The light on the monitor died. It did not flicker or fade, but was simply extinguished, leaving a dark screen that reflected their two pale, exhausted faces in the gloom. The scorch mark on the tactical map, the black wound in the data where the callsign TINKER-01 had been, vanished with it. The ghost in the machine was gone. The machine itself was gone. Rhys did not move. He stood before the dead screen, his mind a processing engine caught in a fatal error loop, trying to reconcile the last data packet—Ben Carter’s dry laugh—with the silent, empty space on the map.
The hope of escape, the slim possibility of an outside ally, was not merely lost; it was cauterized. Ben Carter had been more than a mechanic, more than a lead to their next objective. He had been proof that a life could exist outside the crushing binary of the Babylon Compact and the Chorus of Eden. He was the third option, the independent variable in a closed system. His sacrifice was not a noble act in a grander strategy. It was the erasure of the one variable that did not compute, the one man who had chosen to live in the margins and who had died proving the margins were an illusion. The system had simply expanded to consume him.
Rhys’s hand, the one of flesh and wire, went to the utility pocket on his thigh. His fingers closed around a small, heavy object of brass and glass. The dosimeter. Ben had used it as a paperweight, a relic from a time when risk was a thing you could measure in the physical world. He had pressed it into Rhys’s hand with the Cog of Solace, a down payment on a debt that was now paid in full with plasma and scrap iron. Rhys pulled it out, its weight a cold, solid fact in his palm.
He held it up in the profound darkness of the server room. The needle on its face, once a measure of the world’s poison, was frozen, stuck hard against its pin. The faint, rhythmic clicking that had been the background radiation of his entire life, the sound he heard even in his sleep, was gone. The device was silent. It was not the muffled quiet of the Causeway’s damp air or the electronic failure in the chapel. This was a dead silence. A silence of broken glass and crushed components. The phantom clicking in his own mind, the auditory hallucination of his anxiety, stopped with it. The absolute quiet that remained was worse than any alarm. It was the sound of a song ending mid-note.
The last piece of the world outside the war was gone. The last voice of cynical reason, the last person who saw the grand conflict as a systemic failure to be survived rather than a holy war to be won, had been deleted from the equation. The price of their brief window of escape was the mentor who had opened it. The proof was this broken token in his hand, a small, useless machine that no longer measured anything. It was just a memory of a debt, a cold piece of metal that meant nothing.
Nysa watched him, her own light now a faint grey tracery in her veins. She saw him stare at the dead object, his knuckles white. She saw the collapse, not of a soldier, but of a man who had just been shown the universe was even smaller and more brutal than he had imagined. There was no outside. There was no escape. There was only the machine, and the machine was designed to fail. Ben Carter’s sermon of rust, the words Rhys had dismissed as defeatism, echoed in the silent server room with the force of a final, unassailable truth.
They were alone. Utterly. Below them, in the core of the Archive, Malachi Voss and his fanatics were preparing to unmake the world. Above them, the armies of the Compact and the flotillas of the Causeway were sealing their tomb, their guns ready to erase whoever survived the internal conflict. There were no more allies to call. There were no more secret paths. The board was set, and they had been checkmated from every possible direction. The probability of escape was zero. The probability of survival was a rounding error.
The silence in the room grew heavier, pressing in on them. It was a vacuum, pulling at them, demanding to be filled.
In the absolute darkness of their loss, the only thing left to share was the truth.
