Ashlight

It was Brute who found the body.

The dog stood in the ashen morning stillness, paw lifted, nostrils flaring with a low growl rumbling from his chest. He didn't bark. Kai crouched beside him, the gray soil of the Outlands crumbling beneath his boots, hand resting on Brute's haunch for balance. Together, they stared at the form half-buried in a drift of windblown soot, charred ribs visible through a torn utility jacket, the corpse's head tilted toward the east like it had died looking for the sunrise.

"Another runner," Kai muttered.

Brute didn't move. Just watched.

The chest wound didn't look like shrapnel. It looked… collapsed. As if something had pressed inward, then vanished. A lattice pattern curled along the inside of the ribs, glowing faintly like etched circuitry, pulsing every few seconds with a dull blue light.

Above the chest opening hung an ID tag, unreadable from being half-melted across the collar. But a patch just beneath it remained partially intact: a courier's sigil, worn threadbare. Enough to make Kai think this had once been a messenger. Except the design wasn't standard-issue. It was older. Handmade.

The jawline beneath the soot was half-exposed. Familiar somehow.

The coat collar was worn high. Just like his father's old jacket. The same jagged seam across the left cuff Kai had once stitched himself, on his own coat.

Brute sniffed again, then stepped back, ears flattening.

Kai forced the thought down. "Just a runner," he said again, but even as the words passed his lips, they rang wrong. Runners didn't wear stitched glyph-threads. And they didn't collapse like this.

A glyph-scar shimmered on the coat fabric, red spiral edged in broken Codex script. Not a Resistance marker. Something older. Recursive. A whisper-sigil. The moment it registered, pain surged behind Kai's eyes. Brute growled again, low and short, as though he recognized something.

Kai stood slowly, shielding his eyes. The old sky flickered above — sun filtered through a haze of radiation shimmer and quantum particulate. The horizon was jagged with collapsed towers and the melted bones of old highways. And further still, just a breath past perception, was Lockvale: the city of signals.