The plan was not escape. The plan was liberation. Elias stood in the flickering yellow emergency light of the corridor, a ghost returned from a country of screaming ghosts. He looked at Lena Petrova, her face smudged with grime and fierce with purpose. He looked at Ana Sharma, the junior technician, a woman who had just broken a world to save a person. They were a rebellion of three. It would have to be enough.
— We take the Choir, — Elias said. His voice was a quiet, scraped thing, the echo of what it had been. — We take it now.
Lena nodded, her mind already racing through schematics and protocols. The blackout she had been waiting for was a weapon, but it was a clumsy one. Power would be rerouted. Security would adapt. Their window was measured in minutes. She pointed down the service corridor.
— There’s a fire control panel two sections over, — she said, her voice low and rapid. — I can trigger a level-two alarm in the central hub. It’s a lie, but the evacuation protocol is automated. It will clear the area around the Choir.
— How long? — Elias asked.
— Three minutes, — Lena answered. The price of the lie was time. Three minutes before a thinking person in a control room overrode the machine. — After that, they’ll know where we are.
Ana Sharma, who had been a watcher her whole life, spoke. Her voice was a tremor, but it was there. — The Orison Call. The Abbot will use it to countermand the alarm, to tell everyone to stay put.
— Can you stop it? — Elias looked at her, and for the first time, he saw not a frightened girl but a fellow saboteur.
— There’s a local network node near the hub junction, — Ana said, the words gaining speed as the idea took shape. — I can sever its connection to the main broadcast system. I can jam it. He’ll be shouting into a dead channel.
— Good, — Elias said. He thought of the Abbot’s calm, paternal voice, the sound that had wrapped the station in a comfortable cage. — Clement’s voice is the first thing that needs to go.
They moved. Not like soldiers, but like tired engineers with a job to do. Lena led them through the maze of service corridors, the air thick with the smell of burnt insulation from Ana’s sabotage. The station was a wounded animal, its placid hum replaced by a chorus of confused alarms and distant, panicked shouts. Elias saw the memory of the Cracked Slate of Korbin, the way it had shattered on the floor of the Synod Chamber. Clement had broken the proof. He had not broken the truth.
Lena stopped at a small, unmarked panel. She pried it open and her fingers danced across a touch-screen. A moment later, a new alarm blared through the station, this one higher, more insistent. Red lights began to strobe, painting the yellow gloom in frantic, alternating patterns. Through a grate in the floor, Elias could see the main concourse below. Monks in their off-white habits were moving in orderly lines toward the designated safety zones, their faces placid and unquestioning, their Cognitive Anchors muffling their fear into a dull, manageable hum. They were following the rules, even when the rules were a lie.
— Go, — Lena said, pulling the panel shut. — Ana, you’re on the node. We’ll meet you at the Choir entrance.
Ana nodded, her face pale but her eyes resolved, and disappeared into a side passage. She was moving to silence a god. Elias and Lena pressed on, emerging from the service corridor into the grand, circular hub that ringed the Choir. It was empty. The evacuation had worked. The red strobes cast long, dancing shadows that made the architecture itself seem to panic.
They reached the main entrance to the Choir, a perfect circle of seamless metal in the wall. Ana was already there, her datapad connected to a port on the wall by a thin fiber-optic cable. The serene, genderless voice of the Orison Call was in the middle of a sentence.
— …maintaining calm. Await further instruction. All personnel, maintain—
The voice cut out. Not into static, but into a profound, sudden nothing. The silence it left behind was heavier than any sound. Ana pulled the cable from the port, her knuckles white. She had done it. She had gagged the shepherd. The price of that silence was treason, a cost she had finally decided to pay.
— It’s done, — she whispered.
Elias looked at the door to the Choir. This was the room where he had been sentenced to die. Where his mind had been unwritten. He was returning to the scene of the crime, but this time he was not the victim. He was the weapon. He pushed the door control. It hissed open, revealing the spherical chamber, the single listener’s chair, the great, dark bell of the Oecumene Horn hanging in the center. It was all lit by the same ugly, yellow emergency glow.
He led them inside. The air was cold, still carrying the faint, sharp smell of ozone from his own ordeal. He walked to the central platform, his boots making no sound on the grated floor. He looked at the chair, at the restraints Lena had freed him from. He remembered the storm of the Sum, the feeling of his self dissolving. He remembered finding that single, hard point of will. He was a thing made of pieces now, and that was all right. It was true.
Lena moved to the master control console, her fingers flying across the surface. 'Sealing the doors,' she said, her movements economical and sure. 'Now.'
A deep groan echoed through the chamber as the heavy blast doors slid shut. A final, booming clang sealed them in. They were in a fortress. Or a tomb. The strobing red lights from the corridor were gone, leaving only the steady, sickly yellow. They were alone with the machine that spoke to ghosts.
Lena turned from the console, her face a mask of grim purpose. She looked at Elias, then at the Oecumene Horn. They had the means. They had the will. They had seized the heart of the station. The great bell hung silent in the center of the room. The air tasted of static and resolve.
Now, they would make the whole world listen.
