The convenience store's fluorescent lights hummed a discordant tune, their flickering glow painting everything in shades of artificial twilight. The air smelled of stale synthetic bread and the acrid tang of overworked circuitry from the aging refrigeration units. Lucent leaned against the magazine rack, its plastic edges digging into his elbow, as he flipped through the glossy pages of Aetherion Quarterly.

The cover boasted a silver-skinned Conduit with eyes like polished obsidian, his fingers tracing a glyph in midair that shimmered even on the cheap print. "Next-Gen Spellcasting: The Aetherion Mark VII Reads Your Intent Before You Do!" screamed the headline in aggressive, corporate-approved font. Inside, full-page spreads showed smiling executives demonstrating "ergonomic glyph-flow optimization" while pristine lab technicians in sterilized gloves monitored brainwave feedback. One particularly nauseating diagram depicted a "typical user's neural pathways" before and after using their proprietary spell-compiler, the "after" image lit up like a neon cityscape.

Lucent snorted. As if any real caster needed a tutorial on how to think.

He turned the page to find a buyer's guide for licensed utility glyphs—water purification, thermal regulation, even a "mood-stabilizing aura" for "optimal corporate productivity." Each one cost more than he made in three months. The tiny disclaimer at the bottom read: "Myriad-approved Conduits only. Unauthorized usage voids warranty and may result in Reclamation audit."

The magazine slipped from his fingers as the clerk cleared his throat, a sound like grinding gears. The man stood behind the counter, arms crossed over his stained uniform, his gaze locked onto Lucent with the intensity of a Reclamation Unit scanning for contraband.

Lucent knew that look. Loiterers pay or piss off.

With a sigh, he grabbed the nearest canned coffee—Black Out, the brand's mascot a cartoon raven mid-explosion—and slapped it onto the counter. The credit chip from the alley punks followed, its surface still smudged with the kid's sweat. The clerk picked it up between thumb and forefinger, as if it might be diseased, and slid it through the scanner.

The machine beeped. Once. Twice. Then a third time, sharp and accusatory.

Lucent's fingers twitched toward his Conduit.

But the register finally spat out a receipt, the paper fluttering between them like a surrender flag. The clerk didn't hand it to him. Just stared, waiting for him to leave.

Outside, the city breathed in the spaces between the silence. The streetlights here were older models, their glow weak compared to the Aethernet nodes further uptown. A stray cat—ribs visible beneath patchy fur—darted from the shadows to lick at a puddle of something iridescent near the gutter.

Lucent cracked open the coffee. It tasted like someone had distilled regret into liquid form and added caffeine as an afterthought.

His phone buzzed against his thigh. The screen lit up with a notification from Undernet-7, the text came with encryption artifacts:

GhostKey_Anonymous: "Myriad's new tracer doesn't just scan. It learns. If your Conduit starts auto-casting glyphs you didn't input, smash it. They're training their A.I. on pirate casts now."

Lucent flicked the message away with his thumb, but not before noticing the temperature of his own device—warm, too warm for idle. He turned it over in his palm. The casing was cracked, full of scratches, and full of smudges with his fingerprints.

But before his paranoia flared up, he shut down the thought.

The phone was old, its cooling system shot to hell from years of abuse. That's all it was. Had to be.

He shoved the device back into his pocket, ignoring the way the warmth seemed to bleed through the fabric against his thigh.

The clock on a post ticked. The second hand stuttered, catching on some internal flaw.

Midnight.

Lucent crushed the empty can in his fist, the metal buckling like a dying glyph. The Nimbrix warehouse loomed at the end of the street, its windows boarded up, its loading dock sealed with chains that hadn't rusted so much as rotted.

The green chip in his pocket weighed more than it should.

He stepped back into the night, the coffee's aftertaste bitter on his tongue.

The city watched.

And somewhere, in the dark, something watched back.

The alley exhaled damp, metallic breath against Lucent's neck as he moved through its shadows. His boots found purchase on the uneven concrete, avoiding the slick patches where nameless fluids pooled in the perpetual twilight between buildings. The warehouse loomed ahead, its corrugated steel walls pockmarked with rust and scarred by decades of neglect. A faded Nimbrix logo - that familiar angular 'N' inside a hexagon - still clung stubbornly to one wall, its blue paint peeling like sunburnt skin.

Lucent pressed himself against the cold brick of a neighboring building, feeling the rough texture bite through his jacket. His fingers dipped into his pocket, fishing out the AetherPhone with practiced ease. The device pulsed faintly in his palm, its cracked screen casting jagged reflections across his knuckles. He thumbed through his personal library of bootleg spells, each one a stolen fragment of corporate power reshaped by underground hands.

The Thermal Echo glyph unfolded before him, its edges flickering with unstable energy. He'd cobbled this together months ago from three different GhostKey cracks and his own modifications, rewriting the core parameters until it could see through two feet of reinforced concrete. The spell hung in the air, trembling like a live wire, before sinking into his phone's cracked display.

The world dissolved into shades of heat.

The alley became a blueprint of blues and blacks, the occasional flare of rodent warmth darting between piles of refuse. The warehouse walls shimmered like heat haze on summer asphalt before turning translucent, revealing the hollow interior. Support beams glowed dully where they connected to warmer sections of roofing. A cluster of machinery in the far corner radiated residual warmth from some long-dead industrial process.

And there, near the center - a single human silhouette, burning brighter than anything else in the building.

Lucent studied the thermal imprint with narrowed eyes. The figure stood perfectly still, arms crossed, posture relaxed. No telltale shapes of concealed weapons. No suspicious heat signatures hiding in the rafters. Just one person, exactly where they said they'd be, exactly as promised.

He let the spell unravel, the world snapping back into focus with a soft pop of displaced air. The warehouse door stood slightly ajar, a sliver of darkness beckoning. A thin line of moisture beaded along its rusted edge - someone had opened it recently enough that the night's condensation hadn't yet reformed.

Lucent's fingers twitched toward the glyph-burn scars on his left wrist. This was too clean. Too straightforward. In his experience, straight lines were just curves waiting to be revealed.

But the scan hadn't lied.

He took a slow breath, tasting the alley's cocktail of rot and decay. Lucent's footsteps vanished into the cavernous dark as soon as his boots left the ground, eaten by the yawning emptiness of the abandoned Nimbrix facility. The air hung thick with the scent of machine oil gone rancid and the electric tang of old glyphwork burned into concrete. His breath fogged slightly in the chill as he moved deeper inside, following the faint blue pulse of light at the building's heart.