The Flea Market was a festering wound in the belly of Oubliette, but it had everything if you knew which scabs to pick.
I didn't have the time or the aether-clearance to return to the official, pristine tiers of the Archive to request the file of a dead Irongate Asylum inmate. The Blackwater Syndicate was already mobilizing. I needed a back door onto that island fortress tonight, before Kaelen Vance's heavily armed replacements beat me to Valeria Graves.
I navigated the claustrophobic, neon-lit aisles of the market, the heavy MK-IV Aether-Rifle hidden beneath the folds of my wet trench coat. My boots squelched on the damp cavern floor. I ignored the peddlers selling synthetic joy and targeted the "Grave-Robbers"—scavengers who dredged the Lethe for discarded vials or stole them from the unmarked graves of the poor.
I found a rat-faced man sitting on a rusted oil drum, a dozen cracked, filthy glass vials laid out on a velvet cloth before him.
"I need an Irongate drop," I said, my voice adopting the low, dangerous cadence of a Syndicate Captain. "An inmate. Someone who tried to break out and failed."
The scavenger's eyes darted to the unnatural, cold stillness of my posture. Eleanor Vane's killer instinct made people instinctively want to back away. He swallowed hard and reached under his dirty cloak, pulling out a vial that looked like it had been buried in mud for a decade. The mist inside was a churning, violent black.
"Inmate 712," the scavenger muttered, his eyes avoiding mine. "Name was Corvus. Sent out with the tide ten years ago. They say he found a drainage pipe that led straight out of the solitary confinement block, but the tide came in before he could breach the surface."
I tossed a single silver sovereign onto the velvet cloth. The scavenger snatched it up like a starving dog.
I didn't wait to find a safehouse. The Mnemic Ink had already erased my apartment from my mind, leaving me an architectural orphan in a hostile city. I stepped back into a narrow, unlit crevice between two massive stalagmites, out of sight of the market's main thoroughfare.
I uncorked the vial. It smelled of salt, rust, and absolute, crushing despair.
I pressed the cold glass to my temple, leaning the back of my head against the damp cave wall. I didn't have the silence of the Archive to protect my physical body, but I had no choice. I closed my eyes and let the black mist pull me under.
Connection established.
The sensory shift was violently abrupt. The ambient noise of the Flea Market was instantly replaced by the deafening, terrifying roar of rushing water.
I was on my stomach, crawling through a pitch-black iron pipe barely two feet in diameter. The memory was suffocatingly narrow. The air was frigid, reeking of raw sewage and ocean salt. The water was already up to my chest, and it was rising fast.
I was Corvus. My fingernails were torn and bleeding as I dragged my emaciated body forward through the dark, the rusted iron tearing at my thin prison uniform.
Rule #1: You are Elias, I shouted into the void of my own mind, anchoring myself against the inmate's overwhelming terror. You are twenty-eight. You drink black coffee.
The memory was degrading rapidly, the black water churning with Corvus's panic. The historical record, according to the scavenger, said Corvus drowned simply because he misjudged the tide. But as I pushed forward through the dying man's mind, feeling the icy water rise over my chin, Thorne's analytical logic detected the lie.
Corvus wasn't pushing forward anymore. He had stopped moving.
I forced my perspective outward, trying to see through the pitch-black water. There was a faint, pale blue light ahead. The exit. It was no more than twenty feet away. The water was rising, yes, but Corvus had enough air in his lungs to make that swim. He was a desperate man inches from freedom.
But he wasn't swimming. He was actively pressing himself backward, his hands desperately gripping the rusted grates of the pipe, choosing to let the water swallow him rather than move toward the light.
The discrepancy. What was in the light that was worse than a slow, freezing death in the dark?
I closed my eyes in the memory, ignoring the water rushing into my phantom lungs. "Render," I commanded, forcing my will against Corvus's dying denial.
The pipe groaned. The rushing water froze in place. Corvus's phantom let out a gurgling, silent scream, his mind fighting desperately to keep the blind spot hidden.
"Show me the door," I gritted my teeth, pushing the rigid, mechanical weight of Julian Thorne against the illusion.
With a sickening crunch of rusted iron, the memory cracked.
The pale blue light ahead snapped into horrifying clarity. It wasn't the moonlight reflecting off the ocean. It was an Aether-Mine grid.
Dozens of fist-sized, mechanical spheres floated in the water at the exit of the pipe, glowing with a highly volatile blue aether-charge. They were strung together with monofilament wire. Corvus hadn't drowned because of the tide. He had drowned because Irongate Asylum didn't just lock their doors; they wired their drainage pipes with proximity explosives that would vaporize a man the second he breached the exit. He had seen the wire, realized there was no physical way to fit through the gaps, and simply given up.
The memory could no longer sustain the paradox of his denial. The iron pipe, the freezing water, and the broken inmate dissolved into a cyclone of black ash.
I was floating in the dark. Hovering before me was the Truth Pearl, glowing with a deep, aquatic blue light.
I reached out and crushed it.
The knowledge didn't hit my brain; it hit my anatomy. I felt my ribcage violently shift, the cartilage popping and expanding. A cold, heavy sensation settled deep into the bottom of my lungs. It was Abyssal Respiration. The physical adaptation to extract oxygen directly from aether-saturated water, combined with the agonizing ability to dislocate my own shoulders and hips at will to slip through impossible gaps. I could survive the deep, and I could slip through the mine grid without touching the wires.
Then, the sink opened.
The toll for extracting a physical mutation rather than a learned skill was catastrophic. The vacuum tore through my mind with the force of a hurricane.
I dropped to the floor of the Undercity crevice, gasping for air that suddenly felt too thin.
Anchor! I screamed internally, my hands clutching my skull. I am Elias! I am twenty-eight! I scrambled for a visual. I tried to picture my own face. When the darkness crept in, I always pictured the scar on my jaw, my dark hair, the shape of my own eyes looking back at me in a mirror.
I reached for the reflection.
It was gone.
A smooth, terrifying blank oval existed where my face should have been. I knew I had eyes, a nose, a mouth. But the specific arrangement, the unique geometry that made me Elias, was completely, irrevocably erased. If I looked at a photograph of myself right now, I wouldn't recognize the man in the picture.
I was a stranger in my own skin.
I lay on the damp stone of the cavern, trembling violently. The psychological horror of the Echo Chamber was reaching a critical mass. I was a master assassin, a genius safecracker, a deadly marksman, and now, an aquatic contortionist. But I was rapidly becoming a machine made of meat, hollowed out and filled with the ghosts of dead men.
I forced myself up onto my hands and knees. My joints popped with an unnatural, sickening fluidity.
I pulled the leather journal from my coat. My hands were shaking so badly I could barely uncap the pen. I flipped to a new page.
Case 414. Inmate 712. Corvus.
Truth: Irongate drainage pipes are rigged with aether-mines.
Gained: Abyssal Respiration. Joint dislocation.
Lost: My own face.
I stared at the words My own face. I reached up and touched my cheek, my nose, my jaw. It felt like I was touching a marble statue. There was no connection. No recognition.
I closed the book and shoved it away. I couldn't afford to break down. Valeria Graves was on that island, and she knew the truth about the Blank Century. If I didn't find out why the world was broken, I was going to die a nameless, faceless ghost.
I picked up the MK-IV rifle, slung it over my shoulder, and stepped out of the crevice.
I didn't need to hire a treacherous smuggler to sail me across the lethal currents to Irongate Asylum. I had Corvus's lungs now. I could simply walk into the black, freezing waters of the Lethe, sink to the bottom of the ocean floor, and walk the three miles to the island under the crushing pressure of the sea.
I headed toward the docks, a faceless man walking into the dark.