Torvin’s spearpoint dipped, a grudging concession. The gesture, a slight flick of the wrist toward the main fire, was not an invitation. It was a command. Julian moved, forcing Garran’s legs into a walk that felt like a clumsy parody. Each step was a conscious calculation, an attempt to replicate a grace that was not his. He was a bad actor in a one-man play, and the audience had knives. The price of his last lie, the silent dismissal of Nia’s soul-piercing question, was this: he had to keep lying. With his whole body.
He passed the main fire, a roaring column of orange sparks against a purple sky. The faces that turned to watch him were unreadable, carved from firelight and shadow. They were Garran’s people. And Julian was a virus wearing their brother’s face. Nia fell into step beside him, her silence more unnerving than Torvin’s open hostility. She didn’t lead him to a place among the others. She guided him away, toward a larger dwelling set apart from the communal longhuts.
The air grew thick with the smell of woodsmoke and drying herbs, a scent so rich and complex it felt like a physical weight. It was the smell of a pharmacy and a kitchen and a church, all rolled into one. This was not a chief’s palace. It was a place where important things happened. It was a workshop for the soul. Nia stopped at the hide-covered entrance and looked at him. Her expression was no longer accusatory. It was something worse. It was patient. She was waiting to see what kind of monster he truly was.
Julian pushed aside the heavy flap of cured hide and stepped inside. The warmth was immediate, a blanket of dry heat from a central fire pit. The space was larger than his entire habitation pod on the Grid, circular and high-roofed. Bundles of herbs hung from the ceiling, their dark shapes casting long, dancing shadows. Along the curved wall, furs were stacked with a neatness that spoke of generations of practice. A woman sat by the fire. She did not look up when he entered.
She was old, her face a beautiful, terrifying map of a life lived without filters. Her long grey hair was woven into thick braids, threaded with polished bits of bone. She was Inara Zale, the matriarch of the tribe, a fact Julian knew with the same unearned certainty that he knew the smell of the air. Her authority was not a title displayed in an augmented reality feed. It was in the absolute stillness of her posture, in the way the fire seemed to lean toward her, offering its light. She was a different kind of system, a different kind of control.
He stood before her, a supplicant. A fraud. The silence in the dwelling was a living thing, broken only by the soft crackle and pop of the fire. Nia entered behind him, taking a position near the entrance, a silent guard. Inara Zale finally lifted her head. Her eyes were dark, and they did not reflect the firelight. They absorbed it. They were the eyes of someone who had spent a lifetime reading the truth in the flickering shadows of other people’s faces.
— Speak true, spirit-man, — she said. Her voice was low, not loud, but it filled the entire space. It was the sound of stones that had been settled for a thousand years. — If you lie, lie to yourself first so I can see it in your eyes.
The command was a spear tip pressed against his throat. He had survived Nia’s question with a gesture, a piece of stagecraft learned from watching corporate predators. That would not work here. Inara was not a peer to be bluffed. She was a fundamental law of this place. His mind, a machine built for data analysis, raced through probabilities. The truth was impossible. A full lie was suicide. He needed a third path. A lie that wore the shape of the truth.
He remembered the bleed-through, the phantom itches, the moments of shared thought in the chaos of the Pod. He remembered the ‘spirit song’ Inara had spoken of. He would build his lie from the bricks of her own belief. This was it. The choice. To stop being a passive victim of this world and become an active participant in his own deception. The price was simple: he had to kill what was left of Julian Hale and build something new in its place.
— I am… tangled, — he began, the words feeling thick and clumsy in Garran’s mouth. He let his gaze fall to the fire, a gesture of shame that was not entirely fake. — The spirit song you spoke of. It is louder now. It has a voice. It puts thoughts in my head that are not my own. It shows me memories of things I have not done.
He looked up, meeting her gaze. He was terrified. He let her see the terror, but he wrapped it in the story he was telling. He made the fear a symptom of the sickness.
— It makes me forget. My hands… they do not feel like my own. My own name sometimes feels like a word in a language I no longer speak. I am here, but I am also… elsewhere. A ghost.
He had done it. He had taken the literal truth of his situation—the signal bleed, the shared consciousness, the body dysmorphia of the swap—and repackaged it as a spiritual ailment. A sickness. It was the most important lie of his life, and it was made almost entirely of truth.
Inara Zale did not move. She did not blink. She simply watched him, her eyes two dark holes in the universe. The silence stretched, and Julian could feel his heart hammering against Garran’s ribs. He could feel the sweat on a brow that was not his. In his peripheral vision, the firelight seemed to waver, to break apart into a faint, shimmering grid of pixels. A STATIC_GLITCH. A ghost of his own world haunting him here, in this moment of judgment. He fought the urge to flinch, to look away. He had to hold the lie. He had to be the lie.
After a lifetime, Inara gave a slow, deep nod. It was the movement of a mountain settling.
— Your spirit is tangled, — she said, confirming his diagnosis. It was not a question. It was a verdict. — The song has pulled a thread from the weave. You are a man with two shadows. This is a great sickness. But it is not a lie.
Relief washed over Julian so intensely his knees almost buckled. He had done it. He had survived. He had bought time.
— You may stay, — Inara continued, her voice unchanged. — You will hunt. You will work. You will remember the shape of yourself by feeling the shape of the world. But you will not be alone.
She turned her head slightly, her gaze shifting to the figure by the entrance.
— Nia.
Nia stepped forward into the firelight. Her face was unreadable, a mask of pragmatic calm.
— He is your charge, — Inara commanded. — You will be his shadow. Guide him. Watch him. A river-runner knows a false current. If his spirit is truly tangled, you will help him smooth the waters. If he is a whirlpool lying still, you will know.
The price of his survival landed on him like a physical blow. He was not free. He was on probation. He had traded the sterile, algorithmic cage of the Grid for a living, breathing one named Nia. He had an ally who was also his warden. He had a guide who was also his judge. It was a better cage. But it was still a cage.
Nia looked at him. The raw suspicion from before was gone, replaced by something more complex. A duty. A burden. And beneath it all, a flicker of intense, analytical curiosity. She was looking at him not as an imposter, but as a puzzle she had been assigned to solve. The relationship had been defined. She was the watcher. He was the watched. This was where their story, whatever it was going to be, would truly begin.
The fire crackled, spitting a small ember onto the packed-earth floor. The scent of burning cedar filled the air.
