The placid calm was a cage, and Elias Vance was rattling the bars inside his own skull. The Cognitive Anchor at the base of his neck hummed a warm, gentle lullaby, trying to sing his anger to sleep. It was a comfortable feeling. It was the most terrifying thing he had ever experienced. He had to get to the Infirmary. He had to get to Brother Simon. The thought was a sharp point of glass in a world of soft cloth.
He pushed himself off his sleeping pallet. The choice to move was a physical effort, like wading through thick syrup. The Anchor wanted him to stay. It wanted him to accept his confinement, to see the sterile white walls of cell 4B as a kindness. The price of leaving was the risk of immediate capture, of a trial that would not be a show. But the price of staying was to dissolve into this warm, smiling nothingness. He chose the risk. He chose the cold floor under his bare feet.
The corridor was empty. It was lit by the low, yellow maintenance glow of the station’s night cycle. The silence was different now. It was not the respectful quiet of contemplation. It was the drugged, heavy silence of a hospital ward. The recalibration had worked. The station was asleep on its feet. His footsteps made no sound on the composite deck. He was a ghost moving through a house of ghosts. The detection risk was a low, steady hum in his gut, a 30% chance that a single, wakeful eye would spot him. A gamble.
He kept to the service conduits where he could, the station’s warm, metallic guts. The air here smelled of ozone and grease, a scent of reality in a world of perfumed lies. He thought of the Cracked Slate, the one Clement had shattered. Its fractured screen had shown a broken truth. Now the station was seamless again, its own cracks plastered over with manufactured peace. He was the only crack left.
The door to the Infirmary slid open with a soft hiss. The air that greeted him was wrong. The usual smell of antiseptic was there, but it was too clean. It was the smell of a room that had been scrubbed, not a room that was in use. The faint, underlying scent of sickness and sweat was gone.
He stepped inside. The room was a sterile white circle, just as he remembered. The soft puffs of ventilators and the chime of biometric monitors were gone. There was only the deep, steady Equilibrium Hum of the station’s life support. It was the sound of a machine breathing for a body that was no longer there.
The beds were empty.
All eight of them. They were arranged in their neat, clinical circle, but they were stripped. The thin thermal blankets were gone. The mattresses were bare, their white surfaces glowing under the diffuse light. The Oracles were gone. Brother Simon was gone. Clement had not just confined his enemies. He had tidied his evidence. The information was lost. This was the cost of his defiance, a price paid in the currency of erased truth. The axis of his world tilted, a hard, sickening lurch toward the Abbot’s manipulated faith. There was nothing left to find here.
He stood in the center of the empty room, a man looking for a library that had been burned to the ground. They were gone. All of them. The last living archives of unfiltered human history, removed. Wiped from the public record as easily as a line of code. The station was now a book with all the difficult pages torn out.
Footsteps.
The sound was sharp in the corridor outside. The rhythmic slap of magnetic-soled boots on the deck. Two sets. Moving with the unhurried purpose of a security patrol. They were close. Maybe a minute away. A cold spike of real, unfiltered fear pierced the Anchor’s warm blanket. He had to move.
He ducked back from the doorway, pressing himself into the shadows of the corridor. The footsteps grew louder. He held his breath, his heart a frantic drum against the placid hum in his skull. He was caught. It was over.
Then he saw it. Down a side corridor, one rarely used for anything but maintenance droids, a gurney was being pushed by a single, grim-faced orderly. On the gurney, lying perfectly still, was a body covered by a plain grey sheet. But the sheet had slipped. A hand, thin and pale, dangled over the side. It was Brother Simon.
Elias moved without thinking. He slipped down the side corridor, a shadow chasing a ghost. The orderly was focused on his path, his face a mask of tired indifference. The guards were still in the main corridor, their footsteps receding. A final, impossible chance.
He drew level with the gurney. He reached out, his hand hovering over Simon’s. He just needed one more word. One more fragment. One more piece of the broken truth.
— Brother Simon, — he whispered, his voice a dry rasp.
Simon’s eyes, wide and unfocused, did not move. He was lost in the Anamnesis Maze, a passenger in a billion other lives. But then, something happened. The thin hand twitched. It shot out, impossibly fast, and grabbed Elias’s wrist. The grip was like iron. It was the grip of a drowning man.
For a single, terrifying second, Simon’s eyes focused. They looked directly at Elias. The chaos in them was a storm, but at its center was a point of clear, desperate intelligence. The Oracle was acting. He was not a passive receiver. He was a sender.
— North pier, — Simon whispered, his voice a dry crackle of static. The words were urgent, forced out with the last of his will. — Page twenty.
The orderly turned, his face startled. He saw Elias. He saw Simon’s grip.
— Here! — the orderly shouted. — In the service corridor!
The guards’ footsteps changed direction, now pounding toward them. The orderly grabbed Simon’s arm, trying to pull it away.
— Let go of him! — the orderly grunted, shoving Elias back.
The grip on his wrist vanished. The focus in Simon’s eyes dissolved back into the storm. The connection was broken. Elias stumbled backward, melting back into the shadows of the corridor just as the two guards rounded the corner. He didn’t wait to see if they had seen his face. He ran.
The hum of the station felt steady and deep. The air tasted of recycled oxygen and ozone.
He had to find Lena.
