The first thing Aria noticed was how the sound changed.

Up above, Rainier’s streets were all hard angles and hollow wind—noise bouncing between towers, carried by cables, sharpened by rail lines. Down here, the world folded in on itself. Every footstep softened, every breath turned into a secret.

Their headlamps cut a narrow tunnel through the dark. Old service LEDs still clung to life along the ceiling, strips of pale white that had burned through their color years ago. Ashlight, the locals called it. The way it flattened everything it touched.

Aria walked in the middle, boots finding the faint painted line that once meant “safe to stand behind.” Maris ranged a little ahead, too restless to stay in formation, dermal patches on her jacket catching and scattering their glow. Virel brought up the rear, quiet as ever, the beam of his headlamp steady over their shoulders.

The tunnel had once been part of a Loop service corridor—that’s what the PASS brief had said. Before the Collapse, data and power had flown through here faster than anyone could imagine. Now it smelled like damp concrete and rust.

Aria flexed her fingers, feeling the quiet thrum in her palms. The shard streaks in her hair—those stubborn threads of magenta that refused to fade—felt almost warm against her neck, like they were listening.

“You’re sure this is the right segment?” Maris asked, glancing back over her shoulder. “Because if we get eaten by a ghost, I’d like to at least know it’s the correct ghost.”

Virel’s mouth tugged up at one corner. “Ghosts don’t eat people.”

“Yeah? What do you think they do?”

“Regret,” he said simply.

Aria huffed a small laugh. “That might be worse.”

They walked a few more meters in companionable silence. Overhead, a leak whispered somewhere behind the concrete, a drip they couldn’t see but could feel in the air. The ashlight strips hummed faintly, flickering now and then as the old capacitors complained.

“Okay,” Maris said, mostly to herself. “Three PASS-adjacent almost-adults, check. Two shard-resonant weirdos and one former pulseball striker with a half-charged lantern—”

“Your lantern is fine,” Aria said.

“It’s a metaphorical half-charged lantern. For mood.”

“You’re doing great on mood,” Virel offered from the back.

That earned him a quick grin, bright and sharp in the dim.

Aria’s wristband pinged gently. A little green arc pulsed on the display: proximity to the anomaly zone. She swallowed, throat unexpectedly dry.

The initial report had been simple, almost dismissive—a blip in a disused sensor array under Rainier. Some low-level tech noticed a bandwidth spike on a line that shouldn’t even be powered. PASS tagged it as “possible residual Loop noise” and then, three days later, tagged it “please send someone who can feel things.”

Which apparently meant them.

Virel cleared his throat softly. “Two hundred meters,” he said. “There’s a bend up ahead. After that, no more ashlight—just our gear.”

“How do you know?” Maris asked.

He lifted his own wristband. “Map overlay.”

Aria glanced back at him. His face looked calm behind the glasses, but she could see the subtle focus in his eyes—the way he was listening past the maps, to something else.

“Can you feel it already?” she asked.

He hesitated, weighing his words. “Like… pressure. The way air feels before a storm, but sideways.”

“Sideways pressure,” Maris said. “That’s very reassuring, thank you.”

They reached the bend.

Beyond it, the ashlight strips had died completely, leaving only a stretch of concrete throat vanishing into a matte black. Maris turned her lantern up a notch. The light spilled across old safety stencils, ghost-pale under dust: EVAC ROUTE A, NO UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS, LOOP SERVICE ZONE.

Loop.

Even the faded letters felt heavier down here.

Aria’s shard sense stirred—a soft, steady awareness at the edge of her mind. Not a voice, not yet. More like knowing there was a radio on in another room.

She took a breath and stepped around the bend.

The darkness received them with a silence so complete it made her ears ring. Their footfalls sounded too loud. Her own breathing sounded too loud. When Maris shifted the lantern, the beam jumped ahead and hit something metallic, throwing shadows into long claws along the wall.

“Relax,” Maris said, though Aria wasn’t sure whether that was for herself or the group. “No claws. Just your standard high-grade industrial nightmare.”

The metal belonged to an old access panel, half-pried open sometime in the last decade. Someone had tried to cannibalize the cables inside and then given up. Wires hung like dead vines.

Aria didn’t look at the panel for long. Her attention was pulled deeper.

There, further down—something was waiting.

Not a person, not a machine. Something in between.

She took another step. Virel’s light moved with her; Maris drifted a little closer, for once not surging ahead.

Her wristband pinged again. This time, the alert was different. Instead of a tone, a word.

SORRY.

The letters printed themselves across the tiny screen in a dull, system-default font. No source. No sender ID.

Just: SORRY.

Aria stopped. “Did you see that?” she whispered.

“See what?” Maris edged closer, peering at her wrist.

The message blinked once and then vanished, replaced with the usual PASS logo and a calm heart rate graph.

“Message,” Aria said slowly. “It just said ‘sorry’.”

Maris squinted at the empty display. “Maybe your band glitched?”

Virel’s voice drifted forward from behind them, softer than the hum of their lights. “I heard it.”

Both of them turned.

“It didn’t come through audio,” he said. “But… it was in the channel. For a second. Like… someone bumped the line.”

Aria’s shard streaks tingled. The feeling in the air grew more precise: not just pressure now, but shape. The silence ahead wasn’t empty; it held something coiled, trying very hard not to move.

“Okay,” Maris said, visibly resisting the urge to fidget. “So. That’s fine. That’s normal. Phantom network apologies from forgotten infrastructure. That’s… perfectly reasona—”

SORRY.

This time, all three wristbands flashed at once.

The word echoed down the tunnel—not in sound, but in timing. Light bounced off their faces as the displays blinked in unison. SORRY. Off. SORRY. Off. Three times, like a heartbeat trying to synchronize.

Aria’s own heart stumbled, then found a new rhythm to match.

“It’s copying,” she said quietly.

“Copying what?” Maris asked.

“Us,” Virel answered.

Aria met his eyes over the pale wash of their lamps. He didn’t look afraid. He looked sad.

“What do you feel?” she asked him.

He shifted his grip on the flashlight, jaw flexing. “It doesn’t know what it did,” he said. “That’s what it feels like. Like… when you bump someone in a hallway and you know you did it, but you don’t understand how.”

Maris exhaled, a breath that felt more like a word unsaid.

Up ahead, the darkness swallowed the rest of the tunnel.

Aria looked into it, feeling that coiled presence waiting just beyond their light.

“We’re close enough,” Maris murmured. “PASS said we just had to verify the anomaly, not adopt it.”

“PASS also said this line was dead,” Aria reminded her.

For a moment, no one moved.

Then their wristbands flickered again.

SORR— SORRY S O R RY—

Like a hand learning to write.

And Aria realized they weren’t just walking into an empty tunnel.

Something in the dark was trying as hard as it could to speak.