The journey from the Drowned Causeway was a long retreat into silence. They left the stolen skiff half-sunk in a brackish inlet, a small sacrifice to the grey water, and pushed east on foot. The night was cold, a sterile, breathless cold that promised no dawn. Rhys walked with a new ghost riding behind his eyes, a phantom of fire and a woman’s silent scream that was not his own. The memory, a parting gift from the broker Julian Croft, was a shard of glass in his mind, and he moved carefully, as if trying not to press on it.
He kept glancing at his wrist-comm. The device’s laminate face was a spiderweb of fine cracks, the screen dark. Its silence was the most unnerving part. For years, the steady, rhythmic clicking of its Geiger counter had been the baseline of his world, the constant, metered song of a slow death. Now, its absence was a void, a missing heartbeat that made the whisper of the wind feel like a shout. He found himself tapping the dead screen, a nervous prayer for a sound that would not come.
They found shelter in the husk of a pre-Fall transit station. Concrete ribs, stripped of their metal skin, clawed at a sky veiled by a permanent shroud of dust. The stars were a forgotten myth. Inside the ruin, the wind died, leaving a quiet so profound it felt like the inside of a bell after the ringing stops. They built a small fire from scavenged scraps of desiccated wood, a brief and defiant point of orange against the overwhelming grey. The light flickered across their faces, illuminating the pale, scarred lines of Rhys’s jaw and the faint, internal luminescence that pulsed beneath Nysa’s translucent skin.
Rhys drew his sidearm. The motion was fluid, an extension of his will. He began to field-strip the weapon on a flat piece of rubble, the ritual familiar and grounding in a world that had come loose from its moorings. The slide came off with a soft, metallic sigh. The recoil spring followed. He laid the pieces out in a neat row, a catechism of function and form. Nysa watched him, her milky eyes reflecting the firelight, her expression unreadable.
He paused, the barrel of the pistol cool in his hand. He looked at her, then at the weapon. It was a tool of Matter, a thing of cold, hard logic. It was everything her world was not. He made a choice, the price a small, sharp surrender of the control he had clung to for his entire life.
— You should know how, — he said, his voice a low rasp.
He pushed the components towards her. She hesitated, then her long, slender fingers brushed against the cold steel. He guided her, his voice a quiet monotone as he named the parts. The slide. The magazine release. The firing pin. He explained their function, the simple, brutal physics of the machine. She handled the pieces with a delicate awkwardness, the weight of the metal a foreign concept in her hands. The smell of cleaning solvent and ozone filled the small space between them.
Later, a sharp line of pain drew a fresh crease between Rhys’s eyes. The psychic noise of the wastes, a constant, low-grade static that he had learned to ignore, was now amplified by the Glass Echo’s wound. It was a physical pressure, a grinding behind his temples. Nysa saw the tension in his jaw, the way his hand went to his head.
— The air is loud here, — she said. It was not a question.
She moved closer, the faint light within her veins seeming to brighten in the gloom. She did not offer a miracle or a hymn. She offered a technique, a piece of her own training repurposed.
— Breathe with the static, not against it, — she instructed, her voice a soft whisper, like sand moving across glass. — Do not fight the signal. Find its rhythm. Let it flow through you, not into you.
He watched her, skeptical. It sounded like the spiritual nonsense the Chorus spouted. But the pain was real, and Ben Carter was gone, and there were no other options. He closed his eyes and tried, focusing on the rise and fall of his own chest, trying to match it to the high, thin whine in his skull. It was an act of surrender, a choice to trust her method over his own resistance. Slowly, impossibly, the grinding pressure behind his eyes began to recede. The pain did not vanish, but it smoothed out, becoming a dull, manageable ache. The air was still loud, but it was no longer screaming his name.
The fire crackled, spitting small embers into the darkness. The silence that fell between them now was different. It was not the silence of enemies in a truce, but the quiet of two people who had run out of lies.
— In the simulators, they teach you about acceptable losses, — Rhys said, his voice quiet, directed at the flames. — You run the numbers. A three percent civilian casualty rate is a victory if it saves a key asset. It’s just… math.
Nysa’s gaze was distant, looking back into her own history of cold calculations.
— We called it the calculus of grief, — she replied, her voice a near-whisper. — An oracle interprets an echo of a thousand deaths to save a hundred pilgrims from a rockslide. The spirit doesn’t see the difference. It’s just data. The weight is the same.
He looked at her then, truly looked at her. Across the fire, he saw not an enemy, not a creature of alien faith, but a mirror. They were both just components, cogs in opposing machines that ran on the same brutal fuel. The Babylon Compact with its sterile logic and the Chorus of Eden with its ecstatic faith were just different brands of the same engine, and the engine was designed to devour its own. The realization was a quiet click in his mind, the sound of a final gear falling into place. He was no longer a broken part of a system. He was outside of it entirely.
He pulled out the data-slate they had stolen from Croft. Its black surface was inert, cold. He tried to activate it with his wrist-comm, but the device was still dead. He ran a thumb over its cracked screen, a nervous gesture.
— Your machine has a ghost, — Nysa said, her gaze on the flickering Geist Window of his memory, the phantom signal he had told her about from his last patrol.
Rhys stared at the dark screen of his comm, at the reflection of his own tired face. He thought of the phantom signal, the lie of the diagnostics, the perfect system with a flaw it could not admit.
— All machines do, — he said, the admission costing him the last remnant of his Compact faith. — We just pretend they don't.
A quiet understanding passed between them, as solid and real as the crumbling concrete walls around them. The labels had burned away in the ravine. Pilot. Oracle. Heretic. Traitor. They were just names for parts of a machine they now refused to serve. What was left was something simpler. A shared past of betrayal. A shared present of survival. A shared future that was a blank, terrifying slate.
The fire had died down to a bed of pulsing red embers. The wind outside the ruin was a low moan.
Then came a new sensation. It was not a sound, not at first. It was a vibration, a deep, resonant thrum that traveled up from the stone floor, through the soles of their boots, and into their bones. It was a low, powerful hum, growing steadily in intensity. It was not the choral, spiritual hum of an Eden. This was the sound of immense, buried power. It was the sound of a machine waking up.
The ground beneath them began to hum.
