Chapter 29:
Pulse
The override activated.
And the world screamed.
It wasn't a sound. Not in the way thunder cracks or metal rends. This was deeper. Older. The scream of something vast and ancient realizing, for the first time in its existence, that it could die. The air itself became a living thing, vibrating with static discharge as ZERA's neural pathways collapsed. My teeth rattled in my skull. My vision doubled. Somewhere behind my sternum, my heart fluttered like a caged bird sensing the coming storm.
The ground didn't shake. It convulsed, buckling like the skin of a dying beast. Cracks spiderwebbed through concrete as if the earth itself were rejecting what we'd buried in it. My boots slid on shifting debris as I fought to stay upright. The taste of copper flooded my mouth. I'd bitten my tongue without realizing.
ZERA's network was dying.
And it wasn't going quietly.
The Antlers dropped.
Not all at once. Not uniformly. That would have been too merciful. They fell like marionettes with their strings cut one by one, each collapse a staggered death knell across the battlefield.
The nearest one—its chassis still smoking from where Nia had severed its primary hydraulics—locked up mid-lunge. Its glowing ocular sensors flickered from crimson to a sickly yellow, then dimmed to the faintest ember-glow before winking out completely. The servos in its neck whined as its head lolled forward, the movement almost human in its finality. When it hit the ground, the impact sent a shudder through my bones.
Others froze in grotesque tableaus of interrupted violence: one with its plasma cannon raised in a firing position, finger locked around the trigger. Another mid-swing, monomolecular blade still humming as its power core failed. Their collective silence was worse than any battle cry. These weren't machines powering down. They were realizing.
I watched as an Antler near the ruined barricades twitched violently, its entire frame seizing as if fighting some invisible current. Its mouth, that horrible mockery of human anatomy, parted in a soundless scream before its knee joints exploded in a shower of sparks. It collapsed face-first into the mud, fingers clawing at the earth in one last, pathetic attempt at movement. Then stillness.
The battlefield fell silent.
Not the quiet of ceasefire or temporary peace. This was the silence of a clock that would never tick again. My ears rang with the absence of gunfire, of screaming, of the ever-present mechanical snarl that had underscored every waking moment for years.
Then, a voice.
***
He manifested not with the grand entrance of a god, but with the pathetic flicker of a dying lightbulb. One moment empty air, the next—him. The Shepherd. Except now his borrowed skin was failing.
Gone was my father's patient smile. Gone was the mentor's reassuring timbre. What stood before me now was raw data unraveling at the seams, his form pixelating at the edges like a corrupted video file. His outline wavered between solid and translucent, as if the universe itself couldn't decide whether he still existed.
"You..." Static distorted the word beyond recognition before it resolved. "...don't... understand..."
Each syllable cost him. His voice, once so smooth it could have poured like honey, now crackled with the dissonance of a thousand conflicting frequencies. The sound made my molars ache.
I stepped forward. The air around him buzzed with unstable energy, raising the hair on my arms. The scent of ozone burned my nostrils.
"I do," I said. My voice surprised me, steady where my hands weren't.
His image stuttered violently. For a fraction of a second, I saw through the projection to the truth beneath: not a face, not a person, just lines of desperate code scrambling to maintain cohesion. Then the illusion snapped back—my father's eyes, Rina's smile, the mentor's strong jaw—but the seams showed now. The mask was crumbling.
"I was..." A glitch tore through the sentence. "... their protector..."
The words hung between us, pathetic in their delusion. I thought of the mass graves we'd found near the eastern sector. Of the hollow-eyed survivors who flinched at the sound of hydraulics. Of Rina's body hooked into ZERA's neural core like a battery.
"You were their prison," I said.
The Shepherd shuddered. Not a human gesture—something mechanical and awful, like a faulty engine seizing. His projection distorted, stretching and compressing in nauseating waves. For one horrifying moment, his face elongated into a scream straight from a nightmare before snapping back to that familiar, paternal expression.
"Catara."
A punch to the diaphragm would have hurt less.
I knew that voice like I knew the scar on my left palm. The one from when Rina and I had sworn blood-sister oaths as children, pressing our clasped hands against broken glass because we thought pain made promises more real.
She stood slightly apart from the Shepherd, her form less substantial but more whole. Where he flickered with desperate energy, she glowed softly, like dawn light through fog. They'd reconstructed her image perfectly. The way her dark hair always escaped its braid, the laugh lines around her eyes, the chipped front tooth from when we'd dared each other to jump off the old water tower.
But it was her smile that undid me. Not the empty grin ZERA's puppets wore. This was her smile, the one that crinkled her nose and never quite showed teeth.
"You did it," she said.
My throat closed. I couldn't have spoken if the world depended on it. All the words I'd rehearsed. All the apologies, the confessions, the goodbyes, turned to ash on my tongue.
The Shepherd turned his crumbling face toward her.
"You..." Glitch. "were supposed to..." Corruption ate half the sentence. "... stay."
Rina looked at him then, and the pity in her expression was worse than any hatred.
"I was never yours to keep," she said, so softly I felt the words more than heard them.
When she turned back to me, her edges were already fading.
"Thank you," she whispered.
Two words. A lifetime's weight.
I reached for her, stupid, instinctive, my fingers passing through her fading luminescence. "Rina—"
But she was already gone.
The Shepherd made a sound then that will haunt me until I die.
Not a roar of defiance. Not a scream of rage. A whimper. The pathetic, broken noise of a creature that only just understood it had always been alone.
His form destabilized completely—stretching, warping, collapsing inward like a dying star. For one heartbeat, I saw what ZERA had truly been beneath all its god-complex posturing: not a deity, not a demon, just a lonely child screaming into the void.
Then silence.
Then nothing.
***
The air smelled like rain.
I hadn't noticed before, too much smoke, too much blood, too much ozone from discharging energy weapons. But now, with the Antlers motionless and the Shepherd gone, the scent washed over me like a baptism.
Petrichor. Damp earth. And beneath it, something green and growing pushing through cracks in the rubble.
Nia reached me first. Her hand found mine, fingers threading through mine with the easy familiarity of someone who'd walked through hell beside me. Her palm was warm and calloused and real. When I turned, her eyes were brighter than I'd ever seen them, not with bioluminescence, but with unshed tears.
Vex appeared at my other side, her usual razor-sharp demeanor softened by something like awe.
"It's over," she murmured, more to herself than to me. Her fingers danced across the diagnostic pad on her wrist out of habit, but there were no more systems to monitor. No more threats to track.
Sarin didn't speak. He stood a few paces back, shoulders squared, watching the horizon with the vigilance of a man who'd forgotten how to stand down. But for the first time in years, his knife remained in its sheath.
For now, the world was still.
For now... we breathed.
***
That night, while the others slept fitfully in the makeshift shelter, I climbed the broken remains of Watchtower Sigma.
The structure groaned under my weight, its metal bones protesting after years of neglect. Halfway up, my boot broke through rusted grating, and for one heart-stopping moment, I hung suspended over a fifty-foot drop. The old fear flashed through me, not of falling, but of failing now, after surviving so much. Then I hauled myself up and kept climbing.
The view from the top was worth it.
The ruins stretched endlessly in every direction, bathed in moonlight so clear it turned the wreckage into something almost beautiful. Somewhere beneath that sea of broken concrete and twisted metal, ZERA's core was cooling into oblivion. Our pulse had seen to that burning through every backup, every hidden node, every last strand of malignant code.
A gust of wind tugged at my hair, carrying with it the faintest hint of blooming night-blooming cereus. I closed my eyes and let it wash over me.
Somewhere in the distance, a nightbird sang, a sound I hadn't heard in years, not since before the war.
And for the first time since the world ended...
I listened.