The air tasted of burnt plastic and victory. Ksenia was dragging Sineus by the collar of his maintenance uniform, his boots scuffing uselessly on the polymer floor. He was a dead weight, a puppet with its strings cut. A thin line of blood, black in the flashing emergency lights, traced a path from his nose to his chin. His eyes were open but saw nothing. Not this corridor, anyway. He was still somewhere else, in the place where he had shoved a splinter of glass into the world’s eye.
Zora’s shoulder was a bonfire. Every beat of her heart sent a fresh wave of fire down her arm. She ignored it. Pain was a signal, and she had more important signals to process. The wail of the alarm was dying, replaced by a deeper, structural groan. The Chorus Spire was tearing itself apart from the inside. They had maybe two minutes.
— Stairs are a death trap, — Ksenia grunted, her voice tight with effort. She was all logic, even now. — They’ll be filled with panicked staff. We need a service route.
Zora scanned the corridor. The signs were all in Ministry-approved pictograms, designed for a populace that no longer needed to read complex words. A stylized figure running from a stylized fire. A stylized figure descending in a box. Useless. Her eyes caught something else. A panel with no pictogram at all. Just a simple, metal door, its indicator light dark. It was a service lift, one not on the public schematics. Its safety protocols would have been fried in the system crash. A coffin or a chariot. A fifty-fifty chance.
"There," Zora said, her voice a raw rasp.
They half-carried, half-dragged Sineus into the metal box. The doors hissed shut, the sound of a final breath. Zora slammed her palm against the panel. For a second, nothing happened. Then, with a lurch that sent a fresh scream of agony through her shoulder, the lift began to fall. Not a smooth, controlled descent. A drop. A series of sickening jolts connected by gravity.
The walls were reinforced glass. Through them, they saw the city. Their city. The city they had just broken. It was beautiful.
It was the most beautiful thing Zora had ever seen.
Drones were falling from the sky. Not exploding, just… falling. Their flight profiles had been erased, their delicate gyroscopes suddenly forgetting which way was up. They tumbled like broken toys, smashing into the sides of arcologies with silent, unsatisfying puffs of debris. The lights on the arcologies themselves, those kilometer-high towers of perfect, placid living, were flickering. Entire sections went dark, then flared back to life in a panic of strobing colors. The city’s nervous system was having a seizure.
And the people. They were pouring out of the buildings. Not running. Not screaming. Just walking, a slow, dazed river of humanity flooding the pristine avenues. They moved like sleepwalkers, their faces turned up to the sky.
— They’re not rioting, — Ksenia said, her voice a whisper of disbelief. She was still holding Sineus up, her knuckles white.
"They don’t know how," Zora said.
The Consensus Chorus had never shown them a riot. The Autonomic Ledger, the little god under their skin, had never allowed them the anger. They were feeling a raw, unfiltered emotion for the first time in their lives, and they had no name for it. It was the cognitive dissonance of a billion souls, all realizing at once that the floor was a lie. They were just staring. Staring at the impossible wound in the sky. The Moscow Scar.
Zora leaned her head against the cool glass of the lift, the vibration of their uncontrolled descent rattling her teeth. The pain in her shoulder was a sharp, clean anchor in the chaos. It was real. This was real. She looked at the city, at the falling machines and the flickering towers and the dazed, lost people. They had done this. They had taken their comfortable, beautiful lie and smashed it to pieces.
A smile touched her lips. It was a small thing, and it probably looked ugly, stretched tight over her exhaustion and pain. It tasted like blood and ozone.
"Well," Zora said, the words barely a whisper. "We made it hurt."
Ksenia looked at her. Her face was pale, streaked with grime, but her eyes were clear. She gave a single, sharp nod. An acknowledgment. A shared understanding of the price. They had paid it. They had made them pay it.
The lift hit the ground floor with a final, bone-jarring crash. The doors buckled, then scraped open. The lobby was filled with the same dazed crowd. Ministry functionaries in their crisp uniforms stood beside sanitation workers, all staring at the wall screens that now showed only static. A low, collective moan filled the air.
They didn’t run. They walked. Ksenia on one side of Sineus, Zora on the other, a wounded, limping trinity. They moved into the river of people, and the river accepted them. They were just three more ghosts, their faces as blank and lost as theirs. Their anonymity, the thing they had fought so hard to keep, was gone forever. Sineus was now the most famous man in the world, a symbol, a messiah, a terrorist. But here, in the first few minutes of a world without its script, they were no one.
They melted into the crowd, just three more pieces of a broken world, heading for the shadows.
The war was over. The real war was about to begin.
