Chapter 3
The Shard
The city didn’t sleep—it stared. Neon-eyed, glass-jawed, too proud to die, too broken to be saved. I walked until the silence felt like company. Somewhere between the flophouse and the edge of District 6, I stopped pretending I wasn’t being followed.
Not by footsteps. By memory.
The shard pulsed in my pocket like a second heartbeat. Too cold for comfort, too real to ignore. It didn’t hum. It remembered—and I felt it, like pressure behind my eyes.
When I made it back to my room, the hour was so late it felt like a mistake. The hallway reeked of mold, piss, and old regrets. Same as me. The lightbulb overhead buzzed like it knew something I didn’t. I shrugged off my coat, let it collapse across the chair like an exhausted body, and dropped the shard on the table with the casual disdain of a man who knew better.
It didn’t break.
Just pulsed.
Soft and blue. Like something alive trying not to breathe too loud.
I stared at it the way you look at a gun that’s already gone off.
Lit a cigarette. First drag was fire and calm all at once. The smoke curled toward the ceiling, and for a second, I saw a face in it—his face. Tommy. Or the version of him I’d already buried. My hand twitched. I blamed the nicotine, but we both know better.
The shard looked like glass but felt like confession.
It wasn’t smooth. It wasn’t beautiful. But it had weight—like it carried things it shouldn’t. Faces. Words. Maybe whole sins are encoded in whatever tech necromancer dreamed it up. It glowed faintly with a memory that wasn’t mine, but still knew my name.
That’s the part that gets under your skin. Not that it remembers. But it recognizes that.
I hadn’t even touched it yet. Just watching was enough. Images flickered—my face, twisted. Selene, maybe. Her mouth moved, but no sound came out. A smear of light. A scream behind glass. Then gone.
I blinked—and suddenly it was raining inside the room—just a blink. But the table was wet. My cigarette hissed out. My coat shimmered like it had been caught in the downpour.
Then dry again.
I didn’t trust reality much to begin with, but that didn’t mean I was ready to break up with it either.
I didn’t touch the shard. That would’ve made it real.
So instead, I went looking for someone who already lived neck-deep in the unreal.
The Ragman.
He didn’t live in a building. He haunted one. A squat pile of brick and rust behind an old comic shop in District 6—no name, no signage, just a flickering neon arrow that once said “GIN” and now just blinked “IN” like it was mocking you for walking through the door.
I knocked twice. Paused. Knocked again.
The door groaned open like it resented the idea of work.
The Ragman looked worse than usual—jittery eyes, skin the color of old milk, gloves patched with solder tape and regret. He reeked of burned circuitry and cold sweat. When he grinned, his teeth showed more metal than enamel.
“Vale,” he rasped, like it was a curse. “Still dragging ghosts around?”
“Brought a new one,” I said, and laid the shard on the table between us.
He didn’t touch it. Just stared like it might blink first.
Then he pulled out a cracked reader—a slab of scavenged junk tech held together by electrical tape and spite, slid the shard in like he was offering it to a priest.
The machine shuddered. Lights stuttered. Then it made a sound I’ll never forget—a thin whine, high and sharp, like something screaming through a throat that hadn’t healed right.
My knees buckled. I caught myself on the wall. The shard didn’t just hum. It bled.
The Ragman’s face went pale. Paler than usual. He leaned in close, whispering like he didn’t want the city to hear him.
“Where’d you get this?”
“A man I killed,” I said. “Ten years ago.”
He didn’t blink. Didn’t move.
“You shouldn’t have brought this here.”
“Why?”
He looked at me like a man trying to decide if I was salvageable.
“That’s not a shard, Vale. That’s an open wound wired into something old. Something hungry.”
I didn’t respond.
Mostly because I didn’t like what that meant. But partly because I was afraid he wasn’t wrong.
“What kind of tech is it?”
“Not tech. Not really.” He exhaled slow, like he was about to say a prayer or a warning. “This is SIBYL protocol. Black-site experimental memory conditioning. Tier-zero cognition work. They weren’t just trying to copy memory. They were trying to overwrite identity.”
“And if it worked?”
He looked up at me, face grim and certain.
“You don’t get a better man. You get a city that eats the truth and calls it progress.”
“I need more than a name,” I said.
“You don’t need anything,” he rasped. “You want something. That’s different. Want gets you killed.”
I stepped closer. Close enough to smell the solder on his breath. “If this is what I think it is, I don’t have a choice.”
He studied me like a cracked screen, trying to decide if the flicker was dangerous or just dying.
Then he scribbled something on the back of a faded invoice and slid it across the table.
“Kiera Wren.
Underneath The Blue Orpheum.”
I pocketed it. “Who’s she?”
He leaned back, already fading from the moment like a man retreating into shadow.
“She was like Selene.
But worse.”
I didn’t ask what that meant. I already knew better than to pull at threads when the whole suit’s coming apart.
Outside, the rain had softened to mist, but the city hadn’t. New Babylon never does. It’s a rusted carnival—glitter from a distance, razor blades up close.
I lit another cigarette. Third one since the Ragman. Couldn’t taste it. Didn’t care.
I took the long way back to the flophouse. Needed time to think. Or at least pretend I still could.
Every step echoed like a question with no good answer. The kind you stop asking after the third body.
The room was wrong when I opened the door.
Not broken. Not violated. Just… shifted.
Like someone had moved everything two degrees to the left and dared me to notice.
The shadows leaned in too far. The bulb overhead didn’t buzz—it pulsed, syncing with something unseen. My coat on the chair looked like a man waiting to die. Maybe it was.
And the shard was waiting.
Same spot on the table. Same cold gleam. But something in its glow had changed.
Not brighter. Not louder.
Just closer.
Like it had leaned in while I was gone. Like it was listening.
I poured a shot of whatever I had under the sink. Could’ve been whiskey. Could’ve been paint thinner. I drank it anyway.
The burn was sharp enough to remind me I was still breathing. Barely.
I sat.
The shard stared back.
And for the first time in a long while, I felt something I didn’t want to name.
Not fear.
Worse.
Recognition.
I reached for it.
No click. No pulse. No jolt.
Just a whisper.
A breath at the base of my neck that didn’t belong to anyone in the room.
“Do you remember the piano?”
Selene’s voice. Soft. Ghosted. Like memory on a delay.
“He begged you not to. You did anyway.”
I blinked. The room didn’t change.
But the sound did.
The radio in the corner—broken since I moved in—clicked on. No music. Just static. Then faint, scratchy jazz. Piano, slow and bleeding. Something old. Something familiar.
Something I couldn’t place and hated myself for not remembering.
I stood, but the room stood with me.
The floor tilted—only it didn’t.
The shadows twitched like they were breathing.
I turned—and there was blood on the mirror. Smudged like a handprint, still wet.
Only I didn’t remember having a mirror.
Then came the voice.
My voice.
“What did you do, Carson?”
Flat. Calm. Final.
I couldn’t move.
The shard was in my hand.
But I hadn’t picked it up.
My palm was cold. Wet. Like it had been in ice. Or blood.
I looked down and saw my reflection in its surface.
Eyes wrong. Too dark. Too sharp. Like they remembered something I was still trying to forget.
Then everything cracked—sound, light, self.
Like glass hit once, right in the center, just enough to spider the world.
The radio cut out.
The blood was gone.
And I was sitting at the table again, cigarette burned to the filter, fingers trembling like they’d just pulled a trigger.
I checked the clock.
I’d been gone two hours.
Or maybe I’d only just arrived.
Hard to say, when time starts leaking.
The rain was inside again. This time, I didn’t blink.