The cold was a physical presence in the abandoned subway station, a damp weight that settled in the lungs and smelled of rust and dead electricity. It was a tomb, and they were the ghosts haunting it. Croft’s own internal ghosts, the Equity-Aggressor and the Patriot-Primal, were finally quiet, stunned into submission by the fall into the corpse chute and the subsequent desperate flight. But the silence in his head was not peace. It was a vacuum, and something new was seeping in to fill it. A thin, oily static.
It began as a flicker of doubt, a thought that felt almost rational. Sabine’s confession. The lost data-slate. It was too neat. Too convenient. The thought whispered that her grief had been a performance, a tactic to gain his trust before she disappeared with the real prize. He looked at her across the cavernous space. She was hunched over her console, a silhouette against the blue glow, trying to salvage what she could from their compromised systems. The static in his mind sharpened, painting her silhouette with the hard edges of suspicion. It felt clean, logical, and utterly corrosive.
This was not the usual chaotic rage of his parasites. The Patriot-Primal would have screamed about treason. The Equity-Aggressor would have lectured on manipulative power dynamics. This was different. It was a slick, low-frequency hum of pure distrust, a signal that bypassed the usual ideological channels and went straight for the foundations of his judgment. He felt his jaw tighten, a familiar precursor to a parasitic surge, but the emotional flavor was wrong. It was artificial. An external input.
He closed his eyes, forcing himself away from the sight of her. He engaged the protocols the Analyst had drilled into him during a hundred agonizing sessions in the clean, white room of the REM Diagram. Isolate the emotional signal. Trace its origin. Is it endogenous or exogenous? He mentally mapped the feeling, not as an idea, but as a wave form. It had a carrier frequency, a synthetic, repeating pattern that his own chaotic biology could never produce. Vole’s broadcast mesh. It was real. He could feel it in the fillings of his teeth, a vibration just at the edge of hearing. The price of this sanctuary was the slow poisoning of the air itself.
He was fighting the urge to stand up, to put his back to a solid wall, when Sabine pushed away from her console. The scraping of her chair legs on the concrete was a gunshot in the silence. She walked over to him, her movements stiff with exhaustion. She saw the tension in his face, the rigid set of his shoulders, but misinterpreted its source.
— You’re crashing, — she stated, her voice a low rasp. It wasn’t a question.
She held out her hand. In her palm was her last nutrient paste bar, a dense, grey brick of calories in a cheap foil wrapper. She had broken it cleanly in half. A simple, almost pathetic offering. An act of pure, un-memetic solidarity that had no place in the world of parasitic belief. It was a gesture from a world that no longer existed.
Croft looked from the offered paste to her face, her sharp, intelligent eyes shadowed with a weariness that mirrored his own. The artificial paranoia was still humming in the background, screaming that it was a trick, a distraction. He made a choice. He chose the tangible reality of the small, crumbling bar over the invisible poison in the air. He took it. The shared resource, the simple act of acceptance, was more powerful than the broadcast. The hum of suspicion didn't vanish, but it lost its power, receding into the background noise of his own legitimate fears.
They ate in silence, the only sound the faint drip of water from the vaulted ceiling and the soft clicks of her teeth on the nutrient paste. As he watched her, he noticed it. A small, repetitive motion. Her fingers, resting on her knee, were tapping. Not a nervous tic, but a clear, deliberate pattern. Two taps. Pause. Three taps. Pause. Five. Seven. A prime number sequence. It was a self-soothing mechanism, a private ritual for imposing mathematical order on a chaotic world. It was the most human thing he had seen in years.
The observation humanized her beyond the scarred, paranoid rogue. He saw the brilliant, lonely engineer who had tried to build a cure and accidentally created a weapon. The weight of her failure was a tangible thing, and in that moment, he felt a kinship with her that transcended their desperate alliance. He was a walking failure. She was the architect of one.
She must have felt his gaze, because she stopped tapping and looked at him, her expression unreadable. She glanced at his arm, where his Somatic Sigils lay dark and inert beneath the skin.
— They’re quiet, — she observed.
— For now.
— You’re not a system failure, — she said, the words sudden and clear. The statement landed with the force of a physical blow, cutting through every layer of his conditioning. — I’ve been thinking about it. Everyone else is running one operating system. They’re stable. Predictable. You… you’re the first one to run two, and you haven’t crashed.
He stared at her, the concept too radical to process immediately. The CI-Div, his handlers, even the Analyst in his own mind—they all treated his condition as a bug. A catastrophic error to be managed, contained, and, if Hasek had his way, deleted. A weakness.
— You’re the proof of concept, — she finished, her voice gaining a flicker of its old intensity.
The words re-ordered his world. His entire existence, a constant, agonizing struggle against the warring gods in his blood, was not a disease. It was a new state of being. The pain, the paralysis, the humiliation in the supermarket aisle—it wasn't a symptom of failure. It was the price of running a more complex system. It gave the struggle a purpose beyond mere survival. It was a move toward a new kind of reason, one that could exist alongside the storm of belief without being consumed by it.
A fragile sense of hope, an emotion he hadn’t felt in years, began to form in the quiet space her words had created. It was a dangerous, unfamiliar feeling.
The moment was shattered by a new sound. A soft, insistent beep from a small, forgotten motion sensor Sabine had placed at the station's main access tunnel. A single red dot pulsed on its tiny screen.
The dot was joined by another. Then another. A cluster of ten.
They were moving in a standard CI-Div tactical formation. Five hundred meters out and closing fast.
The brief respite was over. The hunters were inside the tomb.
