The walk back to the main floor of the Foundry Chorus was a walk through a tunnel of ghosts. The cold of Kael’s apartment clung to Elias, a second skin that had nothing to do with the ambient temperature. He could still hear the low, 15Hz hum in the bones of his skull, the sound of a machine that ate minds. Lena’s word for it echoed: Unthreading. A perfect, obscene piece of engineering. The rebellion’s heart, this vast, repurposed industrial space, felt different now. The usual nervous energy, the hum of a hundred people building a future in the dark, had curdled into the sharp, metallic scent of panic.
He saw them gathered in the central clearing, their faces lit by the mismatched glow of scavenged terminals. Twenty-five of the rebellion’s core members. The technicians, the recruiters, the few who, like him, could guide others through the treacherous country of their own minds. They were his flock. He was their shepherd. And he had just led one of them to a slaughterhouse. He stepped into the light, and the scattered conversations died. Every eye was on him.
— I’ve called this meeting because of what happened at Cell-Gamma-7, — Elias began. His voice was steady, a tool he had spent years calibrating. He needed it to be perfect now. — We have a new variable. A weapon we don’t understand.
He let the silence hang for a moment, letting the weight of the unspoken settle. He saw the fear in their eyes, the way they glanced at each other for an answer he was about to take away.
"Until we know what these… Stalkers are, how they hunt, and how to stop them, I am ordering a total lockdown. All Lucid Sessions are suspended, effective immediately. No exceptions."
A wave of murmurs rippled through the small crowd. It was a sound of protest, of disbelief. He was taking away the one thing that made them who they were. He was taking away the dream. The price of this choice was their trust, and he could feel it evaporating in the hot, metallic air.
— I know what I’m asking, — he continued, raising his voice just enough to cut through the noise. — But any session could be a death sentence. We are moving blind in a room full of razors. We will stop. We will go dark. We will be silent until we can be safe.
He saw them not as individuals, but as a collection of fragile, interwoven lives. A tapestry of hope he was responsible for. He had taught them to pull the Weaver’s Thread from the chaos of their own minds, to create something beautiful and coherent. Now he was telling them to drop the thread and hide.
"Coach, that’s not a solution. It’s a death sentence of a different kind."
Corbin Shaw, the rebellion’s data analyst, stepped forward. He was a man who saw the world as a series of interconnected systems, and his face held the calm, detached concern of a doctor delivering a terminal diagnosis. He held up a terminal, its screen projecting a glowing, web-like map onto the rusted hull of a dead machine.
— This is our network, — Corbin said, his voice a flat monotone. The map was a delicate lattice of light, connecting dozens of nodes across the city. — It’s fragile. It relies on constant, low-level psychic traffic to mask itself. It’s a conversation in a crowded room. If we go silent, we don’t become invisible. We become a pocket of absolute quiet. We become the most obvious thing on the grid.
He tapped the screen. A timer appeared, counting down from 72 hours.
— Based on current Warden patrol algorithms, they’ll triangulate the silence in three days. They won’t find one cell. They’ll find the hole where our entire network used to be. A lockdown doesn’t save us. It guarantees a systemic collapse.
The logic was brutal. It was clean. It was the same kind of thinking that had built the world they were fighting against. Elias felt a familiar wave of revulsion.
— It’s worse than that.
Jax, the lead technician, emerged from the shadows of his workshop alcove. He was covered in grease and smelled of scorched sugar from soldering. He wiped his hands on an already-filthy rag and pointed a wrench at Elias.
— That thing, the Stalker, it didn’t just kill Kael. It left something behind. A psychic signature. A stink. We can’t erase it because we don’t know what it’s made of. Cell-Gamma-7 is a beacon now. For all we know, this place is, too. You brought the smell back with you.
The implication landed like a physical blow. Hiding was an illusion. They were already marked. The sanctuary was already compromised. Elias’s authority, built on the promise of safety through secrecy, was cracking. He could see it in the way they looked at him now, not with hope, but with calculation. His careful, philosophical guidance had become a strategic liability.
— A network is not a life, — Elias said, his voice strained. He had to pull them back from the cold math of Corbin and the grim mechanics of Jax. He had to make them remember what they were fighting for. — The machines, the data, the network… we can rebuild it all. We cannot bring back a mind that has been unthreaded. We will not risk one more.
He looked from face to face, trying to find the dreamer inside each of them. He was losing them. The fear of the Stalker was being replaced by the more immediate fear of being a sitting target.
A young woman near the front, one he had coached through her first session only a few weeks ago, spoke up. Her voice was small but carried in the tense silence.
"So we just wait?" she asked, her hands clenched into fists at her sides. "We stop dreaming, we let the network die, and we just… wait for them to kick in our doors one by one?"
Elias looked at her. He saw her terror, but beneath it, he saw the first spark of a terrible, defiant fire. He had no answer for her. Not one that didn’t sound like a prayer for a slow death. Not one that didn’t taste like surrender. The silence stretched, and in it, he heard his own failure. The core principle of his rebellion—that quiet, internal reclamation was a victory in itself—had just been proven hollow. It was a philosophy for peacetime, and they were at war.
The meeting dissolved. It did not end. It simply broke apart into fractured murmurs and the anxious shuffling of feet. People turned away from him, forming small, worried clusters. They were talking about Corbin’s numbers, about Jax’s signature, about the lack of an answer from their leader. He was left standing alone in the center of the room, the web of light from Corbin’s projection painting him in a cage of his own making. The hum of the Foundry’s ancient machinery seemed louder now, an iron throat clearing before it passed judgment. He looked at a tangle of thick power cables coiled on the floor, a useless, chaotic mess. The fabric was tearing.
He had lost.
The air was still and heavy. The scent of ozone was sharp in his nostrils.
Then, a single, deliberate movement cut through the stasis. From the edge of the room, where she had been watching the entire pathetic spectacle, Lena Petrova pushed herself off the wall. She began to walk toward him, her steps measured and silent. Her face was a mask, but her eyes burned with an intensity that was not triumph, but purpose.
The argument for silence was over.
He knew the argument for fire was about to begin.
