Rain carved lines through the city’s skin, sluicing down rusted facades and tangled wires strung like vines across 6th Street. Neon buzzed weakly overhead, half the letters in the old jazz club's sign flickering like dying synapses. Logan stood there, collar up, hat low, the brim leaking a slow trickle of water down his cheek. The storefront beside him—once a pawn shop, then a crypto gallery, now nothing but hollow glass—reflected his outline in fractured fragments. A man cut into pieces.
Inside the speakeasy, time moved differently. The green hue of the overhead bulbs turned every bottle into a vial of poison, every face into a mask. Smoke drifted slow, like it didn’t care about lungs anymore. Mira sat at the far end of the bar, her presence a controlled detonation. Cool, precise, dangerous.
“You still think it was about the money, Logan?” she asked, voice like brushed steel.
He didn’t answer right away. He lit a cigarette instead. The tip glowed like an accusation. “The money was never real,” he muttered. “That’s what makes it one for the ages, isn’t it?”
Mira traced the rim of her glass with a single finger. “You’ve always been good at the fine print,” she said, almost fond. “But you missed the bigger picture. Everyone did.”
Logan exhaled a ribbon of smoke toward the mirror behind the bar. It cracked a little more every time he looked at it. “Then tell me. What was it all for? Power? Glory?”
“Legacy,” she said, the word soft like a secret. “But not the kind you’re thinking. This city—Austin—was always designed to fall apart. The systems, the networks, even the people. All programmed to crumble, just… at the right moment.”
He turned toward her then, his expression hollowed by too many nights and too many ghosts. “And you knew the moment, huh?”
Mira shrugged. “Knowledge is power, Logan. But timing? That’s godhood. Ever wonder why the right people vanished when they did? Why you were left behind?”
“You’re saying I was meant to be the janitor?”
She leaned closer, voice a whisper. “Not turn off the lights. Reset them. You’re the only one who knows where the ghosts are buried.”
Then came the rumble.
It started low, like the city’s belly growling. The glasses on the bar trembled. The lights flickered. Somewhere outside, a transformer blew, sending sparks into the rain like urban fireworks.
Mira’s face changed. The cool smile vanished. She stood quickly, tossed some cash that meant nothing anymore.
“Looks like it’s starting,” she said. “You’ve got less time than I thought.”
Logan reached out, caught her by the wrist. Her pulse was fast. “What are you not telling me, Mira?”
Her eyes met his. For the first time, she looked afraid.
“There’s something buried under Austin,” she said. “Something none of us understood. Not the Beekeepers. Not Central. Not even The Gardener. You were always meant to find it.”
“What the hell is it?”
“You’ll know when it wakes up. Just remember—this was never about the money.”
She pulled away, vanishing into the misty night. The street swallowed her whole.
Logan stepped outside as another tremor shook the ground. He stumbled. Looked down.
Through a spiderweb crack in the asphalt, he saw it: lights. Flickering, deep beneath the surface. Not artificial. Not electric. Something older. Pulsing like a heartbeat. Syncopated with his own.
A rhythm. A signal. A summons.
Whatever it was, it had been down there a long time. Watching. Waiting. Growing.
And now, it was waking up.
Logan’s Internal Sync Log
- Mira confirmed Project Legacy was not economic—psychogeographic? Symbolic? Ritual?
- Ground destabilization consistent with subterranean anomaly.
- Signal from beneath city alive, not broadcast.
- Cross-reference with Beekeeper mesh metadata and Gardener root maps.
- Time to breach: unknown.
- Objective shift: contain, decode, or become the pulse.