The order had been given. Not by him.
Corbin Shaw, the rebellion’s data analyst who saw souls as statistical noise, gave Lena a crisp nod and turned to a terminal. He was already searching for a hunting ground. The argument for fire was over. The argument for fire had won. Elias Thorne, the man they called the Cognitive Coach, stood alone in the center of the Foundry Chorus, a ghost at a feast he had tried to prevent. His flock, the twenty-five people who formed the heart of their desperate little movement, were no longer his. They were hers.
The vast, cavernous space, usually filled with the nervous hum of work and whispered hope, was now split by a canyon of silence. On one side stood Lena and her Hunters, their faces hard with purpose. On the other, his Healers, the ones who believed in his quiet philosophy of reclamation, looked lost. They looked at him, their eyes asking a question he could no longer answer. He had offered them safety in silence, and a girl with fire in her eyes had shown them it was a beautifully furnished tomb.
Then a man moved.
He was the Veteran Dreamer, a man named Silas Kane, and he was the rebellion’s oldest memory and its only true diplomat. He moved from the shadows where the old machines slept, his steps slow and deliberate, eating the ground with a patience that felt like gravity. He did not hurry. Silas stepped into the dead space between Elias and Lena, a bridge of scarred flesh and quiet authority. The low, anxious whispers in the room died. All that was left was the drip of water from the high, rusted ceiling and the faint smell of ozone.
Silas looked first at Lena, his eyes acknowledging her victory without judgment. Then he turned to Elias, and his gaze was full of a sorrow that spanned decades. He was the only other person in the room who remembered the world before the Productivity Loops, the only one who truly knew what they were trying to win back.
"We are a body that is tearing itself in two," Silas’s voice was a low rumble, a sound that had calmed more panicked dreamers than Elias could count. It was not a voice of command, but of diagnosis. "And a house divided, as the old words go, cannot stand. It will fall. The Mandate will not need to hunt us. We will simply bleed out on this floor."
He let his words settle in the quiet. He was not taking a side. He was describing the shape of their extinction.
— Lena, you are right, — Silas said, turning his head slightly toward her. — Hiding is a slow death. They have a new weapon, and we are fools if we do not learn its measure. To stay as we are is to wait for the blade.
He paused, then his eyes found Elias again.
— And you are right, Coach. To become them, to trade our grief for spears without thought, is to lose the very thing we are fighting for. To rush into battle is to impale ourselves on their logic.
This was the crisis. The choice. To die slowly by hiding, or to die quickly by fighting. To rust, or to burn. Silas was laying the two paths out on the cold concrete floor, and both led to a grave. Elias felt a cold knot tighten in his stomach. He had seen this coming. He had felt it in the way the younger recruits looked at Lena, with a desperate hunger for action that his gentle sessions could never satisfy.
— So I propose a third path, — Silas continued, his hands open at his sides. It was the gesture of a man showing he held no weapons, only a proposition. — Not a compromise. A synthesis. We do not have the luxury of choosing between two rights. We must weave them together. One hunt.
The words hung in the air, simple and terrifying.
— We do it your way, Lena. We hunt one of these… Cognitive Stalkers. That is the objective. But we do it your way, Coach. With control, with precision, with the purpose of understanding, not just destroying. That is the method.
He was offering them a single, terrible path forward. The only path that did not involve one half of the rebellion turning its back on the other. The price was a risk so profound it made Elias’s teeth ache. They would be deliberately calling the monster to their door. They would be taking the most fragile, beautiful thing they had—a conscious, dreaming mind—and staking it like a goat to attract a tiger.
Lena’s jaw was tight. She looked from Silas to Elias, her eyes calculating. Her victory had been total. She held the room. She could have refused, could have forced the schism and taken her army with her. But she was a strategist before she was a zealot. She saw the logic in Silas’s words. A divided force was a dead force. She needed the Healers. She needed the Coach’s unique skill.
She gave a single, sharp nod.
The gesture was a physical blow. The truce was half-formed. The decision now fell to him. Every eye in the room swung to Elias. He could feel their collective gaze, a physical weight. They were not looking for leadership anymore. They were looking for his surrender. For his permission to let them risk their lives in a way he had sworn to prevent.
He thought of Kael, the cell leader from Gamma-7, his body breathing in a chair while his mind was a crater. He thought of the cold in that room, the low, mind-eating hum. His entire philosophy was built on the sacred duty of preventing that. Now they were asking him to invite it. To set a place for it at the table.
His hand, hidden in his pocket, found the small, tangible fragment of the dream-woven blanket he’d salvaged from the psychic blast that destroyed the Boiler Room. The last piece of the Weaver’s Thread. It felt impossibly delicate, a memory of a hope that now seemed naive. He had taught them to weave reality from the threads of their imagination. Lena was asking them to weave a noose.
He looked past the faces of his followers, at the silent, monolithic machinery that filled the Foundry. They were ghosts of a dead industry, monuments to a time when work was done with hands and steel, not minds and loops. The rebellion was a similar ghost, a phantom of humanity haunting the perfect, sterile machine of Optima Consolidated. And what were ghosts, if not regrets?
He could say no. He could hold to his principles. He could let the rebellion break. He would keep his hands clean, and he would preside over the slow, dignified death of his own faction, a quiet clinic for souls that would be wiped out in a matter of weeks. He would be pure, and he would be extinct.
Or he could say yes. He could sanction the hunt. He could take everything he knew about the sanctity of the mind and turn it toward building a better cage. He could become a butcher to learn the shape of the knife. The price was simple. He was trading his soul as a healer for the chance to keep his flock alive. A terrible, necessary bargain.
The silence stretched. He felt the weight of 72 hours, the countdown Corbin had put on their existence.
— I will agree, — Elias said. His voice was quiet, but it carried through the vast, silent space. It was the sound of a lock breaking. A wave of relief, so palpable it was like a change in air pressure, washed through the room. The axis of their world had just turned. The sound of it was a collective, held breath being released. They were no longer hiding. They were at war.
He held up a hand before the murmurs could begin.
— On one condition.
Lena’s eyes narrowed. The truce was fragile.
— I lead the session, — Elias stated, his voice gaining a sliver of its old authority. — I design the construct. I guide the team. Your objective, Silas, but my methods. Absolutely.
This was the cost of his surrender. He would not send them into the fire. He would walk in with them. He would hold the leash. It was the only piece of his purpose he could salvage from the wreckage.
Lena held his gaze for a long moment. He could see the calculations behind her eyes. She was weighing his control against her need for his expertise. She had the army. He had the map to the battlefield inside the skull.
— Accepted, — she said, her voice clipped.
The truce was sealed. Not with a handshake, but with a shared, desperate acceptance of a suicidal plan. The tension in the room did not vanish, but it transformed. The static of division resolved into the low, purposeful hum of a machine being brought online. People began to move, to talk, their voices no longer whispers but clipped, functional exchanges. Jax was already yelling for his technicians. Corbin was pulling up schematics.
Elias stood for a moment longer, watching the organized chaos bloom. He had just agreed to build a weapon out of the most sacred thing he knew. He felt the Weaver’s Thread artifact in his pocket. It no longer felt fragile. It felt heavy, dense, like the cold, hard steel of a tool waiting to be used.
The rebellion had a future. It was a future measured in hours, and it would be paid for in blood and dreams, but it was a future.
He had to teach them how to hunt a goddamn monster.
The first step was to build the bait.
