The Sobbing Gallery of Kintsugi was not a place of quiet reverence. It was a wound in the fabric of the Grid, a permanent Bleed Zone where the city’s physical reality and its psychic counterpart, the Echo, were locked in a state of perpetual, weeping collision. Silja Valis and Orina Cassel moved through its main hall, the air thick with the smell of damp stone, ozone, and a cloying, floral scent like funeral wreaths left to rot.
Statues of forgotten Pinnacle founders lined the hall, their polished chrome faces streaked with moisture. These were tangible tears, a physical manifestation of the sorrow that saturated the psychic topology of the place. The moisture dripped from their unblinking eyes, running in dark rivulets down their sterile forms to pool on the marble floor. Each drop landed with a soft, mournful chime.
Orina flinched at the sound, pulling her thin Pinnacle tunic tighter around herself. The ambient psychic stress was a physical weight, a pressure behind her eyes that made her feel dizzy and sick.
— It’s just psychic residue, — Silja said, her voice low and steady. She held her Phase Calibrator, a heavy tool of dulled chrome and hardened polymer, its screen glowing with a steady green wireframe map of the unstable space. — Don’t let it get to you. We’re here for the data trail.
Orina nodded, trying to focus. The ghost of Aris Madden had led them here. Its lyrical code was a faint, singing thread on her own datapad, a beacon in the oppressive gloom.
— It’s stronger this way, — Orina whispered, pointing toward a side gallery where the air seemed to shimmer.
They had taken less than twenty steps when a series of heavy, resonant thuds echoed through the museum. It was not the sound of the weeping statues. It was the sound of magnetic locks engaging on every exit. Ten of them, sealing every door and window.
Silja’s head snapped up. She checked the wireframe on her Phase Calibrator. Red lines, stark and absolute, now blocked every path on her map.
— Perimeter is sealed, — she said, her voice tight. — We’re trapped.
Outside, ten security agents in the sterile white tactical gear of the Board of Consensus took up positions. They moved with a silent, synchronized efficiency, instruments of a single will. They did not need to enter. Their orders were to contain.
— Rhys, report, — Silja spoke into her comm unit, her knuckles white on the calibrator.
Miles away, but with a direct line of sight to the museum’s exterior, Rhys Marko sat in the command couch of his Husk-Frame. The hulking machine stood motionless in a derelict plaza, a forgotten giant among crumbling office blocks.
— I see them, — Rhys’s voice crackled back, calm and professional. — Ten agents, standard formation. They’re boxing you in. No physical breach possible without a firefight.
— We don’t do firefights, — Silja stated. It was a core tenet of the Synchronists. They were not soldiers trying to win a war; they were surgeons trying to heal a dying world. Violence was just another symptom of the system’s decay.
— I know, — Rhys replied. He looked at his main sensor feed. The display was no longer just glitching. The faint, spectral trees he had seen before had resolved into a full, shimmering overlay of the Echo’s influence on the Grid. He could see the psychic stress on the Sobbing Gallery not as an abstract danger, but as a visible architecture of light and shadow.
His eyes traced the lines of force. He saw the sorrow of the place flowing in currents, pooling in the foundations, and running up the structural supports like water through a root system. And on the building’s north face, he saw it. A single, load-bearing pillar that glowed brighter than the rest. It was a resonant structural support, vibrating in perfect sympathy with the psychic frequency of the entire Bleed Zone.
It was the building’s heart.
— Silja, I have an idea, — Rhys said, his focus narrowing. — There’s a weak point. Not physical. It’s a resonance cascade failure point.
— Explain, — Silja ordered, pulling Orina behind a weeping statue as she scanned the empty hall.
— The whole place is a tuning fork, and that pillar is where it’s held. If I hit it with precision, I can overload the local field. Create a shockwave. A Focal Drift.
A Focal Drift. A temporary, localized warping of spacetime, caused by a massive injection of psychic resonance. It was incredibly dangerous. It was their only option.
— Do it, — Silja said without hesitation.
In his remote work node, Corbin Vance watched a schematic of the museum. Twelve blue icons represented his agents. Two red icons, the assets, were stationary in the main hall. His predictive model showed a 100% probability of containment.
— Report status, — Corbin said to his unit commander, his voice a flat monotone.
— Perimeter is 100% secure, — the agent’s voice came back, crisp and certain. — Assets are contained. No movement detected.
— Hold position, — Corbin ordered. — Wait for my command. He wanted to see what they would do. Their methods were illogical, and that made them a valuable source of new data.
Rhys engaged his Husk-Frame’s targeting system. He did not aim for the agents. He did not aim for a door. He targeted the base of the resonant structural support. The system calculated the exact force required.
He drew back the mecha’s massive fist.
— Brace yourselves, — Rhys warned over the comm.
He slammed the multi-ton limb into the pillar.
The impact was not an explosion. It was a deep, resonant chime that shook the very air. A force of 800 G struck the pillar, and the psychic energy within it amplified the resonance by 1200%.
For a single, silent moment, nothing happened.
Then, the world broke.
A massive Focal Drift erupted from the point of impact. Inside the gallery, the weeping statues screamed, their tangible tears instantly vaporizing into a thick, cold fog. The marble floor buckled, not cracking but flowing like liquid. The air itself seemed to fold, and the far end of the hall twisted into an impossible, spiraling vortex.
The space inside the gallery warped violently.
— Now! — Silja yelled, grabbing Orina’s arm.
Directly in front of them, a section of the wall dissolved. The stone and plaster melted away not into rubble, but into a shimmering, oval-shaped tear in reality. Through it, they could see a forest of impossible, skeletal trees under a bruised purple sky. The Echo.
The new exit would only last for seconds.
They dove through the tear.
The portal snapped shut behind them with a sound like tearing fabric, sealing itself just as the gallery’s interior settled back into its sad, stable shape. The Focal Drift, a hundred meters in radius, collapsed after five seconds of chaos.
Corbin Vance stared at his monitor. The two red icons representing Silja and Orina had vanished. They were not outside the perimeter. They were not inside the building. They were simply gone.
— Report, — he demanded.
— Sir, the assets… they’re gone, — the unit commander said, his voice laced with confusion for the first time. — The building is still sealed. But it’s empty.
Corbin’s logical trap had failed. His perfect, 100% secure perimeter had been bypassed by a method his system could not compute. He watched the empty schematic, the clean lines of the building that should have been a cage. His confidence in his predictive model, his faith in pure logic, dropped. It was no longer absolute.
The air in the gallery was still and quiet. The statues resumed their silent, steady weeping.
Corbin’s agents were left standing in an empty, sealed building, guarding nothing at all.
