​Chapter 8. I Can Offer You Far More

He woke as if dying — slowly, with the sense that his body wasn’t really his anymore. His head throbbed with a dull, rhythmic pain in his temples, and his tongue felt like a foreign, withered piece of flesh. Mark lay still, listening to the steady, indifferent murmur of the rain. His mind reluctantly gathered itself from the fragments of last night: Barry’s greasy laugh, acrid smoke, the warmth of cheap liquor burning in his throat. The air here smelled exactly like it had on that first night — the one that turned into a vision. Ancient damp, stale dust, and that faint sweetness of decay soaked deep into the walls. Time itself had curdled and rotted in this room.

The room swayed when he sat up, a wave of dizziness washing over him. Gray, lifeless light oozed through the fogged windows, catching on familiar shapes of disorder: a dresser with peeling sides, the sagging seat of an old armchair, a cup with amber residue dried at the bottom. Eliza never cleaned here. Bare concrete floor. And in the midst of this desolation — a dimly glowing lamp. A luxury. An absurd anomaly for the Ring.

The mismatch scraped at him from inside, like a splinter he couldn’t get out. The room, down to its last crack, was the same one from his fevered memory. Mark stood. Beyond the glass, washed by endless rain, lay the familiar landscape. Out there, beyond the Barrier, was the sterile, unreachable glow of the City. Here — the filthy districts of the Ring, the scars of ruined buildings, torrents of water devouring the streets.

A month ago, this place had been a hallucination, a waking fever dream. Now it was simply the room he woke up in. The impossible, forbidden memory had turned into routine — a shabby apartment in the Ring where he now shared a bed with Captain Eliza Dahmer. He walked across the room and touched the sheet — ice-cold. Eliza had left long before dawn, without leaving even a trace of warmth behind. Only emptiness.

A small light blinked insistently on his wrist.

“What is it?” Mark asked hoarsely.

“Incoming message from Eliza Dahmer,” the cuff replied in its lifeless voice. “‘Leaving for a couple of days.’ End of message.”

She left often—far too often. Disappeared without a trace, sometimes for a day, sometimes longer. “Work,” she would throw over her shoulder whenever he asked, and that word became a shield every guess broke against. He had stopped asking. This place wasn’t meant for him. It belonged entirely to her, like a second skin. Her presence clung to everything: the curve of the book spines on the shelf, the shine of the trinkets on the dresser. Everything here carried her imprint. And he was just another object in the collection, a temporary guest tolerated for a while. The apartment allowed him inside but breathed with a life not his own. And it watched.

He stepped into the bathroom and flipped the switch. A brief delay, then the flash of a dying bulb, the angry sputter of old wiring. The dull ceiling lamp flickered and reluctantly came on. The air met him with the smell of decay. Mold had eaten into the tile grout, rusty tears streaked the walls. A thin, dirty stream trickled from the showerhead. He stepped under it without expecting anything — no warmth, no clarity, nothing. He simply stood there, letting the cold water wash the remnants of the night from his skin. Her scent. Her touch. A rough towel, socks—yet the shirt was nowhere to be found. Not on the chair, not in the wardrobe. He was close to giving up, ready to throw the jacket over his bare torso, when something on the dresser caught his eye.

Amid the chaos of her things — scattered hairpins, a powder compact — lay a cuff. Old, its screen dead, but the glass perfectly intact.

His hand moved on its own, fingers closing around the worn metal. Light, feminine. A thin crack traced the rim like a strand of hair. Holding it felt wrong, as if he’d grabbed someone’s secret with his bare hand. He’d glimpsed it here before, assuming it was Eliza’s. But she would never have left without her cuff. Which meant it was someone else’s.

His heart thudded, dull and heavy. Maybe it was evidence she’d taken home from the Center and forgotten. The drawer was slightly open. He pulled the handle, and it slid out silently. Inside lay a terrifying, deliberate order. Dozens of cuffs. A whole graveyard. Different models, all with dead screens. Some were charred; one had a dark, crusted smear of dried blood. And beneath them—more. And more.

His fingers disobeyed him, picking one up, then another. On the inside—names, worn down to ghosts. “Lin...” “A. Ken...” And then he found a narrow one, a child’s. A shiver ran through him.

His palms broke out in a cold sweat. He dropped into a crouch. The drawer stared back at him with its multitude of dead displays. The faintly sweet smell of old metal made him nauseous. Thirty cuffs, maybe more. Trophies.

Mark straightened abruptly, stepping back. He stood staring at the wall but saw nothing. The room’s colors drained away. The thick, anxious scent of decay returned, as if seeping straight out of the drawer.

He shut it. Then opened it again—just to be certain. Not a hallucination.

He needed to understand what he was looking at. He grabbed three cuffs at random, tossed them onto the table, and connected them to the charging port. His hands worked automatically while his mind refused to accept what it saw.

They charged quickly, with a short, hungry click. The screens flared to life. The souls trapped inside seemed to wake at his touch. Identification. All three showed active status. A shudder ran through him, sharp as a jolt of electricity. The Contour always locked a cuff seventy-two hours after vital signs ceased. Always. Which meant someone had altered the protocol, leaving these devices alive.

“Center access. Scan,” he said, his voice sounding muted and alien.

The cuff silently projected a holo in front of him.

[Karina Liu > 28 > Civil Service, Sector D] Status: unknown. Last signal: 2140-03-12.

[Haruka J. > 33 > Technician, BioTech] Status: unknown. Last signal: 2140-08-03.

[Reina S. > Age not listed > Account restricted] Status: unknown. Last signal: unknown.

Mark read the text with a strange, dull detachment. Dates. Names. The same verdict spelled out in white: unknown. None of them officially dead. They had vanished. And their cuffs—almost personalities—had lain in Eliza’s drawer like trophies. The cuff blinked patiently, awaiting further command.

“Access Karina Liu’s logs.”

His clearance at the Center sliced through the encryption like paper. A brief pause while the system weighed the request, then: confirmed.

“Last video. And vital signs,” he ordered.

The holo flickered:

File REC>40028. Playing.

The image emerged out of digital darkness: a room barely visible through static. The camera struggled with the gloom, trying to lock focus, turning everything into blurred, spectral silhouettes. Smooth plastic walls. Somewhere off to the side, a dim lamp burned, casting long, distorted shadows.

Eliza’s voice came through.

“I can offer you far more than you want, sweetheart.”

Breathy, with a serpentine hint of seduction that made Mark’s jaw clench.

The camera trembled.

Pulse: 110. Breathing elevated.

Karina’s breathing.

A figure separated itself from the shadows. Nude. Female. A silhouette he knew better than his own.

Karina’s quiet, stifled whisper — a question drowned in fear. And in response: Eliza’s soft, intimate murmur of assent.

Pulse: 160.

A second of absolute silence. Then a lunge — chaos. A blurred motion, a white flash across the frame. The camera fell. The sound that followed wasn’t a scream, but a short, strangled gasp, cut off by another heavy, muffled blow.

Pulse: 0. Respiration: 0. No vital signs.

The image tore apart, dissolving into static. The last frame caught the tiled floor, someone’s shadow, a movement at the very edge.

But the audio remained — wet, rhythmic, methodical. Not a cry. Not a struggle. Just the noise of something happening beyond the frame, steady and final.

Signal lost.

And over it all came the even, emotionless voice of his own cuff, analyzing the log:

“End of recording. Wristband deactivation initiated by external cause. Analyze remaining logs?”

The sound still echoed in his ears as he stared blankly at the holo. He dragged a hand over his face — the skin felt cold and clammy. A deep breath didn’t help. His skull buzzed, filled with the white noise of what he’d seen.

Tampering. A virus. A simulation. His mind, trained by years of service, clung to protocol, like a drowning man to a lifeline. Corrupted logs. Substitution. In the Ring — possible. But in the City... tampering with a wristband meant a death sentence. He could explain everything. Everything except the sound.

Wet, visceral, chewing through every mental barrier and settling deep inside his skull. Pulsing there — alive, repulsive.

The room felt too small. He stood and began pacing from corner to corner, trying to drown out the sound, the image. Too real. Too sharp. His thoughts darted from object to object, searching desperately for something solid to hold onto. The door. The dresser. A bottle. A heap of wrinkled clothes in the corner. Simple, ordinary things. Now they looked like props, painted illusions. The only reality was that sound. There had to be a rational explanation. There had to be.

The call came suddenly, like a lifeline thrown into the whirlpool of “window–door–window.”

“Homicide,” the cuff announced. “Priority level: three. Kane, Logan. Time: 9:11 a.m.”

Protocol demanded simple, memorized actions. He bolted out into the street.

Barry, as always, was waiting at the office — he didn’t have a car.

The Center’s office in the Ring was a low concrete block squeezed between warehouses and empty garages. It had once been a police station, then a National Guard outpost, and now it housed Division C. A peeling sign reading “Storage” hung over the entrance. Not a soul around the building. Convenient.

The door was solid steel, no scanner. Mark knocked with his knuckles, short and precise. It took about ten seconds before he heard shuffling steps behind the door. A heavy bolt slid back, and the door cracked open just enough for a sleepy guard to peek through. He looked Mark over, recognized him, and stepped aside silently, letting him in.

The interior was a hybrid of a dispatch room and a morgue for obsolete equipment: tables rubbed down to bare metal, chairs with torn upholstery, and an unbeatable layer of dust. The air hung thick and bitter — a harsh mix of burnt coffee and the acrid smell of melting plastic from the eternally dying coffeemaker.

On one monitor, figures from some synth-show writhed in silence; on another, a sector map pulsed dimly. By the wall, two techs hunched like vultures over the guts of a terminal. A third, Tom, was locked in his eternal war with a cuff over blitz chess. On his holo, the king was once again in check. Tom moved a pawn with resignation. He always lost.

A side door creaked open and Barry stepped out, pulling on his jacket as he walked. Sleepy, disheveled. He spoke in the tone of a man for whom all calls had long blurred into one.

“Sector 4 again. Damn workers and their damn Pops,” he muttered. “Stupid place. Locals say it’s cursed. Satanists,” he yawned, “coming out of their ears.”

Barry didn’t talk like a cop anymore — more like a broken record stuck on the same dreary song about hopelessness. Nothing new. Mark nodded silently. But inside, everything tightened — not because of the call or the sector. Because of the memory. Because of the sound.

“Losing again, Tom?” Barry sneered as he walked past.

“Go to hell,” Tom muttered without looking up from the holo where his virtual king sat hopelessly cornered.

The two agents by the terminal exchanged quiet snickers. It was their daily ritual — watching Tom prove yet again that a human couldn’t beat a machine. He always lost, but he stubbornly started a new game every time.

Outside, they were met by a thin, needling drizzle and a sky rubbed pale. Mark’s car waited under a peeling awning. He opened the door, and the interior exhaled stale air and plastic. Barry dropped into the passenger seat with a heavy thud, sighing as if life itself were too much to carry.

The world beyond the windshield was a washed-out watercolor of gray. The rhythmic patter of rain. Everything as usual.

“You alright, partner?” Barry’s voice cut through Mark’s haze.

“Didn’t sleep,” Mark muttered.

“Ah.” Barry grimaced knowingly, his greasy eyes flashing. “Your captain was pretty hammered last night. Drinks like... well, like a fish – or rather, like a captain.”

He let out a deep, cavernous chuckle, pleased with his own joke.

“And where’d you lose your shirt, with your mistress?” Barry was in rare form today.

Mark zipped up his jacket and fixed his gaze on the window.

The car slid down the wet street. Concrete boxes drifted by — identical, peeling, blind. The world had lost focus, as though someone were erasing it with a blunt eraser. Mark stared straight ahead, but saw nothing except the interference buzzing through his own mind.

One thought kept circling in his head. The cuff. The sound. The final frame. And now Sector 4. Another murder. Another line in the corpse ledger.

He tried to feel something — fear, disgust, anything — but inside him grew only a ringing, glacial emptiness. And that emptiness frightened him more than any recording of someone else’s death.

“Sector 4, West,” the car announced, and Mark blinked, dragged back into reality.

He knew this district by taste and smell. The taste of machine oil on his teeth, the smell of rust and burned wiring. The asphalt had given up long ago, cracked apart, exposing soil soaked through with grease. Metal clanged somewhere in the distance — the sector’s ceaseless soundtrack.

Between the skeletal remains of old factories and warehouses, shacks and huts clung to each other — ugly growths of rusted metal and broken concrete. Here they repaired what the City would have discarded without a second glance.

Even the mechanical hum couldn’t drown out the sounds of life: shouts from the market rising into curses, followed by a short, indifferent crack of a gunshot.

This district survived on leftovers. On contraband. On the skill of turning trash into something functional. And on the Ravens gang, whose boss, Pops, maintained the fragile balance between anarchy and survival. The City didn’t come here. Neither did rival gangs. For them, this place was a black hole on the map, valuable only for its wheezing generator.

The car sped past an abandoned factory. On the wall, drawn in charcoal over a faded corporate emblem, stretched a huge, skeletal raven. The bird dug its claws into the concrete; beneath it — a short, furious warning: “Pops will find you.” The Ravens’ marks were everywhere, like black sores on the walls.

The car hissed to a stop by the building — a three-story, pre-war eyesore, peeling and hunched as if under its own weight. The entrance exhaled dampness and the rancid smell of a shared kitchen. Cracks branched like lightning across the walls, mixed with the traces of other people’s desperate lives: a tiny icon nailed to a doorframe, a prayer scratched into the paint with a knife, and just below it — a fat, furious curse word.

Behind the doors — silence. Dead, alert. The tenants had sunk into themselves, turned into pure listening, nothing else. Someone flickered past a peephole and vanished instantly. In the Ring, one law reigned: don’t get involved. Not your business. Not worth your life.

Halfway down the second-floor corridor, a door stood open — a bright rectangle of emptiness leaking a smell into the hallway. First came the usual stench of mold, sweat, tobacco. Beneath it — a second layer, metallic, unmistakable.

The body on the floor lay broken, twisted at an unnatural angle, like a rag doll tossed by a petulant child. Nothing remained of the head — just a bloody mess of bone and tissue. On the wall behind it was a dark stain with ragged splash. As if someone’s last thoughts had burst outward and frozen on the concrete.

“Well, he really spread his mind around,” Barry tried to joke — then fell silent. It unsettled him, too.

Three more shots: chest, side, lung area. No frenzy. No panic. Not a brawl — an execution, just like at Babylon.

The mess in the room wasn’t from a struggle for life, but from life itself — the kind lived in shadow and trash. Above the bed, scratched directly into the concrete, was a crude goat’s head — Baphomet. Nearby, in a puddle of hardened wax, lay a melted candle stump and an empty gin bottle.

It looked grotesque, yet oddly routine. A satanic “ritual” here was just another part of everyday life, like drinking or fighting.

Barry stepped up to the wall and poked the goat’s head with the idle curiosity of a pathologist.

“You think he actually believed in this stuff?”

Mark shrugged. The protocol kicked in inside his head — routine, mechanical, soulless. Four shots. A neighbor heard them and called the police; the Center intercepted the call. Next step: canvassing.

Leaving Barry alone with the body and the drone, Mark stepped into the corridor. The single window on the landing didn’t illuminate so much as deepen the shadows, making them thick and bottomless. The grimy walls gleamed with old grease.

The feeling came suddenly — that something was watching him. From cracks, from peepholes, straight from the shadows crawling along the walls.

And in that silence, where every step echoed like an intrusion, he heard a whisper. Soft, female:

“Mark.”

Eliza’s voice. So close, it felt like she was standing right behind him — and then it was gone.

His heart jerked. He spun around, staring into the darkness, seeing nothing. The corridor was empty. Only the weak light from the landing and the hollow quiet of the building.

Forcing down the sudden spike of fear, Mark began checking the apartments methodically. His first knock on a door covered with torn faux leather met with a coffin-like silence. Behind the second, someone coughed dully, took a couple of steps, and froze to listen. Mark waited. Nothing.

Before he could reach for the handle of the third door, something clicked inside. Not a lock — more like the dry snap of a deadbolt. The door opened a sliver.

A girl stood in the doorway. Seventeen, perhaps. Fragile, pale, almost transparent, with a tangle of pale hair falling over her face. Dressed for a different season: short shorts, a thin T-shirt. Against the ingrained filth of the corridor, her skin looked unnaturally, painfully clean, as if she’d just been pulled out of some sterile cocoon. Thin lines curled along her arms and collarbones — fresh tattoos, more like scratches: interwoven runes, spirals, symbols Mark couldn’t decipher.

But it wasn’t the tattoos that struck him — it was her gaze. Calm. Attentive. Without the slightest trace of fear. As if she already knew who he was and why he had come. Like an acolyte greeting a priest.

“Hello,” she said, her voice clear, steady.

She stepped back just enough to open the doorway and inclined her head slightly — a gesture completely out of place here.

“I’m Angela. I’ve only been here a couple of weeks.”

Mark nodded silently, trying to make sense of the strange greeting. He had expected anything — fear, indifference — but not this ritual quiet.

“You’re...?” she began, without finishing. A strange half-question.

“No, I’m not a cop,” he said. In the Ring, people feared cops because of the shock troopers. “I’m with the Center. I’m questioning neighbors. There were shots last night — did you hear anything?”

She shook her head, pale hair shifting around her face.

“There are always noises here. Rain, footsteps in the hallway...” She paused. “Screams. Shots. You get used to it.”

She spoke evenly, as if reciting from a manual. She looked at him for several seconds, then said the last thing he expected:

“Come in.”

And again that slight tilt of the head. Not submissive — almost ritualistic, like a gesture of reverence.

Protocol said he should keep his distance from civilians. But something in her calmness, in that strange gesture, made him step across the threshold anyway. Curiosity? Or the sense that he was standing on the edge of something important, and this door was the only way in?

The room was an exact copy of the one where the body lay: the same washed-out gray, the same scraps of peeling furniture, the same stripped-down bedframe. Only here it didn’t smell of death. The air was smoke-soaked, moldy, but lived-in. On the wall opposite, drawn in heavy black marker, was a perfectly straight inverted pentagram — not a faded old scrawl, but fresh, ink still heavy on the surface.

“Sit,” she said, pointing to the bed.

Mark obeyed without thinking. And in the same instant, reality cracked.

The air halted, thickened, like water at great depth. Sounds — raindrops outside, his own breathing — stretched out, lost their edges, took on a resonant, cathedral-like echo. The room stopped being a room. It felt alive, pulsing, pressing in on him from every direction.

“Broken,” Angela said, her voice flat, almost mechanical.

“Crushed,” another voice repeated, but from somewhere behind his shoulder.

“Below,” whispered a third — thin as spider silk — from inside his head.

It was no longer she who spoke, but a whole chorus — dozens of voices, male, female, childish, all braiding into one dreadful knot. They didn’t sound; they vibrated directly inside his mind, each one brushing against his thoughts with an icy touch.

The words dripped into his consciousness like acid.

“Trampled,” she said.

“Destroyed,” he said.

“Taken,” said the others.

“Forgotten,” the rest whispered.

And from within the faceless terror — something personal, almost intimate:

“Mark, do not judge.”

He opened his mouth to say something, to shout, and a word tore out by itself. Not his word. Someone else’s.

“Chaos.”

“Chaos,” Angela answered — her voice closer, almost inside his ear.

“Chaos,” echoed inside his skull — in his own voice.

“Chaos,” she whispered, so close he could feel her breath.

“Chaos,” he answered.

And then came the last one — spoken by the chorus, spoken by him, spoken by her:

“Kill them all.”

Then silence descended. Not the absence of sound, but something dense and heavy, like a velvet shroud over the world. A silence that pressed on his eardrums and screamed louder than any voice.