Silas stepped out of his Nexus corporate car as the parking garage gave way to the Forge City sun. The light flooded his optics, every photon registering as data his hungover neurons couldn't process fast enough. Military-grade polarization kicked in a second too late.

  His car, a matte-black Spectre coupe, sealed its falcon-wing door behind him without a whisper. The vehicle's surface crawled with nanites that bent scanning frequencies around it, making it functionally invisible to most surveillance tech. A rolling void in the city's omnipresent sensor net. The kind of privilege that came with Domain operative status, though privilege was just another word for leash when Nexus held the other end.

  He had been on a multi-day binge of high-end drugs and alcohol, spending most of that time at Bella's Exquisite Decadence with some of his fellow operatives. The synthetic companions there had been works of art.

  He needed the reprieve to blow off some steam from his assignment. Watching Cole Walker live his life, make friends, the endless cheery laughs; it had been like watching a life he might have had if he'd made different choices. He walked through the silent, cavernous garage, his polished shoes the only sound in a concrete tomb filled with rows of identical black Spectres. Each one represented another soul who'd sold themselves to Nexus, another set of compromises wearing expensive suits. The place was a monument to corporate conformity.

  Silas walked through the Nexus building's biometrically-sealed doors, the scanners hitting him with seven different biometric readings in a single second: retinal, thermal, gait analysis, pheromone signature, brainwave pattern, soul-resonance, and something classified that made his Domain flicker. The grand lobby hit him like a weight on his chest. The oppressive scale of the place was physical. The floors were polished black marble that reflected the vaulted ceilings, like walking on a frozen, starless sky.

  A massive, holographic Nexus logo rotated slowly in the center of the hall, its light the only real illumination. The logo itself was supposedly a form of subtle mind control, its rotation designed to mess with your brain just enough to make you more compliant. Employees moved quiet and fast, their conversations barely whispers, their eyes fixed forward, nobody wanting to be seen. Everyone here knew the first rule of Nexus: visibility was vulnerability.

  Silas spotted his boss, Arthur, getting dragged across the marble floor by two Internal Affairs in armor that could eat a direct hit from a Sequence Five Domain. Both arms, no dignity left.

  "No, this is a mistake!" Arthur was screaming, his voice cracking through the cathedral-like silence. His suit was torn, his perfect hair gone wild, looking exactly like what he was: a man watching his entire life collapse. "I have been loyal to this company for twenty years!"

  He spotted Silas walking in, and a flash of desperate hope lit his eyes. "Silas! My protégé, please! Tell these men they are making a mistake! You know me! You've worked for me for four years! Please, they're about to take me to the 'back room'! They'll rip out all my Nexus implants and then throw me out onto the streets! I'll be nobody! Worse than nobody. I'll be an example!"

  Silas glared at the man who had given him his pointless assignment, his expression running cold as processed steel. Inside, something flickered. Not guilt exactly, but the shadow of it, like corrupted data trying to load. Arthur had been an asshole, but he'd also taught Silas everything about surviving Nexus politics. Too bad he hadn't learned the most important lesson: everyone was expendable.

  "Don't know what you are talking about, Arthur. But if they are saying you did it, I am sure the investigation was thorough. Should have made better choices." Silas's voice carried all the warmth of cryogenic storage.

  "You bastard!" Arthur screamed, understanding dawning in his eyes. "You..."

  More screams and protests spilled from Arthur as the enforcers dragged him toward a featureless black door. The door that everyone knew about but no one talked about. The door that people went through but never came back from.

  Suddenly, a sound was emitted. A sound Silas felt in his bones. It was a sound like a chord played on the wrong side of reality. His Lucent Domain recoiled from it, his reflections shattering and reforming in panic. Arthur’s voice just cut out. No fade. No echo. Gone. His mouth still worked. His throat convulsed. But nothing came out. Like watching a man scream in a vacuum.

  The hair on the back of Silas's neck stood up, and his heart began to race.

  The space next to Arthur folded in on itself, a visual stutter, and then a man was simply there. No entrance. He just edited himself into the frame.

  He was tall and thin, wearing a grey suit woven from spider silk harvested in the dead zones.

  Marcus Aurelius. Sequence Three Void Scripture of the Silence Domain.

  "There, finally," Marcus said as he popped his back. Everyone within earshot involuntarily stopped what they were doing, their bodies recognizing danger even if their minds didn't. "That noise coming from your mouth, Arthur. It was grating. Like nails on a chalkboard. Like a child's tantrum. Unbecoming of a Nexus executive."

  Arthur stared. Sweat slicked his forehead. His jaw worked uselessly, grinding on silence. A thin line of blood started to track from his nose. His body was trying to scream hard enough to tear itself apart.

  "Now then. Can you be a good boy and just let this happen? Unless you want me to be part of the experience. And trust me, Arthur, you've read my file. You know what I did to the board members of Titan Industries. They're still technically alive, you know. Somewhere. In a sense."

  Arthur gave a nod that barely registered. The light behind his eyes was already out. He looked like a man who had just done the math on twenty years of service and realized the sum was zero. He stood up. No drag marks needed. He walked into the dark like he was clocking out for the last time.

  Marcus pivoted, his gaze landing on Silas. It felt like being pinned by a gravity well. Those eyes weren't human. They were deep-sea trenches, leaking darkness from somewhere else.

  "You're Silas Dorn, aren't you? You worked for Arthur?" The past tense hung in the air.

  "Yes, Mr. Aurelius. What... what can I do for you?" Suddenly, any trace of hangover was gone, his brain pumping him full of adrenaline as it howled for survival. Silas’s tactical suite ran a threat assessment and came back with a flatline. You don't escape a Sequence Three. Especially not this one.

  Marcus smiled. It was a simulation of warmth that didn't reach the eyes. The smile of something that had learned to mimic human expressions through trial and error but never quite understood the underlying emotion.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  "Come with me to my office. We have a few things to talk about."

  He fell in step. You don't say no to a man who can edit reality. You just hope you're walking toward a promotion and not a disposal chute.

  The elevator ride to the top floor was in a private, high-speed lift made of obsidian and chrome.

  The walls were lined with what looked like stars, actual stars, somehow captured and compressed into two-dimensional displays. It ascended ninety floors in ten seconds. The inertial dampeners were so good his inner ear didn't even register the climb. It was high-end Domain engineering. The only indication of their ascent was the city dropping away beneath them through the elevator's transparent floor.

  Marcus's office was huge, almost the same size as Silas's entire apartment. The space was too big for the building's footprint. Either it existed partially in another dimension or someone had told reality that the rules of space were suggestions here.

  The room was pure minimalist dread, with a single, massive desk carved from what looked like a petrified rift beast's bone. Silas recognized it: a Void Leviathan's skull from one of the first beasts to emerge from the rifts. The windows ran floor to ceiling, showing either a live, high-resolution feed of the void between galaxies, or maybe actual windows to deep space. With Sequence Threes, who knew.

  Marcus pointed to a chair that looked tiny in the vast, empty space. "Sit."

  The chair was positioned perfectly to make whoever sat in it feel like nothing, a speck of dust in an infinite void. Marcus dropped into his seat behind the desk, the stellar backdrop making him look like some kind of god surveying his creation.

  "Um, so, Mr. Aurelius... can I ask what this is about?" Silas kept his voice neutral. He swallowed the bile trying to climb his throat.

  "Shame about Arthur, huh? A real corporate man, a model of loyalty. Had us fooled this entire time. Twenty years of perfect service, then boom, selling corporate secrets to Eclipse Biotech. Or at least, that's what the evidence says. Fucker even passed his regular psych-evals, which we are still trying to figure out how he did. Probably had some black-market icebreaker running in his neural net to spoof the results. Though between you and me, those evals haven't been updated in five years. A competent high school hacker could probably beat them."

  "I guess you don't truly know a person," Silas replied. The irony of the statement wasn't lost on him, seeing as he'd planted that evidence himself, after all.

  "Yeah, just still weird. We combed everything, every byte of his data trail for the last five years, trying to find a trace of hacking or sabotage to explain it, but couldn't find anything. Too clean for my taste, personally." Marcus smiled. "Usually when someone frames somebody, they leave traces. Tiny ones, but traces. This was... artistic. The work of someone who understood our systems intimately. Either way, he is guilty or just too stupid to notice any hacks that could have framed him. Both of which are fireable offenses."

  Silas’s mind was racing. Did Marcus know? Was this all an elaborate game?

  "It is the golden rule of our world, isn't it? Be useful, or be gone," Silas said coolly.

  "Yeah, yeah, it is. I looked over your report. Good stuff. Most people would have turned their nose at such an assignment and half-assed it. Personally, if I were in your shoes, I would have thrown it at some intern to handle. But you! You went into the weeds on this Cole Walker. Favorite foods, sleeping patterns, sexual preferences, the exact angle he holds his blade when threatened. I don't even think my own wife knows this much about me. Hell, you even confronted the guy in battle to test him out after discovering their plan to break in, next to that psychopath Draven nonetheless..."

  The name hit Silas like a jolt of static. For a microsecond, he wasn't in Marcus's office; he was back on the rain-slicked rooftops of Swarm City, five years ago. Draven was a blur of motion below, a whirlwind of violence, while Silas watched from a sniper's nest a mile away. He fed him a constant stream of tactical data. They had moved like two halves of the same blade, a perfect, terrifying synergy of mayhem and control. He remembered Draven's laugh over the comms after it was done, a sound that was genuinely, terrifyingly joyful.

  "...who according to his psych-eval is even crazier than me," Marcus continued, oblivious to Silas's momentary disconnect. "And that's saying something, because I once deleted a man's shadow just to see what would happen. He lived, but he never stopped screaming. Also, guiding them down the halls to make sure you could confront them head-on with Draven? Chef's kiss."

  "Thank you. Your words are too kind," Silas replied, his heart pounding. Every instinct told him this was a trap, but he couldn't see the shape of it yet.

  "You did lose the package, though," Marcus replied, his tone shifting, the casual praise evaporating. The temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees.

  "It was unfortunate, indeed." Silas had rehearsed this response a hundred times.

  "Yeah, indeed. Though personally, I say good riddance. We have backups, and if Crimson Gate wants to lose over a dozen scientists to a murderous half-Domain, half-rift-beast monstrosity like we did, it will probably benefit us in the long run. Let them deal with the screaming and the cleanup. We already got the data we needed from the prototype. You have worked here for five years, have been a Domain for three. Long time without advancement. What percentage are you of your core purification?"

  "Eighty percent, sir. Been stuck there for six months now. My parents wanted me to choose Void. They couldn't see the elegance and possibility of Lucent like I did. But maybe I should have listened to them," Silas muttered. It was a calculated vulnerability, a moment of weakness designed to appear human.

  "Didn't ask for your family drama," Marcus replied. "Save it for your therapist. Oh wait, you had to kill him last year when he learned too much. Messy business, that."

  Silas’s gaze dropped to the floor. How did Marcus know about Dr. Anderson?

  "Anyways, despite your lack of progress, reviewing your combat stats, you could probably take down a Sequence Five Domain. Your technical skill is exceptional; you use your powers like a scalpel while most use theirs like hammers. I can appreciate a man who does everything in his power to get stronger, even when life throws him a curveball. With Arthur gone, you’re in line for a promotion... and a little extra, if you're up for it."

  "Extra, sir?"

  "An experimental procedure. Project Chrysalis. We have had some setbacks and failures, and by setbacks I mean a 60% mortality rate and by failures I mean the survivors sometimes try to eat their own reflections, but it will help you quickly progress. Though there are... some risks. Mainly a possibility of irreversible psychosis and unstable physical mutations. One test subject's skeleton turned to glass."

  Silas looked at him. He knew too many people who had taken such offers. Some got ahead. Most ended up in body bags or as screaming abominations in Nexus's containment cells. The smart ones took the regular promotion and lived boring, safe lives. But the smart ones also didn't frame their bosses for corporate espionage.

  "Or," Marcus continued, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, "we can do a deep dive into your terminal and neuro-net also. You know, to make sure whatever may have been behind Arthur's fall from grace isn't impacting you. A full system audit. We'd be very, very thorough. We'd look at every keystroke, every thought you've had near a company terminal, every dream you've had about the company. Very. Thorough."

  Silas gritted his teeth. It was a threat wrapped in the language of opportunity. Take the dangerous, potentially fatal experiment, or have the possibility of them finding out he was the one who set up Arthur be revealed. He had been beyond careful, using twenty-three proxies and a stolen Crimson Gate cipher, but Sequence Threes had resources he couldn't imagine.

  If they looked hard enough.

  “Thank you for such an opportunity, Mr. Aurelius." Silas’s voice a perfect mixture of gratitude and humility. "I don't deserve it and will do everything in my power to live up to your hopes."

  Marcus's smile widened, showing too many teeth. "Oh, you'll live up to something. Whether it's a success or another cautionary tale remains to be seen. Now get to Sub-Level Fourteen. Go past the containment cells and through the disposal wing. Doctor Parker is waiting. She's modded herself with six arms. Claims it improves the surgeries outcomes. The patients who survive say otherwise."

  Silas stood up and walked out. He didn't look back. The mask of the loyal company man stayed welded in place until the elevator doors hissed shut. Alone in the silent, falling box, the adrenaline finally dumped. He leaned against the brushed steel, his hands trembling.

  September 24th, 4431.

  Excerpt from a lecture given by Master Sergeant Abrimov to a squad of cadets before their final submersion test.

  Jacob fought on Nastor and in orbit at Killie Station to defend the jump point. He carried an outdated mech and a battered assault transport through the entirety of the Second Founding War.