CW: drugs, combat, robots, ambiguous humanity, nuclear weapons

(Σ)

ARC OF FIRE

She's plenty of time to stew over how deep into the astrology trip Shin has hacked, plenty of time just hunting for an open outlet not cabled into by Valby's stasis tank. 'Cause Val's life, she thinks, no matter his endless strength, is living death trapped in the stasis tank, like Grandmere's was—death tech used to service life. She thinks, to know you live in a parallaxfuelled symbiosis is one thing, but to have that parallax laid so open, so bare—Shin studies what's not his to study with guiltless focus. She would think soulless but there was a soul, wasn't there? Must be at least one to chart that far past the Thane's Moon, already fixing in place the Harbinger's, and the pantheistic paths beneath those which may have reset since she had last looked for them.

Still her mindfit now hacked with the shiftband is the smoke of a dart of Ivory's emergency stash. She lit it in the silent space—that would be still if not for Chére's restless movement—that smoke fuels the mindfit with toxin the shiftband transmutes to access points within the addiction receptors, which chains them to memory. So that memory will be what her psyche chases, chases in detail until it lapses. Until then the mindfit is blunted by the dark ‘holic aether, and so she thinks through that haze Shin a cult of shadow demons, and their reach so vast, that they have tiered so high in the astrology and if they're behind the Modals too—

Finding the right socket she places the chip within the R3plikoid; blue lines pulse through limbs pale as snow. Around her the cables in thick tangles run spiderwebbing and clotted patterns over the cold steel floor—that had been built of steel crystallized into thorns to brace and support itself within the larger sprawl-fracture structure, that had built itself, nanites hacking the star creditflow, seeing a chance to yoke a compressed and isolated populace, acting as if with one mind, claiming to speak for the moon credits. If Ivory lives here, Chére thinks, she's crazy, and if Shin thinks the stability of the credit matters that much—but that's too far beyond her. She doesn't think she wants that far into Shin's business.

Valby stares at her the whole time, still of body but eyes full of life, movement, tracking her, limbs wavering in the gloop of the stasis tank with the ripple of ice blue gel—shimmers through the glass of the tank, streaks of violent white like albino diamond shards. The R3plikoid's voice, when it speaks, is autocrafted, singsong ethereal yet precise, inflective.

"The last thing I remember was a dream run," says the R3plikoid. "I think I've gone too far."

"Just far enough," Chére says, staring at the R3plikoid. The name is in her head, within who she is, her selfhood centred on the razor line of her eyesight—which now in probe cuts off the R3plikoid from the slants of the Omarchitect's Bay, the sleek finish of the R3plikoid glistening against the cold blue light with the eyes of Valby dead set on her neck. So that she turns and fixes him with a death stare, softens—old social status instinct—not letting the full hatred through. You can look at someone that way, hold the fire back, save it for the next time. One look into piercing hazel eyes.

"Parallax? What do you mean? This isn't the Veldt?"

Chére winces. Next to the R3plikoid rests a battered notebook, decaled in magazinecollage. INSTRUCTION MANUAL. She begins poring through it; what looks like a boilerplate tech readout has been cut and pasted into with notes and in some cases blurred out and scribbled over with a felt marker.

"Here we go. This has been heavily researched... blah blah blah... the parallax Realm is not to be confused with a deathsim... the subject will progress through several stages of perception... collaborative project with parallax Intercessor; this will be a distinct nodal soul capable of conscious contact with.... Okay I think this is it. Basic chip install...."

She remembers what it was like, then, in her Habitexa—installed within a passivity. Her spine chills as she hears clattering from the corner of the Bay where she'd entered; of course the Feral is still outside, and with the time she's used up, she thinks there must be more. She'd fitted a rebar sledge that was lying next to the hatchway in a locking slot, wedged into the slot to block the latch—still, she thinks, kept like a pet, one way or the other, if not in her Habitexa then in here or some other deathtrap.

Valby's face is set in twisted grimace and she tries to ignore it.

"So that's done," she says to herself, trying to stay focused. "Hold on. I gotta unplug you."

The R3plikoid—Lesia—stares at her with its soft eyes, wide and pale as moons, glowing silver against the cold blue light that she realizes is getting stronger; the Bay is bathed in it as if under a rave strobe. She draws near the stasis tank.

"Dude," she says. "What are you doing?"

There's no answer. Instead Valby's features tremble and smear beyond the gel like he's trying to reset himself. The pounding on the hatchway is louder, more urgent, and beats a faster melody; behind the rhythm she hears dim shouting. She finds the wall socket and yanks the cord free, hears a soft scratching and turns to see the rising R3plikoid.

"My status is pretty dead low," Lesia says. "Either my tactica is offline or it's gone."

"Tactica?" Chére shakes her head. "Can you fight?"

"My martial forms are," Lesia says, in a gesture that could be shrugging or her testing her limbs, "limited without it."

She sees the rebar bend then, wrench itself askew as if possessed of soul—in the strobing blue light like a broken limb, pale of bone.

"What can you do?" Lesia says.

Chére's turn to shrug. "Social process professional. I can charm them to death." Joke falling flat as she flattens out the pages of the manual. But I was losing. "Says visual coordination will be weak due to low storage space. Where you're pulled from, you were working from different storage rules. Different physics or something."

She studies where the blue light blends with the silver of the R3plikoid's eyes, a colour like thawing ice. "Your eyes are like—" she says, then stops herself. "What’s your vision like?"

The R3plikoid's features twist; where the eyes are pale novas the mouth is hollow, the nose absent, but furrowed as if in anger or disbelief the effect is to draw the jaw hollow out, as if it could swallow more than the air needed to scrape across synthdrossFM vocal circuits, as if it could swallow the world.

"Tricameral. Topside halves in synchronicity. Bottom halves are disjointed."

Chére wonders when she was supposed to have become an expert. Smoke curls into the stale air from the burning dart, wafting translucence distorting clarity into fragments of light, a thousand shards or more like stars stabbing into night if she could count them. She'd left it behind her ear and it curls before her in ribbons, the shiftband splicing endorphin into ‘holic; what it seeks in the smoke is the char, the cinder, though by instants it's been chased out of the furling to leave only the vapour—which thinned is a gossamer cloud, twodimensioned, flat as paper before her.

The R3plikoid breaks her trance. Lesia is pacing up and down the length of the Bay, gauging her speed and agility, Chére guesses; the rebar implodes then, as it does snapping the lock latch in half. Lesia, on the back end of her pacing, turns.

There are three Ferals now running what she thinks is a battle pattern, lurching movements veiling fury in speed. Lesia sets herself as Chére fades away, fades out of her mind at the same speed she presses herself flat against the far wall, Val's blue eyes tracing her the whole time. They all scramble for better angles, zigzag across the flooring—coming in one on each side and the third as the killing blow.

Lesia isn't within their grasp by the time it arrives, clutching at dead air, limbs flailing in crescents as if in mock embrace, as if miming romance or the kind of sweaty stuff that came up when the choker would OD her, so that she'd have to apply for fresh temperance licensing or else be isolated so hard it would be hard to call her a professional at much but lying around daydreaming. She's at their six, cut between them, and the surprised third Feral is offstep, runs right into a chromeplated knee slamming into him with the severity of a Shin Five Zero standard checkin; he lifts off like a rocket, crumples into where the doorhatch, blasted open, juts at a sharp angle. Spine first and Chére sees the body twist and fall.

Innocence lost; first sighted maiming. Of course under cover of white ice that she thinks is still thawing into unseen mist—Shin's gone and with him the dark aura he carries around with him as a counter to the corollary, which means the white ice would be free to act, settling into any free terminal systems or pocket deathsims.

Val blinks in rapid fire bursts. Mounted against the far wall where she's splayed herself is, she sees, the Omnarchitect's emotional readout terminal—a glazed liquid crystal screen shines bright but the terminal system itself is rustflecked and scarred with dust trails. She sees a message spell itself out: THE BLUE ARC OF FIRE; THE ICE CRYSTALS. SPLINTERED AT THE SOLID BLACK AIR.

The first two pivot as one; Lesia does a turning roll, the R3plikoid's chrome a blur of white fire in the strobing blue, offcentre still as the first two reach her. The R3plikoid must be way less agile than Lesia's motor patterns are used to because the first attack gets her blindside—looked to Chére like she couldn't swivel the R3plikoid's stiff casingskull fast enough. They are, she knows, steeped in inception from their years of playing, absorbing martial arts techs and god knows what other skills; even then their styles are distinct. The attack is a flurry of small blows that push Lesia back into an awkward stance, but Chére sees the other line up a heavy blow—no two Ferals are the same, each with a different blend of techs from different deathsims.

It's the ice, she speculates, the layering of the sprawl fracture grid, Layer Zero a foundation of security protocol and layered above it culture feeds and the Layer Seven Archives; isn't sure what else could generate the selective-sight hologram forestry. Moon credits are dataloaded and aggro onto the ice, any ice at all. In the endorphinspliced ‘holic dissociation she's above herself, seeing the top of her wispy hair frizz, the set of her shoulders bunched against the Bay wall, and then floating through the ice, scouring it for ways to help as she does—even as Lesia puts the first Feral in the way of the second with an overshoulder takeover, even as the Feral's shoe plants him square in the nose and his eyes glaze.

He stumbles back, but it wouldn't be guilt to him, just a tactics fuckup. In his dilated eyes she can see from her disembodiment a void within the dark pupils; recovers with a graceful windmill into a stance she thinks he's ganked from some Shin Five Zero emulator, or else a hyperrealistic deathsim chasing down memories of underground fight clubs. She'd expect to see fear in his eyes but there's none as he motions Lesia forward—instead a smirk that parts to spill something she hears in her fugue state has to do with a prophecy, a hallucination, she thinks, they came up with, and this would be a test to them, to work it out.

The Feral is breathing hard; upon his face stretches a beatific smile. She sees a yellowed, stained molar, eyes nearclosed, fine slants beneath the lids. She can read his thoughts like an open book—faith, acceptance—but can't read Lesia's even the way she had in dreams. The cold blue strobe plays over them both; Lesia's body shines like the moon evanescent beyond the Pandora Field, and against the Feral's thrifted clothing, a loose, dark sweater and baggy jeans, it draws out seams and contours. She sees wrinkles and folds but Lesia's body is smooth chrome and plastic in fiery gleam, like an angel of light bearing down on a demon.

Thoughts that spiraled from her subconscious in remembrance had always formed a pattern; fractal thoughts, clipped instances merging together. So when we were together, she thinks, I thought it would be different—it may be yet with time.

The manual, she tells herself, focuses. Scanning through text. "GridLayer capabilities... Hmm. White ice activation. Built in GridLayer support through..."

The Feral has never let go of his serenity and undaunted begins to walk towards Lesia; the white ice in thaw is an infinity of diamond motes in mist, and in the bi-strain fugue of the mist and focus burn of the dartsmoke she has to chase the focus as her centre, keep herself routed. She feels her experience surge, astrological knowledge gained through pursuance of a path, which she identifies in its rising as beneath the Tathagata's moon, under the benediction of Hades—the Pisces faith sign: Remorant, that could swim in the wake of great beasts. Still she thinks beneath a faith sign like that she might be swallowed without notice.

Over her body for a better view of the fight; the Feral had feinted and then gone all in, a vicious elbow aimed at the jointed casing of Lesia's neck—Lesia blocks with a strained grace, catching the deflected arm with her sinister wrist, whirling him around, but the Feral's ready, using the time, space and angle to hit a wallrun, landing in a cartwheel and springing away. Too late she'd realized the Feral's after her; she'd floated away, the mist like grey fire around her, as if she could bend it through ripples but it parts for her and leaves not as much as a breath in its wake. For a moment it's a grey haze with the Feral somewhere behind it, and she wonders if Lesia can see her spirit, knowing she's left her body, her body too somewhere beyond the haze.

The Feral is looking for a leaping roundhouse, a horizontal windmill of a knockout blow, before he's fried; a shell of light tears through his body even as his body collapses into it, folds inward with a sickly groan and then he's gone—and before her is the shell of light, an orb of pure golden flame that for a moment held shape in his torso like a heart of fire and then had burst as nerve and skin spiraled into it.

"Activating GridLayer access. I need to know what; some kind of white icebased pulse weapon that traps... cited as 'monad' with degrees of reference.... equivalent to our understanding of spirit. Underscored by something called dharma. Yikes." She looks before her. "I don't think he's coming back."

Fading into the mist which shines brighter as if residue has left traces like morning dew clinging to petals of grass. Fragrance smears the ‘holic synaesthesia—faint traces of incense, undertones of ammonia—these scent the death dream of Aelencah which she knows nests in lightgrowth, crawls in tendrils through the access tunnel, and spires up into the Hypermall where the crystalline facets have entombed it as if you'd trap an insect in amber.

Compare bugs now, she thinks, to bugs from back then. They're tiny and they fly; not much has changed, not much needs to. So much has left me since I first felt alone—lonely through long stretches of time masking them with an energy that unlike others I could dispossess, separate it from the heat of my blood, and wrap it around me like a veil. That could veil me until the 'holic choker went haywire and I lost it all.

The blue light bathing the Bay is a bitter burn like sunlight through ice, streaking the mist in white scars. The Feral who'd been thrown into the facing wall moans.

"Let's get out of here," Chére says.

WAITING ON YOUR SEVEN

Shin Five Zero headquarters is a networked cluster of spires that themselves shape their own resonance for the purposes of hex and black ice work; viewed from higher in the sprawl fracture they align a pentagram tracing spire to spire. They are connected and access each other via pathways that run in tangles like meshings of cable and wire to form layers that strafe in metaaspect the layers of signal fire that form the sprawl fracture Grid matrix—that brace both ice white pale in white silver and obsidian as the black void of the sky beyond the sprawl fracture, that is serrated by tower spires and in some places hidden from view. Where the towers conjoin they form fresh layers in the Frost structure like foam pockets or bubbles; within these bubbles and pockets are chambered sprawl fracture lives and loves.

The chūnin and kunoichi staffing the entrance lobby had given Lesia weird looks. R3plikoids are a rare sight—there were two of them and neither had been undeadoids, so she thinks they must be interns or otherwise working off some social debt. To augment yourself beyond death, she'd thought then, and had shuddered. The chūnin and kunoichi are young, slender; they stare at Lesia with vacant eyes, the kunoichi chewing gum in a metronomic rhythm, her tongue sliding through her teeth to pop a bubble. As if running a scan, and she knows the scan would be all mental, liminal to psychic, and relayed to the Elders who doubtless would have some way to file and process it—they'd use the layers of the Grid matrix for this, store data inside the dark woodwork of their archaic spires flush with blinking diodes, that would run like worms strung by cable and cord throughout the spire structure, until at the top you can find the Elders. She's just here to sign for her stuff.

Which means admitting to the desk that she ran interference on one of Shin's ops—for even knowing Ivory messes with the whole quantum superposition of mooncredit stability. Ivory for Shin exists only as a tether between that stability and the Omnarchitect who does the math converting credit flow into an electric mana that can be used to power the symbiotic growth of the Hypermall, which itself has symbiotes attached like the Graft. If the Omnarchitect is sad, feels lonely—and he'd been suicidal—it's because she wasn't checking up on him, or so they'd say, reasoning that it became her job when she started checking up on him; never mind that when she was hired to live so close and run the apothecary she was bound to make her way to the Bay eventually.

"So you were getting this," the desk says in a voice of bemusement, "black magic terror stuff." The girl's bubble is long popped to mush within her mouth, her tongue turning it over as her eyes are blue with Elder thoughtsignal.

"Is that what it is?" Chére says. She can see from here past the reception a long hallway; what look like elevator banks are concentrated in a halolike nexus, ringing the centre of the chamber itself laid out like a temple, tatami mats clustered over the hardwood surface—though that hardwood is built on ossified chrome, she reminds herself: it can hold me. Half of her wants the stuff back so she can take it back to Miho and Yuka, get some time to check on their Ghoul situation.

"It's for hexing the Giants," the chūnin says. "Keeping them off your back by playing off the density of the white ice. Stain it black with the right ritual and all of a sudden the hunger goes away." He rolls his eyes in a way that invites chasing them to where they peak beneath the furrow of his eyes and slide back. "But what you don't know is that the Giants are a force of good. Freeze our emotions so that we don't descend to Ghoulhood."

"Are you happy?" Chére asks. She hadn't meant to.

"I'll answer your question with another question," the chūnin says, and by the blank stare of the kunoichi she knows every word is finding its way to the Elders. "You know they eat of themselves, right? Hunger is profane to them. I mean its inaction."

"That detail," Chére says, "is avoidance."

Above the chūnin in spectral light she can barely make out is the Executioner's moon; in the low light any substance that makes its way out of her cortex fades into the stale light within Shin's headquarters. It's there and she charts that it's in the third phase—he must, she thinks, know it too, and she colours.

"Are you trying to talk your way in to be with her?" the chūnin says.

"I was told she hadn't been decked."

"Technically true. She got some loopholes out of it." The message doesn't need to be translated: we write the rules here and the loopholes too—it happens if we want it to or it doesn't at all. "She doesn't get consent, though. She can't choose to leave. She doesn't have a choice. It's in the ruleset loadout of the Grid layers now." His eyes flash, his mouth smirking. "So we don't have to deck her, you see. She comes autodecked by her own life."

"I want to see her," Chére says.

The chūnin folds his hands together, but the possessed kunoichi takes over. "We haven't decked you either, so you still have a choice. Evidence lockers accessed from the left hand path-vator. Seeing your friend? That's a direct action and we've charted it accordingly. Right hand path-vator. You can't do both."

Lesia speaks up then in her melodic voice, that echoes down the hallway like a ghost echoes its own former life. "You'll have to pardon me," she says. "I'm used to haptics. Why can't she do both? I didn't flash any temporal logic there."

The chūnin rolls his eyes, but possessed, acting as a camera, the kunoichi can't; her stare at Lesia is wide and open and it takes Chére a second to realize that Lesia's lying. The R3plikoid is staring into the kunoichi's eyes as if hypnotized—what she's doing, though, is wilful. R3plikoids can't be confused like that; they don't have 'holic receptors, never mind chokers or other thought protectors. She can generate her own haptic, Chére figures—staring right into the kunoichi's eyes she's seeing the Elders too, which they'd have a problem with if they figured it out.

As if on cue the kunoichi's eyes drop, and she quietens up; a languorous yet lazy wave of her hand gestures that she has something else to do, spiral elliptic in the weak light of Shin HQ. The chūnin watching this go down realizes that this is above his pay grade—must've, for he's silent too, baring only with an arch of his eyebrow that he's waiting for the pair to leave. As Lesia's question catches up to him he shrugs.

"It's about time. As a R3plikoid you wouldn't understand. You don't know you can be off until you're off. To be human is to know you can and will be off. Not on. Not present in yourself." He rolls his shoulders again. "When the daylight goes this place isn't safe. It's loaded to the brim with black ice. We've rigged it with the most demonic stuff you can think of. What we call terror? We monopolize it. We own it. We are the night."

Standard Shin prop. If you get the message they've won. They'll keep winning. Chére remembers her iso'time in her Habitexa and frowns—she isn't going back; they'd refit her choker then and then where would she be with the thoughts she wants to feel as hard as possible? Still she thinks Miho and Yuka are up to their elbows in some cause or other, suicide by Shin, but they're old enough, aren't they, to choose how they'll die?

The Executioner's moon looks like it's about to change phase just from this conversation.

The chūnin folds his arms. "So what are you gonna do?"

Lesia laughs, an awkward sound that nonetheless trills, echoes, drifts into silence the way ripples break to wave.

VIOLET PLAGUE

She's seeing Ivory. The R3plikoid has a GPS feature built into the entire reality that must be re-simmed for the R3plikoid to understand and process it; she manifests it as the occasional direction down the mazelike hallways they'd found after stepping off the path-vator—for it had wound like string over paper through the spirenest of Shin HQ, and from that angle in ascent she'd seen about 65 percent of the sprawl fracture all at once, stretching into the horizon in legions of towers many with crystalline tumours of moon credit capital growth attached, like a violet plague breaking out over the sprawl-fracture's very skin.

Chére’d been confused. This is the roughest mindfit she's had in quite some time; without the white ice in its constant cycle of thaw and freeze, shuttered in such totality by the black, every holic receptor is screaming in parched agony—that remains muted though the screaming is done through pain, the fire of receptors with nothing to process and free of even their own natural holic, like screaming into a pillow. Her psyche is willing her to talk about it but she can't; the knowledge that once she starts she'll never stop and make it worse is hardcoded into the format of the astrology trip as she's known it. Sink yourself to the level of need and that's a good way to stop your soul ascending at the end of the game. Still if Lesia is generating her own haptic she can feel it too, and Chére feels better knowing that.

"Your weapons are nonoperational here, right," she says to make conversation.

"In my world we call them armata. It's true. There's a dry socket, a hollow where I should feel the use function."

Chére nods. "That makes sense. Shin told us there's no white ice here." Staring out over the abyssal sprawl fracture which is walled in to keep out the Nukeworld Frontiers—the walls had been black and covered with etchings and sigils, as if the night sky had fallen around them. We are locked in, she thinks, with the mooncredits, and all the hauntings that come with that. Not so much locked in as a reverse gravitational attraction; the walls only do so much. We draw the moon credits towards us like flies to rancid meat. That's why the mallform is growing so fast.

The path-vator had dug itself inside a routing loop which repeats in a three time pattern every stop at Holding. Ivory is in Section 11; stepping off, Chére and Lesia see everywhere the Shin Five Zero decal, 'the midnight truth,' a wide open eye with a pupil that swims back and forth, beneath that in the script of katakana reads LOYALTY, COURAGE, STRATEGY, ACHIEVEMENT, FIDELITY. These are put up on impenetrable doorways with the massmade tatami flooring creasing belying the harsh chrome of the thresholds. Following Lesia's directions the two make their way to Section 11—through hologram field shielding Chére sees other prisoners, and all of them look decked, blankfaced, blankeyed and sitting in rigid posture; despite this they're not chained, could be meditating if not for their hands unclasped, their eyes wide open and roving at the same pace as 'the midnight truth.' Ivory is different. She's pacing back and forth, which means she's undecked like Shin said, unless she's been decked to do that.

When she sees Chére and the R3plikoid her eyes widen; she presses against the hologram field with both hands splayed, the fields shimmering in a cool blue translucence. She laughs then, appears to, her mouth revealing perfect teeth white as moons—through the shimmering translucence the effect is of streaking light, like the thaw of white ice.

"Ivory—" she mouths through the field, and Chére shakes her head.

"My name's Chére, and the R3plikoid with me is Lesia from the Parallax."

Ivory's face twitches. "That is a freaking R3plikoid. Don't you know only Ferals mess with the Parallax?"

Chére fights to stop her eyes from rolling. "I need you to explain some stuff, but I don't need to hear this. I can leave whenever I want." Leaving out: things aren't that square for you.

"Explain?" Ivory says. "They booked me on selling black magic terror weaponry. What they mean by that is anything that can affect the black ice they love so much." Her eyes narrow. "You didn't want that for yourself. You don't look like the type. And you don't know much about it."

Chére can tell by the way Ivory settles back that her eyes agree with the cloistered shopgirl.

"What is this," Chére says, changing the subject. "A compressed Habitexa?"

Ivory's eyes flash. "They call it that. The 'holics they circulate are stale—they've been left in the black ice for too long. This is an aura from a decade ago."

"You said that stuff was dangerous," Chére says. "Because it messes with the ice." Ivory's eyes are bluetinted with the hologram field; where before they'd been a pale seagreen now more like chlorine water.

"Imagine Shin's whole secret tradition being exposed. Because without the cover of black ice it would be. The secrets to their hypnosis. The secret to decking."

Lesia speaks up. "You keep talking about decking. What does that mean?"

Ivory backs away, hands up, palms facing. "I don't talk to R3plikoids. Sorry." In her palms there are whorls that could spiral into prayers, Chére thinks, grooves that leave the skin and whisper like thread to unseen sky.

"They call it decking for two reasons," Chére says. "To do it they use a deck, or a control rig. But they also say it's like a truth serum combined with a fate analytic—once decked you know what you want and what Shin wants are the same. They say this slots you into the shuffle of the very deck the WychFates use."

"Listen, you," Ivory says, pointing a stabbing finger at the R3plikoid. "You think not being able to die is a virtue? We hate you for it."

"I die over and over again," Lesia says, confused. "All this goes forever."

To that Ivory spirals her finger against her ear and is still.

"So we know that Shin uses control rigs," Chére says. "Everyone knows. So what are you talking about?"

Ivory grins. "How do you think they square it with the GridLayers and mooncredit unity?"

Chére stares. "It's not alive."

Ivory laughs again. "It doesn't need to be. You think something that can trigger the MG Nukes again needs eyes to see? A mind to think? All it needs is the trigger pull." She grins. "Because of the moon credits, the way they line up—the Grid layers know every facet of us, knows where we are and how to get us. All decking routes through the Grid. It has to."

What she says next is a whisper that Chére has to strain to hear through the hologram field. "There are grids beyond the Grid. You know that, right?" She gestures to Lesia. "I'm not talking about your precious parallax. What I mean is that there are worlds other than this. We follow similar patterns but all remain distinct." She turns her back on Chére. "Never would've figured you for a Parallax chaser. Take it up with the Ferals. You'd get along."

"I can't," Chére says, "because my Parallax friend imploded one with a reverse gravity well."

A long silence stretches then. Ivory crosses her arms. "I'm only here because I was selling to you. If you hadn't asked they never would've known. They didn't book you because you fit into their plans just roaming around undecked. How does that make you feel?" She glances over her shoulder at the R3plikoid. "Respect, I guess."

"So what you're saying is that the moon credits have us over a barrel. That it comes down to credit stability or we all get nuked."

Ivory shakes her head. "I'm saying the moon credits are the means and reason we'll be nuked. You saw the—what did you call it—a death forest? You saw the manifestation of all the Grid knows. I can tell you this. Whatever the Grid is, it doesn't like the Hypermall. Doesn't like me for living in it. Doesn't like Val either. I bet you left him around just waiting for the Layer ice to take over. I suppose you didn't care what shade it was."

Chére frowns. "It's all ice, isn't it? Protection from the Giants. They're rough."

Ivory's eyes burn like light bleeding from cracked halogen. "The stuff Shin does under cover of black ice is worse than anything the Giants could ever do."

Chére can't answer that. Lesia tugs on her shoulder—arm lean, shellac white encased, trijointed fingers cool to the touch, white like bridal veil lace. "It's time to leave. Haptic reception detects a guilt trip overload. You're dry on—what do you call your biotic haptics?"

"’Holics," Chére says, the voice shot through with sadness. She'd liked Ivory at first, beneath her glasses her eyes of fire. The hologram field chambers, Chére thinks, are like tombs around us; the people sitting in them may as well be already dead. Now she steps back and takes perspective—they swirl around her in pockets of coloured light, bubbles of light in pastel hues, bright rippling fields that look like they've been colour-grated through a kaleidoscope. She thinks it's just her head swimming with the 'holic famine, but can't be sure.

"You," Ivory says, screeching now, her voice octaves in the sky, getting higher. "You follow that Parallax trash and it'll keep you from what you're really supposed to do! You're supposed to nuke Shin to smithereens! I've seen enough. You're the only one who can do it!"

"I have other problems," Chére says, but the sound spit through the fissure of her lips is weak, spit through as Lesia is dragging her away. My angel, she thinks, turning the idea over in her head—a R3plikoid from the Parallax. What did she have to fight back there? What could tether her here other than my need which was incubated by the Habitexa in 'iso'? What did I pull her away from?

Ivory is still talking but now she can't hear her through the hologram field; white teeth sliver stabs of light through the field and then gone are with her laughter as she shakes and palms her mouth closed. Just stop existing, she wills Ivory. Stop existing for me.

She feels on her now the roving eyes of every decked prisoner here—these are now circuit boards for Shin, but not two-way relays like the chūnin and kunoichi are; they'd die for Shin now, knowing they would, they know they would because they know Shin wouldn't ask them to. Even though that's all Shin does, she thinks, is to ask you politely to die. They'd never do it directly. A decked circuit board though—that you could incept the concept into, they'd think it was their idea.

Alarms blare. Staccato chimes are more discordant even than the klaxons had been in the Hypermall LCL, pitch notes seeming to gnash and claw against each other—she thinks of silver steel blades scraping together.

"Run," says Lesia in her autotrill.

BINARY TRUTH

She's running. She's not looking back. All around her are the swirling hologram pockets that she'd seen as tombs, final resting places, but with every fizz of hologram shutdown she knows she's wrong; she can hear the catcalls, the screams of predators seeking prey in the grey haze of hunger. She'd left it to Lesia to remember where they'd left the path-vator, hoping the R3plikoid would memorize it in binary, concrete, unshakeable truth—because Lesia, she thinks, can't do anything else for her. Her haptics are not combatoriented; she had a different system for that. Here starved of white ice there's nothing she can do but escape.

Some prisoners drop from above, others racing out in parallel to their trajectory, released from facing angles, all of them thinking something like a kill equals freedom. I messed up, Chére thinks, coming here at all—they think what Ivory thinks, that I'm a terrorist, that I want to bring down Shin's control of the sprawl fracture. After being isolated she'd bled sympathy for the crones of the Graft, for Valby and even Ivory, so long ago. Was that really the chūnin's Executioner's Moon, she thinks, or was it mine? Could they do that? Pretend to be marked for death?

They've reached the path-vator door; Chére is about to start pounding on the recall when Lesia stops her. "Give me a segment." Trijointed fingers split apart, untwining from each other like frayed ends of string, meet the control panel to interface.

Chére looks back. Section 11 is a dome filled with hologram field bubbles, almost a honeycomb hive in setup; about fifty of the closest hologram fields have been shut down, the air of the dome blood red, the atmosphere swirling into where the hologram fields have gone down. Blood red.

"It's not black ice," she says, though if Lesia is listening the R3plikoid gives no sign. "It's red ice. It's so dark that it looks black in the darkness." She swears. "It's blood psionics."

"It's not your problem," Lesia says, trijoints scrambling over and through insets in the control panel. "You stay here? Deal with it? They'll zero you. I can tell. I'm not blind. That's what they want."

The path-vator door bisects then, cloven apart as if by bladestroke, the kind that leaves you still and then splits you; Lesia's dragging Chére into the path-vator as war cries decimate the silence, fragments of silence living cruel short lives.

"We gotta go," Lesia says as the doors slam shut. "I've set the path. Give it a second to process and launch."

Beating on the door. Knuckle imprints. Boot imprints beneath those, mottling the steel like bruises, fractures.

"They're gonna kill her," Chére says, as 'noided as she ever was—of course they'd never kill Valby. Ivory's different; they can get a new shopgirl, one that doesn't sell away black magic terror stuff to the first errand girl to be sent in. She knows.

"They won't deck her. She's gotta be undeckable. That's why they didn't. It wasn't up to them. It was up to her. SOP would be to get rid of her then."

Lesia listens but her eyes are no longer an ice blue but a pale gold hue of honey. "I'm low on power. Interfacing takes it out of me. I can get us out of here but not much more. The decel here is nuts. Our side of the parallax you guys have made it into the transdimensional void and work us over like bored gods—make us strong, fast, smart, and then 'cycle us for parts to make more. I'm not strong or fast here," she says, "and I don't want to think about how much processing capability I've lost."

Chére knows what she's doing, keeping her talking. "You probably have more layers than me in your subconscious." Because the path-vator is tracing its curving ascent along the looping cable path. Leaving Section 11 behind.

Silence is born again when it dies, must die in order to be born—as the precepts of the astrology trip teach, the human soul works the same way, broken by star placements and myth structures and if never broken is never reforged. Section 11 plummets away as the larger spirenexus embraces them.

AGENT

"So what do you want to do," Lesia is saying.

Chére wanted to put as much distance between her and the Hypermall as possible. Now a slender cut like a moon phase jackknifing a slot of glimmering crystal between two multilevels; above them the layered sky of the sprawl fracture is a dull grey opacity that reflects in places the higher tips of the spirenexus to their east, still on a lateral plane on the latticed Grid layers' geospatial front. 'Cause I don't have it, she thinks. Don't have more excess to be drained from me down there. That's how LCL works and now I know—they'd drink me like vampires. That had meant leaving behind the Graft; Miho and Yuka who to her she'd seen as differing halves of the same philosophy.

The sky is scarred here and there by great rifts where the strain of the void beyond has sunk pressure into the lower carapace; from these spill shadows that mingle with the firelight of the sprawl fracture, creating serrated shadowforms like lightning bolts that dance and flicker above them. Chill pervades the air, goosebumps raised on her nape before they raise on her arms as well.

She kicks at the floorplate. "Not be iced or decked." She looks over the honeygold eyes now going amber. "You need a charging port, don't you?"

"Pretty bad," says Lesia.

Chére sighs, resigned. "We'll hit up my Habitexa. They can isolate me there but it'll let you get some rest." Gazes at the sprawl fracture before her. They made that choice for us, she thinks.

SLOW DOWN PHASE

As the door to her Habitexa opens she tries to figure out right away if someone's been here—Shin would call her freedom from that moot. Light from the hall cuts through the pitchdarkness of the offline Habitexa as the doors yaw open. By then she's running parched on 'holic and has to stop herself from shoving Lesia aside to flip it all on; when she does the Habitexa is ringed by blue light as if it braces the whole capsulefront, walls of grey techmatter. She'd felt the hackles on her neck rise and realized Lesia had transmuted the latent white ice that exists here into energy for a shot of whatever had imploded the last Feral into pure stardust distillate—to keep her covered in case Shin had been around, which means she'd been as 'noided as Chére was.

The techmatter is in lattice patterns of fused plateware and threading cable; the haloic ring that is as if brace is more akin to foundation, energy support for the Habitexa where GridLayer access is concentrated and in this way can be cut off by black ice with a thought. Still she'd had time to hook Lesia into a makeshift charging port.

Dreaming once of a panda cub that had accompanied the colo-refs into the Nukeworld Frontiers, splotched black and white tufts of fur raised for the vidloop she'd seen—the sprawl fracture public access channels never mentioning the shinobi cult that controlled from the shadows through the black ice of the Grid's layers. She'd seen though in the panda's fur both the white and black of the ice and figured that was the secret code within the vidloop, though of course the colo-refs had raised it as guardian from the wild emerald-eyed dogs that roamed the Nukeworld Frontiers. In that panda's eyes she'd seen fear translated through all she believed she knew—so she'd thought she'd been among the few to know, that the public access channels had lent the sprawl fracture viewers freedom from the burden of knowledge that it absorbed psychic residue from the starmatter still extant as thermal mist from where souls were blasted into the aether by the MG Nukes.

So it had known more than it had needed to keep the colo-refs safe; she'd seen in its eyes and read with a voice inside she couldn't silence it knew its own doom approached with a speed that had become more than relative—that had spliced itself into her dreams until she'd felt as one with it, breathed as one with it, and at last felt just as alone. In the end prophecies could not begin to account for what it had known though they'd been found here and there in the cindered ruins of the neighbouring sprawl fractures who were under the guidance of shinobi cults of their own, because it’d known further and thought deeper. Though these prophecies in bound scrollworks had seen their own fates approach with clarity, the panda cub which had grown severed from kindred had seen beyond even this age into the next defined by a coalition of reborn sprawl fractures.

From the dead would return all the cults of old and they would destroy the last sprawl fracture and create a megalithic structure union, form an alliance to destroy Shin Five Zero which they'd say a tethering to aggro philosophies had both foretold their death and explained why they deserved it. This is the last of the public access she's able to retrieve in her dreaming until the black ice iso' barrier falls.

SEEDS OF LIGHT

Where they were together in the blinks of each other's eyes now both are consciousness-dissolved into the aetherfilm of each other's isodreams, entwined in thought like spirals of a double helix but separate in terms of visual-spatial distance. Still both find themselves within the black void of the isodream thinking the same thing—that they can't risk waking so soon, so low on ‘holic and energy that they aren't sure when they'll next get a chance to rest.

"Just gotta wait it out," Chére says. "Sounded like something was coming for us, though. On the pirate-aux channels, anyway." She'd plugged in as user mode: A-Modal, an ability she'd unlocked under the Thane's Moon path—this was the next best thing to being a Modal, one's dream route taking a perfect parallel to the symbiosis of weave that was the GridLayers' tessellated patterns, so one could see what they did if not do. In the dreaming darkness veiling the pockets and brightening the glow of each other's monads, an aspect of being Lesia possessed that had come out of nonbeing, flipped the script on the parallax henge—it had been weighted then to one side.

The grandweave of the darkness itself is a soft lattice of light, glimmering in a shine that only rendered as a soft wave foam fringe, baring depths to the grandweave like crevasses beneath the ocean, from ocean skin to earth below and sieved where no light can reach. It's no way to be living and aching, and she feels the hunger of the grand weaver, hunger for the shared vision that must meet and in some way join to it, as if one could never leave the endless winter of ice, denied from sleep's later seasons, echelons or states as they are known.

Now she is more open to the grandweave's skin showing as a rippling ocean of light fathoms below—had never tried to look below her feet in a dream, to see nothing but the grandweave as foundation even for the isodream, though that is like ripping plant from soil. Shut out what she carries with her to waking is black static latticed by light; black lakes where the seeds of light cast may not grow because snuffed out by black ice they are in frozen chrysalis.

Even together the pitch darkness is bleak, bites on their fraught nerves. Till she rotates in place and sees the Lesia not as R3plikoid but of some casting nearer a mold of symbiotic host vessel for a reality parasite—Lesia'd explain, to them like a virus but of biopathogens they called 'ghosts' that could enter their heads, coexist, to a degree alter one's vector, soon shifting and gone beneath her true monad essence. Which Lesia tells her is called an affectpulse, glows in true blue in the epsilon binding. There are worlds other than these; she knew because she'd encountered a traveller from one, beyond the parallax.

The affectpulse—or what Chére guesses is a strain of monad and that at any rate exists in a kindred synchronicity—relays to her what she sees from her side of the black ice mirroring. What she sees is what the Modals would see, if they were here, and scrapes even other Modals from the same data; so she can see them by their presence which has left an imprint in the data pockets of the Grid matrix, where their presence has gouged fragments of data from what would otherwise be pure black static of the isodream—that would exist like the fire that melts diamonds, reflecting in facets, refracting, haloed by itself. So in this unity they compare notes. Alone together they wait.

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