The access to below was not dramatic.

No sealed door stamped with ancient warnings, no armed cordon, no modern barrier. It was a service corridor behind an administrative block, where the network of underground infrastructure for the living, breathing capital of Orvas V gave way through a door and a stairway to passages older than memory.

Luroth stood at the top, and did not look down the stairwell for long. ‘These ruins have been simply… beneath our priorities. The city has grown and regrown over it for generations. Archaeologists occasionally fight city planners to study it, but… understand, our past is not a mystery. It is simply not relevant any more.’ His eyes flickered across the three of them; Airex, Cortez, Thawn. ‘There are guided tours through the upper levels. School groups. History enthusiasts. They do not go to these deeper levels.’

‘Because it’s unsafe?’ Cortez asked, peering down the tunnel with an engineer’s eye for structure, peril.

‘Largely, because it is a long walk to see ruins which look much the same as the ones much closer,’ Luroth said with a shrug.

Largely, Airex thought. He had learned over the last weeks that the Orvas did a good line in acting as if the mysterious, the unknowable, that which could not be easily quantified, was simply beneath their attention. Perhaps that was why a spiritualist group of extremists under the sway of a godlike telepathic being had managed to grow so fiercely.

He took the first steps down. The lights above them faded as the stairwell was left behind, and the air changed to grow cooler and more humid, carrying the faint tang of stone and staleness.

They descended past the point where the city’s maintenance lights stopped and their flashlights became the only illumination, though they could not quite banish the darkness between pillars. The stairs led to a corridor of carved masonry, and here, at least, there were signs of modern support, reinforcement and struts that kept the tunnels intact.

Luroth had not joined them, so it was by studying his PADD of the maps provided that Airex could gesture to another stairwell down.

‘There. That’s the way,’ he said, waving his torch before he tapped his combadge. ‘Airex to Valance. We’re moving into the ruins proper now.’

Valance’s voice came back level and low. ‘All still up here. Keep us updated.’

‘There’s no guarantee,’ Cortez said with a taut anxiety, ‘that our comms will work if we’re about to tinker with Vezda tech. We might go dark.’

‘Understood. We don’t –’ A distant sound, a rumble. Shouting in the background. Then Valance was calling, barking instructions, and the three members of the away team exchanged wide-eyed looks in the chaotic, noisy uncertainty.

When Valance’s voice came back to them, the background had not abated. ‘There was just a detonation on the rail line. It’s starting up here. Finish it down there. Valance out.’

In the gloom, Thawn looked paler. ‘Even if everything down here goes as brilliantly as we can dream,’ she said, ‘that shouldn’t affect the Ashen Path going on a rampage.’

‘You never know,’ said Cortez, voice forcibly light. ‘We might get lucky. Maybe this is the “off” switch for a pack of crazy extremists.’

Airex said nothing, sharing Thawn’s opinion more but not wanting to feed the anxiety. There was nothing they could do about above. Their concern was below. He led them deeper into the catacombs.

The corridors here began to turn and change. It was like sliding through centuries as he saw the work of different hands with different tastes over different epochs. The walls bore old markings, but they were the scarring of tools, not ritual warning.

Cortez’s tricorder chirped softly as she walked, its screen adding a distracting beam of vertical light. ‘There’s composition variance in the stone,’ she murmured. ‘Not natural. I’d have to run deeper scans to figure out what.’

Nobody, not even Cortez, stopped to run those scans.

Airex felt Thawn shudder behind him, and he glanced over his shoulder, unsettled not merely by the reaction, but that a telepath shared the exact uncertainty he felt. ‘You’re picking something up.’

‘It’s like… the memory of feeling,’ Thawn replied in that uncertain tone she used when trying to describe telepathy. ‘Enough pain and suffering somewhere can leave a telepathic echo, particularly if there’s been manipulation of psionic energy, which is what we’re expecting here. Fear. Terror.’

‘And now?’ Airex felt his skin prickle.

‘Now it’s like standing near a place where people used to scream, and if you listen hard enough, you can hear them.’

Cortez glanced forward, face tight above the tricorder screen light. ‘Great. Love that. Super reassuring, Rosara.’

Ahead, the passage opened into a vast chamber carved from the same dark stone as the tunnels, but the markings stopped being the precision of engineering and became the intention of display. The walls were etched with dense bands of script and unfamiliar sigils, layered over each other, cut deep but worn smooth with age. Between them ran shallow channels in the stone, faintly luminous, pulsing in a slow, deliberate rhythm.

At the far end rose a plinth of etched, dark stone, gleaming script embossed out of the rock, both unfamiliar and yet matching enough of what Airex had seen in records to steal his breath. A match for the images taken at Vadia IX, at Skygowan.

A construction of the Vezda.

‘The heart,’ he murmured.

The sigils brightened fractionally in answer, as if in time with their breathing.

Cortez picked up her jaw and looked at her tricorder. ‘The Orvas didn’t freak out that this place glows?’

‘It probably didn’t, last time anyone who’d report anything was down here,’ said Thawn, speaking as if to talk too loud would bring disturbance as she gingerly advanced. ‘But a lot’s happened since then. ‘Kavel, Varnir, the other builders. The Ashen Path.’

‘It’s been fuelled,’ said Cortez, still stabbing at her tricorder. ‘Whatever this thing was meant to do, it’s running hot.’

Airex didn’t answer, his eyes locked on the heart. It was stone, cut by hands, by minds, by belief. Scripture that was more than spirituality or decoration, with each band of writing spiralling, intersecting, repeating. He caught glimpses of languages he knew in there, languages that could not have been known by Orvas crafters, and in the channels between them, a dull light gleamed like a slow, steady pulse.

He took a step closer without meaning to.

Thawn stopped dead, hand half-raised as if she had to push against something, the colour drained from her face. ‘Dav.’ Her voice was thin, urgent, and the fact she’d dropped rank was perhaps more startling than anything else in this place. ‘Don’t -’

He didn’t turn. ‘I’m not touching it.’

Cortez frowned again at her tricorder. ‘It’s reacting to something. Could be our EM emissions -’

‘Or what’s happening on the surface has begun,’ Thawn said sharply. ‘Is fuelling it.’

‘Or,’ Airex breathed, ‘it’s reacting to us.’

Then his knees buckled, and for a second he thought he’d blacked out. Except he was still upright, with the chamber spinning around him, contracting and expanding in time with the sense of pressure, like a hand closing around his brain. Not crushing, not painful, but intimate, as if fingers were testing the shape of a lock.

Stars exploded in front of his eyes as if he’d taken a blow to the head, but slow, spiralling, spilling out before him, and other images rushed to fill in the space between them. People – Orvas? – gathered in circles around plinths like this one, faces upturned, eyeless sockets pouring with blood. And behind it all, that same pressure and presence.

So much noise. So much suffering. So generous.

They weren’t words so much as impressions, but they were more powerful, more real than what he knew was going on around him – Thawn yelling, Cortez knelt beside the plinth, both moving and speaking and doing something, and yet so far –

Airex’s breath hitched as he tried to lock down his thoughts, the way he’d trained around telepaths. But when the unfathomable and unknowable changed, that brought small comfort. He could block these images from the outside, these memories that weren’t his.

Which left the memories that were.

Faces, erupting before him like a nightmare more vivid than any he had known. First, the regrets of two centuries of life, of those loved, lost, left behind, failed. Then the inevitable: then everyone Lerin had hurt.

You would have been a fine supplicant. A master of pain, in your own way.

Cortez was barking instructions at Thawn now, the two clustered around her tricorder. If they’d been trying to reach him, they’d given up for now, their attention on the plinth.

Then it was like he could hear a voice, and Airex nearly choked when he recognised it as Jack Logan.

You don’t get to walk away from what you were.

Logan, on his knees in the facility, screaming – but was that even Logan, then? Or was he dead by then?

Trust me. I know.

Logan, in Sickbay, eyeless and bloodied, pinning Kharth against the bulkhead by the throat.

Even though you’re damn good at walking away.

Kharth, younger, her face turning hard when he’d told her he had to leave, that he’d been selected, that he’d been chosen. Then her face years later, seeing him – seeing Airex – for the first time.

I can trust you to do your job. But I can’t trust you with me. You, Dav, not Lerin.

The world spun underfoot, the chamber rushing away from his senses, from his awareness, and the presence shifted. As if a hand was placed on his shoulder. Warm, companionable.

Vice-like.

‘Not the person you hurt the most,’ drawled Jack Logan, stood among nothing but his pain. ‘But the one you hurt an’ loved. The one you gotta face every day.’

He couldn’t lash out, couldn’t push the hand away, because it wasn’t real. ‘I’m going to destroy you, you psychic parasite –’

‘Destroy me?’ The eyeless shade of Jack Logan scoffed. ‘Talk about your god complex, Dav. Problem is?’ A shrug. ‘I’m a god.’

And before him rose the streets of Orvas V. The capital in chaos. Smoke rising from somewhere unseen. Shouting. Running footsteps. A flash of a rail line, twisted, broken. A scream cut short. The smell of burning insulation, the taste of blood that wasn’t his.

The people he loved embroiled in the heart of it. Valance. Kharth.

She’ll never forgive you. And you’ll watch her die. And carry those memories for another few centuries.

Because you’re always somewhere else when it matters.

At last his mouth opened, not to threaten any more, but to bargain, to beg, to do anything –

– and Thawn hit his mind like a shield.

Not in a wave of gentle protection, not like wrapping a telepathic blanket around him, but a Betazoid shove, hard and desperate, a blunt-force intrusion that snapped him half into himself.

‘No.’ Thawn’s voice was a rasp, and the real world snapped back into place. He saw her, hair and eyes wild, facing him as behind her, Cortez rose to her feet, backing away from the plinth. ‘You do not surrender to it.’

As he blinked, she turned back to the heart – and froze. The chamber’s pulse surged. Brightened.

And Cortez grabbed them both. ‘We go. Now.’

Airex staggered. ‘We’re not -’

‘We gotta go.’

He was too weakened from the telepathic onslaught to fight, to do anything but help grab Thawn, help Cortez drag her from the chamber. They staggered and stumbled in grim retreat, tumbling out into the darkened corridor, and though the pressure in his skull faded, though, as they ran, Thawn’s gait grew steadier and steadier, the sick sense in his gut only grew.

They had been unprepared. And they had failed.

Cortez dragged them around the first hard turn and shoved them down onto cold stone.

‘I’m sorry,’ Airex gasped, slumped against the wall. ‘I couldn’t… it got in my head…’

Cortez was swearing, fumbling for her tricorder, but Thawn looked up at him with huge, dark eyes.

‘It’s not just a Vezda,’ she breathed. ‘I felt it, Dav – I’d felt it before. We’ve felt it before.’ A quiver ran through her that he could feel in his bones, the last vestiges of the connection from the barrier, and he knew and understood before she even said it. ‘It’s not just a Vezda. It’s the Veilweaver.’

The entity they’d encountered over a year ago, deep in the spinward reaches of old Romulan space. An imprisoned telepathic power they had freed.

That had nested in the hulk of the facility that launched the fissure, nearly destroyed a whole sector.

That had killed Jack Logan.

That was going to rip Orvas apart.

‘We couldn’t stop it,’ Airex breathed. ‘Not then, not now.’

‘What are you two fucking talking about?’ snapped Isa Cortez, brandishing her tricorder, thumb hovering over a single control. ‘Get your damn heads down!’

Then she triggered the explosives.