The Thread of Ndeye

"Open your eyes." The tip of Astou's knife brushes my Adam's apple.

I sit up. The floor of Secteur Cendr freezes my vertebrae. The sleep imposed by the goddess fades, replaced by a new, sticky order slipped beneath my skull during my absence.

Find the weaver. Grant him a Mort Narrative.

HATHOR.∞ demands her tithe. She claims this clandestine artisan blurs my Résonance, that he steals memories to sew them together in the dark.

The water on my gauntlet hardens, a familiar edge. Astou sheathes her blade without a word. She read the directive in the slump of my shoulders.

We cross three flooded levels. The workshop cowers behind folded sheet metal. I tear the obstacle away.

The weaver does not even look up.

An emaciated old man, kneeling amid luminous threads. Fragments of stolen lives. They hang from the ceiling, intertwining in a loom cobbled together from server carcasses. He binds laughs to screams, searching for logic in the scraps.

Sever his lies.

The voice weighs a ton. I step forward. The old man scuttles backward, shielding his work with calloused palms. My AQUA.SANCTUM reacts. The crystallized water elongates.

Astou shifts to my right.

I raise my arm. The movement is fluid, programmed, a relic of my past. But the blade stops ten centimeters from the web.

One thread shines brighter.

At the heart of the tangle, an image flickers. The sharp profile of Ndeye. Astou's mother. The old man has salvaged the exact fragment we thought we had isolated.

I look down at my partner. She saw it. Her hand grips my wrist, the cold of her skin piercing the armor.

Destroy the weave to feed the goddess, or spare the relic and shatter our cover?

My arm remains suspended. The drop sliding down my blade strikes the concrete.