Ryn hadn't let Kael see the shake in her hands when she led him into the supply hut. She never did. Letting people see weakness was a mistake she'd learned to stop making years ago.
But when he'd said the word Keeper, something deep in her chest had cracked open.
She didn't sleep that night.
After they parted, after she made sure Kael was hidden somewhere safe underneath a forgotten service chamber sealed with biometric locks she'd cracked herself she returned to the east edge of the ruins. The place she never let anyone follow her to. Not even him.
The wind had picked up, scraping ash across the glassless windows. She climbed through a second-story hole in the wall and sat in the corner where the ceiling had collapsed. Moonlight spilled across the scorched floor.
She pulled out the thin metal cylinder she always carried. A relic. A memory.
A lie, maybe.
The voice it held was long gone, but she remembered the words.
"If they come for me, don't run. Don't hide. Burn them with what they tried to bury."
Her mother had whispered that the night before she vanished.
Ryn had been nine.
Back then, she hadn't understood. She'd thought her mother worked in sanitation like everyone else. But the people who came that night hadn't looked like waste management officers. They wore Enforcer black and spoke in clipped, coded language.
They took her mother.
They torched her home.
And they made a mistake.
They thought no one else was left.
But Ryn had crawled through the vents before the fire reached her.
She never forgot the way the world smelled the next morning plastic, blood, and secrets.
And now Kael was talking about Keepers. About living records and memories that spoke.
He was in deeper than he realized.
And if he wasn't careful, he'd end up exactly like her mother.
Ryn leaned her head back against the cracked concrete, eyes closed. She let the cylinder roll between her fingers, then snapped it open. Inside: a folded square of poly-film, so old its edges were curling.
She unfolded it.
Not a photo. A map.
Hand-drawn.
Lines of territory from the time before the Annexation. Back when city-states still had names instead of numbers. Back when people had identities not assigned by barcodes or birth-level quotas.
Her mother had made it.
There were marks along the edges symbols, notes, coordinates. And one, scrawled in thick ink in the bottom corner: The Ark sleeps beneath broken teeth.
It was nonsense. Probably.
But Ryn had spent the last eight years collecting pieces of nonsense like puzzle pieces, waiting for something to click.
And now Kael, reckless, loudmouthed Kael, had stumbled into one of those pieces.
She needed to act fast.
She re-rolled the map, slid it back into the cylinder, and rose.
She had a contact near the Old Grid. Someone who trafficked in forbidden tech, fragments of old knowledge things even the black markets feared to touch. If anyone could confirm what Kael had seen, it was him.
But it was dangerous. Enforcer patrols were thicker than ever. And now, they were looking for someone marked by memory.
By truth.
She touched the scar behind her ear faint and long-healed. A relic from her own encounter with the forbidden.
She hadn't told Kael that story.
Not yet.
Let him think he was the only one changed by truth. It made him brave. Gave him purpose. She wasn't about to steal that from him.
But deep down, she knew.
They were both already beyond saving.