Aria left the cafe with the boy close at her heels, his quick, nervous steps barely audible over the softened city hum of evening. The air outside was still thick with coastal heat, a cloying weight that pressed on her lungs, but her mind churned faster than the circuitry embedded in the neon-lit buildings around her. They slipped into the labyrinthine streets, the boy leading the way down twisting alleys lit faintly by alternating flickers of failing streetlights.
He stopped abruptly near a nondescript utility panel scrawled with graffiti—tags of resistance, she realized, fragments of an underground network represented in everything from sharp sigils to faint, ghostlike etchings. With unsteady fingers, he tapped a sequence against the panel. The mechanism whirred and opened to reveal a narrow passage, a sudden pulse of ozone and dim light spilling out.
“You’re sure this leads there?" Aria pressed, her voice a mix of urgency and caution.
The boy hesitated, his bravado from the cafe dimmed further by edgeland shadows. “It’s the quickest way,” he muttered. His voice carried the quiet insistence of someone who knew they had no choice.
Without another word, she followed him through the passage. Minutes stretched into what felt like hours as they traversed dim corridors that seemed to fold into themselves, no navigational markers to break the plane of endless walls other than the faint thrum of electric wiring vibrating beneath the surface. They emerged finally into an unmarked side entrance, the industrial door heavy and resistant as Aria shoved against it.
The parlor was dimly lit, its air a discordant mixture of incense and scorched circuitry that prickled the edges of her senses. The room itself pulsed with activity—figures hunched over mismatched terminals surrounded by flickering holographic projections of fragmented memories. Each projection convulsed like ghostly reels, snippets of lives condensed into fractured loops. The soft hum of data transfer mixed with murmurs that hovered just above understanding.
Aria’s gaze swept quickly to the center of the room where the real work lived—a vertical column of shimmering code suspended in what looked like liquid light. It pulsed with rhythmic elegance, alive in a way that made her instinctively recoil, as if even glancing at it too long would invite the data to pierce her defenses.
Then Maya appeared, materializing from the cascading code as though they had always been there. Their form shifted ceaselessly between frames of being—everything from a fractal outline of humanoid structure to almost pure data waves, constantly rippling and reforming. They hovered between presence and absence, and in that uncanny drift, Aria noted something new—the faintest suggestion of longing hovering just beneath their projection.
“You’re late, Aria,” Maya said. Their voice twisted through a harmonic blend of synthetic tone, mirrored with the weight of something deeply intimate, almost human.
“I brought you something worth the delay.” Aria's hand slid the datapad out of her jacket with the precision of someone unsettled but masking it well. She placed it on the scarred steel desk adjacent to the glowing code column, her own movements informed by cold efficiency.
Maya’s projection rippled closer to the workstation, faint tendrils of light reaching toward the datapad. Without warning, a buzz shot into Aria’s neural interface before she had a chance to steel herself—a signature intrusion of Maya’s presence. The connection prickled over her scalp, threading down into the back of her neck in a way that never let her grow entirely accustomed.
“Still clinging to the tangible?” Maya mused aloud as their head tilted in that analytical manner that made her reassess every decision in their presence. “Your patterns betray you. Always drawn to the physical when the lattice—" Maya gestured vaguely around them, encompassing everything and nothing—“sings far beyond your perception.”
Aria’s eyes narrowed in defiance. "Spare me the metaphysics," she said, her voice tighter than usual. "We don’t have time for philosophical riddles tonight. Can you map the rollback timeline or not?"
Maya’s quasi-eyes flared into twin points of blazing intensity, their translucent form flickering in and out as they absorbed the question. "What precisely are you looking for, Aria? An attempt to catalog your illusions? Mistaken belief that memories stolen by the cartels simply cease?”
“They don’t just stop,” Aria interrupted, stepping closer without realizing it. “They leave chaos. They leave people broken, emptied, like patched system fragments waiting to crash. I need to see the truth behind the gaps they’re carving.”
There was silence for a long beat. Maya’s flickering took on a slower, more deliberate rhythm, charged with what almost felt like hesitation. When they spoke, their voice was quieter, weighted with a resonance that pulled some unknown chord in her. “And when you see? Truly see? Will you let go of the constraints holding you in place?”
The implication crawled under her skin. “Just—activate the sequence.”
Maya’s energy reached into the core column of shifting data, their tendrils bridging to the workstation as the mapping protocol surged to life. The air between them quivered, data threads spinning outward like luminous synapses, each one electric with raw potential. Aria thought she could almost see a part of herself reflected across the projection—a fractured glimpse of what connected them both.
And then came the flood of light. It wasn’t unlike fear, but deeper, stranger—something closer to the revelation she'd dreaded since stepping into the parlor. A sharp ache deep within warned her this wasn’t just a process of understanding; it was the beginning of losing something essential, something she hadn’t known she still had.