CHAPTER 5: THE CLASSROOM FOR THOSE WHO WERE ERASED
I talked Lyra into helping me break into a restricted data archive by asking her to enter a tactical competition she had no interest in winning, which is not, on reflection, the smoothest pitch I've ever made, and she told me exactly that in the two minutes it took her to agree anyway.
"You want me to fake enthusiasm for a scoring event I don't care about," she said, "so that you can commit an actual crime under cover of a legitimate one."
"When you put it like that it sounds bad."
"It sounds accurate."
She said yes anyway, which surprised me less than I expected, because the price of admission wasn't really the competition. It was the fact that her father's name sat somewhere in the same archive we were trying to reach, filed under a designation the Bureau had never once explained to her, and some part of her had been waiting years for an excuse to go looking.
Milo built us the rest of the plan out of exactly the kind of nothing he always builds things from — three forged badges, each one good for three minutes of borrowed clearance before the system flagged the duplication and shut it down.
"Three minutes," he said, holding them up like a magician revealing a trick that hadn't quite worked yet. "Per badge. After that they go dead, and if you're still wearing one when it dies, security gets a very specific, very annoying little chime in their ear."
"So we swap constantly."
"You swap constantly. Constantly constantly. Like, uncomfortably often."
What followed looked less like an infiltration and more like three teenagers engaged in an increasingly frantic game of relay tag through a restricted hallway, badges flying hand to hand, Jace running full-tilt past a security checkpoint while pretending — badly — that this was a rehearsed drill sequence. At one point I threw a badge to Lyra mid-stride and she caught it without breaking pace, which she later informed me she was going to log as evidence that I owed her a favor for the rest of the semester.
Rowan found us halfway through the hallway, standing exactly where a person would stand if they wanted to look like they'd simply wandered there.
"Is this a coordinated maneuver," he asked, watching us swap badges for the fourth time in ninety seconds, "or is it just organized chaos with good timing?"
"Yes," I said, and kept running.
He didn't stop us. He also didn't help. I filed that under the growing list of things about Rowan Vale that didn't add up cleanly, right alongside the badge that read as a Bureau asset and the fact that the System couldn't seem to fully read him whenever he stood too close to me.
*
The archive itself was smaller than I expected — not some vast, gleaming server hall out of a recruitment video, just rows of quiet, unremarkable terminals humming in a room that smelled faintly of ozone and old paper. My eye didn't need much encouragement to start reading past the terminal's polished front-end and into the raw data underneath.
The list, when it opened, was longer than I was prepared for.
Names. Rank badges frozen at whatever level they'd held the moment they disappeared. Students. Squad captains. Researchers. A disturbing number of children too young to have ever been formally awakened at all, logged anyway, erased anyway, as if the System had decided erasure didn't require a person to have existed loudly enough to matter first.
One name stopped me cold enough that Lyra had to say my own twice before I answered her.
Hart, Maren. Status: deceased, Rift Gate incident. Cross-reference: Tier Zero, transferred.
Milo's mother. Officially dead in a Gate collapse, according to every record the academy and the Bureau had ever shown him. The hidden layer underneath told a different story — one where she hadn't died at all, but had been moved, quietly, permanently, to somewhere the ordinary interface didn't have a name for.
"Tier Zero," I read aloud, before I'd fully thought through whether saying it out loud was a kindness or a cruelty. "It says she was transferred."
Milo went very still in the particular way people go still right before they stop being able to hold something together. "Transferred where?"
"I don't know yet."
"You don't know yet," he repeated, and something in his voice cracked open that I'd never heard from him before — not the nervous chatter, not the jokes he used to fill silence, just a flat, furious hurt. "You've had that eye for weeks. You've been seeing things none of us can see this whole time, and you didn't think to check whether my mother was actually dead?"
"I didn't know to look until thirty seconds ago—"
"That's not the point, Jace."
It wasn't, and he was right, and I didn't have a version of that argument where I came out looking good, so I didn't try to build one. We argued anyway, voices climbing past the volume either of us should have risked in a restricted archive, and the noise did exactly what noise does in restricted places: it brought guards.
Lyra didn't hesitate. She put herself between us and the door the moment the first alarm chirped, spear already unfolding in her hand.
"Go," she said. "I'll hold them."
"Lyra—"
"I said go. You have maybe ninety seconds before this becomes a much worse conversation for everyone in this room."
I didn't have time to argue the way I wanted to. My eye tore open an exit that shouldn't have existed — a seam in the wall the ordinary interface would never have shown anyone, a Hollow Eye function I hadn't consciously chosen so much as reached for out of pure animal need. The doorway opened. Milo and I went through it. The price came due before we'd even finished running.
[MEMORY DEDUCTED.]
I didn't notice what I'd lost until we were three hallways clear and my heart rate had started to drop back to something survivable. I tried to remember the specific sound of my aunt Elian's laugh — the one she does when something catches her genuinely off guard, sharp and a little too loud for the room — and found the space where that memory used to live sitting empty, dust outlines only, the shape of a thing gone without the thing itself.
I didn't tell Milo. He had enough to carry that night without adding mine to the pile.
*
We made it out. Lyra found us an hour later, uniform torn at one shoulder, a bruise already purpling along her jaw, entirely unbothered by both.
"They'll write it up as a training incident," she said, before either of us could apologize. "Overzealous competition prep. It won't stick to any of our records. Probably."
"Probably," Milo repeated, in the tone of a man deciding not to examine that word too closely.
The last piece of data we'd pulled before the alarm sounded sat waiting on the tablet I'd smuggled it onto, and none of us wanted to be the one to open it first. I did it anyway, because somebody had to, and because putting it off wouldn't make the contents any kinder.
It was Magnus Rook's name, cross-referenced against a project designation none of us recognized, attached to a single line that took the air out of the room the way the archive's silence hadn't managed to.
[PROJECT CONTINUITY: ERASED SUBJECTS CONVERTED TO SEAL-SUSTAINING ENERGY.]
Not exiled. Not hidden away out of mercy or bureaucratic tidiness. Converted. Every name on that list — Milo's mother among them — wasn't a person the System had simply misplaced. They were fuel, repurposed to keep something running that none of us had been told needed fuel in the first place.
At the very bottom of the list, past names I recognized and dozens I didn't, one final entry sat waiting for me specifically, formatted exactly like all the others except for the status field, which held a phrase none of the other entries carried.
Rowan, Jace. Status: erasure incomplete.
I stared at that line long enough for Milo to lean over and read it himself, his anger from an hour ago folding into something quieter and more frightened on my behalf.
"Incomplete," he said. "Meaning it's still happening."
"Meaning it's still happening," I agreed.
I didn't get long to sit with that. A new message opened in the corner of my vision before I could close the tablet, small and calm in a way that made it worse, not better.
[THE ONE ERASING YOU IS STANDING DIRECTLY BEHIND YOU.]
I turned around slowly, half-convinced my own nerves were inventing threats out of exhaustion.
The hallway behind me was empty.
That didn't make the message feel any less true.