The breach was open. It was not a door but a wound, a jagged tear in the fabric of absolute logic. Inside, raw data screamed, lines of pure information snapping and fizzing like severed power lines in a storm. Elias felt the collective will of the forty dreamers he anchored, a single, unified force surging forward. They were no longer a scattered collection of broken people hiding in basements. They were an army. They were a storm. They were winning.
Lena Petrova was the tip of the spear. Her dream-form, crackling with contained power, was the first through the gash in the server fortress. She moved with a predatory grace, her eyes fixed on the darkness ahead, a place that should not exist. The objective was clear, a point of light in the abstract non-space: the Architect’s server core. To destroy it was to sever the head of the Mandate’s new war. The air, if it could be called air, smelled of ozone and hot, melting code.
— To the core! — Lena’s voice was not a shout but a psychic command that resonated through the entire convergence. — Don’t stop! Don’t let it reform! —
They poured through the breach after her, a river of focused intention. The inside of the fortress was not a room. It was a tunnel of pure, flowing information, data streams rushing past them like the walls of a flume. Elias held them all together, his consciousness the vessel containing their forty minds. He felt their surging hope, a feeling so sharp and bright it was almost painful. It was the feeling of a dam finally breaking, releasing a flood of grief and hope and pure, unadulterated wanting that had been held back for years. This was the price of their new strategy, this glorious, terrifying openness.
He felt the solid weight of the Weaver’s Thread fragment in his pocket, a tangible anchor back in the Waking world. Its familiar warmth was a steady point in the hurricane of the dream. Here, in the convergence, he could feel the threads of their forty minds weaving together, forming a single, perfect tapestry of purpose. It was whole. It was strong.
Then the data streams ahead began to slow. The torrent of information congealed, the light of their own psychic energy seeming to dim as the darkness before them gathered itself into a shape. The triumphant roar of their unified minds faltered, dropping into a confused, uncertain murmur. The forward momentum of the assault slowed to a crawl. Something was wrong.
It was not a program. It was not a construct of the fortress’s logic. It was a man.
He resolved out of the glitching data, a figure taking shape in the heart of their enemy’s machine. He was tall, his posture familiar, his presence a sudden, shocking note of warmth in the cold logic of the server. He stood directly in their path, blocking the way to the core.
It was Silas Kane.
The Veteran Dreamer. Their anchor. Their history. Their friend. His eyes were open, but they were the gray, vacant eyes of the catatonic dreamer in the infirmary. He was not there. He was a puppet, a hollowed-out effigy of the man they loved, and he was chained across the path. The chains were not metal. They were thick, greasy, black threads of corrupted logic, wrapped around his arms and legs, tethering him to the very structure of the fortress. They were a vile parody of the threads they used to create, to heal.
The assault stopped. Not by command, but by a single, shared, psychic gasp. Forty minds, a moment before a single weapon, shattered into forty individual points of horror. Lena, ten feet from Silas, froze, the spear of collective rage in her hands wavering, its white-hot energy dimming. Elias felt the shockwave of their collective despair hit him like a physical blow, and he fought to keep the convergence from collapsing entirely. It was a checkmate. A moral checkmate. The Architect had not built a better wall. He had turned their own heart into a shield.
Then the puppet spoke. The voice was Silas’s. It was his warm, steady rumble, the voice that had calmed so many fears, the voice that had told them stories of hope in the dark. But the words were poison, and they were filled with a genuine, soul-crushing pain that the Architect had clearly left intact for this very purpose.
— Elias… — the voice echoed through the silent dreamscape. — Old friend… don’t do this. —
Elias felt his own breath catch in his throat, a ghost sensation from a body miles away. The puppet of Silas looked directly at him, its eyes pleading, tears of pure data streaming down its face.
— He’s linked the core to my consciousness, Elias. To all of us. All the ones he’s taken. — The lie was perfect, crafted from their deepest fears. — If you destroy it… you unthread us all. Please. You’re killing us. —
The silence that followed was absolute. The low hum of the broken fortress was the only sound. The dreamers were paralyzed, caught between victory and atrocity. To move forward was to murder their own. To retreat was to surrender everyone to the same fate. Lena stood motionless, her weapon dissolving in her hands. The war had become simple. To win, Elias had to kill his oldest friend.
The faint hum of the broken fortress was a funeral dirge. Data-dust, the shattered remnants of their attack, drifted slowly in the non-space.
Elias looked at the ghost of his friend and knew the choice was simple.
