PART 28
We emerged from a wall of wet stone into the dark,
bone-chilling cold of the Paris catacombs,
the air thick with the smell of old calcium and stagnant water.
Millions of human skulls and bones were stacked neatly along the walls,
forming long,
macabre tunnels that stretched out into the darkness in every direction.
But the bones were shifting,
their surfaces flickering like low-resolution models in a failing simulation,
some of them disappearing entirely only to reappear a second later.
"The purge has already started,"
I said,
my voice sounding like two stones grinding together as the silver lines on my face pulsed with a cold,
green light.
"The system is treating these remains as corrupted files,
deleting the memory of the people who died here to clear the system cache."
Daniel was shivering violently,
the sudden transition from the desert heat to the subterranean chill of Europe shocking his system.
"Where is the console?"
he gasped,
his breath forming thick clouds of white mist in the dim light of the glowing walls.
"It's in the Chamber of the Lost Kings,"
I said,
moving forward through the tunnels with an unnatural certainty,
my feet knowing the way before my eyes could see it.
As we walked,
the walls began to dissolve around us,
the stone turning into rows of glowing green code that described the structural integrity of the catacombs.
We were no longer standing in a physical city;
we were walking through the source code of Europe's history,
and the lines of text were being deleted one by one by a massive,
invisible cursor.
Through the green haze of the failing code,
a figure stepped out to block our path,
wearing the ornate robes of an eighteenth-century cardinal.
"You have brought a virus into the sanctuary,"
the cardinal said,
his voice a chorus of whispers that echoed from the thousands of skulls in the walls.
"The girl who rewrites death cannot be allowed to access the prime registry."
"I am the architect,"
I commanded,
my left eye now entirely silver,
my vision splitting into two separate screens that analyzed the cardinal's code.
"And you are nothing but a security sub-routine,
a firewall that has outlived its purpose."
I raised my cold,
marble hand and pointed it at the cardinal,
and before his eyes,
his ornate robes and skeletal face dissolved into a stream of green text.
I didn't delete him;
I simply archived him,
moving his file to a secondary storage folder where he could no longer interfere with our progress.
"Amelia,
your face,"
Daniel whispered,
staring at me with horror as the silver patterns began to harden into a smooth,
metallic sheen across my left cheek.
"I'm fine,"
I said,
though I could no longer feel the wind or the cold,
May you like
my senses reduced to a pure calculation of time and distance.
"The console is just ahead."
