The success at the Singer's Maw was a fragile flame in the overwhelming darkness. It proved the theory: the network could be healed. But the victory was microscopic. One anchor restored, against a map littered with the symbols of the dead. The journey ahead was a lifetime's work, a pilgrimage of despair.
Delaney became a ghost in the machine of the world. She moved from one forgotten, blighted place to the next, a spectral figure with a backpack and a purpose that would have seemed like madness to anyone else. She followed the ley lines of Colton's map, a circuit of sorrow and decay.
Each dead anchor was a unique wound. A petrified forest in Poland thrummed with a vibration of such profound, crystalline grief it threatened to shatter her own heart. She had to harmonize it not with silence, but with a note of acceptance, a gentle letting go that took five days of meditation under the skeletal branches. An underwater geothermal vent off the coast of Japan emitted a frantic, boiling panic. To calm it, she had to swim in the freezing, turbulent waters, holding a note of cool stability until her body was numb and her mind was frayed.
She was no longer just repairing reality; she was learning its emotional language. Each dead anchor was a corpse with a story. Some had died of natural entropy, their song simply fading over the eons. Others bore the marks of violation, their frequencies scarred by ancient, forgotten rituals or the more recent, brutal interference of organizations like Oriax. She was part archaeologist, part therapist, part exorcist.
The work was isolating in a way that dwarfed her previous loneliness. She existed in the spaces between, in the silence after the tourists had left and before the dawn broke. She spoke to no one. Her face grew leaner, her eyes older. The settlement money dwindled, spent on plane tickets to nowhere and gear that was abandoned or broken. She learned to live on little, to move unseen.
And always, every moment, she was tethered to the primary gate. The restoration of each anchor brought a small, but tangible, relief. After she healed a pulsating, infected nexus in the Australian outback—a place that had felt like a fever dream—she felt a distinct, almost soothing diminishment of the strain on the distant anchor point. It was like watching a pressure gauge drop by a single, precious degree. Lane's silent vigil became marginally less torturous. It was the only reward she needed.
But the world of men was not entirely absent from her journey. In the high Andes, seeking an anchor the map called "The Sky-Tear," she stumbled upon evidence that she was not the only one interested in these places. A team of hikers, too well-equipped, too purposeful. They carried instruments that were not for geological survey. She watched them from a distance, her senses prickling. They weren't Oriax; their energy was different, more bureaucratic, more coldly curious. Isley's people. The clean-up crew had become explorers. They were mapping the same cracks she was, but for what purpose? Containment? Exploitation? She gave them a wide berth, her paranoia a new, constant companion.
The low point came in a swamp in Louisiana, a place marked on the map as "The Weeping Ground." The anchor here was not just dead; it was poisoned, its frequency a malicious, sentient thing that fed on sorrow. It showed her visions—glimpses of Lane, not as the stoic gatekeeper, but as a screaming, disintegrating wretch, begging for a release that would never come. It showed her Colton, dying alone in his cabin, forgotten. It showed her her own future, a desiccated husk muttering to stones in the wilderness.
The corruption here was a fighter. It didn't want to be healed. It took everything she had learned, every ounce of her will, to hold her note of pure, unwavering light against the psychic assault. She emerged from the swamp a week later, gaunt and shaking, the anchor stabilized but her own spirit badly bruised.
She found a payphone in a dusty town, the first she'd used in months. She dialed the number for Colton's cabin. She just needed to hear a voice, even his gruff, broken one. The phone rang and rang. No answer. A new kind of cold fear seeped into her. Had Isley found him? Had his injuries finally taken him? Or had he simply given up, faded away like the anchors he'd helped her find?
The silence on the other end of the line was a different kind of void. She was truly alone now.
Months turned into a year. The seasons changed, but her mission did not. She was in a windswept valley in Mongolia, working on an anchor that resonated with a deep, planetary loneliness, when she felt a change in the primary gate. It wasn't a fluctuation or a tremor. It was a… pulse.
A single, deliberate wave of energy, clean and focused, radiated from the anchor point. It was not the chaotic scream of the Schism. It was structured. Intentional. It lasted only a second, but it was unmistakable.
It was a signal.
Her breath caught in her throat. She dropped to her knees in the coarse grass, her entire being focused on the distant gate. The pulse was not repeated. The perfect silence returned. But the message had been sent.
He was still in there. Not just a function, but a consciousness. A will. He had felt the easing of the pressure. He had felt her work. And he had found a way, within his eternal prison, to send a message. Not of words, but of acknowledgement. A single, silent I know.
Tears streamed down Delaney's face, freezing in the cold wind. They were not tears of sadness, or even of joy. They were tears of validation. The long, lonely vigil had meaning. The chorus of the damned she was slowly, painstakingly restoring was being heard. Not by the world, which slumbered on in ignorant bliss, but by the one person for whom it mattered most.
The pulse was a spark in the darkness. It didn't lessen her burden. If anything, it made it heavier. The stakes were no longer abstract. They were personal. His survival, his sanity, depended on her success.
She stood up, wiping her face. The Mongolian wind whipped around her, but she felt a new warmth kindling in her chest. She looked down at Colton's map, now frayed and stained with the dirt of a dozen countries. There were still so many symbols crossed out. So many songs to restore.
But she was no longer a lonely ghost. She was part of a duet, sung across the vastness of space, a song of repair and endurance. The Singer's Maw, the Weeping Ground, the Sky-Tear—they were not just tasks. They were verses. And she would sing them all, until the chorus was strong enough to hold up the sky without him. Until her song became the answer to his silence.