The news of Elias Vance’s public neutering arrived not as a shout but as a whisper. It was a data packet, a simple text update to the station roster pushed by the Orison Call. Privileges revoked. Confined to quarters. The words were sterile, administrative. Lena Petrova read them on her private terminal, and the code felt colder than the vacuum on the other side of the hull. Clement wasn’t just punishing a dissenter. He was dismantling a weapon. He was dismantling her weapon. She had given Elias the tools, the access, the truth about Korbin. Now Clement was taking them away, one by one, with the quiet efficiency of a janitor cleaning a spill.
Her workshop, a pocket of controlled chaos in the station’s rigid, curving spine, felt smaller. The familiar scent of ozone and hot metal was suddenly cloying. She ran a diagnostic on the new raw feed, the one they had risked their lives to install on the hull. The data flowed, a silent, beautiful river of a trillion human lives. It was their only remaining advantage. A secret well of truth in a desert of faith. She had to protect it. She had to protect the path to it. Her fingers danced across the console, building a firewall around the bypass tap’s access point, burying it under layers of false directories and ghost protocols. It was a digital shell game. A prayer made of code.
The chime at her workshop door was soft, polite, and absolutely final. It was not the chime of a colleague. It was the chime of authority.
Deacon Marcus did not enter alone. He arrived with two ghosts. They wore the off-white habits of Canonist Monks, the scribes who worked in the Scriptorium, but their faces were the true uniform. Smooth, placid, and empty, courtesy of the Cognitive Anchors humming at the base of their skulls. They were the Abbot’s hands, untroubled by the things they were asked to hold. Marcus stood between them, a picture of paternal concern. The thin red stripe on his sleeve, denoting his rank, seemed to bleed into the grey of the corridor behind him.
— Lena, — he said, his voice a balm of calm reason. — A lovely morning for housekeeping.
He stepped inside. The two Canonists followed, their movements synchronized, their eyes scanning the workshop’s clutter with a serene lack of judgment. They were not looking at the mess. They were looking for heresy.
— We’re conducting a full, immediate audit of the technical department, — Marcus announced, as if discussing a routine maintenance schedule. — System integrity, doctrinal alignment. Just to ensure everything is in its proper place.
Lena felt a cold knot tighten in her stomach. This was it. Clement had cut off the head. Now he was coming for the hands. Her gaze flickered to Ana Sharma, her junior technician, who was recalibrating a sensor array in the corner. Ana’s face was pale, her eyes wide with a fear her own Anchor couldn't fully suppress. She looked from Marcus to Lena, a silent question hanging in the air between them. A question of loyalty.
Lena forced a calm, professional smile. She was a civilian contractor. A scientist. She was above their internal politics, and they all had to pretend that was true.
— Of course, Deacon, — she said, her voice betraying none of the frantic calculations screaming through her mind. She gestured to her main console. — Full transparency. Where would you like to begin?
The price of her defiance was the risk of total exposure. She had to grant them access. She had to let the wolves into the server room and pray they didn't find the hidden door to the sheep. The detection risk was not a percentage. It was a certainty if she did nothing.
The two Canonists moved with unnerving grace. They did not speak. One of them produced a data slate and connected it to her primary server rack. A diagnostic program bloomed on the main screen, a web of invasive, crawling light. It was an audit software Lena had never seen before. It was new. It was aggressive. It was designed to find her.
Marcus watched, his hands clasped behind his back. He was not a technician, but he understood power. He was here to observe the application of a tool.
— We’ve had some… signal instability recently, — he said, his eyes fixed on the screen but his words aimed at her. — Anomalies. The Abbot is concerned that our instruments may have been compromised. That they might be telling us stories other than the one we are meant to hear.
Lena kept her expression neutral. She felt Ana’s terrified gaze on her from across the room.
— My diagnostics are clean, Deacon. The Oecumene Horn is functioning at 99.8% efficiency. The signal is pure.
— Purity is a matter of interpretation, — Marcus said smoothly. — We are simply ensuring the interpretation has not been… contaminated.
Lena turned back to her own console, feigning cooperation. She brought up a system schematic, its clean blue lines a mask for the frantic activity she initiated on a partitioned, invisible segment of the screen. She was a doctor showing a patient a healthy X-ray while secretly cutting out a tumor with her other hand. She had built this system. She had built its back doors, its secret passages, its ghost accounts. Now she had to burn them. She had to burn them all before the audit software found them.
She initiated the wipe script. A single, silent command. It was a scorched-earth protocol she had designed years ago for a situation just like this. It would erase every unauthorized log, every back-door password, every trace of her and Elias’s work. It would also cripple her own ability to move freely through the system. The price of their survival was her access. She was choosing to lock herself in the house to keep the invaders from finding her secret basement.
The script began to run. There was no progress bar. No indicator. Just a quiet process eating the past. She remembered the Cracked Slate of Korbin, its fractured screen a spiderweb of broken truth. She remembered Clement shattering it on the floor of the Synod Chamber. This was the digital version of that act. An erasure. A tidying.
One of the Canonists looked up from his slate. His placid eyes met hers.
— We are detecting a recursive deletion script running in the background, — he said, his voice as flat as a readout. — Is this part of a standard maintenance cycle, Technician Petrova?
The air went thin. The hum of the server racks seemed to grow louder.
— Yes, — Lena said, her heart hammering against her ribs. — It’s a legacy script. Clears out corrupted temp files. I can pause it if it’s interfering with your scan.
She held her breath. It was a weak lie. A child’s lie. But the man’s Anchor-dampened mind was not built for suspicion. It was built for accepting authorized statements. Marcus was the authority in the room.
The Deacon looked from the monk to Lena, a flicker of something sharp in his eyes. He knew. He didn't have the proof, but he knew. He was a shepherd who could smell a wolf, even one dressed in a technician’s jumpsuit.
— Let it run, — Marcus said, his voice still unnervingly calm. He turned his attention back to the main screen. — Let’s see what’s left when the system is clean.
Lena’s fingers flew across her console, running meaningless diagnostics, creating a smokescreen of activity. The wipe script was silent, but in her mind, it was a roaring fire. It was devouring the logs of Elias’s visit to the workshop. It was eating the search queries that proved Brother Simon was an archive. It was erasing the path she had used to steal the Scriptorium access codes. Each deleted file was a small death. A memory of their rebellion turning to ash.
The Canonist at the server rack made a small, quiet sound. The audit program had finished its primary sweep. A list of directories appeared on the main screen. All of them were standard. All of them were clean. The back-door logs, the ghost accounts, the hidden partitions—they were gone. The script had finished moments before the scan reached that sector.
They had found nothing.
She had won.
The relief was a physical thing, a wave of heat that washed through her. She had done it. She had saved them.
— It appears, — Deacon Marcus said, turning away from the screen to face her, — that your systems are, as you said, perfectly clean.
His voice was still mild, but his eyes were not. The paternal warmth was gone, replaced by a cold, hard assessment. He had lost, and he knew it. But he was not finished.
— However, — he continued, — given the recent instability, the Abbot feels a second set of eyes would be beneficial. For oversight.
He gestured to Ana Sharma, who flinched as if struck.
— Technician Sharma will be assigned to monitor your work going forward. She will co-authorize all system-level commands. A measure to ensure continued transparency.
The victory turned to ash in Lena’s mouth. This was not an acquittal. It was a new kind of prison. He hadn't found her back doors, so he was putting a guard on the front door. A guard who was her friend. A guard who was terrified.
A notification appeared on her console. A system-wide permissions update. Her access level, once nearly absolute, was being downgraded. Access Level: 4. A reduction of three levels. She was being locked out of the deep system. Her own system.
— Of course, Deacon, — Lena said, her voice a dead, hollow thing. — Whatever ensures the Abbot’s peace of mind.
Marcus gave her a final, knowing smile. It was the smile of a man who had lost a battle but had just successfully encircled his enemy’s entire army. He had not found the evidence of her heresy, so he had simply taken away her ability to commit it.
— Excellent, — he said. He turned to Ana. — You have your new assignment, Technician.
Ana looked at Lena, her eyes pleading. She was being asked to be a jailer. A spy.
Marcus and the two Canonists swept out of the workshop, their job done. They left behind a silence that was heavier than any sound.
Lena’s access was gone. Her freedom was gone. She had saved the evidence of their past actions, but she had sacrificed her ability to act in the future. The rebellion was now blind. And isolated.
The air in the workshop was still and cold. The low hum of the servers was the only sound.
Clement had caged the technician. Now he would go after the flock.
