voice was calm.
"Go back three seconds."
The footage obeyed. Neris appeared in profile. Her hair was tied back. Her hood was lowered, though she wasn't really trying to hide.
She moved quickly. She knew the place.
A few steps behind her… Then gradually catching up… Another person entered the frame with an ease that was almost disconcerting.
As though the camera meant nothing. As though being seen had never been a threat.
Their features gradually came into focus, fine lines, a steady gaze, a presence that was difficult to define, neither truly masculine nor truly feminine… Or perhaps simply too free to fit inside that old need to choose.
But what stood out most was the quiet confidence with which this person occupied the space around Neris. Not like someone trying to win her over. Not even like an ordinary friend, more like someone around whom the air itself became easier to breathe.
Neris turned her head ever so slightly toward her. The movement was almost imperceptible. Yet it was enough. She wasn't simply safe, she trusted her.
The person beside her briefly slipped a hand into hers, a simple gesture, almost discreet and yet deeply intimate. Then they gently led her toward the back of the café, where the cameras lost their precision.
Kaissa couldn't take her eyes off that hand, that almost insignificant gesture.
Perhaps even more than Neris's disappearance… That was what tightened something inside her. The thought that her daughter had accepted someone else's guidance. That she had found understanding somewhere else.
In a world Kaissa herself had always defined as unstable… contaminated and dangerous.
Several seconds passed.
"Identify her," she said at last.
"No match in the standard databases," the agent replied.
"No reliable identification."
"She is neither a registered citizen of Skyward nor an official resident of Groundward."
"Either she doesn't exist..."
Kaissa's voice remained calm.
"...or someone has gone to great lengths to erase her from the official layers."
"No one disappears completely."
But even as she spoke, she felt her certainty falter.
Back inside Pulse-9, the deputy received the extracted sequence through her lens. She turned her head ever so slightly to study the face again. The movement was almost invisible, but it was enough.
Behind the bar, the person facing her, noticed. Something in her expression closed, almost imperceptibly.
The deputy held their gaze.
"This person."
She projected the image onto the counter.
"Does she come here?"
"A lot of people come here."
"Not like her."
The answer took its time, but the hesitation, no matter how slight, was already enough.
A little farther away, one of the agents watched without appearing to. He wasn't interested in the words. He was interested in what the words awakened around them.
In the back room, slightly below the main floor, two people had slowed their conversation and glanced toward the bar.
The agent discreetly activated his audio filter. The music gradually faded. Voices emerged fragmented and reconstructed.
"...do you think it's because..."
"...they know about..."
"...no... impossible..."
Nothing clear. Then...almost nothing, except that one name surfaced twice, from two different voices, like an alarm.
"...Soren..."
The agent remained perfectly still. That was enough. He transmitted the information.
"Name detected, probable point of connection: Soren."
At the bar, silence fell in an instant. The deputy inclined her head slightly.
"Thank you."
"I didn't say anything."
"No," she replied softly.
"But they did."
The two agents withdrew as discreetly as they had entered. Nothing had been overturned. No one had raised their voice. And yet, in their wake, the place seemed more alert as though the air itself had recorded their passing.
Before stepping outside, the deputy cast one last glance toward the back room. Someone had just switched off a row of glowing fiber lights.
A tiny change. Was it a signal?
Back in the heights of Skyward, Kaissa replayed the recording again...and again. Her eyes never left Neris or the hand that had briefly touched hers, then that face beside her.
That quiet confidence, almost unbearable.
Soren.
The name lingered for a moment as though it refused to fit into a category, as though it already existed beyond the system.
Kaissa slowly straightened.
If Neris had taken refuge in a world built on chosen bonds… on hidden loyalties…then this was no longer a disappearance.
It was an opening, a fracture, perhaps even a passage toward something the system had never learned to map.
And for the first time in years… Kaissa understood that she was no longer hunting only for her daughter. She was approaching something else. Something that, for years, had learned to live in the system's blind spots.
She stepped closer to the console.
"Replay it."
The recording began again; the same path, the same gestures, the same seamless sequence. Nothing changed. Then… Something shifted. It was almost imperceptible.
The figure beside Neris turned her head slightly toward the camera, toward Kaissa. The gaze remained perfectly steady. The feed flickered a fraction of a second of latency. Then a single line appeared: brief, unstable and impossible.
"You're looking too late."
Kaissa didn't move.
"Replay it."
The recording started again, identical with no hesitation, no glance and no message. As though nothing had ever happened.
Silence settled over the room. The systems reported nothing unusual and Kaissa remained motionless, her eyes fixed on the screen.
For the first time in years… She no longer knew whether the system had failed.
Or whether… Something had just answered it.
The Guardian Angel : How many times has a breath, a glance, a dream, or a simple intuition passed through Kaissa's life without her ever stopping to notice? People often call it chance when their senses had already recognized the truth long before their minds could understand it. And what if, sometimes, it wasn't their imagination speaking to them at all... but a world they had simply forgotten how to listen to?