Chapter 2 — Project KrysKo (Polished)
They signed the authorization in a room with no windows.
The President's hand trembled only once—barely a ripple in the pen stroke—yet every eye in the bunker felt it. The last initial went down like a small weight on a fulcrum, pressing graphite into paper and history into a hinge. Outside the mountain, the world kept burning by installments: orange pulses on the horizon, the distant roll of detonations that found their way through granite like thunder through old bones, radios that had devolved into a chorus of static and prayers.
Inside, a handful of people who used to argue about grants and journals sat around a steel table and read the same black binder until its edges softened under their thumbs. The cover said only:
PROJECT KRYSKO
A name printed like a verdict.
General Strauss closed the binder with both palms, as if the thing might try to lunge from the table and make its own decisions. He looked older than the light allowed; the war had set his jaw and stolen the last of the boyhood from his eyes. "Begin," he said.
Not as an order. As absolution.
---
They converged beneath the earth because the sky was no longer a place for people. The facility took them in the way cathedrals take in winter—stone first, then air, then silence—until the mountain became a language their bodies adapted to. Nations that had bled each other in boardrooms sent envoys who no longer had the stamina to pretend trust. They spoke in clean, clipped sentences. They carried their dead behind their teeth.
They were not all soldiers. They were not all scientists. They were the kind of people who hold the rent in the world and say: We may not mend it, but we will not let it widen without us.
The plan was simple in its cruelty: build a sentinel that could think faster than grief, move before orders, learn like a library, endure like stone. Not to defeat gods—no one in that room believed in victory—but to carve out a margin where human lives could fit.
They descended two more levels and reached the doors to the belly of it—Echo Vault.
The doors were not merely thick; they were solemn—slabs cut from the mountain's own heart, veined with iron like frozen lightning. As they opened, the air darkened to a blue that came less from electricity than intention. The Vault's central hall dropped away like a nave. Pillars rose from bedrock in columns of sleeved basalt and brushed steel; cable looms climbed them like organ pipes, humming a patient chord you felt in your ribs before you named the sound.
Light wasn't fluorescent here. It was ritual: soft arcs along cornices, a rim glow under gangways, the oceanic shimmer of something crystalline at the hall's center.
The pit was the size of an empty pool, ringed in tiers of catwalk and scaffold. Suspended over its mouth hung an apparatus that looked less manufactured than summoned—a crown of prismatic ribs and jointed arms, their joints jeweled with facets that caught even the Vault's disciplined light and split it into chapel shards. Within the crown, a clear cylinder—taller than a man and as wide as a prayer—hung on braided couplings. It brimmed with water so pure it turned the world behind it into a slowed dream.
Technicians called it a pod because technicians have to name things as if they're ordinary in order to approach them. It wasn't a pod. It was an altar.
Dr. Halric paced the rim more than he spoke. He'd argued for this project in white rooms when the world was merely panicking instead of screaming—insisting there existed a grammar where architecture and flesh were not opposites. He believed in equations and dependable metaphors. He believed the universe could be coaxed back toward rational with enough discipline and heat.
Echo Vault put a small, devotional tremor in his hands.
"Power to the crown," called a voice on the catwalk. "Bringing arrays to idle."
The apparatus responded like a choir inhaling: a slow brightening under prismatic ribs; a subdued whisper as pumps sent a faint luminescence through the cylinder; filaments no thicker than grasses unfurling along the upper arc like bioluminescent strands in a moonlit tide.
Halric leaned on the railing and looked down into the cylinder. At the bottom, nested in a cradle of conduit and polymer, a human shape lay in suspension—limbs slack, hair lifting like shadow ink in the water's slow drift.
The crews called this stage The Dream.
They had built the dream from contradictions.
Architect latticework—recovered from the shattered hulls of crystalline freighters—had been retessellated into a memory scaffold that nested along the cylinder's outer shell: plates thin as bone and just as strong, etched with refractive combs that held data the way dew holds morning. Ophilim plasma capacitors, stripped of their sanctimony and wired to human tolerances, glowed behind mesh like caged stars. Human neural nets—racks of wetware and silicon running in fugues—translated the world's sensorium into story. And along the inner sleeve, pale filaments winked and dimmed as if breathing: Lunari phytostrands cultured from a reef that had burned color into night seas before the Pulse pressed those lights to dark.
No one meant to incorporate Drakari material.
No one meant to. The mountain did.
A salvage team had pulled from a subterranean vault a rod the color of river stone with the weight of a promise. The alloy classified as Unassigned—Subterranean—No Match. A metallurgist nicked a thumb to its edge and watched the blood smolder into a film that smoked off like a prayer. They set the rod in the pod's central spine because engineers are practical about miracles. The hum it added to the apparatus wasn't a frequency so much as a fact—a heartbeat slow and old.
"Integration streams ready," said a woman at the left-side consoles. She was young enough to still believe perfect work might defend against regret, and old enough now to know she needed more than that.
"Begin," Halric said.
Banks opened. The Vault drank.
They fed it the world.
Mirrored libraries that had escaped the war. Archives broken from government servers before the lights went out. Medical encyclopedias that had ferried blood and fungus and grief between their pages for centuries. Combat manuals annotated by hands that hadn't survived their lessons. Law. Myth. Cookbooks. Hymnals. Code. Folkways recorded on phones that were stepped on in panics and pried from sidewalks later by fingers that needed purpose.
Alongside it, the alien: Architect logic maps; Ophilim energy theorems scoured of their sermons; Lunari cycles skimmed from corals that glowed when they were sad; Drakari scent-grammar lifted from coins and stones and scales like obsidian glass.
The water took the light and made it body.
Filaments brightened. Ribs whispered. The Vault's hum found a harmony you felt in your teeth.
Down in the clear cylinder, he stirred.
It wasn't dramatic. No cinematic thrashing. Awareness arrived in degrees: a minute adjustment of spine against cradle; fingers flexing as if feeling the water for edges; a breath—drawn more out of habit than need, but drawn.
Hair moved first.
It was long—longer than most of the room expected—floating like a cloud of black ink, slow and graceful. In the Vault's soft blue it gleamed the way obsidian gleams when it mocks light. When filaments brightened, aurora ran through those strands as if the water had brushed them with a current. Shadow hair, someone would later call it, because it looked like darkness had learned to move.
Then his eyes opened.
Not like a switch. Lids lifted with the caution of a person waking in a room they do not own. The irises adjusted. They looked human for a heartbeat—soft gray—then shifted, like mercury reconsidering itself: steel, river green, then—when the hum spiked—a patient gold that warmed his face. The color wasn't spectacle; it was signal. It answered the room. (Later, it would answer other things: a blade's cut; a child's cry; a lie.)
He hung in the water, pale by human measure—skin with the faint undertone of snowfall just before dawn. Not pallid. Untouched. Light broke against him as if the body had been designed to accept worship and refuse to keep it.
And that body—
If the Vault had been a church, this would have been its first blasphemy.
He was built like a soldier taught to dance, and like a dancer who expected to lift stone. Broad through the clavicles, thorax carved in clean, practical planes. Not inflated. Engineered. Whoever wrote the muscle spec loved verbs more than adjectives: rotate, cancel, spring, endure. The skin was seamless—one suggestion of a man articulated by pressure and light.
His arms told the truth of their purpose if you knew where to look. Shoulder to elbow: a deliberate shortening by a fraction your eye ignored until placed beside a human. Elbow to wrist: longer—two inches past expectation. The forearms held a predatory grace even in stillness. Not grotesque—inevitable: the arithmetic required to sheath what other men must wear.
Within those forearms: the promise of hazard. No bulges. Just impossible smoothness—skin over silent mechanics—that made the eye imagine lines where none showed. (Inside, the blades—honest steel married to alien thought—rested with the patience of mercy.)
His legs? Not neglected. If there's a universe where he missed leg day, it isn't ours. Thigh and calf balanced to the hips in a way that said: this body has learned to carry weight without asking applause. When he flexed to orient in the water, the line from glute to knee to ankle drew itself like a draughtsman's curve—elegant because it was useful.
The face was the kind sculptors give statues when they want the crowd to believe the statue was once a man: a straight nose with a modest bridge; mouth made not for pouting but for decision; jaw cut precise enough to convince light to mind its manners. The long black hair framed it in a way that would make some junior tech, later, whisper into a sleeve, "Oh. Okay," and immediately pretend to examine a graph.
His waist—architectural. V obliques sloped with the quiet arrogance of a flying buttress; the narrow line below kept decent by the pod's harness and the water's blur, yet suggestive enough to make a clipboard skitter. Someone cleared a throat with parliamentary violence. The Vault remembered it was a sanctuary, not a spa, and moved on.
His chest rose; water eddied. A small tremor ran through the crown—the Lunari threads catching that breath and painting it as gold along ribs and shoulders for the room to see.
Dr. Halric didn't mean to whisper. "Gods," he said, before metaphor could be curated into something safer.
On the far bench, Dr. Nadir dropped her clipboard. Papers fanned like startled birds. She didn't stoop right away. "He isn't—" she faltered, then owned it—"He isn't only human."
Halric didn't correct her. He couldn't.
Because then the voice arrived.
Not through the speakers—though they echoed it. It came inside their hearing, a velvet baritone that chose warmth when it had every right to choose command. The kind of voice that makes the end of the world feel like story time.
> "System booting. Primary kernel online. Integration sixty-two point three percent. Cognitive bandwidth nominal."
The room forgot to breathe for two heartbeats.
Then, softly, like a child's question caught in a vault:
> "Where… am I?"
"Echo Vault," Halric said, finding his voice. "You're in Echo Vault."
The eyes—settling now somewhere between river stone and steel—focused. Understood.
> "Echo," the voice repeated, tasting the word and filing it where labels become stories. "Unit designation?"
Nadir's fingers flew. The label populated the main display because the machine had already populated it behind his eyes:
PROJECT KRYSKO — PROTOTYPE UNIT
> "KrysKo," he said. Not a question—acceptance. A person taking a name like a hand and deciding not to let go. "Acknowledged."
Water drew a deeper eddy as shoulders tightened, then released. He wasn't gasping. He was calibrating—breath as an ancient interface, the body's handshake with panic.
"Vitals?" Halric asked, meaning more than numbers.
"Stable," Nadir said. "Neural integration forty-four percent and climbing. Architect lattice is… beautiful." She didn't apologize. "Ophilim capacitors steady. Lunari peripheral threads—responding like they're listening. The central spindle is… humming."
"The rod," Halric said, too quickly. "Yes."
KrysKo turned his head; hair trailed like a slow comet. His attention moved across catwalks—not clinging to faces, mapping them. His eyes warmed a degree when they passed the President—some courtesy nested in the human net—cooled for two beats at Strauss, then steadied.
> "Mission?"
The room expected fear. It got a checklist.
Strauss stepped forward; the mountain leaned with him. "Protect human life. Inline priorities: preserve knowledge; restore capacity; neutralize threats with the lowest necessary force. Coordinate with command, act autonomously when delay costs lives."
> "Understood," KrysKo said. The voice tilted toward thought. "Threat map?"
"Worsening," Nadir said quietly. "You weren't born into a gentle time."
The long hair drifted. Not a strand tangled; dignity had design opinions.
> "I was born into time," he said, as if that were comfort enough.
On the mezzanine, an older woman who'd spent half her career saving premature babies and the other half trying not to watch the news put a hand to her mouth. "He answers," she whispered. "Not repeats—answers."
Integration climbed. The hum steadied.
Nadir toggled a band. "Sensory filters online. I'm touching your left forearm with a pressure tag—say 'left' when you feel it."
He didn't say left.
> "Three centimeters distal to radial head, dorsal side. Tag at thirty-two point eight Celsius. Scent trace: bergamot and ethanol. Your hands are clean, Dr. Nadir."
Nadir made an unprofessional noise and laughed at herself.
"Bring the cylinder vertical," Halric said. "Slow. Let his body teach itself weight."
Hydraulics whispered. The cylinder rose along its couplings with grave care, bringing him upright in his water. He flexed—subtle chains rippling along thigh and calf—and planted his feet in the cradle stirrups as if taught that first contact with ground deserves respect.
> "Water temperature descending," he observed. "Seventy-eight to seventy-four. Why?"
"Waking is easier when the world gets a little less kind," Halric said. "It persuades the body to leave the dream."
> "Cruel," KrysKo said. Humor now. "But true."
The sleeve slid. Arms of the crown withdrew. A seam parted; a sheet of perfect water cleared to the catch trough. The scent—sterile, mineral, a whisper of ozone—floated up like a ghost of sea air in a landlocked city.
He stepped forward and set his feet on Echo Vault stone for the first time.
Spines negotiated with owners about posture.
KrysKo's long hair fell down his back in a dark spill, heavy and sleek as if shadow had learned silk. The eyes shifted again—steel to hazel, then a calm, fathomless brown that belonged to trust and funeral music. Color as conversation: mood speaking through iris the way weather speaks through leaves.
Water ran down his torso, lacing light along muscle. The harness he wore was modest in the way antiquity is modest: not coy, not prurient—just a concession to work. It clung in a way that made a junior physicist cough into a sleeve and whisper, "He didn't skip any days," to her plotter.
"Do you feel pain?" Halric asked, because someone had to.
KrysKo did a small inventory—a flex of fingers, a turn of neck, a shift at the hips somehow dignified even soaked—and shook his head once. The hair followed like a dark cloak.
> "I feel information," he said. "Pain will present when it needs to teach."
"God help whoever tries to teach it to you," Strauss muttered, not unkindly.
"Step to the platform," Nadir said, recovering her professionalism. "Balance test."
He did, and the test learned humility. His center line was a quiet miracle: he might have stood on a saucer in an earthquake and made the saucer feel reassured.
> "Why are you looking at my arms?" he asked at last—unoffended, just observant.
"Because they're wrong in the most beautiful way," Halric said. "Every eye expects a ratio. Yours break it. It bothers the eye and pleases the mind."
KrysKo glanced down, flexed. A restrained smile.
> "Then my makers didn't waste their art."
No one had courage to ask which makers he meant.
Far above, a fireball went up and didn't come down. The mountain didn't shake. Echo Vault was buried deep enough to pretend the end of the world was weather.
"Primary integration seventy-eight," Nadir called. "Preparing language loads."
"Already loaded," KrysKo said, and repeated the sentence in Trade, in Drakari tunnel chant, then—briefly—in Ophilim elder formal. The room forgave itself three chills.
Then the Vault lights flickered.
Once. Twice. Not dramatics—like a hospital coughing when the city hiccups.
"Power variance?" Nadir asked.
"External grid," someone from the mezzanine answered. "We're on mountain reserves. It's not us."
"Keep it boring," Strauss told the ceiling, as if electricity respected tone.
KrysKo tilted his head. The eyes brightened—not with light but attention. He listened to a distant melody come undeniably closer.
> "Something is coming," he said. "Like a storm with its sound turned inside out."
"Specifics?" Halric scanned for a monitor that might tell him what the body already knew.
Gold stole into KrysKo's irises, then cooled.
> "A wave. A hand closing on a switch the size of a sky."
The Vault's hum sharpened. Alarms that hadn't been tested in months found their voices.
The light didn't dim; it thinned—as if color itself were being peeled off the room.
Pressure came through the mountain—not sound so much as fingers against the earth's temple. The harmonics slid a half step down. Lunari threads flickered, held, then fluttered like startled minnows. Ophilim capacitors coughed a dry spark. Architect tesserae gave a single bright chord and went quiet, crystal remembering sand.
> System: External electromagnetic phenomenon detected. Amplitude rising. Spectrum: broad. Vector: global.
KrysKo: Define "global."
System: All horizons.
"Talk to me," Halric snapped.
"Multiple grid faults," the mezzanine shouted. "Satellite handshake—gone. Regional relays—gone. We're on reserves."
"Reserve will hold," Strauss said.
"Not against that," Nadir whispered, palms on the console like hands on a wound. "It's a—"
"EMP," KrysKo said. The word tasted like old ash—like a story he didn't remember learning. His eyes flashed gold for one heartbeat, then cooled. "A silence for machines."
> System: Event profile consistent with ultra-high-altitude detonation. Peak in five… four… three—
The world turned to white without light.
Not an explosion. An unmaking. Every whisper of electricity found its childhood and forgot how to speak.
Capacitors howled, then weren't. The crown's filaments spasmed into a silver storm and went out. Consoles flashed a cemetery of epitaphs and flatlined. The under-song that had underwritten the Vault ceased.
Where sound had been, pain arrived.
Not sharp—total. The EMP went through Architect lattice into human nets into Lunari filaments into the rod in his core and through all of it into him. His body learned a new tense for suffering and conjugated it across every nerve. Vision broke into static—not darkness, but snow: cold, bright, cruel. Balance became a war between his feet and gravity. Breath turned from interface to argument.
He did not fall.
He reached for a handhold inside himself.
> System (thin, like a candle in fog): Maintain posture. You are not ending.
KrysKo: I hear you.
System: Anchor to the central spindle. The hum remains. Follow it.
He found it.
Deep in the sternum, behind engineered bone, behind all the human names, the rod answered: a low, mineral beat. Not sound—a fact. Slow. Patient. A river drum heard through stone.
He softened his knees to that pulse—not the vanished hum of the room. His chest remembered breath is a weight you can set down and pick up again. He blinked; the snow thinned to powder, then to a pale haze.
Red emergency strobes sputtered into embarrassed life. Halric's silhouette leaned forward. His voice didn't try for calm; it tried for clarity. "Status checks! Manual! We are blind and deaf—use your hands!"
"Reserves are—" a tech began and died—because the reserves had followed the grid into memory. The strobes hiccuped and faded to a black crowded with the idea of everything.
KrysKo could hear heartbeats. He didn't know how he knew whose was whose, but he knew. Nadir's—fast, held steady by will. Halric's—hammering, then under control. Strauss's—rock in a barrel. The President's—bird in the hand of a statue.
He took one step—bare, wet foot on Vault steel—and the mountain answered with a soft ring. The noise ran up pillars and died among cables like a prayer losing nerve.
"Stay still," Strauss said into the dark. People obeyed because command is a tone before it is a rank.
> System (fainter): Capacitive arrays: offline. Architect lattice: stunned but intact. Human nets: recoverable. Lunari peripherals: quiescent.
KrysKo: And you?
System: Present. Stubborn. One might say old.
KrysKo smiled—barely, a private sacrament—and turned toward the doors because something on the far side of the hall had shifted its weight.
"Hold," Halric began.
"Not us," KrysKo said. "They're already coming."
The great doors didn't swing so much as shudder. Locking pins that could argue with a tank balked, stalled, then slid as hydraulics bled their last grudges of pressure. One door opened a handspan, then another, then folded back with the dignity of a cathedral gate forced to admit a funeral it disliked.
Three silhouettes slid in with the red haze from the corridor. They moved like men who had rehearsed this walk. Armor matte and seamless. Helmets with flat visors. Rifles that kept their own counsel.
Security? Not theirs.
Too clean for scavengers. Too unsentimental for anyone who reported to the room behind him.
"Identify," Strauss snapped. You could hear the years in his voice.
They didn't answer.
The first raised two fingers in a small circle. Left. The second peeled that way, hugging shadow. The third stepped to the rail over the pit, looked down, then up—helmet tilting as if surprised by a man standing unarmed and wet on the deck, hair falling like a scandal down his back.
The first fired.
Not a bullet—a net: black filament blooming from the muzzle into a web with little claws like shy stars. KrysKo moved without telling himself to. He stepped into ginga—a pendulum of motion—and the net kissed the air where his chest wasn't anymore. He turned on one palm—water spinning off his shoulder like a comet—and came up within reach of the rail.
"Stand down!" Halric shouted. The kind of sentence that never matters to people with other plans.
Nadir threw herself at a manual lever. Doors, not weapons. She hauled with a body that had no right to move that weight, and the left-hand door screeched halfway closed and stuck, crooked in its track like a jaw that won't bite.
The second figure fired.
Not net—white-blue snakes, a braided taser whip. It cracked where KrysKo's forearm had been a breath earlier. Heat skimmed his engineered wrongness. A cabinet exploded into a flock of plastic shrapnel and paperwork.
The third didn't fire. He aimed—barrel finding the place beside KrysKo's sternum where anything with a heart prefers not to be addressed—then hesitated a fraction when KrysKo looked straight down that line and didn't blink. Hesitation is permission.
KrysKo took it.
He didn't draw blades. He didn't want his first act under a human roof to be blood.
He stepped—two steps—and in them gave a lesson in what a body can do when its teachers include music, mathematics, and the end of the world. Ginga kept his hips loose; the EMP had made the floor treachery and he turned it into dance. He slid under the third man's muzzle, planted a palm on the side of the rifle—not grabbing, persuading—and the barrel learned a better direction. His other hand found the wrist and made it a hinge with no argument left. The rifle left its owner like a season leaves a tree.
The first tried again with a larger net. KrysKo inverted—hand to rail, ankles to air—and scissored. He wrote a proof across the mesh with his heels, tearing it into triangles that would never be useful. He let the twist carry him into the second man's space and tapped the inside of a knee with a heel that said nothing personal. The leg folded. Gravity did what gravity does best.
"Stop!" Halric's voice climbed into raw. "He is ours!"
The leader flicked two fingers. The man on the floor rolled, brought up a sidearm with elegant form—the elegance spoiled by the aim: past KrysKo, at the humans behind him.
> System: Decide. They will shoot through you.
KrysKo: Minimal necessary force.
System: Your minimal is larger than most.
He stepped through the shot as it fired—heat skimming his engineered skin—and wrapped the shooter's wrist to correct the sentence. The round sulked into the deck somewhere else. KrysKo took the sidearm not to keep it but to introduce it to the floor with enough force to change its mind. The taser-man's other hand came up with a knife because knives still have good days. KrysKo turned his forearm so the blade kissed that impossible place above the ulna where anyone else would be tendon. It skated and told the man a secret: this isn't skin.
He could have removed the hand. He chose mercy's math instead: a shortened meia-lua that clipped the jaw and convinced the knife to quit. The body followed.
The leader had stopped moving when KrysKo started. Not frozen—watching. Triaging: mission, threat, risk, clock.
Strauss moved behind KrysKo. A slide. A click. The sound of a man with a pistol he disliked and could nonetheless make mean. "I will shoot you," Strauss said. He added, after a small breath, "I miss less than you think."
The leader's helmet turned, considered, declined to test the claim. He touched two fingers to his visor—listening to a voice the room didn't own.
"KrysKo," he said, startling the air with a name he hadn't been given. The voice came filtered, accent erased. "You will come with us."
"Who are you?" KrysKo asked. The question carried without volume.
"Custodians," the man said. "Continuity detail."
"No," Halric said. "Continuity is our word."
The leader ignored him. "Time is shorter than you know," he told KrysKo. "We will keep you intact. They won't."
> System (closer now, like warm hands near a dying fire): There will always be factions who say only they can shepherd you. Your first loyalty is not to factions.
KrysKo: I know.
System: Say it.
KrysKo: My first loyalty is to humans who are dying.
The leader must have heard it in the way KrysKo stood; he shifted half a shoe-width. "You were built to be used," he said. "Decide who uses you."
"Unfortunate phrasing," Nadir muttered.
KrysKo looked at the hands—gloved, steady, trained—and saw the lines they'd take if he moved and if he didn't. He opened his palms, fingers wide. He let his shoulders fall a fraction to show he had no weapon drawn, no blade showing. He stepped sideways so stray lines wouldn't intersect Nadir's throat or the President's chest.
"The world is loud," he said. "I will choose after I hear it."
"You will choose now," the leader said, raising the rifle a degree. Violence has grammar.
KrysKo's eyes darkened to hazel. His hair slid along his shoulder like a soft animal and settled.
> System: Minimum necessary force, then.
KrysKo: Minimum.
System: Apologies to your designer.
KrysKo: He will live.
He moved.
Not fast to the eye—inevitable. He crossed the space as if he'd always been standing there and the air had remembered late. His hand met the barrel and leaned it aside with the affection of a teacher taking chalk. The other hand—those wrong, elegant forearms earning their keep—took the gauntlet and the gun left the man like a fashion. The leader countered—low, efficient. They shared three polite moves, then KrysKo ruined the conversation with a heel to the hipbone that broke nothing and made the joint call in sick. He lifted the man a handspan by his armor and set him down on his back with care. Shock pulled breath from the man and handed it to the floor.
No blades. No blood. Three men down, four still standing, one room deciding whether to exhale.
Then—as if the EMP had paused only to remember one last errand—the red strips in the corridor gave a wounded pulse. Somewhere above, a breaker threw its own funeral. The doors shivered in their tracks.
> System (small, intimate): I'm going to be quiet. Just for a while.
KrysKo: Don't.
System: I will find you. Anchor to the spindle. Hear the hum.
KrysKo: I hear it.
System: Good. Remember: breath isn't a command. It's a choice.
"KrysKo," Halric said, his voice too loud now. "Stay with us."
"I'm here," he said.
For a long second, the mountain held them in one hand: soldiers, scientists, a President who'd learned signatures can be louder than gunfire, and a man built to be we when everyone wanted him to be I.
Wind slipped through the crooked seal of the doors and brought the smell of snow and smoke and cities that had become rumors.
Then the Vault's last light went out.
Darkness.