The transition was not a movement. It was a substitution. One moment, the cold stone of the Sobbing Gallery of Kintsugi was under their feet; the next, they landed in a place without ground. They stumbled onto a floor of packed, white dust that felt like powdered bone, the impact silent. They were lost in a new, more profound wilderness.
They stood in a forest of impossible, skeletal trees. The trunks were smooth and white, like enormous ribs curving up from the pale dust to claw at a sky of deep, bruised purple. There was no wind, no sound, no birdsong. The silence was a pressure, a physical weight that muted the very thought of noise. This was the Echo, raw and unfiltered.
Orina Cassel, overwhelmed by the absolute wrongness of the place, fell back on a lifetime of training. She fumbled for her datapad, the cool polymer slab a familiar anchor in the madness. Her fingers flew across its surface, trying to get a reading, to quantify the environment and thus control it.
The screen was useless. It did not show static. It showed a hostile, cascading waterfall of symbols she had never seen, a language of pure chaos that seemed to mock her attempt to read it. Her tools, the very extension of her logical mind, were worthless here. A knot of panic tightened in her chest.
— Stop trying to read it. Feel it, — Silja Valis instructed, her voice tight with a strain that had not been there moments before. Navigating the Echo, even for a moment, was draining. A fine sheen of sweat coated her brow. Her own Phase Calibrator, the handheld device for mapping unstable psychic terrain, pulsed with an erratic green light, its logic struggling against the sheer irrationality of the place.
— Feel what? — Orina’s voice was a thin, terrified whisper. — There’s nothing here.
— There’s never nothing, — Silja countered, her pale gray eyes scanning the motionless white trees. Her stamina was already bleeding away, a steady drain she could feel in her bones. She put a hand on Orina’s shoulder, her grip firm. — Your gut knows the way. Trust it before this place eats us.
Desperate, Orina squeezed her eyes shut. She forced her breathing to slow, pushing past the panic that screamed at her to run, though there was nowhere to run to. She tried to do as Silja said. She tried to feel. She let go of the need for data, for proof, for logic. She simply listened.
She focused on the low, sub-audible hum of the world around her, the pressure of the silence. At first, it was just an oppressive void. But as she concentrated, she began to sense currents within it. It was not chaos. It was a different kind of system, one governed by rules she could not name but could begin to perceive.
A path revealed itself. It was not visible. It was a line of lesser resistance in the psychic noise, a channel of quiet that snaked between the skeletal trees. In her mind’s eye, it was a thread of faint, silver light.
She took a hesitant step forward, placing her foot where the path told her to. The ground felt solid, but it was a conditional solidity, as if it agreed to hold her weight only as long as she believed it would.
— This way, — Orina said, her voice gaining a sliver of confidence. — I think… I think this is the way.
Silja watched her. She saw the change in Orina’s posture, the shift from panicked technician to focused navigator. For the first time, Silja’s internal assessment of the girl from the Pinnacle changed. The trust level, a metric she constantly ran on allies and enemies alike, ticked upward. It climbed from a skeptical 30% to a solid 50%. She made a choice.
Without a word, Silja followed. She put her own strained senses aside and put her life in Orina’s hands, walking directly behind her, matching her step for step. The mentor was now following the student. The relationship had inverted.
Orina led them through the forest of bone. The white trees seemed to lean in, their branch-claws reaching, but the path held. The oppressive silence seemed to thin along the silver thread only she could perceive. With every step, her confidence grew. She was not analyzing a system; she was becoming part of its flow.
Ahead, the bruised purple sky tore open. A shimmering distortion appeared between two of the largest trees, a familiar sight now. It was a tear back into the Grid, a way home. Orina did not hesitate. She led them directly toward it.
They stepped through the tear and collapsed onto the grimy, damp concrete of a Sump-side Bleed Zone. The sudden cacophony of dripping pipes, distant machinery, and the smell of rust and rot was a shocking, welcome assault. They were back.
Orina lay on the ground, gasping, her body trembling with exhaustion and adrenaline. But a fierce, triumphant light burned in her eyes. She had not just survived the Echo. She had understood it.
— You did it, — Silja said, her own voice heavy with fatigue. She leaned against a rusted wall, the psychic drain leaving her pale and unsteady.
— I felt it, — Orina replied, pushing herself to a sitting position. She looked at her hands, then at the chaotic industrial alley around them. — Like… like a different kind of system. One with rules you can’t write down.
The lesson was learned. It was part of her now.
The air in the alley was cold and still, carrying the faint scent of ozone from the closing tear. A single drop of oily water fell from a pipe above, landing with a soft pat on the stained concrete.
