Six hours until Neyza, the target of his three-year sting, was reduced to carbon along the Chasm's incineration gutters. His grand design had collapsed into a furnace, and he held the detonator. He turned on the man beside him. He spun, a predator scenting weakness, and snarled at Yaldor. “You couldn’t have led with that detail, Arch-Magistrate? ‘Oh, by the way, that pathogen you’re so fond of is about to roast the girl you just arrested.’ A slight omission, wouldn’t you say? Or did you just enjoy the drama?” Yaldor’s gaze was weary, not offended. “You would not have listened, Bozkar. Your hatred was a closed circuit.” He gestured to the frantic, static-ridden feeds. “Now, if you want her out, you’ll need to move faster than you’ve ever moved before. Every bulkhead into the deep prison is under lockdown. Only an absolute brute-force bypass—a complete purge of its security routines—will crack the seals. It will cost you everything.” Everything meant the entire black-market apparatus he had spent a decade piecing together in the smog. He did not hesitate. “Fendur!” Bozkar lunged toward the master console, striking the touchpads. “Get me every active asset, every encrypted credit chip, every illicit data-shard. I want a real-time asset valuation. Now.” Fendur stiffened at the terminal, his cybernetic collar whirring as he tracked the telemetry. A twitch broke his flat expression. “Bozkar, what are you –” “Don’t make me repeat myself, Fendur. Liquidate it. All of it.” Bozkar slammed his palm against the holoscreen, the image of his vast, sprawling network of illegal operations flaring to life. “Every illegal data broker. Every ghost-network server. Every ‘antiquity’ in every hidden vault. I don’t care if it's a centuries-old Arcane Orb or a chipped credit chip with five credits on it. Convert it to pure, untraceable transit-codes. I need a breach into the Chasm, and I need it yesterday.” Fendur tracked the red timer. “Bozkar, that’s your entire syndicate. Cataloguing alone will eat half our window. To fracture the subterranean firewall isn't an infiltration; it's burning our entire grid to ash.” “Then burn it!” Bozkar snapped. “Prioritize route authorization over credits. Dump ninety percent of the margins on the open wires if you must. Just buy me the entry bypass.” Fendur nodded, his fingers flying across his own datapad, a blur of motion. The room hummed with the frantic energy of data transfer, the metallic smell of overloaded circuits filling the air. Red balance sheets cascaded downward, clearing out ghost accounts and safehouses until the ledger dissolved into raw clearance tokens. Ten years of calculated criminal leverage vanished in thirty seconds. Minutes later, Fendur’s voice was tight, strained. “Bozkar, wait. I’m cross-referencing something… an anomaly during the liquidation. A series of ancient data-logs tied to your syndicate’s deepest vaults, the ones under the Old City. I’m pulling a diagnostic… by the Void, Bozkar, this is it.” Bozkar looked over. “Speak.” Fendur’s console refracted a green helical breakdown. “The contagion. It wasn’t an imperial bioweapon. The root strain leaked straight out of your old clan's vaults under the Old City. The relic crates your father hid—they were patient zero. Yaldor didn’t butcher your bloodline out of greed, Bozkar. He welded a quarantine shut.” Bozkar stood frozen against the console edge. His clan had harbored the outbreak. The decades of spite, the venomous trap he had spun for Yaldor's daughter—built entirely on a holy vendetta that was nothing more than an ignorant slaughterhouse error. He had fed Neyza to a slaughterhouse to settle a fiction. The master terminal wailed, cutting off the diagnostics with an illicit feed rerouted from subterranean holding. Neyza materialized through static. Soot caked her brow over a purple split on her cheekbone. She held a sheared strut of pipe, chest heaving beneath a torn tunic. Behind her, a bloated riot warden—its skin swollen purple over exposed servo-joints—lumbered into frame, green luminescent drool dripping from its jaw. “They’re through the barricades!” Neyza shouted over wet shrieks, jabbing the iron rod into a warped prosthetic knee joint. Metal ground against tendon. “Gamma-Nine corridor is overrun! The warden units are mutating—get an extractor down here! Anyone—Level—” The hulking guard roared, a wet, gurgling sound, and slammed into Neyza. The camera spun wildly, the image dissolving into a mess of green and black static, then went dead. The only sound was the incessant, mocking countdown: **05:47:12**. Bozkar gripped the metal frame until the casing cracked. He had driven her into that dark corridor with his own forged evidence. “Codes?” Bozkar demanded, his voice a low growl. Fendur’s fingers paused, hovering over the execute key. “The entry string is loaded,” Fendur murmured. “Look at the blast layout, Bozkar. Once we burn the mainframe, the upper bulkheads slide shut behind us. No return relay. We step past that threshold and we're locked in the incinerator pit with the clock ticking down. It’s suicide.” Bozkar watched the red digits slice downward. The dead feed showed nothing now but her blood on concrete. A clean death here would be too kind an escape. “Execute,” Bozkar said, his voice hard, devoid of hesitation. He reached over, slamming his own hand down on the execute button beside Fendur’s. Hydraulics groaned through the deckplates as the hijacked credentials flooded the prison's relays. The lower blast gates of the subterranean complex groaned, separating under the forced command, while five hundred tons of reinforced lead prepared to crash shut behind any who dared enter.

The Truth in Ash