The frigid water seized Mireira, driving the air straight from her ribs. She plunged deep, pressure hammering her eardrums amid the churning undertow. Disorientation was a luxury she couldn’t afford. Archiving survival instincts had been her life’s work, even before this body, and they screamed for immediate action. Her boots scraped against a rough, inclined surface – the quarry wall. Pushing off, she fought the undertow, kicking against the pull of the deepening shaft. A faint, churning sound above indicated the continued collapse, but the primary deluge had subsided. Her fingers, numb with cold, closed around a jagged outcropping of iron-veined rock. She hauled herself up, sputtering, her vision blurry with residual pressure and darkness. Then a frantic, gurgling churn sounded nearby. The informant thrashed, a pale outline in the dark, slipping under, coughing on brine. “M-Mireira! I can’t…” he choked, swallowed by the froth again. “Stop fighting the current,” Mireira commanded, her voice flat. “Let it carry you to an eddy. Grab anything.” She did not reach out, testing only the footing beneath her own boots. The informant was dead weight, an erratic liability. His survival ranked far below her own. He bobbed up again, spitting bile and grit, staring unblinkingly through the gloom. The frantic flailing slowly subsided into a weaker, more desperate dog paddle. “Where… where are we going?” he whimpered. “Down,” Mireira stated, her gaze already scanning the submerged passages. The quarry was a spiderweb of old mining tunnels, a forgotten labyrinth. She’d studied its blueprints, memorized its choke points, its hidden routes. One path, she knew, led north, eventually resurfacing near the smog-choked seat of power. They drifted along the subterranean runoff, the cold stiffening Mireira’s joints, the man’s ragged gasps punctuating the rush of stone-channeled water. Finally, the flow slackened against a shelving bank of silt. Mireira dragged herself onto the bank, skin prickling with numbness. The informant crawled out behind her, collapsing into the mire, his shoulders shaking. “It’s… it’s freezing,” he stuttered, wrapping his arms around himself. His teeth clattered together like loose gears. Mireira ignored him, reaching into a hidden pocket in her tattered coat. Her fingers closed around a small, waterproof packet of dried rations and a flint-and-steel. She needed to conserve heat, but more importantly, she needed to see. A small, guttering flame sprang to life, revealing the damp, oppressive walls of the cavern. “We need to keep moving,” she said, biting through a strip of hardtack. “The Galtis manor sits over drainage conduits. We can use them to skirt the metropolis.” The informant stared at her, lips purple against pale skin. “Toward the city? Mireira, that’s where *he* operates! Where Zareto keeps his workshops! Are you mad? We barely slipped past him!” “He expects me to flee into the outer barrens,” Mireira replied, chewing slowly. “My predecessor was predictable. I am not. Dense districts offer crowds, forge smoke, grease. Ovesta is spent earth.” She offered nothing more; fear clouded the man’s judgment where she calculated leverage. The march through the lightless tunnels dragged on. Mireira measured pace by tunnel gradient and the faint reverberation of distant boilers, while her companion stumbled over cross-ties, dragging his heels in the sludge. “What if he’s waiting above?” the informant whispered hoarsely as they squeezed through a dripping fissure. “He anticipated the quarry. He anticipates everything.” “Then we adapt,” Mireira said, her tone flat. “Worrying is inefficient.” Suddenly, a faint whirring sound above them. Tarnis. The mechanical bird-chimera zipped down from a ventilation shaft Mireira had pried open minutes earlier. It landed on her shoulder, a faint glow emanating from its optical sensors. In its metallic beak, it held a small, glass vial, clinking softly. “Good work, Tarnis,” Mireira murmured, gently taking the vial. It was filled with the viscous, sickly green blight, still effervescing faintly. Tarnis had followed her instructions, returning to Ovesta’s surface to retrieve a sample from the blighted soil. She held it closer to her flickering flame. The glass wasn’t plain. Embossed subtly into the bottom, barely visible beneath the toxic liquid, were a set of intricate, stylized gears intertwined with a laurel wreath. Etched into the glass base rested the seal of the Crown Apothecaries—interlocked brass cogs encircled by laurel leaves, distinctly absent of Zareto’s raptor crest. The Crown Apothecaries ran the sovereign poison laboratories, sequestered behind steel vaults. Why would imperial researchers compound Zareto’s blight? Nausea settled behind her ribs. A flash of searing heat, of agonizing pain, ripped through her mind. Not her memory, but *hers*. The original Mireira’s. A stifling, gilded room, the scent of expensive incense and volatile chemicals. Zareto, slumped across a workbench, gray-faced and shallow-lunged, flesh turning clammy. And a phial in her fingers containing thick, resinous fluid—a counter-agent to neutralize an imperial dose. The Crown had sent a strike team, and she had countered the draught. She had moved to shield him from the court. The memory faded, leaving Mireira reeling. It wasn’t a betrayal. It was a desperate act of preservation. The original Mireira hadn’t been trying to escape Zareto, not then. She had been protecting him. But protecting him from what? And why had Zareto believed it a betrayal that warranted her body’s transformation, her will’s erasure? “Mireira?” the informant’s voice drifted over the scrape of shale. “You’ve gone pale.” She shook her head, filing away the disjointed recollection. Crown chemists were woven into this decay. The web reached far beyond an obsessive biomechanist; it touched the court’s administrative core. Hours later, after what felt like an endless journey through echoing pipes and forgotten service tunnels, a faint, gray light appeared ahead. The air grew fresher, colder, carrying the distant scent of coal smoke and damp earth. They had arrived. They emerged from a grated storm drain, blinking into the wan pre-dawn light. Before them stretched a manicured expanse of frost-kissed lawn, bordered by ancient, gnarled oaks. Beyond that, a winding gravel path led to a massive, wrought-iron gate, its intricate carvings depicting predatory beasts entwined with clockwork mechanisms. And behind it, cutting into the low clouds, rose the Galtis manor—spires of blackened iron and smoked panes overlooking the valley. The informant froze, his arm shaking as he pointed toward the iron spires, then back down into the sluice. “Mireira,” he whispered, teeth knocking together. “Are we running away, or are we walking straight into his courtyard?”

Echoes in the Dark