The Artifact [Varnava]

[Josiah]

Somewhere along the way, he lost himself. Or rather not himself, but the fractions of reality that surrounded him. He and Varnava sat together on their couch, a rare moment for the cushions that welcomed them. The defined shape of his boyfriend's leg made him push his own against him just that little bit more. A comfort.

He watched him. His warm voice held Josiah still, fixated. Varnava's mouth gave shape to the enthusiastic thoughts in his head, interrupted only by the sneaks of an offhanded smile that made itself aware every other moment. He knew that tone; hopeful, but with a hollowed-out place in the back of his mind that reserved the right to say, "I knew it," when the other shoe finally dropped. Ever optimistic, but never naively so.

"You're thinking about it again," Varnava said. He didn't ask. The corners of his eyes held the smile where his mouth didn't, a hidden amusement. "That company you were talking about?"

Josiah smiled too. The urge swelled in him to look away, but he maintained. "I won't anymore," he promised. A heartfelt lie quieted by Varnava reaching across to take his hand and assure him it was fine. He squeezed his fingers and flattened their palms against one another. His skin was neither cold nor warm, only static with living memory of every other time their fingers had played this game.

The filled walls of their apartment had started replacing the stone caverns of the abandoned sewers more frequently. Glimpses of patrols and waypoints could be seen from their view, high above the quarantined city. The less they were out in it, Varnava had reasoned, the less suspicion they would draw. While vampires weren't moving through the streets with freedom anymore, something was: an artifact called the Healing Vambrace. The longer Josiah searched for it, the more walls he came up against in every database he mined for information until finally a dead-end.

It all came to a stop at one business called Canadian Spring Technologies, a company that touched on the metaphysical, promoting natural healing with pure spring water detox. Its selling point came through quantum physic explanation surrounding the correlation of positive thinking with natural water structure both inside and outside of the body.

A fancy pricetag for hydration.

For all he knew, it could have been a scam; the product, the proposed result, the interest in the "healing vambrace," all of it. All that was certain to Josiah was the answer remained hidden behind security lock after security lock. He'd seen them, the lengths that someone was willing to go to protect this artifact.

He could see the measures, the long scrawl of code preventing him or any other hacker from getting so much as a glimpse at where this thing was. He could sense that he was close...

Heat spread through the back of his neck without warning. The comfort of home blurred, lost focus, and disappeared entirely behind a computer's interface, a superimposed image that burned itself across the walls, across Varnava, and the windows showcasing the freckled night sky. He tightened his grip on Varnava's hand. He used the touch as an anchor point to ground himself, while his mind seemed desperate to abandon everything, even consciousness.

A myriad of numbers overtook him. That warm, gentle voice he'd clung to gave way to the rhythmic ticking of white noise like a ceiling fan kicked up to high speed.

Canadian Spring Technologies

Somewhere in their database, he would find what he was looking for. His muscles began to relax. The coding of his scripts was as familiar to him as his own name, as his favorite piece of art. They guided him along, navigating toward the administration node. He pushed through.

Level 1

Level 2

Level 3

The hollow twist of code untangled and took shape. Instead, binary matrices shaped the "halls" of the database to the last stretch. System alerts rang in his head, desperately trying to triangulate his location and shut him out. He silenced them, confused the code to let him pass.

Level 4

Level 5

Level 6

The database bottomed out. When he could go no deeper, he scoured the adjacent nodes. Emails, accounts, customers, programs... Reports...

"I found it," he heard himself say. The barrier of deciphered code fell away, disconnected. He closed his eyes to refocus. "I found the location. We have to go get it."