The Abbot’s office had been a box of wood and lies. Elias walked away from it feeling like a specimen that had just been re-labeled. Divine grace. The words were a cage painted to look like a halo. He moved through the main corridor, a curving tube of polished white composite that felt slick and false. Monks passed him, their heads bowed, but he could feel their sideways glances. He was a story now, a walking piece of scripture. The thought made his skin crawl.
He needed to get away from the clean surfaces and the quiet reverence. He needed a place where things were just what they were. A turn, another turn, and he found a narrow archway marked with a simple stenciled code: 7-Gamma. A maintenance corridor. He ducked inside. The oppressive, engineered silence of the station was replaced by something more honest. Here, the Equilibrium Hum was just a background noise, buried under the specific clicks of relays and the low, powerful thrum of a primary power conduit running along the wall.
The air smelled of warm metal and ozone. The light was a dim, functional yellow from caged utility strips. This was the station’s gut, the unbeautiful truth behind the serene face it showed its believers. He leaned against a wall of exposed pipes, the vibrations seeping into his back. He was a glitch. He was a miracle. He was a man in a hallway, and none of it made any sense. He was so lost in the competing definitions that he didn’t hear her approach.
"They don’t have surveillance in the service corridors," a voice said from the shadows.
Lena Petrova stepped into the weak light. The lead technician, the woman who measured the signal, stood with her arms crossed. Her grey jumpsuit seemed to absorb the dim light, and the fatigue on her face looked deeper here, away from the Abbot’s office. She had been waiting for him. Her presence was an answer to the question he hadn’t known how to ask.
"He called you a miracle," she said. It was a flat statement of fact.
"He called me clean," Elias corrected, the word tasting like ash.
"Same thing," Lena’s expression didn’t change. "A problem that doesn’t need to be solved. A result that can be filed away without further questions. It’s tidy."
She pushed off from the opposite wall and closed the distance between them. She held something in her hand. It was a standard data slate, dark and rectangular, but its screen was a catastrophe. A spiderweb of fractures radiated from a central impact point, turning the surface into a mosaic of black glass.
"This is a different kind of miracle," she said, holding it out to him. "This belonged to your predecessor. His name was Korbin."
Elias looked at the object. It was just a piece of broken hardware, but it felt heavier than that. It felt like a gravestone.
"He vanished," Lena’s voice was low, almost a whisper.
Elias reached out and took the slate. The immediate price of this choice was the loss of his own ignorance. He was no longer just a novitiate with a strange condition. He was now holding a dead man’s secrets. The slate was cold and solid in his hand. He ran a thumb over the fractured screen, the sharp edges of the glass a threat against his skin. He had accepted the risk. He was now part of Korbin’s story.
"Vanished?" Elias asked, his own voice sounding distant.
"One day he was running diagnostics on the Horn, asking questions about signal drift and data artifacts the Abbot had flagged as ‘noise.’ The next day, his bunk was empty. His records were sealed. Deacon Marcus told us he’d been recalled for reassignment. Nobody ever gets recalled."
She let the words hang in the humming air. The station didn’t have a prison. It had something more efficient.
"They tidy anomalies here, Elias. Things that don’t fit the story. People who ask the wrong questions."
The cracked screen of the slate in his hand seemed to darken, the fractures looking like a map of a place from which no one returned. The move toward a truth he could author himself was beginning, and it felt like stepping off a cliff in the dark. The hum of the power conduit beside him seemed to drop in pitch, a low, resonant warning.
"Why are you telling me this?" Elias asked. "Why are you giving me this?"
"Because you’re the first anomaly they can’t tidy," Lena said, her grey eyes sharp and intense. "They can’t make you disappear because the Abbot has already made you a saint. And because I’m a scientist, and I don’t believe in saints. I believe in data. You are a piece of data I don’t understand."
She took a step closer.
"I want to know why you’re immune. I want to know what’s really in the signal. That slate has Korbin’s unsanctioned research on it. His raw data logs. It’s encrypted, but I’m close to breaking it."
Here was the offer. The terms of an alliance.
"I can give you access," she said. "Back-door access to my system logs. To the raw feed, unfiltered by the Scriptorium’s engines. You can see for yourself what the Sum really is. In exchange, you let me study you. You help me solve the problem of Elias Vance."
It was a formal proposal for treason. The price was everything. His safety. His new, holy status. His life, if Korbin’s fate was any indication. But the alternative was to live as a hollow miracle, a comforting story told by someone else. A piece of taxidermy for the Abbot’s collection.
"They don’t like questions here," Lena added, her voice hardening. "They prefer prayers."
Elias looked down at the cracked slate, then back at Lena’s tired, determined face. She was offering him a choice between two kinds of faith. Faith in the Abbot’s gentle, suffocating story, or faith in the hard, sharp edges of a broken piece of glass. Faith in a truth that was given, or faith in one that had to be found.
He made his choice.
"I’ll help you," he said.
The words were quiet, but they echoed in the narrow space, a contract sealed in the station’s humming guts. Lena gave a single, sharp nod. The tension in her shoulders seemed to ease by a fraction. She had found her new research partner.
She handed him a small, metallic data chip.
"This has a secure comms channel and a one-time access key to a terminal in my workshop. Don’t use the main station network. Don’t talk to anyone. Assume everyone is a believer."
She turned and began to walk away, her form dissolving back into the corridor’s gloom.
— Lena, — he called after her.
She stopped but didn’t turn around.
— What happened to him? To Korbin?
— He found something in the static, — she said, her voice flat and distant. — Something that wasn’t supposed to be there. Don’t make the same mistake. Don’t just find something. Understand it.
She disappeared around a bend, leaving Elias alone with the thrumming power lines and the cold weight in his hand. He looked at the slate again. Its screen was dark, but he could see his own face reflected in the fractured glass, a distorted portrait of a man who had just agreed to become a ghost.
The low hum of the power conduit vibrated through the deck plates. Dust motes danced in the single beam of service light.
He would see what the dead man saw.
