Sink Work

ACTIVE MEMORY

✦

Alon walked briskly down Nullstone Corridor, cut across Nullstone Row, and turned onto Splice Alley. Ahead, Sio’s apartment rose invitingly. She briefly considered barging in unannounced, but she had somewhere else to be.

The market called to her. She slowed her pace, relishing the scents of spices, incense, the mouth-watering scent of food sizzling over open fires. Verdan’s Maze had always been her favorite part of the city, of the whole world, probably, especially on clear, bright days like this. She loved the chaos, the diverse crowds hawking cheap tokens, fake anchors, and occasionally rare artifacts worth far more than their sellers realized. Colorful flags fluttered from windows and street posts, lending every day the air of a festival. Her heart swelled. These were her people.

Most of them traced their roots back to when Gindara’s only neighborhood had been the Underside, springing up along the southeastern harbor. Back then, the port had been bustling and full of life. Now, it was a ghost town riddled with vault junkies and sinkrats. The Underside, where she called home, had earned its terrifying reputation honestly. She still loved it fiercely, loved its struggling people, helplessly drawn to them despite her inability to truly help, though she kept trying.

She passed one of many vaultback clinics now crowding out the local merchants of Verdan’s Maze along Ashring Path, the long, curving road that ringed most of Gindara’s outer wall. She restrained herself from spitting at the storefront. Fucking animals, she thought.

To the northwest, she caught a glimpse of Spinde Mall’s glinting red dome. Straddling the border between the Upper Verge and Verdan’s Maze, it was everything she hated: the glossies’ shiny, smug, and soulless monument to conquest; a slow ruin wrapped in glass. She wasn’t naive enough to believe techno-mnemancy could be stopped. Progress was inevitable, so was evolution, but this blatant greed and appalling disregard for consequence made her sick.

She passed a father cradling his sick child on the corner of Ashring and Spiral, begging quietly for food. Less than a foot away, three glossies “chatted,” their faces glued to their phones, oblivious. Their mnemjacks were slung casually over their shoulders, now a fashionable accessory among the younger elite.

Get yours in custom obsidian or black jade! Choose from crushed moonquartz or spirit opal! Now in woven dreamsilver or braided auraglass fibers!

They were a walking advertisement for power, privilege, and the luxury of forgetting. She almost lost her lunch.

She crouched beside the father. “Here,” she said gently. “For your child.”

She pressed cold cash and her backup pouch of mnemtags into his hand.

He stared at the items, then up at her face, startled, overwhelmed. “No, I can’t take this. It’s too much. Please, take it back!”

But Alon was already walking away. He stood, as if to follow and thank her, but the moment slipped. Her name, her face, her voice were already unraveling, already gone.

As she neared Vault & Vale, one of the gaudiest new mnemtech clinics, the crowd thickened. The air crackled with anger. Shouting rose above the din, echoing off the polished towers. The protest was in full swing. She spotted the signs first: handmade, furious, passionate. Then the Blackliners in riot gear, wall to wall, shields up, helmets down. The smoke was heavy, acrid with mnemfog gas and burnt paper. Broken glass glittered in the gutter. Blood smeared a warning across the curb.

They were hauling people away by the dozen. Glossie rigs lined Bálinta Row, stalled northbound toward the prison. A rig’s door slid open for a moment, enough for her to see the inside wall lined with mnemjack ports: a mobile harvester disguised as a detention van. Her jaw clenched until her teeth ached.

She hesitated. The pull was real. She could ditch the appointment, jump in, take up a sign, get arrested with them. But no, not today. She wasn’t ready to go toe-to-toe with the Council on a good day, and today wasn’t good. Besides, her meandering through Verdan’s Maze had made her late to the drop. Daylight was running out.

She’d just collapsed onto her couch the night before with noodles and a book, Kiskis in tow, when the knock came, quiet and precise. She opened the door to a stone-faced specter, Kiran Tayag, the last person she expected. He didn’t bother with pleasantries. He handed her a name, a vague description, and a location. Someone who had another location. Further information on Varek Ruan.

It wasn’t that she was afraid of Kiran. Well, that was a lie, actually. “I’m terrified of the motherfucker. He could kill you with a finger,” she’d said to Sio once, and meant it. But that wasn’t the worst of it. She was terrified because she understood him, that terrible devotion to Selaya, the ferocious clarity of purpose. That kind of devotion could gut you from the inside. And she respected him for it, which is why she avoided him whenever possible.

“Joy,” she said, as she took the slip of paper from him. He didn’t respond. He didn’t linger. A neat spin on his heel, and he was gone.

Now she veered left down Bálinta Row, cutting south to avoid the protest crowd, then west along Echo Trace, slipping past Selaya’s house. The scent of flowers drifted on the breeze. She breathed it in. Selaya’s echo garden. Gods, she loved that place. The most peaceful corner in all of Gindara. The only peaceful place, maybe, aside from her own greenhouse. She slowed for just a moment and let the stillness graze her. She used to sit with Selaya here, not speaking, letting the flowers remember for them. But that was before everything got sharp. Before the world started coming apart at the seams. She turned away, the ache quiet and familiar, and kept walking.

She neared the rendezvous, eyes sharp now, scanning each street and shadowed alley she passed. Selaya’s house fell behind her. As she moved past two vaultback clinics tucked behind the tenement blocks that pressed against Selaya’s rear garden wall, she saw them. They weren’t what she expected.

They were human, barely fifteen, maybe sixteen. They were just another face in Verdan’s Maze, someone you might pass while haggling for incense or anchor charms. Freckled, hooded, nerves barely hidden beneath the squared set of their shoulders, unremarkable, until they looked up and their eyes stopped Alon cold. They were shifting. Colors rapidly changed, unnatural, never matching, like light stuttering through a cracked prism.

Alon approached cautiously, scanning their shifting, multicolored eyes. “You Turi?” Alon asked quietly, eyes flicking to the bustling street behind them.

They nodded once, sharply. “You Alon?”

“Depends. You have it?”

Turi hesitated, eyes darting left and right. Their thin hands moved impatiently at their sides, feet tapping. Alon wasn’t sure if they were scared or just moving in that typical human fashion—impatient, fidgeting, as if keenly aware of their brief time alive and so were eager to move, to experience, gulping greedily at life. Turi suddenly reached into their jacket pocket, pulling out a battered wardpad. It was scratched and chipped at the corners, screen heavily cracked.

“Where’d you get it?” Alon asked, almost reflexively.

Turi’s gaze snapped up, colors swirling rapidly through their irises: emerald, violet, amber. They smiled humorlessly. “If I told you, you’d be an accessory. Let’s not.”

Alon shrugged. “Fair enough.”

Turi handed over the wardpad. “Careful. Playback’s glitchy. Might mess with your head.”

Alon took it, feeling its weight settle in her palm. She glanced down. The screen flickered to life. Grainy, corrupted footage skipped and pixelated into shapes, then a dark blur shot across the screen. It was fast, dangerous, and familiar. Her breath caught sharply, heart hammering. Without realizing, her hand went to an old scar beneath her left collarbone, an injury she couldn’t remember receiving.

“Hey,” Turi said, quieter now. “You okay?”

Alon swallowed thickly. “I—” eyes locked on the screen. “I just—” she tried to play the footage back, but her hand was shaking too hard.

Turi took half a step back, wary. “I’ll let you figure that out on your own. Good luck.”

Then they were gone, slipping easily into the throng of Verdan’s Maze.

*****

Alon stood there longer than she expected to. She opened another encrypted message, memorized the location, and when the wardpad shorted out in a fizz of sparks, she felt something almost like relief. Its screen hissed black. She dropped it into the nearest street compactor, waited for the satisfying crunch, then turned west, past the rim, past the city's glow, toward the borderlands.

The hollowsink lay just beyond the Upper Verge, west of Spindle Mall. She rented a treadskiff from a local dealer and kicked it to speed across the cracked terrain. The lightweight hovercraft soon melted into a long line of treadskiffs. She rode fast, barely registering the thinning protest crowd or the last streaks of gold retreating from the sky. Creepy meeting at The Third Silence aside, something about that grainy footage had deeply unsettled her.

She trusted Selaya. If Selaya thought Varek Ruan posed a threat, she believed her. So why did her gut say otherwise? Or maybe not otherwise—just…not the whole story. And she’d learned, painfully, never to ignore her gut.

The gates at Gindara’s northwest edge loomed ahead. Once, gate wardens had stood here. Now, the gates stayed open. The asxang were already inside. Beyond the wall lay a ghost town, little more than a shanty sprawl of tents, scavenged fabric, warped plastic, and rust-bitten scaffolds: a hollowsink encampment. Emaciated men, women, and children, with eyes rolling around in their heads, scratched out a brutal living here.

Sinkrats, they were called. The clinical term was Mnemonic Exposure Dependents or MEDs. There were many paths to becoming one: living too close to a hollowsink; overusing mnemtech—cheap smileshop jacks, unregulated vaultbacking; undergoing too many memory extractions without reintegration; surviving a failed spell; or having your memories siphoned, again and again, to power someone else’s mahijxa. Mostly, though, you had to be poor.

The people here drifted in states of half-self, volatile or numbed, disassociated, their identities fragmented. Hallucinations were constant, resonance unstable, memory bleeding without form or tether. Hollowsinks pulled at them because the sinks were full of loose echoes, floating, fragmented memory traces waiting to snag whoever wandered close. The problem was that catching those echoes broke you. So the cycle went.

All the hollowsinks were outside Gindara, for now. Alon glanced back at the city’s quiet spires silhouetted against the dimming sky. She wondered how long they had. She hoped she’d be dead before one bloomed inside the walls.

*****

The descent into the mnemvault was quiet, too quiet.

It lay tucked behind old transport lines and a collapsed drainage field in the hollowsink. Whatever signage had once marked the place had long since rusted to illegibility. Alon found the vault entrance half-buried under moss-covered concrete and twisted rebar, its spelllocks degraded but still faintly humming with residual charge.

She laid her palm flat against the door and listened. A low, faint thrum warbled through her skin. Old, but not dead. The vault recognized memory. The seal yielded with a sigh, not a click. Inside, the air was thick, static-charged, damp, too quiet to be natural. Her footsteps echoed on cold stone, swallowed too fast by walls that seemed greedy for sound. Dust drifted in a haze that wasn’t just dust. Resonance hung here, clotted like blood in a wound that refused to close. Strangely, the interior looked new. The outer shell of the hollowsink had slouched into decay. The stones were cracked and overgrown. Shattered seals and rust-chewed railings clambered over each other. But this mnemvault had been used recently.

She entered a corridor lined with gurneys, straps and buckles in a disarray. Twisted IV poles stood sentinel, their bags empty, their tubing brittle with use. Exam rooms, blown open and wrecked, lined the corridor. Some were intact enough to disturb her. She spotted containment chairs with burned-out anchor nodes, half-dissolved resonance threads still flickering across the walls. The air reeked of singed ink and severed spelltraces.

This wasn’t just a vault. It had been a prison, and there’d been a fight. Restraints were snapped or melted. Blood marked the floor near a charred emergency exit hatch. Scorch marks ringed the doorframe. It had been sealed shut with a Lethemist lock, in a pattern she recognized but couldn’t quite name.

She stepped over a broken resonance harness. The leather straps were blackened, the rune-thread frayed and still pulsing faintly. The sharp, metallic smell of burnt mnemink hit her. She closed her eyes and breathed through it. The air pressed in. Her Threader training kicked in without effort, muscle memory and ritual recall. She tuned her senses, and the vault began to whisper.

“Subject unresponsive. Initiate second splice—” a clinical, cold voice.

A furious voice, ragged with urgency, cut through it, “Don’t move. I’m getting you out. Stay with me.”

A flash of green light burst across the corridor. It wasn’t real, but an echo that left a warmth on her cheek, a phantom wind, a scent of scorched copper and ozone.

Her body recognized the pattern of a high-level tactical breach spellward. It was Silent Wars-era. The method was designed for rescue and extraction, allowing a team to enter a sealed vault without collapsing it.

She reached for the wall to steady herself. It pulsed with memory still tethered, still alive. Alon closed her eyes and pushed, threading into it. The vault shuddered. A scream ripped the air, raw and cracking at the edges. Runes flaring across skin, searing into flesh. Her fingers moved before she could stop them, forming a sigil she didn’t remember learning. Her hands danced through a spellform that didn’t belong to her.

Or did? The memory siphon, the counterspell, she knew it.

Images, sounds, and sensations began to bombard her. Boots thundered down stone. There was a rush of heat, another cry, more flashes. Fire, blood, and desperate incantations rose in waves around her. And a name—no, not a name. A call sign: Drift.

A man’s voice, commanding, close behind her as if speaking right into her ear, “Keep your head down, Drift. I’ve got you.”

Her heart lurched. She staggered back, vision doubling. Out of the corner of her eye, a flash of a tall silhouette moving through smoke and fire. Heat in her chest bloomed. Run. No, stay. Hold the line.

Who the hell is Drift?

That name clawed at something deep and buried. She didn’t know it, didn’t remember it, and yet, that voice was familiar, simultaneously terrifying and safe. She swallowed, struggling to push down whatever had opened in her chest. For a second, it worked. She pressed her palm harder to the wall, trying to breathe through the static buzzing in her teeth. There was fire residue in the cracks, elegant ash traced sigils, their lines brutal and clean, belonging to decay mahijxa. The kind that didn’t just kill, it erased.

Varek.

But the name didn’t land. It slid across her mind like oil on glass. Why do some of these memories feel like mine? And if they are, why can’t I hold onto them?

She opened her eyes. Sweat trickled behind her ear. The vault had gone still again. She swallowed, steadying her breath, and stepped deeper into the corridor. The vault opened into a wide, partially collapsed, low atrium. Discarded spellcases littered the floor, their rune-etched metal blackened and long inert. Burnt sigilcloth clung to the walls like old skin. Some of the runes still pulsed faintly, twitching like dying nerves. The resonance…it was everywhere. A spiral of pain, soaked into the stone. She crouched and touched the floor. A burst of fear, hot and animal, flared, a dying breath trapped in a loop.

“Target compromised. Pull back—”

“No! Hold the line! They’ll breach the inner—”

“You said we’d be safe!”

Static cut through the voices, then silence. She blinked back the stinging in her eyes. She wasn’t crying. It just felt like she’d lost someone. Again.

She stood slowly, taking in the ruined space. Her fingers hovered near one wall. She couldn’t make out any runes, just hasty, clumsy scratches. It wasn’t spellwork. They were tally marks. One wall was covered in them, some overlapping, some frantic, some patient, some…erased.

Her breath caught. Someone had survived down here long enough to count the days, long enough to try forgetting them. Her vision blurred again. This was becoming dangerous Threader territory. There were too many impressions in one place, too many unprocessed griefs bleeding together. She shook her head, trying to dispel the resonance stacking. She stumbled slightly, bracing herself against a crate half-melted from nullfire. A handprint ghosted its side. The wall behind it was scorched deliberately, a ritual erasure.

A cleansing or a cover-up? she wondered.

She touched the stone again. And there, like a spark in pitch, Varek’s angular, efficient runes. A Lethemist’s script, threaded through with a Threader’s eye. She stared at the strokes and knew the spacing. Why?

Her voice rasped out. “Why were you here?”

The runes gave no answer, but the air shifted from memory to presence. Something stirred in the shadows. It wasn’t an echo or a ghost, but something waking and watching, a flicker at the edge of vision. The wall behind her began breathing, and cold curled around her throat.

Then, a whisper, too close, too soft, “You forgot me.”

*****

The scream came from the walls.

She spun just in time to catch the air rippling, then tearing. The sidlak didn’t leap out; it poured out. It moved like flame but wasn’t fire. A wraith of grief, radiant and wrong, its body tendrils of light and memory. It gave no heat; instead, it cast a wide circle of aching around it. Faces crying, screaming, pleading flickered across its form, drawn from the depths of sorrow. It pulsed with a terrible intimacy.

Her hands moved before her mind caught up, familiar sigils threading through the air, fingers carving a spellward. Her heel dug into the dirt, but the grief was faster. It hit her like a punch straight to the chest, bypassing every defense. She choked and collapsed to one knee. The sidlak wasn’t physically touching her. It didn’t need to. It sank its mental claws into the pain inside her and pulled.

Small hands slipping from hers in floodwaters. Kelp brushing past thin legs. The mournful cry of penelopides spiraling through sea mist. A soft voice saying goodbye. A broken promise at a graveside. Lengthening shadows. Cold rain. A promise she hadn’t meant to keep.

The asxang fed on it and grew brighter. Her spine arched as the psychic pressure surged. Her wards flickered, flailed, faltered. She screamed back. Words woven with instinct, memory, Threader reflex. “No! Fuck you! I won’t forget her!”

A wild wave of resonance slammed outward, unfocused. It staggered the sidlak, but only barely. It circled closer now, wailing through its many mouths. Flashes overlaid the room: a battle, fire, screams, a vault breaching. A tall, broad figure moved between her and danger, with eyes lit like embers, wounded and raging, fierce and impossibly sad.

“I said keep your head down, Drift—”

The vision broke. The sidlak struck. Pain that wasn’t entirely hers flooded her mind. It was also the pain of a child with sun-dark skin and a starved frame, reaching for her across a sinkhole.

“Please. You promised—”

“No—” Alon gasped. Her hands were shaking.

She knew that voice. It wasn’t the child’s, but her own. The memory was real. One of a hundred rescue missions. One of a hundred broken promises. Too many memories swirled through this place, stacking and bleeding together. She couldn’t separate one grief from another, couldn’t tell where the vault’s past ended, and hers began.

“I promised,” she whispered, trembling. “I promised I’d come back.”

The sidlak lunged. She met it standing tall, arms flung out with runed palms, crackling with resonance. She screamed the girl’s name. The vault erupted in sound and light. The sidlak shattered, blown apart in a whirl of echoes, flame unraveling in a slow, spiraling collapse.

Alon dropped to her knees.

*****

She staggered out of the mnemvault, slamming the door open with a hollow bang, uncaring who or what heard it.

Outside, the cold air hit her like a slap. Gindara’s light pollution was a distant, faint orange bruise on the horizon. Above, the stars burned sharp and brilliant against the ink-black sky. She leaned her forearm against the bent doorframe, breathing unevenly. Her mind was a snarl.

She blinked against the images of the asxang and the girl in her mind, and the sounds of all the voices. With a trembling hand, she wiped at her face as if to clear cobwebs.

What the hell am I doing out here? What even was this mission? Why had Selaya really sent me? she thought.

She could feel it. Something inside her had cracked open. A piece of her lost past had surged up with brutal clarity. She stared down at her shaking hands.

She turned, climbed onto the treadskiff, and gunned it hard back toward Gindara, back toward the light. The city rose ahead, slick with midnight rain. By the time the treadskiff reached Talaan, the sky over the council tower had turned the color of burnt glass. Alon didn’t stop to think. She went straight for Selaya’s office, slamming the door open. She found herself staring down the barrel of Kiran’s mag-sync pistol.

Alon froze in the doorway, boots caked grey with ash, gun barrels already lifted. “Don’t shoot! It’s me!”

The air went still. For a breath, neither moved. His jaw clenched. Her pulse thundered. She could smell the ozone from his weapon.

Selaya’s exasperated voice cracked through like a whip. “Oh, for gods’ sakes. Put those away.”

Alon dropped her aim, and Kiran lowered his half a beat later.

“Since when,” Selaya added coldly, “do you two think you can just barge in and out of my office?”

Kiran holstered his pistol without looking at her. “That was really fucking dumb of you,” he said.

“Yeah, well, it’s been a really shitty day,” Alon pushed past him into the room.

Kiran moved to the door, shut it, and stationed himself just inside. One hand clasped the opposite wrist—a wall with a heartbeat.

Selaya crossed to her desk. Her eyes swept over Alon, noting the soot in her hair, the trembling in her jaw, but she said nothing. Alon dropped the assignment scroll. The wax seal cracked against the real wooden desk, a small, deliberate violence.

“I keep reading it,” Alon said. “But every time I look away, I forget. And when I look again…” She exhaled, shaky and bitter. “The name doesn’t change.”

Selaya’s voice stayed quiet. “No. It doesn’t.”

“The Ember Cleft,” Alon said. “That’s what they’re calling him.”

She didn’t sit. Her hands clenched at her sides. Selaya watched her calmly, too composed, like someone holding a door shut inside her own head.

“I haven’t been sleeping,” Alon added suddenly, the words tumbling out. “Or when I do, it’s all…fractured. Images I can’t make out. Old places. Words I don’t understand. It’s messing with my fucking head.”

Selaya said nothing, but her fingers stilled against the edge of the desk.

Alon shook her head. “I don’t know why, but that name hurts. I don’t remember him. But every time I read that name, something in me reacts, like a bruise getting pressed.”

Selaya studied her, eyes steady. “You don’t have to take it,” she said.

“You already fucking gave it to me.”

“I didn’t know what you’d find out there.”

Alon looked down at the scroll, at her own name inked beside the order. “Someone else was there with him. Helping people escape. There was a fight. I think someone was fighting The Cleft and helping people get out. I don’t know if they succeeded.”

Selaya’s eyes searched Alon’s face, but she said nothing.

Alon continued, “He’s not just some rogue Lethemist. I can feel it.”

“I know.”

Her voice roughened. “What the hell are you doing? What is this about?”

Selaya didn’t answer. Alon turned to leave. Kiran moved first, opening the door before she reached it, stepping out ahead of her without a word.

“You should’ve asked someone else,” Alon said.

Selaya’s voice followed softly behind her. “I did.”

Alon stepped out, and the door snicked shut behind her. Kiran was waiting. He didn’t speak or shift, just stood in the corridor, still and silent. She didn’t flinch at the sight of him. She didn’t look away. He met her gaze with his own steady, unreadable one: a soldier’s look, a survivor’s. It didn’t ask questions or offer comfort. There was only recognition.

He gave a slight nod, and she returned it before walking away.