The world outside the fold was a silent, warped film. Through the shimmering distortion, Jian Li watched the Geometric Union patrol march past, their stark white Certainty Frames a violent slash of order against the bruised purple twilight of the Exclusion Zone. They moved with a rhythmic, mechanical crunch, oblivious to the two figures hidden just twenty meters to their left in a pocket of stable reality. The soldiers were not navigating the chaos; they were paving it over, extruding a temporary, perfectly flat path of solid ground that erased itself behind them. It was the philosophy of his former faction made manifest: a forced, sterile line drawn across a living page.
He felt a cold certainty settle in his gut. He had made the right choice to flee. That rigid, unthinking order was a prison far more absolute than any physical wall. It was a cage for the mind, and he had spent his entire life trying to sing his way out of it.
Anja Farid stood beside him, her stillness a stark contrast to his own coiled tension. She was not watching the patrol. Her gaze was fixed on the chaotic landscape beyond them, her head tilted as if listening to a conversation he could not hear. She was a part of this place, attuned to its unpredictable flows. He was just a trespasser with a clever machine.
The patrol was slow, methodical. They had time. Acting on an instinct born of years of Union training—gather data, always gather data—Jian unclipped the data slate from his belt. The small device, a standard-issue Union tool, felt alien in his hands now. He activated its passive scanner, a simple function for sweeping local communications traffic. It was a long shot, but the patrol might be broadcasting tactical updates. The price was a small drain on his precious energy reserves, but ignorance was a luxury he could not afford.
The slate’s screen remained dark for a long moment, showing nothing but the faint, grating background noise of the zone. Then, it chimed softly. It had not found a tactical channel. It had intercepted a high-priority, system-wide broadcast, a leak from the Union’s supposedly secure network. The signal was strong, originating from the neutral city of Heliopolis.
A voice, polished and devoid of all emotion, filled the small, still space of the fold. It was the voice of a Union news anchor, the sound of manufactured certainty.
— …repeating this top story. An emergency session of the Sisyphan Directorate has been convened in Heliopolis.
Jian’s breath caught in his throat. The Sisyphan Directorate was the powerless official government, a bureaucratic ghost that existed only to rubber-stamp the inevitable. An emergency session was almost unheard of.
— The topic, according to our sources, is the unsanctioned reality-stabilization event in Neutral Agricultural Zone 7, and the subsequent identification of the rogue composer, Jian Li, as the source of the anomalous broadcast.
The words hit him like a physical blow. Rogue composer. He was no longer just a fugitive. He was a headline. His secret work, his desperate act to save a few lives, had become a planetary political crisis. The weight of it was crushing, a sudden and immense responsibility that stole the air from his lungs. He was a variable in an equation he had no power to solve.
He glanced at Anja. Her eyes were wide, her placid expression finally broken by a look of dawning, fearful comprehension. She was no longer looking at a simple survivor, a man she had pulled from a wreck. She was looking at a figure of immense, terrifying importance. The man whose music had made the whole world stop and listen.
The patrol was finally out of sensor range. The rhythmic crunch of their boots faded, swallowed by the zone’s ambient hum. The immediate physical threat was gone, but a far larger one had taken its place.
— We should move, — Anja’s voice was a low whisper, pulling him back from the precipice of his shock.
She pushed against the shimmering wall of the fold, and they stepped back out into the open. The air of the Exclusion Zone was a tangible thing, thick with the taste of ozone and the smell of damp, organic decay. The quiet stillness of their hiding place was gone, replaced by the constant, low-grade hum of a world at war with its own laws. The price of leaving their sanctuary was the return to that pervasive, unnerving noise.
Jian looked down at the data slate in his hand. The announcer’s voice was gone, but the words echoed in his mind. A crisis. A political firestorm centered on him. The leaders of the Union and the Hunter-Gatherers would be focused on Heliopolis, locked in a battle of words and influence, each trying to claim him as their asset or their prophet. They would be arguing, maneuvering, posturing.
They would be distracted.
A slow smile touched Jian’s lips, chasing the shadow of fear from his face. He saw it then, a path opening where a moment before there had been only a wall. The chaos of politics, the rigid machinery of statecraft, was just another system. And like any system, it had flaws. It had blind spots.
The immediate physical threat was gone, but the air in the fold, still and cool, now felt charged with a new and far greater danger.
The crisis that named him a target now offered them a path.
