The Fifth Step
By Ridley Longsworth
The tunnels beneath the city always smelled of dust, metal, and secrets. Lira moved through them like a shadow, her patched coat brushing the damp walls, her boots soundless against the concrete. In her bag, a thin bundle wrapped in oilcloth—a copy of The Old Histories, one of the last known to exist. Worth a fortune to the right buyer. Worth her life if caught.
She paused at a junction, pressing her hand to the stone. The vibration told her what her ears couldn’t—footsteps above, slow and deliberate. Patrols. The Ministry’s Seekers.
She waited. Counted the seconds. Mapped their rhythm.
Five steps ahead, always five.
Once, long ago, she hadn’t been quick enough. The orphanage walls had closed in like iron jaws—rules, punishments, the Director’s shouts. She’d escaped by crawling through a drain pipe in the dead of winter, lungs burning, heart promising never again. Never trapped. Never caught.
A soft buzz in her earpiece broke her thoughts.
“Lira? You there?”
The voice was cracked, old static—Jett, her contact.
“I’m here.”
“Change of plans. Client’s dead. Ministry raided the docks.”
Lira swore under her breath. “Then why am I still carrying this thing?”
There was a pause. Then, quieter: “Because I found something else. A name. From the old orphanage records.”
Her breath caught. “Don’t play with me.”
“It says Mira Pell. Transferred to Facility Nine. Alive.”
For a long moment, all she could hear was her own heartbeat—fast, sharp, disbelieving. Her sister’s name. After all these years.
“Send me the coordinates,” she said finally.
“Lira, that place—”
“Send them.”
The route to Facility Nine took her beyond the city’s grid, past the neon hum of the towers and into the ruins where silence was law. Along the way, she bartered pages for passage, stories for shelter—each trade a small erosion of the walls she’d built to stay unseen. Every step closer to Mira felt like walking into light, and she hated the hope that came with it.
When she finally reached the facility, dawn was bleeding through the clouds. The gates were rusted, the walls half-collapsed. But the locks—the locks were new.
Inside, she found rooms full of broken machinery and ash. The ghosts of experiments past. And in the lowest level, a flicker of life—a generator still humming, feeding a single cryo-chamber.
Through the frost-covered glass, a girl. Pale. Sleeping.
Her reflection stared back at her—lean frame, messy hair, eyes ringed with exhaustion. For a heartbeat, she couldn’t tell which one was real.
“...Mira?” she whispered.
A voice behind her answered instead.
“You shouldn’t have come.”
She spun. A Seeker stood in the doorway, gun leveled, his uniform gleaming with the Ministry’s insignia.
“We kept her alive because she’s valuable,” he said. “You can walk away, Lira. Stay invisible. Like you always do.”
She looked once more at her sister—and then at the book in her bag. The Old Histories. The truth no one wanted known.
“Not anymore,” she said.
And for the first time in years, she didn’t think five steps ahead.
She just moved.
When the explosion lit up the morning sky, the city’s alarms screamed awake. And in the ruins outside the city, two figures walked together beneath the breaking dawn. One limping, one weak but alive. Lira didn’t look back. She’d lost everything she’d built to survive.
But for once, that meant she was finally free.
