They stood on a silent ridge, watching the dust settle. Below them, the grave of the Sunken Archive was a wound in the twilight, a vast and growing stain that blotted out the bruised purple of the sky. The air, still warm from the energy of the implosion, tasted of pulverized rock and the sharp, clean scent of ozone. It was the smell of a system unmade, of a circuit board snapped in half. Rhys felt the grit of it on his teeth.
He pulled the dosimeter from his pocket. Ben’s dosimeter. The small, heavy object of brass and glass felt alien in his palm, a relic from a man who had paid his own debt. The glass face was a spiderweb of fine cracks, the needle frozen hard against its pin. He held it to his ear, a habit from a life spent measuring the world’s poison. There was nothing. Not the steady, familiar click of a Geiger counter that had been the rhythm of his entire existence, but a profound and absolute silence.
The ghost was gone. For years, it had been a flicker at the edge of his vision, a phantom signal on the Geist Window that his machine could not parse. A hairline fracture in the perfect logic of the Babylon Compact. Now, under the open, poisoned sky, there were no screens to flicker. The ghost in his machine had died with the machine, and the silence it left in his mind was heavier than any sound. It was the quiet of a question that no longer needed asking.
Her hand found his.
The touch was a small, cool weight in his own, a fragile anchor in the ruin of the world. Her fingers, thin and wiry, laced with his. Flesh and bone, not steel and wire. It was not the grip of a soldier or the touch of a comrade. It was an answer. He looked at Nysa, at her profile outlined against the last fading light. The glow in her veins, once a river of soft gold, was now a barely-there web of grey, the last embers of a fire that had burned itself out to buy them these moments.
They were fugitives. Traitors. The words had no sting left. They were just facts, like the cold wind that was beginning to pick up, or the taste of dust in his mouth. He had traded everything for this. The price for erasing Project Chimera from the board was home. It was every sterile bunk, every ration pack, every callsign that would ever answer his hail. It was the entire architecture of a life defined by obedience to a corrosive system.
He had burned it all down for this ridge, this silence, and the woman standing beside him. He tightened his grip on her hand, a silent oath in the gathering dark. They were stateless. They were exposed. But they were no longer components. The axis of his world had shifted, not with the violent lurch of a crippled Mecha, but with the quiet, irreversible click of a lock disengaging. He was no longer a pilot following a vector. He was just a man, standing on a piece of rock, with a long road ahead.
The last of the light bled from the sky, leaving the land in shades of ash and bone. The air grew cold, carrying the clean scent of deep, disturbed earth.
They had to find water before morning.
