Continuity

The smoke clung to her clothes as she emptied the ashtray, a reminder that some people still burned the world to feel powerful.

Lyra Kade kept her head bowed, her eyes tracking the room through the glass that framed every office along the corridor. She worked the cart with practiced ease, hands busy, posture small, attention everywhere. The glass made the floor feel exposed, reflections overlapping with movement beyond them, every angle a potential witness. She cleaned without haste, timing her motions to the distant clatter of typewriter keys and the low hum of voices bleeding through walls.

Paper and ink hung in the air beneath the smoke. The smell was dense and lingering, soaked into wood and fabric and time. It stirred recognition without nostalgia, a sense of weight and effort that felt unnecessary. Heavy bookcases lined the walls, their shelves crowded with ledgers and binders stamped with dates and routes and names. Filing cabinets stood in rows, metal drawers scuffed from decades of use.

She knew better than to linger. A cleaning woman rifling through records would draw the wrong kind of attention. Instead, she stole glances when sound covered her, eyes flicking across pages long enough to catch headings and destinations before moving on.

This place managed shipping. Goods. People. Everything that entered or left the region passed through these offices at some point. The history of every voyage taken by the men who worked here was buried somewhere in this building. She did not know where. That was why she had taken the job, learned the rhythms of the floors and the habits of the staff, kept her head down and her mouth shut. Time was the advantage of the invisible.

Invisible, but not untouched.

The looks came anyway. Sometimes hands did too. Casual, proprietary, easily denied. She swallowed it all. Rage was loud if you let it move, and she needed quiet. What she was looking for mattered more than momentary satisfaction.

After hours helped. Most of the clerks and managers had gone home, leaving the building to the cleaning crews and the last of the men who lingered over drinks in their offices, laughing too loudly, smoke curling from their cigarettes as if the air belonged to them. She polished what they dirtied. The surface of order. The appearance of control.

She slid open a filing cabinet drawer, scanned the first folder, then froze at the sound of footsteps. The drawer closed softly. She returned to her cart and lowered her head as a figure passed in the glass. Another janitor, blue uniform, moving with the same tired efficiency. Not a threat, but a limit. With someone else on the floor, every office was suddenly too visible.

She pushed the cart toward the elevator.

The building rose by rank as much as by height. The lower floors were for transactions and paperwork, open and loud and crowded. Above them, the offices grew quieter, more private, more important. She had no official reason to be there. That had never stopped her before.

She guided the cart into the elevator and waited for the doors to close. When they did, she reached into her pocket and withdrew the key she had made the night before. It slid smoothly into the control panel. The lock turned without complaint. A button lit that had never been meant for her. She pressed it.

The elevator began to rise, the familiar pull settling in her stomach. Only a few floors, but enough. Enough to change the air. Enough to change who watched and who was seen.

Floor twelve.

The doors opened onto silence.

The space beyond was nothing like the offices below. Soft carpets muffled her steps. Dark wood gleamed beneath carefully placed lamps. The walls were adorned with framed art and religious iconography, ornate and deliberate, beauty arranged to be witnessed rather than used. It was elegant in a way that demanded labor, waste shaped into proof.

Lyra pushed her cart forward, then stopped. She remained motionless, listening down the length of the hallway for any sign of activity. The silence held. No footsteps. No voices. No movement carried through the walls.

She left the cart where it was and moved on foot. It would be quieter that way. If she was discovered, she would play the part, apologize, claim confusion, say she was lost and trying to find the right floor. It was a lie simple enough to be believed, especially here.

The offices on this level were sealed behind ornate wooden doors, heavy and solid, their surfaces polished to a dull sheen. Each bore a plaque with a name and a title. She moved slowly, reading as she passed.

Brother was the lowest rank among the clergy. There were none here.

Deacon. Elder. Minister.

She stopped at one door and read the plaque again.

Pilgrim Calder Boone.

Her chest tightened, a reflex she ignored.

The pilgrims traveled the paths. They alone were granted authority to move freely between enclaves, to plan logistics, determine destinations, curate the official history of movement and purpose. If there was a record of the voyage she was looking for, it would have passed through their hands.

She tested the handle. Locked, as expected.

The key she had used on the elevator would not work here. These doors were meant to stay closed, and the people behind them were meant to remain undisturbed. She stepped back, already cataloging the lock, the frame, the hinges.

Her hand went to her hair.

The pin slid free easily enough, its weight familiar between her fingers. She paused only long enough to acknowledge the cost. Once it bent, it would not go back. She could not walk the halls like that. Not here.

She fed the pin into the lock and worked by feel, listening more than watching. A soft resistance. A shift. The faint click of metal giving way.

The pin came back out slightly warped, useless for its original purpose. She tucked it into her pocket anyway.

Lyra smoothed her hair as best she could, adjusting the head covering to hide what it no longer held. It would pass at a glance. Maybe. Long enough.

She slipped inside and closed the door carefully behind her.

The light revealed a room built to impress. A sitting area, a conference table, a large desk near the back. Bookshelves lined the walls, filled with volumes. Wooden cabinets ran beneath them, drawers flush with the paneling. Everything was deliberate.

Lyra moved to the desk and sat, letting her eyes close as her body finally rested. She pictured the man who used this room. His habits. His routines. What he touched without thinking. What stayed within reach.

The iconography was consistent. Busts of great men in human history. Industrialists. Builders. Figures of command and accumulation. All of it arranged to face outward, positioned to be seen and absorbed, to instruct anyone who entered the room in what this society valued and who it believed had shaped the world.

Everything except the object on the desk.

A bronze eagle stood there, perched on a squared base, its surface darkened and mottled with age. The metal bore the faint green trace of oxidation in the grooves of its feathers, each line incised with care rather than ornament. Its chest was thrust forward, wings folded but tense, as if flight had been delayed rather than abandoned. The eyes were small, fixed, and unyielding. It did not face the door like the rest of the room’s symbols. It faced inward, toward the chair.

Lyra picked it up.

A perfectly circular clean spot marked the desk beneath where it had rested, surrounded by a thin layer of dust. She scanned the surface again and noticed a second clean swath, narrow and deliberate, running just above the drawers to her right.

She placed the eagle at the far end of the clean path and drew it toward her. The desk answered with a muted click. Something shifted.

An ornate section of the desk slid outward. What had looked like solid wood separated cleanly, revealing a hidden drawer.

Sliding the draw open further she inspected its contents

Inside, there was no paper.

The space was shallow and lined with dark felt, meant to hold something small and protected. A single object rested there, flat and dark, no larger than her hand. It looked almost like a piece of polished stone, its surface matte and unbroken.

Lyra hesitated, then lifted it.

Only then did she register the weight. Dense without being heavy, balanced in a way that settled immediately into her palm. It warmed quickly against her skin. She turned it once, then again, searching for the familiar tells of construction.

There were none.

No seams. No markings. No ports. No fasteners.

This was manufactured. That much was certain, but not anything she could place within the history of human manufacture she knew.

She slid it into the inner pocket of her smock and closed the drawer. As she did, voices carried down the hall. Confused. Questioning. Someone had noticed the cart near the elevator. It was not a cleaning night for this floor.

The room did not feel the same afterward. Lyra moved for the door.

The moment she stepped into the hall her head covering shifted. Her hair slipped free, dark and unmistakable against the collar of the smock.

Someone looked twice.

"Hey," a voice called. Not alarmed yet. Just uncertain.

Lyra ran.

She tore down the corridor, boots striking carpet that was never meant for speed. Shouts followed her now, sharp with recognition. Doors opened. Authority woke.

She burst through a service access and took the stairs two at a time, boots striking metal, the sound no longer something she could afford to care about. Her hair had come loose completely, the pin gone, the head covering abandoned somewhere above. The disguise was burned beyond recovery.

By the time she reached the lower levels, the building was awake.

Voices echoed through corridors. Doors opened and slammed shut. Someone shouted her description, wrong in the details but close enough to matter. She cut through a side passage she had only mapped once, trusting memory and momentum, pushing toward the back of the structure where the offices gave way to utility space.

She needed out. Not the front. Not where the guards would funnel. Somewhere ugly and forgotten.

The air changed before she saw it.

Oil. Fuel. Cold metal and old dust. The smell hit her like familiarity, grounding and urgent all at once. She slipped through a side door and into a wide, shadowed space that swallowed sound and light. A hangar. Or close enough. High ceilings. Concrete floor. Scattered equipment pushed to the margins.

And there it was.

A shape beneath canvas, angular and unmistakable even at a distance. Wings folded tight. Propeller nose-down and waiting. Old. Mechanical. Honest in a way nothing else in this place had been.

Lyra crossed the floor at a run and tore the cover free.

The aircraft stared back at her, all rivets and hard lines, a relic of another age that still knew how to fly. She climbed the wing and pulled open the cockpit.

The cockpit was cramped and merciless. No screens. Just dials and levers and a stick worn smooth by hands long dead. She found the ignition by instinct, flipped the switch, and the engine coughed, then caught. The entire frame shuddered as the propeller spun up, loud and violent.

She pushed the throttle forward and guided the plane toward the open doors. Men spilled into the hangar behind her. Through the doors, night exploded around her, stars sharp and unobscured. There was enough space to get airbone and she wasted no time shoving the throttle as far as it would go as she was pressed back into the pilot's seat.

Gunfire cracked through the space. One round struck somewhere on the plane with a sharp metallic report. Lead projectiles, she thought distantly. Quaint. Still dangerous.

As she pulled back on the stick between her legs she felt the craft strain, then lift, the ground falling away as men poured out of the hanger behind her, still firing.

She was airborne. But she wasn't out of danger yet. She needed to get out of this airspace before they had time to scramble a pursuit.

Soon enough shapes emerged around her, sliding into position with impossible smoothness. Car-sized forms, matte and quiet, occupying the air rather than cutting through it. No propellers. No exhaust. Lights flickered in precise patterns.

A voice came through the radio. Calm. Procedural.

"Unregistered aircraft. You are exiting authorized Continuance Fellowship airspace. Reduce velocity and alter course immediately."

Lyra’s mind raced through bad options. Jump. Dive. Crash and hope.

Then another voice cut in, familiar and maddeningly composed.

"Good evening, Captain," Ada said. "I see you’ve predictably secured some trouble for yourself during shore leave. You could be facing several decades of incarceration for this one."

"What do you want, Ada?" Lyra snapped, gripping the controls. "I’m a little busy."

"A new transport request has come in. Time sensitive. I believe you’ll find the destination intriguing. Shore leave is over, it’s time to gather the crew."

Lyra exhaled sharply. "Just when I was getting a chance to relax a bit."

"I can delay these drones briefly," Ada continued. "You will need to abandon the aircraft and proceed on foot. They may assume the vessel returned."

"Buy me time," Lyra said. "I’ll start gathering the crew."

She brought the plane down hard in an open field, skidding it into the trees and killing the engine. The night swallowed the sound.

The air smelled of grass and soil, cool and clean in a way the air she had been breathing for weeks never smelled. She climbed out and moved away from the aircraft on foot, tall grasses brushing her legs as she put distance between herself and anything that could still be claimed.

Behind her, the enclave remained lit.

A low, concentrated glow marked its perimeter, the outline precise and contained. Lights traced roads and structures laid out with intention, a self-sustaining island of heat and motion in a landscape that had learned to rest. Nothing spilled outward. Nothing needed to.

They would not follow her beyond the boundary. Their authority ended there, just as it always had.

Ahead, the land opened into rolling plains that stretched toward a horizon softened by restoration. Fields and wild growth interwove without hard edges, agriculture folded into the ecology rather than imposed upon it. Distant lights sat low and shielded, sparse enough that the stars still owned the sky.

Lyra did not look back.

She adjusted her course toward the dark, toward the waiting quiet of a world that no longer needed to announce itself, and kept walking.