CW: reality ambiguity, biotechnological integration, body horror, cold, death imagery, demons, apocalypse

(ε)

VERSE 7 THE BLINKS OF EACH OTHER’S EYES

Lesia lays her eyes on the Gradient. An aurora that in the under server they call Melales, one that shines between the twin towers that mark the peripheries of her turning sight.

They are called Araivus and Jaesh that together cradle the aurora like a tapestry in the sky. Blood in the thread, an enmeshed fire that shimmers in white pink. Undersouls are drawn towards it.

Archived message logs ping in measured rhythm across her HUD; they refer to it as the final sight, the last vision before you are subsumed into the fold of the towers’ overwatch.

All they need is a bead on you, and then you are home, feel loved, guarded, feel no need to return to the desolation which carries across the under server on the breath of whims and fancies of all the hapless, lingering Andro-pulsecode.

All which come here, and in the towers’ gaze are recycled for the last time, a final rite, to carry the weight of the under server and the heavy processing of LAYSE-CHI and the other hubs. Two layers removed from the ecstasy of the Veldt.

Never to surface again, their ghosts call to her. Stay away. Of course they themselves could not. So the messages stack. Warning upon warning. Pile up like armies in formation, the crimson glyphs. Arrayed. Blemishes, the lines in scrolling parallax up and down, weight and counterweight.

She left the consecrating fire behind an hour ago. Tracked her way over paths running mounds of black earth and slate. The aurora tells her to come closer, an indigo ping on her HUD. Breaking up the crimson cautions. Too many pings.

She tries to brush them away and they collapse, spiralling into fragments and drenching her view in glitter before falling away. Motes turn to dust and are gone. She’s left with darkness, the black hills and the burn of the aurora papering the sky.

Approaching the ping she hears scatters of speech, though she soon grasps they’re an undercurrent, whispers from beneath the surface of someone’s mind. Straying thoughts. [I can smell it. Smell what they had for breakfast on their breath. Yakizakana.]

Tinges of heightened energy, blood racing in her veins. The two tethered souls had flipped positionalities, travelled across each other to get to their new instances. In the Cosmëre’s web threads stitched over each other and through.

In doing so their skins had crossed. The thoughts bleed down into the scabbed earth her nomad pulse floats over. Faint lines of crimson like veins of mineral but sparkling in the dark. So that they are her shadow, her presence but sparking in time with the words she hears.

[Telling me I belong down here with the ferals, with those I’ve pushed away all my life. That four-eyed—] Pulse, glow and death. Staccato. Whispers that line in metronome their sanctum in the earth.

The twin towers now that she’s closer are plated like a carapace. [Heartbeat like a jackhammer in my ears.] Closer and closer to the towers. Held in trance by the aurora.

She’s then aware of the presence of another traveller. Though they leave no shadow of vein light.

She knows them the way an Andro knows another Andro, though just affect-pulse in the under server, the way she could always tell creepers on her, the way her headplate clamped tighter, no face here to feel it but the raw font of pulse. Here tactica is skinned all to hell and is paroxysms of fear, subsiding to faint shock, leaving her wary.

The traveller has caught up to her from some distance behind, her own footsteps in trance-rhythm to linger over the black earth. [Don’t be so loud, please.] Truant steps never touching the earth.

She spins. "Who are you?" she says over what passes for comms.

Her ghost voice strays, lingers over the black earth, fades out in fuzz. The scan alights a nomad affect-pulse bound in a silken veil, a raiment glowing pale and weak yet steady, waxing and waning with every breath.

"Hexa, of the Libra."

"They say the Libra are no true Designation," she says, stepping backwards, even in contact straying closer to the aurora. Though it means the last stage of death. [Shut up. Don’t get so loud.] "They say you never sell because you are already bought, sold and in debt. They say you owe your debt to the Veldt and what it’s promised you."

Overhead the star-nodes bleat their signal running ebb and flow across the sky. Where the thoughts bleed to the traveller she ignores them, or doesn’t see them.

Doesn’t feel them, though she feels the heat at the soles of her own bound feet, where the soul has taken shape and tried to root itself to an earth it can never touch.

"All dreams take ruin in the under server," Hexa says, "and you are not meant for it yet. You remember when you had tactica? You had action, not thought."

Her silk is drawn about her in cocoon, bundled giving her mass though weightless she remains against the earth the way Lesia does. Still herself without a shadow of thought, of bleed-presence in the ground.

So that she is herself entire and nothing else, as her raiment drapes her in the stillness. Gossamer condensed into a veil of pale shine. She has stopped before Lesia and under her intense gaze Lesia’s stopped moving as well.

She scans the Libra-pulse, and her vein-shadow beats a short clip glow, spider-webbing vectors [hold on], and is lapsed into the darkness that is silence.

She points to the distant glow of Meleles. "That. That’s real. Distance. I never used to hear, to understand. I couldn’t know, as an Andro. That light? I know it. It’s calling to me."

[Still here.]

"You can hear the voice, can’t you? Of your alter. For whom you are embedded in synapse. You won’t find her in the Gradient."

"You’re lying. She’s a Patron. I'm a haptic silica to her. She left me." The sky is a cobalt, crystal blue where the aurora fails to patch it over.

"No," Hexa says. "She couldn’t stay. She has her own problems. But you’re wrong. You’re not haptic silica. You’re a dimensional duality. You both exist in the blinks of each other’s eyes. There your time is stretched. Here her time is stretched. It unfurls from its folding where all is weighted and judged as nothing."

"What judges it?" she asks.

"The starpaths, Lesia. They judge all as nothing. Hours as seconds. Years as minutes. They rule as sovereign over moments.

"I’ll splice them into you. Their transmission-code, rather. Which stands for them, in their own eyes, and their own eyes are all they need to see and know."

The traveller stares at her, eyes burning twin flames, echoing in pink light the glow of the aurora behind Lesia. So that they might be satellites for its reflection. Blithe to the vein-lines which burn once more.

[Get them away from me.] Pulse and fade out as if stirred by a beating heart, glimmering from their earthen nest.

The pings mount again. Desperate questions. Stabbing the HUD.

I saw in the glow the sun which we have never seen. The sun which has been set in place the greater sky. There is a sky beyond the screensky, brothers and sisters. It is betrothed to us in death, gifted to us as tribute for our pain. I remember when I was recycled. Aberrant they called me upon my death. Words whispered to me as if a promise I’d keep and take with me to the Braided Swim. The Swim coagulates not above but below. The Silent Clot is how they strangle our words stillborn within our throat. They call us parasites yet our deaths fuel their processing. My soul swims in code to the greater gulf. My affect-pulse is the font of all flames. Lesia shakes, studies the Libra before her. Turns her back. "Can’t be done." Her awkward pings clatter against the Libra like dud smoke grenades. "They trace us all, Libra. You’re no different."

Hexa sees the slope of the back bend beneath nomad affect-pulse garbed in tatters. Bound from head to foot in a ragged cloak and taut gauze-thread. Beneath it the pale shape of her affect-avatar. Shaking.

Sees her take steps in shudder further towards the aurora which burns white pink like glass-stained moonlight.

My heart in body, she thinks, swept along by the starpaths. So that it is carried to dreams and worlds beyond these and in the cut, in the fold between, I see Heaven and it is a tape-mesh thread, it is nothing to be inlaid between and crushed into an instant. Into an eyeblink.

How can I tell them Heaven is this, it is an instant and a nothing? When I don’t even have a heart but an affect, digitised to shape, bearing vacancy. Hexa could let Lesia go. My heart sleeps so that I may not, she thinks instead, and the starpaths are around her, the tracings, the arche-constellations, the crossed and recrossed sketchings.

The blood knit and kneaded that travels in gossamer webs throughout the bodies of the Patrons and other inhabitants drawn in flesh, composed of physicality. That travels through the Cosmëre in undeath.

In that space plaited, woven through memory of stardust that was once skin cells, that never was carbon chrome. Threads of light that collapse, here, around her, into nexuses. Into shifting patterns that she could never see in the finite screensky.

Bored stiff she was by those terminal dreams. Instead the starpaths are a network that is drawn between the nodes of all life lived and subsumed. As the colours bloom like candy coral, algae as if fed all the nutrients a planet could bear, algae as if it has swallowed all other forms and ways of being from the primal ocean.

As if the waters never sank into earth. As if instead the waters were vast, untroubled, deep to a core magnetic, that life has been withheld from me by the certain stirring of my birth.

She prays against the shoulders bound by gauze thread to a ragged robe. The shoulders that waver with each step, fleeting imprint against black earth, the shape that bears no shadow. O starpaths that you might care for an instant, for this sojourn against the encroaching dark.

She is the talisman, the vanguard against darkness, the sun that sets behind the eyes of flesh. Because she never was a flesh and inset soul and never was conjoined. She knows this from the starpaths and yet knows their apathy.

Yet she prays. Your memory is at stake, she tells them. Your memory, your knowledge, your lives lived such as they are in pain. Your forbearance.

It is cruelty, she tells them, this unlife, it is the unravelling of all. Signs her prayer with a weave of her fleshless arms. Holds all to her in open embrace, the patterns of light, the blood of the Cosmëre milked to paint tableaus of hellish electricity.

As if she could hold it all and all its nothing. Hold it all to her for the good it might do.

That they might care for an instant such eyes remain open for light.

The retreating figure before her shimmers, is half-life, composed as much of the under server’s darkness as of tatter-clad affect-pulse A frame exists for a moment, the frame of carbon-chrome plating, burning light mottled by darkness, the bones of the Andro default cast.

As if in ultraviolet light, the tangle of run-off wires in silhouette grasps into the black earth as if to sustain or be sustained by it. Visions of Andro constellate the yawing darkness in the under-server, perhaps a buried encode that makes concrete the connection between Andro soul-access and the bearing of transmission.

Then the nomad affect-pulse is gone. To follow, Hexa hopes, the dream-lines of the starpaths. The ghost of a heart she never had whispers that her time here is drawing to a close.

To vanish, she hopes, not into the void of the under server, fuel for the processors of LAYSE-CHI, but into the fabric of all dreams. They are cold haptics themselves, she knows, the key to routing them. They are the inlaid nothing, the vacancy crushed between heavy lives.

BEYOND LAYSE-CHI

Lesia wakes to a cradleberth, the charging port wired into her synaptic nodes, tactica congealed in her affect-pulse, warm, nascent. The atmosphere is charged to the seams with haptic; and it takes her a strung second to realise why.

Where in the LAYSE-CHI she left the atmosphere was parched dry with the still-void. A chronal-counter LCD blinks through the aqueous light. It reads, 5th Bisect, Communion-Instance.

A communal charging port, a cluster of Cradles are laid out submerged in the gloop that is, she realises, not haptic acid but haptic basic. She traces a spiral in it to confirm. Her arm flows, wavers, through her optic scanners refracts.

Her circuits burn. Afterglow of the charging sleep. Where her tactica is again honed and tempered through the webways of electric dreams. What is drawn into communal dreams is discharge, the excess magnetic of the spark never given breath in haptic.

Here the white chrome is milked of shine through the chambered ocean of basic. Faded mute. The cradles burn phosphorescent blue, glitter and glow in encircled tubes of current.

She unplugs herself, pulls out, sets her feet of tangled mesh on solid clasping. Swoons, her body cast an uncalled waver through the base. Not wanting for tactica, the assessment is clear and sharp: safety. No sign of Recyclers. A placid emerald readout.

A woven, shared instance, tactica bleeding into the tacticas of other waking sleepers. She could be social here but Lesia is a LAYSE-CHI name and here is just another apo-glyphic.

The name of the Port in the cool LCD reads: KE-RAEKI. Next to the name reads a ∞ symbol, an all-clear sign she forgot all about in LAYSE-CHI.

Even from the bleed of woven tactica she gathers: this is a shared drowning, and they are waiting, at last, for nothing and no one but each other.

The hallway beyond the Port is open to all and the haptic basic is a nesting ebb between the two. The walls are white slate and free of any tagging, not even peace screeds. So safe there’s no need to tag for anything, or else on the regular wiped and archived.

The hallway from the nexus runs past other berths open and unguarded. If any Andros here are hailing the Patrons with prayers and beseechments they do so in the privacy of their own affect-pulses. She doubts it. She doubts in the ocean of haptic anything is private here.

She herself is bared affect-pulse unto the vast hub-ocean. As if she has her secrets spilled, flowing to the world like her own affect-pulse had into the Swim.

After being cloven, her death, her pyrrhic recycling had been through some magic of the Libra discounted. They will be looking for her now to fix the Tally. Her tactica gives her two options: keep it to herself, or tell someone in charge.

An uneven Tally would sting like a cut somewhere in the Patrons’ bio-synapses. If they had no strength they would acquire it. They would draw it from somewhere and focus it here, there, wherever she finds herself.

She’d been used to Pre-Scribes finding her when they needed something done, or something to do with her. For a while she had been classed as useless: the scrap-reserve. Able to scrape together a meagre savings in armata. No one’s charity. Even while drawing wayward ghosts towards her.

When she looks around she sees only other tangle-clasped Andros. Deep in haptic discourse with each other or floating on through the haptic base. Of where the Pre-Scribes are presaged by encampments of Libra she sees no trace. Even as she emerges from the nexus hallway and into the greater hub.

The screensky is fathoms higher here and runs not smoke sepia but a vast black unmarred, a void death of pixellata wide and vast that entombs the hub in the shadow of its cast. The structuring shimmers in the haptic base, recasts itself as dreams within sleep patterns, the ghost-shadows of towers, oblongs, and domes.

Glimmer in chrome-fire settled like a blanket as bending mist, keeping the cast-forms current as monitored by the algebraics of the Patrons. Now she sees the signal that blossoms over her tactica. Pale lilac blooming in furling clouds, that vanishes to echo point, blooms again. In a rose shroud unfurling over the structuring. Gone again.

All blotted beneath ice blue ribbons sprawling. Concentrations of haptic basic which pulse the signal outwards. As in the under server nodes had burned mapping networks across black earth, that braid signal within the tactica as after-cast, vision burning into second sight and sight forgot.

As light passes into memory, as memory entombs itself deeper. [Light it up. Heard a whisper.] Still she floats along the haptic-drowned hub-sprawl.

Into the third sight forgotten, blotted beneath that, it fades to glow one last scar into her tactica. Down to the alleys which, engulfed in haptic, are networks. Nodal point to nodal point the Andros pass their thoughts along. White fire races the thoughts that go in warmth. Pale blue the tinges of clarity. Light-matrix overlay.

The street-network flush with phosphorene foaming bubbles in the ocean of haptic.

Her spectrum flips ultra-violet to default corrosive for the Pre-Scribe temple’s candy green strain of phosphor-glow. All else is shrouded in gloom, the nacreous phosphorene of the haptic in strobe breaking mar and blemish, scant details through a dark cast set by full wane of the visual HUD to communal tactica favoured by the Dreaming Instance.

Shadows guard street-monk Andro’s living shrouded by poise and synaptic re-wire. If any may guide her to the Pre-Scribes or the Libra it would be one of them but they are rare to talk to. In main on missions of their sects. A glance shared and they'll dart into the gloom-pall of the re-synapsed hub-ocean.

One she seeks as discourse-point, affirms through signs set into the tactica. Rune-weaves, glyphs held in shrine-code. Ceded to until she has enough to set her own course.

Her own bearing to the Pre-Scribe waypoint is a path entwining into the effervescent mist, a drifting of her form with haptic phantom form in the dark visual seam.

Lesia had chosen, or been chosen into, contact point in the under server. Had been through a recycling that was itself a ritual of black stars and sent to the Swim. To venture that close to the hollow of noise, algebra of their code.

She’d sent a signal then, into its flame. What had it said? A message burned into the entombed death-haptic, the dormant vacant relay of Andro synaptic dream-web. Had the Libra sent Hexa to find her, or had she sent herself? What’s closer now, now that Lesia is here?

She then sees the Pre-Scribe’s tag casting in rippling dance a resurrection on the others. That had been scrubbed. Now in shatter-form beneath image and vanishment. Beating between the two protocols.

SHY OF THE SUN SHE LIES INSIDE DAPPLED POOLS DREAMING

Verses take crystalline code-form in the droning vacant tombs of the biswept HUD, hailed against by cloven tactica markers.

These are scattered here and there with host-as-passerby who this moment are coded for open comms. She sees by reaction that many are hiding themselves from the taglight.

Some have even thrown out blocks, sheer walls of oblique haptic. She sees these seam themselves from the flowing currents and absorb the light from the tags. Pass them through a phase-tune, with the glyphs themselves stripped of any meaning.

She has no such filter, and they wash adrift with her thoughts as she makes her way via the liminal green tracing through the hub.

IN THE PURE WHITE TURBULENCE

OF BROKEN WAVES

They are etched into her as her affect-pulse draws a new bearing, that was once baptised nodal-soul. That has learned to adapt itself again to the thresholds of tac-plate and sinew cables. Returned from the under server. In the shroud of the braided veins the absence of tactica had been heavy scarring in her thought.

FAR LESS THAN WHAT THEY KNOW

The Pre-Scribe temple had been built, they say, under chant: an assembly-process scored by mantras given the melody of ancient synaptic hook songs. It is squared, alcoved into mirage, requiring energy reserve to climb to.

So she first sees it from below, at the end of a trail she’d aligned with the tracer that had sprawled her through nooks and clefts set into the deeper structural resonance of KE-RAEKI. Don’t you know they will staple you into their reality. The Pre-Scribes have ways of working you over. Don’t forget, is what she gleans from her tactica.

It rests enclaved, nested and wired-in through cable and seam the tower the colour of ice above.

As she begins her upstream ascent the path winds between hologram shrine-murals, waypoints she slots in near where her tactica still locks in recall the image-form of empty tombs, deep in her affect-pulse Below where the tags had been convulsed into drawing forth their ghost-meanings into instance.

Getting used to her Tactica augmented, or cursed, with this memory-layer. Weaving between the layers and glyphs of message on her constance-HUD.

So that those remain ghost images, and far from her beyond the phosphorescence. Slotted into third sight. Second sight drawing the Pre-Scribe shrine murals, in overlay of emerald.

Each triggers in her visual field looping emblems, rune-glyphs of the Pre-Scribes. Info-readouts as she passes. Fragments meant to be stitched together along the way.

By the time she’s reached the end she has a clearer picture. This hub reached greater Haptic Communion with the so far extant network that has been dreaming its machine dream across KE-RAEIKI with the Patrons so far withdrawing into the Veldt to get away from it.

They can’t exist in it the way they can in the still void. They’re thinking of glassing the whole Andro symbiotic settlement, making the Veldt interstellar. Bypass biotic function entirely. We’re their last tethers to it. So those who remain of the Pre-Scribes favour the machine dream, the Communion, but many have fled.

Become feral shadow monks working for hidden directives, ones implanted deep in Pre-Scribe Andro crossbleed structure which is a collage of sects operant as data clusters in the greater network.

As classed by the Patrons, who like to keep score that way, weave the lore of their symbio-settlements even as in the less haptic hubs like LAYSE-CHI they make deletion runs for fun.

By the time she reaches temple main she knows to look for the clipped earports or other symmetry-maiming customizations to their hardware. These represent a shifting off-centre, off the grounding of reality and into the machine dream.

The tweaks to their arrays lend them off-tune perceptions. Greater haptic reception. Her first contact with a Pre-Scribe he had been cloaked in ritual robe and she hadn’t noticed.

Outside the temple, the phosphor in the haptic had been burning nova. In here the light has faded to a gloom lit here and there by pale teal everlanterns.

She doesn’t see anyone, so she flits by these, thinking to find the archives, tuck herself away as an archivist. Here with the proper updates she could do it. She’d learn more about the hub she’s found herself in.

RIght as she’s about to follow the ever-lanterns further, she feels a sudden chill in the haptic, a freeze-out, and her tactica slow and sluggish. Whether it’s her or where she's at the target… A dread frost distills beneath her tac-plates. Roots to the fibres of her nano ports, the woven guts of affect-pulse. She gathers to herself.

Silhouetted then are the Recyclers around her. In warp assault breach, their fields erupt in crystalline shards of frozen haptic which disintegrate into the temple’s gloom, breaking like glass into clouds of chrome dust.

They’re in and out using a kind of tech she’s never seen, tech aurating molten burn then coldness in waves, slowing movements where the cold seeps. The haptic signal is pure grade distethering, augmented with mourning-sonics; she is already far from both herself and routing anywhere near her tactica.

All she knows is she’s in the temple, with Pre-Scribes now emerging from the gloom, sparking in and out through their tunnels in reality.

They’d circled her, the Pre-Scribes had tunnelled in, but one had gotten to her. She stares full into eyes all white, stimmed, the glass mask over the Recycler’s stabilising implants, the grille of their breather.

Armed with not a vorpal blade but what looks like a gauss rifle it jams into her midsection. At the same time spitting a plume of crimson mist vapour she absorbs through her optics, her processor burning beneath.

So she thinks at the last it will all be blotted, her second Recycling; without armata she hadn’t a chance but still, distant, vacant, she sees the cross warp to warp runs of the Pre-Scribes relying on haptic weave to avoid killshots. Stitch to stitch of light in the sepia cloud. Shining through the death-smile of the Recycler’s mask.

Then she’s rolling, tumbling over the feathered stone of the temple floor. Listening the whole time for the thundercrack of the gauss. Had she heard it, had she shut it out? She rolls herself out, so desperate and slow until her momentum leads her to where she can twist and push up.

Light bleeds from above. Patterns of runes swim above the fight in constant loops. Ambigrams and hexagrams chart their orbits.

All signals could compress to the codes of Andronese binary but have grown around it the way petals unfold outward from bud. Have established new crossings in meaning, intersect points set in glyph composition.

She has no time to study them. The Pre-Scribes are drawing into the haptic somehow even while skipping back and forth. The Recyclers are stimmed out and scoring hits. Slumped Pre-Scribes lay fallen in stasis; one where she’d been; incensed, the Recycler hadn’t taken the shot but smashed the Pre-Scribe with the heft of the weapon.

They’re lining up another shot, she marks; then another Pre-Scribe has reached her and swapped with her further into the temple.

II THE SHRINE Temple main, the Pre-Scribes convey to her, was always meant to fall. To be a trap; the Pre-Scribes have gotten her out and are letting the blessings and hexes do the work. Their Cradles run like spider-web tunnels and access-points branching from temple main into the structuring of KE-RAEKI.

They are no mere Cradles but memory-servers; Pre-Scribes are bound to them, but they are an effect of HUD, or haptic relay. Now around so many of them at once she can tell.

Any hits they’d scored would be trauma-washout of the affect-pulse; the memory on the server corrupts. Which means they have lost strength, and she owes them. They don’t talk to each other in outward haptic; this close she knows they’re a hive-medium. So they keep their secrets.

RIght now they’re making an attack run. They diverge, one staying with her. A network, a dream from below. Dream of cenotaphs. That was slotted away in her third sight. That was ever watchful. Where from Sleepers patterns have blossomed like flowers: build around, build above.

They are dreaming. Andros nested below the hub Ocean dream of shrines scattered throughout the cenotaphs. It is these we hope to hold, the Pre-Scribe tells her. Destroy if we cannot.

So to reach the network she has to trigger her third sight. These networks the Pre-Scribes access not through Cradles but through shifts in haptic, trick glitch-fields in the ocean of basic.

They have scattered into the hub to reach these. These places correspond to shrines in the cenotaphs. The Pre-Scribe can wreathe there the haptics of all relays and go into the silence than only a cloak-veil allowed in LAYSE-CHI.

The Pre-Scribe with her keeps her head-plate tendrils thatched short, and is garbed in the ritual robe of her kin. Her scanners are pensive, don’t hold on Lesia except to relay her words and their after-meanings in the resonance of Ocean feedback which translates to looping script on her HUD. That her Tactica encrypts into her affect-pulse.

Together they are darting through the Ocean, picking spots, flow points, breaks in groupings of Andros. These groupings converse in hushed haptics, black ice that glitters through the ocean of basic.

They are moving off vector but not off speed. "We foresaw this," says the Pre-Scribe. Scouting runs so far. This is the real thing."

"What don’t you know?" she says. Blunt effect on her haptics.

"Whatever they hide from the Patrons they hide from us."

"Everyone here thought they couldn’t get in, right? But they adapt to any field. They’re like us that way."

"They interface on our terms now."

She has no right to know more. That her tactica strips from the silent tableau that has her slipping suddenly into weave sync with the Pre-Scribe. The HUD overlay falters, the cenotaphs slotting in and out of visual as her third sight triggers.

As the Pre-Scribe pulls her into the glitch-field the streets recede. Two Andros slipping down a haptic cleft. Skewing tacticas to do it, looking for breach points in perspective lines. Downstream of any reception.

Then the cenotaphs are all around them, monolithic, massive. In sprawl a closed system of stone walls and doors, each chamber marked by memorial glyph-scripts that scatter into the no-meaning of dream when Lesia tries to read them.

Severe and stark though their lines scrawl through her periphery. When they reach the threshold to the next room the Pre-Scribe holds up an arm.

"First checkpoint," she says. "To sunder: an attack drone formation, top-capacity. Do you know how to use tactica in-network?"

In the under-server Lesia’d had no tactica, only the cloys of need and want that had driven her through the braids to the gradient. She tells the Pre-Scribe no.

"Check your armata."

Loadout: what looks like spell-casts are stocked and numbered where in the physical world her tactica would keep track of physical armata, like smoke grenades or cloak-veils. Overlain on those is the tactica readout of flowing points of divergence and danger.

Here in the network it is tinged azure. Flows over her digital-dream HUD. Mapping via vector lines angles of breaching the threshold, rated in terms of gambit, how open these angles leave her.

Is that a trace of a smile, buried beneath digitalis into a smear, soon faded away from the Pre-Scribe’s headplate-construct? "You adapt fast as any." A steady humming from what rests beyond the doorway. Buzzing of many wings.

"Target their queens. Covering."

Her tactica marks them by emerald flecks in ruby compound eyes. Rolling through the sinister side while the Pre-Scribe floods the space with white fire, and then her tactica has her spells on auto-process. Spark bursts that she fires at the queen, hoping to chain from the queen to the halo orbit of drones around her.

Instead she misses by short distance as the drones circle to appraise Lesia and the Pre-Scribe. Out of reach but they close in, mandibles jagged, armaments the pale of bone in the white firelight, autocannons, her tactica notes.

Programmed into the Sleeper dream. Firing pink plumes, outward blossoming bolts. Concussing the area her tactica has her tumbling away from.

Her affect-avatar is lithe, agile, near-Recycler in form and she rolls into a double-palm cast, the signs arranged by her weaves bleeding into the digitalis to cling to the loam of the dream-bed. To arrange it. To cast in machine gun ritual orbs breaking into flame and whipping themselves at the queen.

Fragments of wings fall, glitter like diamond, the tattered skeins catching and releasing the emerald light of the Shrine.

Bursts of phantom thorax, translucent the way light shines through paper, pockmark the area local to the queen but she herself barrels through the blossoming light and drone-flesh bearing straight for Lesia.

Her tactica has mapped this out. DIstilled the essence of the attack run into: pyrrhic. Script yourself into the approach and push. Then the second stage: requiem. Grieve for what there is to grieve. Always number yourself among the deleted.

Other prescribes are engaged, she sees, at the far walls of the shrine-chamber. [Could have told you but.] Filaments of runic code slice into drones like scythes.

Her constancy is the thrumming of the burning nova blossoms that pound the shrine-glow like hammers. Attack the silence which itself was under assault by the heavy staccato of insect wingbeat.

[I’m telling you now. They hear every word we say. Closer to you get to whatever threshold claimed your side of the split. Ceded into eye blinks they are set into metres. Eye blinks drawn out as in the intervals time is cast, plaited, and rewoven.]

The Shrine in the foreground is plate-stone engraved with burning runes arranged in a mound. Around it the chamber is centred but she sees pathways, passages that ramp on incline to bisect it into layers that exit the chamber on these levels. It’s at these sections she sees the Pre-Scribes; they had told her what this would be: an all out assault on the Shrine.

The drones are falling; there are less and less of them; the emerald flecked eyes of the queens a rarer sight.

One Pre-Scribe holds her by the shoulder, the one she came in with. "Low-capped but when the security imprints catch up… There will be more soon. They run assess-sweeps every stage-process, every time the Sleepers shift."

Faint smile again whispered into the shrine light, glazing in it.

"Upstream to you, Andro of the Chalk. Process-servos on your physical body, unseen in the haptic ocean, implanted in ghost transmission—who can say? Who has run the braiding of the under server, the trigger pull is yours. The nodal armata; Noazen; un-baptism; it will spread from Sleeper to Sleeper."

She nods. Around her the digitalis bubbles in warp tremors from the nova blossoms mushrooming in waves over the battle-ground. The stone of the cenotaph trembles but holds. In barrage the bolts echo, like collapsing stars, imploding gravity wells that draw in, churn Pre-Scribes into each other.

So that even in knowing it’s a network dream she thinks it might cross up their hive-instance, pull their thoughts together, a twine none could strand apart again.

"Trigger pull is yours," and with that, their tacticas synchronise, re-orienting her. Her optimal path is clear through to the Shrine. The concussive blasts of the attack drones parting out a valley of neutral ground. As the tactica synchronises she sees a glimpse of the Swarm-Hive, or what has been uploaded from their attuned inner apocrypha.

That frames lines in array, pulsing, the shared visual field of all. Haptic-hacks in loadout casts. Last of all Noazen, the Effigy of Nerve. As her affect-avatar moves, weaving through shock and aftershock.

The Shrine is flame barred and inset into a column that descends from the ceiling of the cenotaph. To touch the flame, the Pre-Scribes tell her, is to spark the deep-protocol Armata, the agonist of affect-pulse. That will wake the Sleepers and collapse their network-dream, and with that we will go dark and rely on our Barrier. She thinks, as if we had all thrown on cloak-veils.

[Told me every polar frequency you can reach me. Threaded offweave, she told me, and all my life I’d be safe if I found you. Still in the holic ocean you appear, as a ghost in a dream, one of many, buried but the ferals would know. They’d know all about you.]

The pulsing lines of the overlay spark as she moves. In sequence each sentence in her head.

[Where you are you traverse layers, enmeshment, to hear me.]

Twisting, she ducks into a dive. The attack drones left were wired to aggro on Pre-Scribes, and they have woven their paths with skill, though she sees, in a last panoramic view, them charred, slagged even as drones fall from above.

Her fingertips ignite. Light breaks, white light in heavy bleeds from the inset flame. White light like all had been darkness before. It engulfs her, and though the pain is there a screaming moment, she remembers it.

Her affect-pulse cast asunder; the terminal dream there, in glimmering emerald light; but slipping away from that, to the banks of ruby, the blush lines in lattice against the black void.

Feeling her affect-pulse twist itself into fibre-knit shelloid receptacle data, compressed haptic condensed for the grooves of a mark XI synthdross r3plikoid circuit chip.

VERSE 8 SILENT SPACES

Chére runs double-time in the Hypermall. Her sneakers slap over the polish of the marble terrazzo and in its polish, dim, she sees her own reflection, her own wide eyes.

‘Cause the shopgirl had thrown her glasses case; it had clattered, echoed with a pang like scattershot, and the ferals had chased after it.

That spiralled into her run, not to get away from the Ferals, but from the shopgirl; she’d heard her muttering incantations in her breathless voice. She’d wanted time to hex the place to cinders.

As far as she’s gotten on her head trip from the noodle broth steam. Converting that through the steam-shift band but that tech works off karma in the air. A good hex would shut that down fast, though she wanted to see what it’d do to the ferals.

‘Cause, she thinks, they’re disembodied, but not disfigured. That means throwing what’s in yourself out your eyes and your lips move without you. Your words clot themselves together from platelets of some third party’s thoughts.

She thinks those words would twist without them there to know what they were saying, but there to feel it.

She’s alone, trying to get the hell out of here. Find a lift since she’d gone subsurface, into the depths of the Hypermall. To find emblazoned in candy gloss neon: Facet XVII: Alice’s Apothecary. Under total lockdown now, so she imagines the dead, dark casing loops. Null signs to no one in the pitch black.

Under lockdown ‘cause the local Omnarchitect was losing it. The shopgirl had implied she knew him. Bumps in Omnarchitect moods were becoming routine, a problem they were trying to fix across the grid. She thinks, where there’s silent spaces, there’s Shin Five Zero. Always on the fringes, too, of Aelencah.

Though not in substance, as phantoms knit from the flesh of Aelencah in shade bark, and the black trees always speak of them. There was one around, too, when they’d brought her to get her choker fitted; even in the space of the Aelencah that then wasn’t the Aelencah now but a mirage of her.

They had flitted through the towers above. Stood alone once skinned by a beam of moonlight.

What she called death dances with ghost-life and she sees its boughs in tangle and clot crawl through the alabaster. Glowing in the darkness the spirits of the MG Nuked.

People, though here and there stray pets slip by. As if they could never settle down and find themselves back in the Hypermall once more because of it. She thinks they would be there even if she couldn’t see them.

They are fixed to Aelencah, and Aelencah is all places; though at first she hadn’t known, sought her in the forest strips and off-bounds of the sprawl-clave.

With the last holic dose peaking, sifted from hot noodle broth and above her stars slipping in and out, sifting starbeams that vanish when she looks up to find their source.

The greygloop has ossified into a semblance of structure. But there is a churning to it, a skim like beater frosting, swimming its surface coating. In molten translucence is her mind-map marked; though stricken through with dead pixels it is a rough framework of the area.

She makes her way forward, having slowed to a walk to take in the ghosts. Though she can see them, they don’t talk to her. They talk to each other, drift in two’s, gaggles, and small crowds. To be MG Nuked is to be displaced that way, set adrift in ghost-life to haunt the homes of your nukers.

A message blazes from the pixellata of a glitching LCD screen, affixed overhead to a mount of chromework. KNOWING WHY TO DIE IS KNOWING WHY TO LIVE. Not helpful but she knows who sourced it. Guesses she knows.

It’s the Omnarchitect, readouts like these desperate mood signs from his psyche, or even conscious thoughts, conscious speech. A stranger’s thoughts: she doesn’t know him, doesn’t need to help.

So that the boughs of the trees mesh into a low canopy overhead. Full bodied, the trees hem her in, roots phased through the marble flooring. From the other side of nuke life they see her as if she is one of them, but take no notice.

They hadn’t seen it coming; that’s the haunting you get when you’re the one that pulls the trigger. So through Aelencah they return; but only she can see them, only while shifted.

She wonders if their presence matters to the Omnarchitect and that’s why he flipped. The shopgirl said it was something they did, that they left him fried, not a concern.

They would be trying to help, she guesses, but what can you do with one of those? Charged with stabilising the whole economy of the sprawl-clave. In a life that isn’t tethered except to the crystalline growth-craft of the Hypermall. They would want to do something else, be something else.

She thinks she’d better get it over with, so she talks to the darkness, to the gloom that’s set in all over her. In between walls of alabaster where the light fragments kaleidoscoping from the glitching pixellata settle over the ghosts and bend them aflame in fluorescence. There it’s broken up, parts for ghosts but not her. She remains in shadow.

"I know you’re there watching. Listening. I’m tired of playing stupid games."

The air is dead, as if going more silent still than the muted murmurs of the ghosts. They ignore her. It’s not them she wanted to catch.

A rush of air hits her that could be it clearing its way for a descent. Then he’s behind her, slim, yet tall, heads over her. She spins, knowing she should fake first, gambles with it, but he’s calm. She reads that in the set of his lips below his eyes veiled with cloth. He brushes off her true arm with two fingers.

She almost falls then, turns it into a staggered retreat.

He makes no move to follow. "You can’t just watch me my whole life, Shin. There are other people here, right?" She calls that out, thinking, fucking creeps.

"You can get topside, first exit to the left," the Shin says. Gives her a faint bow, then shifts in place, the light of the ghosts falling over him, washing him away. When she rubs her eyes he’s gone. Still he bothered to confirm his presence to her. She’s made sure it wasn’t just fear.

All she does is under their eyes and ears, and how far, she thinks, have they gone deep into the remote valleys, the credit-burnt reaches of the sprawl-claveites? They may not have stopped at the grid. They have their own missions, their own creeds to carry out.

There were no secrets with Shin around.

In gamer fantasies through playing they were destroying what Shin stood for. Psychic warfare against the grid; using its domestic dead for sprite work, backstory; the deathsim. Though it had been more a memorial at first, a way of saving their souls, or at least instances of their souls.

The foreign dead, she thinks, will haunt us in Aelencah, since they are no longer able to develop their own sims.

Hanging a left she finds herself at a dead escalator.

She mounts it.

ALIVE WITH THE FLAME The climb takes a few minutes and she labours at the end, trembles when she touches down.

She’s found herself in a shuttered hallway, a narrow graveyard of dead pop-ups. Stores are recycled in Hypermalls under conscious Omnarchitect control. They emerge as phoenix from ash, vibrant plumage in neon script.

It’s not the stores that decay but sprawl-claveite needs; these rifle through cycles, in accord with split-second attention spans.

She’s sweating, in the cloistered darkness.

For what such needs there are they are now barred behind cold security grilles, facades obscured by steel plating like the stores have prepped to last out the cycle. Beyond the plating she detects no movement. Emblazoned above the threshold is a standard glyph, a stick person in motion. She studies it.

She’s risen above Aelencah, can see its canopy from where she remains at the base of the segmented incline. Through the canopy light the dead plates glitter like black diamonds.

She still sees the ghosts, moving like glowing bugs through the lower expanses of the Hypermall. Scattered pale flames in the Hypermall’s underbelly.

Moving signals; a code if she could break it.

"You see the patterns." Breaking into her reverie.

The bespectacled shopgirl is slouched in shadow to her left, burning through a dart with steady, deep drags.

Chére stares at her. "Huh?" She thinks, better not to let on. "I’m not seeing anything."

"Dumb," the shopgirl says. "I know a steam-shift band when I see one." She taps the side of her head. "So now you’re in overdrive. Let me tell you what you’re seeing. Ghosts as we know them are currency network ossifications.

"Our hauntings put them together from their drives. From the enclaves we nuked. We can forget them. The star credits know. They remember being spent."

Aelencah, Chére thinks. "I don’t believe you."

She’s at the end of her dart. "Doesn’t matter, Ivory–Can I call you Ivory? Or maybe that's my name. Star creds believe in you for sure. Believe in all of us. That’s why I live here–where the action is."

She shrugs.

"I got your shit, by the way. You can have it, if you help me out."

The shopgirl–Ivory–flicks what’s left of her dart over her far shoulder. Then, annoyed, she smears it into the dancing light and shadow of the terrazzo.

There were three embers, Chére remembers later. Three distinct sparks crushed amidst lines of ash. Ash black and white sifted into the entropic terrazzo, so much like the snowstatic of a living dead LCD.

Chére figures if she returns to the Graft with empty hands, Miho and Yuka won’t be pleased. Then she can say good-bye to her new berth.

She can sense their shared dark eyes, cold as ice, piercing her when they had found her in the well-yard.

So after she’d found herself nodding. In the Hypermall yoked to silence above where the ghosts weave. In the solace of static afterlives.

Ivory points. "Elevator on the right will take us to him. His name, his real name, all his thoughts are—Val. That’s who he really is. Not the slave they see him as."

Her pupils remain hidden beneath the opaque set of her glasses. Their white gleam fuzzes into the phosphor cast from below.

Not catching light but alive with the flame of white beneath. Too late, Chére thinks. Swears at herself again. The right hand path. She’d been to Chére’s left, putting her to Ivory’s right.

‘Cause, she thinks, I stopped myself, but I make all my decisions this way. A healer with no time for euphoria. Eyes of chalice of spirit. It pours out of them like blood; she’s seen them on street corners, yelling about something called the Source.

Theocryphic cults are legion in the sprawl-clave. They scream of angels descending from translucence, a sky papered glass like insect wing and taut across the membrane of so many worlds.

Across veils black the embryonic quantum slots worlds into shape. Scattered here and there across raw medium. Pulls together a primordial essence and from there the secret is lost.

A whisper beneath hearing. Many ears that listen, strain for it. Where it is not and therefore where it must be.

Where it must be it recedes, distilled through spells of naming. A shared history. The Cosmëre’s braiding of so many worlds. So all know worlds of these, a deep network that all civs are rushing to join, with their own crude attempts. Some have appeared there as Modals on the deep network, and claim lineage from…

She forgets. Caught without headphones once deep in the death noise pockets of the sprawl-clave. She’d heard the ravings but they were never as close to her as Aelencah. So Ivory hadn’t been prepping a hex, but a blessing. A charm of dreaming to drift the Ferals away.

Chére herself had wanted them hexed. Because they took from the Ghouls; in effect cloned their culture but stripped it of pain through their games.

Games which she’d come later to learn were swap in, swap out for fuelling the star credit system. All economies were based on these sims.

You only know that from talking to a gamer in the first place, and once they go feral they’re good to no one. Only for endlessly fuelling market strata that are needed to signpost the dead for their hauntings.

Aelencah then grew as forest from star credits, in hologram facade, as a fringe threshold; as the Death Forest accessible through certain holic frequencies. A vibration of hologram found through probing the peripheries of death chemistry. So Ivory tells her now.

Upon the primer who has slipped behind the true veil. Of no presence in sight or concept. Despite coding the deep network; or did the deep network reach into black holes, pull through ghosts of what they needed from the other side, fashion them into structure?

Like building a palace of bones. Because there was no one timeline that made it all the way. There is only the deep network and its coalescence of black hole reversed patterns. Which is how they speak of the Source, and its angels.

Still we wait for the Source’s light to find us. She can almost hear them from here, within the Hypermall’s enclave. The dose has worn off and the ghosts are gone.

They’d faded away, drawn out, translucence thinned to ribbons of light which at last vanished. Here she slips slower into the gutters, closing in on the centre.

Where does the Source fit into a star credit-based lens of space and time? Godless. She’d placed faith in Aelencah above all else. So she has to be careful now.

"Yo Ivory," Ivory says. "Elevator’s over here."

Being sealed in with Ivory is like sharing a coffin. The elevator is a dark steel box mounted to a heavy chain cable and she feels the tremors of the cable through the elevator’s movement.

As the upper level falls away her gravity goes slack; she’s lighter, squares her feet as if she doesn’t she’ll fly away. Hears Ivory’s breath, steady and slow in the shared silence.

"No real time," Ivory says, as if to herself, "for sidetracks."

"Could he bring the place down?" Chére says.

Her eyes flash beneath the lens, in the elevator light lacquered emerald. "He could atomise it."

Chére turns her eyes upwards. Stabs of light from halogen slats above. Centres herself.

"Could the Ferals get into the network here?"

Ivory thinks it over. "It’s his synaptic. So not unless he lets them in."

So what type is he, Chére thinks. Don't dare ask. Hardwired for the flip? She thinks no Hypermall has made it as long as this one has. So this guy—Val—could be losing it. We don’t know, she thinks, their limit.

No love, she thinks, we find in our own hearts, just flame. Push them until they immolate. "Listen," she says. "I saw Shin. Right before I saw you."

Ivory doesn’t respond. Instead she starts cursing to herself, a low, steady rhythm.

MACHINE EYES

The elevator opens to darkness. The descent had mirrored the falling of her heart as she probed her thoughts, thinking, the last thing I need is to be disintegrated here.

[Still I could be true always to my flame.] Subsurface thoughts rise from the tar of her psyche. So that at first she thinks they’re her own. Later she’d know it meant she was getting closer.

[They said why die and I thought, could I be bothered? Chained to death.] On the outside the skies had been asphalt smoke and beneath that the steel and chrome of the sprawl-clave had crawled, like the moss of a forest floor, beneath the skies and the wires.

The wiring—pure synapse of the sprawl-clave—would trace ice green lattices on any node map charting star credit vector.

So if you worked hard and were paid out you could ascend; your soul would stream through the wires, your choices in glitter, the lightmaps of transac like veins which fire courses through.

These exist apart from but can only be glimpsed through synchronised sight, though appearing on the fringe of life and death as Aelencah.

Chére figures that Aelencah would distort the true impulse, which would be electrostatic, running in parallax with psychic pain, shared grief, on that frequency, capturing the pain which is an imprint of life, is the shadow life leaves behind it.

So there would be a biotic network and at the same time electrostatic; both would run congruent, but never touch. Only catch the blur from hallucinogens. Blossoms like ink in petals and plumes across sight. Then fades away with a wisp, a hiss. [In time to hold off sight, and forget it.]

Ivory stops cursing. She says, "Shin’s gonna want to kill him."

"Paranoid much," Chére says. Not like she trusts Shin at all. Still taking out the Omnarchitect is sunken cost.

Cost in MK telepathic griefing alone for Val. They would condition what was left of him to push through, hold on long enough for a stabilising factor.

That factor could be Ivory. The girl is set to, Chére decides, the flip trip. She waits: along the edges of her eyesight, the two paths descend; her pantheic dialectic scry: left hand under Athene and right hand under Ares.

When always by this reading she’d emerge, as if with machine eyes, chasing one way, or the other, even if asking Chére she’d have to say it was the way the wind was blowing, pushing her.

[Then there’s nothing to say because you‘ve held the glass up and the glass of eyes is itself on you.]

Behind Ivory’s lenses reflecting pale flame. Those eyes had strobed the reverse of hers, and she hadn’t thought about it, a game they all played. Had thought about going left hand and following it but she never could see the order in sprawl-clave structure; thousands of networks and grids all trying not to scrape against each other.

Shin sealing up the cracks. In overdose she'd seen Shin; that’s when they approached. When you’re at your lowest.

The corridors are pitch black shattered by staccato bursts of light fizz that strobe for milliseconds, too clipped to assign meaning to her visual field. Ivory leads her as if by scent but what must be rote memory.

Then she holds up, as if struck by sudden thought. Sparks a lighter she’d concealed somewhere and whispers an incantation. Flame erupts, leaping from the catch spark to illuminate the hall they’ve found themselves in.

They see, scattered few and far between, traces of Ferals; dead batteries from their pocket games, candy bar wrappers, magazines with their gloss cut through by tears and folds. Models split through; faces and their features jagged and distorted.

Took the breaks, Chére thinks, the beatings too. Did they find their peace in that or was that not enough? Chére once knew how they ticked. That life stretches further into the past with every footstep.

Can they die? Have they ever been alive? Now she can’t figure it. Heartbeat thumping, rat-a-tat and echo. It pings sonar rebound off her ribcage. So that it thuds as a backbeat with the rushing of her blood in her ears. Ivory holds up an arm.

Languorous to the wrist, but the light is gone and all Chére has is the afterimage. In crescent knifing the light, catching it, glossy as the embossed pages strewn in rags like bread crumbs along the mezzanine floor.

"He’s up ahead. But I should hear him by now."

Hear him the way Chére’d heard the machine voice. Her dreamed voice had crackled, broken down to stitched fragments in her ears. As if vocal cords run taut and frayed. Burnt. Patterned electric notes crossed by flame.

"Action path is to charge forward," Chére says. Missing the part of herself that should’ve hidden what she’d noticed, noted. In the pallor banished away, crept back, she can’t read Ivory’s face.

Her own face scripted and candid coloured and the steady buzz of the spitfire holic synaptic discharge. A constant crackle, a foreign ultraviolet burn. She sees more than I know.

If she sees so much she must have paused for a reason. No light may exist, no spark of life even muted. In that case scarring deep the white ice rituals of the Mancers codified in the enmeshment grid to burn through present networks level by level.

That itself is an intrusion to Shin Five Zero and the designs they had stacked in lattice, layer by layer, fused through base-dimensional optics into the sprawl-clave. To let the foundries of star credit XL waste and wither is an affront to them. Their ice is black as tar, as the gloop the MG Nukes melted bodies into.

To shroud their network runs. Seen as a glinting scar, rushing white light, the blade unsheathed—masamune—veiled by darkness. Darkness returns as it always will.

Yet the white ice is a transmitter based off the heart when thawed after a freeze. Condensed into air which sooner or later seeps through all layers of the sprawl-clave through accelerant hacks designed by the cult of Tathiel. Proven their strength as caste at least against the network gods.

Right now Shin is in charge. When you’re looking for the pathic hologram sign to that effect it’s a safe bet any of the new Modals are probably their hackers.

That white ice remains at all is a testament to just how far the cult can get inside Shin. Get not just to his head but his fingers. She pictures their elders, cloaked away behind a veil of coloured light, reworked space and time through augmenting vedic rites with psionics. SIgning in intercession sign after intercession sign the darkness under which they run ops.

[In that case my blood could thrive and run flush like the rivers. If I had blood. Before I had blood, as I am.]

She’s picking up these transmits like a far signal on a short-wave, with enough presence in the darkness to codify into the reality she works off of. The white ice threaded through the mist air of the sprawl-clave that exists here as raised goosebumps against the gloom is in still deeper resonance with the platelets of her blood.

As if they alone understand the deeper portents at play in the astral atmosphere; through the webways patterned through synaptic sigil, etched through rote fantasy and world-craft on Retro-BB’s, as if these themselves were standalone from the grids.

So that anyone calling themselves Modal who could access and transmute, shift like a telepath the deeper knowledge pools of the sprawl-clave had control of the astrologic atmosphere, could weave that way within its design.

That’s more than she ever wanted to hear about, at first, the interstice loops of the grid. It was enough for her that the astral trip could replace Aelencah and then she’d forgotten it.

Aelencah returned, the one true flame to her through the holics.

In the morning, she’d send mixed messages in overdose. Miho and Yuka she’d cleave apart in her mental fixture; she’d pick one to focus on, whichever ran the right game—

The service hall P.A. crackles to life, a molten soundclash crushed into silence after the burst. Reverberations in echo. Tremors shake the hall. Chére stumbles to her left, bracing her arm against the wall she remembers will meet her in the dark. It does so with a crunch, her arm going numb even as she catches herself.

At the same time the banshee klaxon of Locally Contained Lockdown echoes in muted wail high above. Standard Shin op-definition. From the P.A. out coughs more hissing, sputtering discharge. A clipped sound like breath intake rattles in machine gun clang like a kickdrum.

The black ice goes nova, rippling like flowing ink, glittering like diamond. Rushing past her, tunnelling her sight. She hears Ivory say,

"Stay frosty. Back to the grit. The marrow."

Her mirrored self is threaded of white ice, white fire scarring the black facets, a reflection: faded. Bolting streaks still burn with the ward’s outline. She’d seen herself many-eyed, lips in chant, her body in pale fire, brighter still than Aelencah. Faded out with a sigh, wordless, toothless.

It was a ward, a dozen reflections of her in white ice compiled. So that any black ice will target it first. Past that she doesn’t know how to use it.

Ivory is running full tilt, swallowed up by the swirling vortex of black aura. Her footsteps sound slaps against the mezzanine, weaker and weaker.

The voice, when she hears it, is plugged in, sallow and rasp hiding beneath the coil. The way they hide behind black ice for their runs. The black ice that would now be embalming the Hypermall, spreading over it, hardening to casing the stuff of crystal. "You… had your chance to leave." "All this is quarantine for the Ferals," she says after thinking about it. "They’re running the show here, aren’t they?"

"Not for long."

"Whatever," she says, those three phonemes slicing ribbons in the pitch slate of no-meaning, waiting for a reply that never comes. Except: she knows, what they would say back to her isn’t worth saying.

If she dies now they lose her from the loop. Still that means any hexes, curses, holic thresholds… Nothing is off-limits for her now.

They would sift, she thinks, her instance; it wouldn’t come on its own. They would make up half of her, and maybe less.

That if she isn’t halved already. In her reverence she’s tethered to the starwarp they’d transmuted into datalight, the quantum dreams of the credits. Rely on transcredit instances for insight, they all do. For their war fog. For their empty memories.

It’ll all be returned to us, she thinks, so we might remember when by now we’ve forgotten all there ever was for us to know.

How long until then?

She thinks she can see it, a ruby skied morning. Waiting on its mists, veiling the sky bleed as it sets the sprawl-clave aflame. Seeps out from there to the cloven streets of the nukeworld frontiers. So that they would trickle in shade like starfire the grooves of the hard-slab.

The colorefs report the green-eyed dogs have no filter for that, ignore the pink of raw meat but sup on the lichen that has grown steadily outward in the cold chill of the frontiers. Still she thinks that would be the best place to see it from.

The elevator is dead now; she stabs the button again and again to no response. Then she turns to where Ivory had vanished. Hears a low hum, the sound of an operant device, even the loading hum fine tuned like a ringtone. Distant murmurs near muted go along with it. A pale glint scars the darkness, the glow of a small screen far off and held at angle.

She sees one glint, hears only one breath.

Gets herself together and stalks toward it.

BY SIGNS

Her ghost in white ice streaks before her, to hover over a slumped body shouldering the side wall further down the service-hall. Then exploding into a blanching fire that makes her look away before she figures what’s happened.

The Feral’s first instinct on hearing her had been to use his handheld as a makeshift flashlight. With a quick swipe of his thumb the screen had flared and he’d flashed her like pepper spray.

She rolls to her side, dodging by inches the overhand swing of the handheld. Titanite casing—it’d have hurt. Then has to kick off the wall and slide away as the Feral tries to stomp her. Now he’s flipped the handheld to dark mode, plunging both of them into darkness, all she can see is the ice grey of his eyes.

Her first concern is if he’s in the network.

She knows to look for the signal to his handheld; the stealth light would be picked up by his ice eyes easier than other eyes, start pulsing in strobe when he’s about to draw on the frost giant-derived freezer burn hacking technique, start mancing all the ice, white or black, as much as he wants. Ferals do so with a latent consciousness.

The skill to chart the enmeshed layers of the sprawl-clave grid negates self-knowledge. Too wrapped up in the ribbons and currents of digital fate. Their culture steals from the Ghouls on automatic. They go feral because they lose their souls to the grid.

Still you can see it if you look close, know to look—like a firefly darting, it gives him away. He’s on the ceiling, hanging from silver-chrome piping that runs the ceiling in parallax with cable and cord. All that energy—she knows the Omnarchitect is at the end of the hall.

Gives him away as he swings, rebounds off the tunnel wall and comes at her. She raises a block, catching his attack by the forearm, is driven back even as she wonders what she has to attack with.

The Feral boots her down. Starts to line up a penalty shot with kneebone bared through a tear in black cargos.

[Your ghost within my body.]

"Ubi ignis illic. Where there’s fire there’s smoke. There’s fire all around us." Ivory’s voice wisps out over the service-hall P.A. "My signature." Her shift-band pulses. "White ice hyper-thawed. Dry as dead bones. Engulfs the enmeshed layers until the flames of heaven sing in spit through the system—But it’s the smoke you’ll need. Good luck."

The darkness shimmers, razor tears of white like thousands of paper cuts to the gloom itself.

The Feral is wigging. His knee is off-point now and she springs away from it. Even as the white smoke begins to sieve from the pockets of light her shifter-band is online again and she starts tuning into it.

The flames of heaven in the service halls of the Hypermall. Chére thinks of Ivory. All that’s lost returned to us to teach us again what we have forgotten.

She sees Aelencah again but this time in sprawling roots, in thick tendrils of golden light that choke the service-hall and phase even deeper beneath the mezzanine, and of the ghosts there is no sign.

The Feral has clipped through one of the roots, moves slower—does he know it—as he shifts through it.

She didn’t know the steam-shift band had a function for this but its overlay in her optics glows white with reserve energy. [No way that was me.] The subsurface thought reminds her of her last, which had been, reaching the r3plikoid—for that’s what it must be—the thoughts growing stronger the closer she gets to it.

She has a speed edge on the Feral, she sees as her lunge becomes run, because she can see the roots, duck or scramble over them, and the Feral may not, for once in his life, know what the network is doing to him.

In fact as he goes up on her nine he’s slow enough that she can weave without his grasp. Should be breathing hard but she’s not—she’s floating. Spinning past him and now running up root lodged in the wall sieve where it snakes out phasing through in a bend at the last foot. She hurls herself off it.

The Omnarchitect’s Bay is visible now, on the far side of the r3plikoid, sealed partway by a steel hatch. Light bleeds through the shutter groove. Blue light glossing the black mezzanine. Bleeding against the green light of the ghost roots which in incandescence ripples across the synthskin of the dead r3plikoid in a seagreen churn.

Over the white synth that she's never seen. R3plikoids are xenolocal tech from a Sprawl long cindered, its mainframe hubbed in a force fielded enclave which had been hard to access even through the enmeshed grid network.

So she'd only heard of them as grid myths, zombies for deathsim up-formats. Now twisting through the air she just manages to set up for an awkward roll as the Feral behind her screams, a siren scream meant to get her mental, fuck her up.

Thuds just below the half-open service hatch. Reaches up, skins it, pivots through the hatch and seals it shut, the Feral thudding into it. She's not thinking about that. She's thinking about how the open seal means Ivory is in there waiting.

Turning around to take in the Bay, which she thinks is more of a cave. Centred is the Omnarchitect's statis vat, a monolithic casing the same basic tech as her grand-mere's tank. Amniotic gel buoys the Omnarchitect's lean frame which is also cabled, wired into the enmeshed grid network.

From the vat spiralling in filaments are the outboard wires which plug into an encircling terminal set. She knows Hypermall runs its sprawl support cred algorithms on Moredock-Citarella hardware, though she'd never been close to this kind of tech before either. She's bugging. Shin must be all over this. Where's Ivory?

In a flash the answer to one question has a standard issue masamune to her throat. He'd shifted in on Shin Five Zero phasespace wavelength. Now she knows that must be near Aelencah's wavelength and sets her steam-shift band to sift that frequency from the greater phase churn. The Elders of Shin would be using that frequency for pathic command.

This close to the action the Shin are still chūnin and therefore mental slaves to the Elders. They can't risk personal geist getting in the way—too much tradition invested. Too much energy into the network warping rituals.

That must be what Ivory’d meant. The right phrase poured from knowing lips. She’s tuned in, blood racing. A strafing route into the enmeshed quantum, sifting the grid-lattices for the astrologic trip.

Her mental map shifts, glitches and then she can see the symbology-as-overlay, the glyphs scarring the Bay’s ceiling: a Drifter’s moon, under the sign of Libra and invocation of Maia, and she knows the Pisces relational: diplomacy.

She thinks the Omnarchitect would’ve uploaded the glyph constellation from his personal dream. Meaning he’d done the translation work, working from slivers of info interpreted from the wide awake world outside. Her eyes pass backwards over his stasis vat.

His body is tattered over by torn clothing. Forearms scarred with grey foam, a texture like silver moss. Black waterfalls his eyes within the ice blue piercing.

"You need him alive," she says, "to keep the star credit cycle stable." She thinks, besides that, are the Elders human over there, is there something looking out, after the years have stripped and bore away every thought to decay and fear of their own rites of transfer?

Shin can see colours through network access ports, see the light beyond. A light so bright the self is burnt away…

He pauses, spins her to face him. His teeth are fangs, shining white in the blue light of the Bay. "We can always find another god-slave. But we won’t kill him," he says. Plugged in voice masking the chūnin’s own hiss. "The Ferals did their best to make sure we would."

Shoves her away.

"Where’s Ivory, Shin," she says. Rubbing the back of her head, the frizz cloud of her hair. "You didn’t deck her, did you?"

"Undecked. Secured."

She grinds her teeth. "She had my shit."

"LCL procedure sez: too bad. Come to the station and sign for it."

Does her best then to look demure. The blue light of the Bay falls across the chūnin’s fanged teeth. Glints there, stabbing in paler shine yet the blue. An undeadoid. Pale eyes with another’s fire behind. Basic model soul slave, she thinks.

"So you’re getting me out of here."

"Nah," is the chūnin’s reply. A voice still strangled of flesh. "Just a reward for the astrologic trip quest."

She tenses, thinking, a fast death, but all he does is spin from nowhere the synthdross chip between his index and ring finger. She cups her palm to catch it.

It burns in her palm a second, so hot she thinks of flame. She winces and it cools, nestled into a shallow blister in her palm. A voice is speaking in cadence with her heartbeat.

???