Not every rebel is born in a blaze.Some are carved from gears and ghosts — children of forgotten towers and fallen mothers.
This is Rosa's story.The girl who heard the thirteenth bell.
Present Day – Night at the Tower Hideout
The southern sky crackled with faint aurorae, like static bleeding through a curtain too thin to hold back memory.
Rosa leaned against the rusting balcony rail of the abandoned transit tower, flipping a battered silver coin between her fingers. One side was marked with a stylized cog; the other with an unfinished glyph that never quite caught the light the same way twice.
Behind her, the others slept — Lucien propped against a collapsed support beam with his hood drawn low, and Asher curled beside an oil drum fire, twitching occasionally as if dreaming of wolves.
Rosa stared out at Nocturne City.
A wound pretending to be a beacon.
The skyline flickered — neon advertisements half-functional, arc-towers casting uneven glows across rotting rooftops. Somewhere, distant music drifted from a broken radio. She hummed along, barely aware of the tune leaving her lips.
A lullaby. Or maybe a warning.
Her eyes lost focus.
And the memory came.
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Flashback: The Clocktower Girl
Before she was Rosa the saboteur, the rogue techwright, the girl who mocked fate —she was just a child in the shadow of a dying god.
Rookspire District — a place where rooftops leaned too close together and the sky looked like it was always about to fall. Towers rose like bones from a buried thing trying to claw its way free.
The Bell-Tower — the real one, not the one rebranded by tourism boards — loomed over everything. Black-steel ribbing, gearwork chimes, a face with no hands. A construct built not just to keep time, but to forget it.
Her father, Dr. Garel Mirska, was a wanted man. Not for murder. Not for theft.
For restoration.
A banned technomancer who repaired limbs, rewrote interface runes, and whispered to forgotten machines.
He never told her who her mother was. Only that she had a voice "like velvet lit on fire," and eyes that always watched the edges of mirrors.
Rosa didn't cry much as a child. But she listened.
The bells, especially.
She loved them. Each chime meant something different — not just time, but texture. A code her ears could decipher.
Twelve chimes meant another day had passed unbroken.
But that day—
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The Collapse
She was six. Sitting in the back of a supply cart loaded with copper shavings and gear-oil jars. Watching the world with soot-stained hands and a nose full of ozone.
Then —The sound.
Not twelve. Thirteen.
An extra bell that did not belong.
It rang once. Loud enough to stop birds mid-flight. Enough to silence the whole of Rookspire.
And then the tower collapsed.
Girders snapped like ribs. The massive bronze cogs that once rotated centuries of coded time fell through air like executioner's blades. The sound wasn't just metal — it was anguish.
She saw her father on the walkway.
He looked up as if he expected it.He didn't run.
She never saw him again.
She didn't cry.
Not that day.Not ever, for him.
But the bell kept ringing in her head, long after the tower was dust.
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Life on the Streets
Nocturne doesn't love its orphans.It repurposes them.
Rosa became a street-myth by age nine. The Gearrat. The Smoke Whisper. The girl who rewired city trash into drones and stole from vending machine AIs without triggering lockdown.
She moved through backdoors — both digital and real.
She formed the Ragloop Crew, a gang of lost kids who believed in her more than in gods or glyphs. They built turret-spiders from scrap and named them after dead saints. They hacked billboards to play reruns of cartoon operas while they robbed the district's food trucks.
But Rosa wasn't looking for fame. Or vengeance.
She was looking for a sound.The thirteenth bell.
And the truth buried beneath it.
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Meeting Lucien (Again)
At fourteen, Rosa caught a strange shadow trailing her through the market blocks of Ember Hollow.
He wore robes too clean for the district, but his eyes were tired.Not tired like the others. Ancient.
She pickpocketed him mid-step and left him a glyph-tag burned into the alley wall:
"Don't follow ghosts. You'll forget your own shadow."
She didn't expect to see him again.
Two years later, he returned. Half-masked. Eyes glowing faint blue.
He didn't ask for the coin back.He asked for her help.
He told her the truth:That her father wasn't building a tower.He was sealing a gate.
He'd been part of the original Bell Engineers — a faction erased from records after discovering something behind the thirteenth chime.
Something that wanted out.
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Rebellion Awakens
Rosa didn't cry. Still didn't.
But she acted.
She reprogrammed every junkbot in the district. Turned the Ragloop Crew into the spine of a new movement — the Ember Circuit. They didn't want to overthrow the city. They wanted to reboot it.
One sabotage node at a time.
Surveillance towers blacked out.
Glyph trains rerouted mid-transit.
Cultist vaults detonated from inside out.
Through it all, Rosa kept repairing broken clocks.
She never tried to rebuild the tower again.Not to hear the thirteenth bell.Only to silence it.
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Return to Present
The coin snapped upward with a flick of her scarred thumb. Spun into the cold air.
She caught it. Held it. Stared at the unfinished glyph carved into one side.
A seal. A promise. Or a mistake she still didn't understand.
Footsteps behind her.
Asher approached quietly, his breath still warm from sleep. He stood beside her, rubbing his arms against the night wind.
Asher: "Couldn't sleep?"
Rosa (softly): "Can't stop remembering."
A beat passed. He smiled.
Asher: "You were always more than the girl who flirts with death."
Rosa: "Yeah…But she flirts back sometimes."
They laughed. Not loudly. Just enough to let the ghosts know they were still here.
The city below pulsed — not alive, not dead.
Just waiting.
Waiting for someone to hear the bell again.
[End Of Chapter 104]
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Next Chapter PreviewChapter 105 – The Devil You KnowBeneath the Phantom Cathedral, Asher discovers a forgotten crypt sealed by song-glyphs — each one embedded with memory-code tied not just to Lucien, but to Asher's bloodline.And someone's waiting inside.Not a demon.Not a god.But something that remembers everything.