Chapter 8 — Part 1: Return to Stone
Segment 1 — Through the Ashrun Canyons
The canyon air was made of echoes.
Every sound came back wrong—footsteps too long, breath folded over itself, the faint clatter of loose stone stretching thin as wire before snapping back into silence. Cohort Nine moved in a tight file through the pale corridors of ashrock, where the light never quite reached the ground. The wafer in Jax's ring pulsed against its metal casing—soft, arrhythmic, like a heartbeat trying to remember the right tempo.
KrysKo led them.
Not by map—by sense.
The canyons felt different to him now: geometry with memory. The way the walls leaned, the mineral residue in the air, the faint hum buried under the rock—each spoke a language of construction older than the University itself. He could feel the design logic in the angles, how each turn anticipated sound, how each echo was part of some lost architecture's plan.
> [Ambient pattern detected: acoustic relay system. Architect origin probable. Function: communication or containment.]
Containment, he thought. Always containment.
Ronan's silhouette flitted between the rocks ahead—low, balanced, patient. The Drakari hybrid moved like he'd been carved from the same dust, blades reversed in his hands. "Still no wind," he muttered. "Feels like we're walking in a lung that forgot how to breathe."
"Maybe it's holding it," Jax said, his voice hushed by the walls. "Waiting to exhale."
Kara adjusted her satchel strap, her voice low. "Don't tempt it."
They came to a fork where two paths split, one climbing toward light, one descending into thicker gray. The air from below carried a faint metallic tang—iron and something else. Burned circuitry.
"Mechanum residue," Jax murmured, crouching. "Old beacon tech, pre-Fall era. Someone tried to repair this recently."
KrysKo's system pulsed.
> [Signal anomaly — low frequency resonance at 41.7 Hz. Source: sub-surface emitter, distance 32 meters.]
He raised a hand for silence, then crouched, brushing a thin layer of dust aside. A small bronze plate revealed itself—half-buried, engraved with worn glyphs. Around its rim, three cracked lenses protruded like blind eyes.
Then, faintly, a tone bloomed through the canyon.
A bell.
Low. Distant. Beautiful.
Kara froze. "Tell me that's the University."
"It's not," Ronan said immediately.
The tone deepened, vibrating the rock beneath their boots. Dust drifted from the walls. Jax checked his wrist sensor. "It's not coming from the surface either. It's right below us."
The bell flared again, too clear, too perfect. And this time, the sound split—duplicating itself into two tones, slightly out of phase. The interference made the air shimmer.
KrysKo's system hissed in his mind.
> [Alert: Architect mimic resonance. Function: lure pattern. Classification: Predatory signal.]
"Move," he said.
Ronan was already moving. He dove forward, yanking Kara by the collar just as the ground behind them fractured. A circular section of stone dropped away like a trapdoor, revealing a hollow chamber beneath—metal ribs and gears grinding awake after centuries.
The false bell screamed now—its tone warped, guttural, electronic. A shape rose through the dust: a cluster of spindled limbs around a cracked emitter core, half-machine, half-insect. Its "head" was a bronze bell fused to a mouth of blades, tolling itself with every shudder.
"Beautiful," Jax said grimly. "And homicidal."
Ronan flicked both blades open. "Jax—can you kill the sound?"
"Working on it!"
KrysKo stepped forward, rolling his shoulders, finding the rhythm before it found him. The false bell lunged—fast for its size, jointed limbs stabbing forward like spears. He slipped sideways into ginga, weight low, footwork tracing a semicircle in the dust. The first limb struck; he pivoted, swept it wide with a heel, and slashed upward with a retracting forearm blade.
Metal screamed. Sparks flared.
Kara pulled a smoke ampoule from her satchel, crushed it underfoot. Mist coiled around them, softening light, breaking line of sight. "Blind it!"
The thing didn't have eyes, but it heard. It struck at the air, homing on sound. Jax cursed under his breath, tearing at a panel of the beacon core with his gauntlet tools. "Feedback loop—need ten seconds!"
"Five," KrysKo said.
"Fine—five!"
Ronan vaulted over the creature's back, driving both blades into its emitter housing. The false bell's next toll came out warped, high-pitched, dissonant. Kara's ears bled from the sound; she pressed both palms to her head. "Now, Jax!"
"Loop engaged!"
He slammed his gauntlet into the ground. The air filled with a shriek of reversed tone—mirror to the bell's frequency. The creature convulsed, limbs jerking, bronze shell fracturing. KrysKo felt the resonance crawl up his arms like static, rattling the synthetic plating beneath his skin.
He drove a final heel into the thing's chest. The bell cracked in half.
Silence.
Then the canyon seemed to breathe again.
The smoke thinned. The dust settled. The creature lay collapsed, its body leaking thin trails of black lubricant that smelled faintly of iron and vinegar.
"Report," KrysKo said, out of habit.
"Alive," Kara said, wincing as she cleaned her ears. "Mostly."
"Intact," Ronan said.
"Smarter than before," Jax muttered, crouching over the remains. "Look at this. It's got both Architect and Mechanum circuitry. Somebody's been welding time periods together."
Kara frowned. "That shouldn't even be possible."
"Shouldn't," Jax agreed. "And yet—here's a suicide beacon that rings people to their death."
KrysKo knelt beside him, scanning. His system confirmed the blend: Architect alloy bones, human conductive solder, and Mechanum resonance logic.
> [Classification: Chimera Construct — Unauthorized Hybrid.] [Age: Indeterminate. Last activation: 47 hours prior.]
"Forty-seven hours," KrysKo said aloud. "Someone was here two days ago."
Ronan's jaw flexed. "Vulture?"
"Or their buyers," Jax said.
They stood in the stillness for a long moment. The canyon held its breath with them.
Then Kara, softly: "We're too close to the city for this."
"Which means," KrysKo said, straightening, "the University isn't just being watched. It's being mirrored."
They left the broken bell behind, following the upper path toward daylight. For the first time since the Flats, there was real wind. It came thin and sharp from the east, smelling of stone, rain, and civilization.
---
They emerged onto a high ridge where the canyon opened to a distant horizon. Beyond the ash and ruin, faint towers pierced the mist—a sprawl of white spires and bridges suspended over river and rubble. The University.
Kara exhaled a sound halfway between relief and disbelief. "We made it."
Jax shaded his eyes. "Looks smaller than I remember."
"Because now you've seen what's bigger," Ronan said quietly.
They started the descent. Each turn revealed more of the world reborn: scorched farmlands stitched with patchwork green; caravan routes winding toward the gates; long columns of refugees under Warden banners. A drone patrol hummed overhead—metallic wings marked with the University's sigil, lenses scanning.
Jax flinched as one swept low. "Friendly surveillance. My least favorite kind."
"They're measuring us," KrysKo said. "Not greeting."
Kara's hand drifted toward her satchel where the courier's ribbon was folded. "They'll ask for proof."
"They'll get it," Ronan said. "On our terms."
By mid-afternoon, they reached the first checkpoint—an outpost of brass pylons, sandbags, and ward-glyphs. A pair of Wardens in oxide armor approached, visors up. Behind them, a small Mechanum scribe tapped notes onto a slate, eyes glowing faint blue.
"Halt," the Warden said. "Identify cohort and authorization."
"KrysKo O'Ruadhraigh," KrysKo said evenly. "Cohort Nine. Field retrieval unit under Warden Senn."
Recognition flickered behind the guard's eyes. He glanced toward the Mechanum scribe, who whispered into a throat mic.
Seconds later: confirmation.
"Warden Senn's orders," the guard said. "You're to proceed to the inner gates under escort. Your cargo—"
KrysKo nodded to Jax. "Show it."
Jax unhooked the ring from his neck. The wafer glowed faintly as he lifted it. "Courier fragment. Classified."
The Mechanum scribe's expression didn't change, but his fingers stilled mid-type. His voice was too calm. "You brought it back alive?"
Kara stiffened. "We buried the boy ourselves."
The scribe bowed slightly, lips forming a single word—"recorded"—before motioning them through.
Ronan waited until they were clear of the outpost before muttering, "He wasn't talking to us."
"I know," KrysKo said. "He was reporting upward."
---
As twilight bled across the sky, the road curved toward the city's lower bridges. The air grew colder, more ordered. The faint hum of the University's core systems resonated underfoot—a subsonic presence that felt almost alive.
KrysKo slowed once, glancing back toward the distant canyons. The cracked bell they'd left behind still tolled faintly in memory, not sound.
> [System Note: External resonance signatures persist. Possible trace link from false beacon to internal infrastructure.]
He didn't say it aloud. Some truths needed containment, too.
They walked on, toward stone that remembered names.
By the time they reached the lower causeway, day had traded its color for glass.
The bridges here were all survivors of old war design—arched titanium bones over what used to be the southern river. Now the channel carried only a slow gray trickle between layers of fused sediment. The University loomed ahead, towers vanishing into the fog like enormous needles stitching the horizon shut.
Lines of people crawled toward the gates. Caravans of refugees, traders, and license-bearers—all moving beneath the quiet, measured vigilance of the Wardens. The air smelled of wet stone and boiled rations.
Every face carried a version of the same story: something burned, something lost, something remembered because forgetting had become a luxury.
Kara walked near the rear, her scarf pulled tight. "It wasn't this crowded when we left."
"It wasn't this desperate either," Jax said, eyes flicking over the makeshift camps along the road—fires in barrels, families sleeping under tarps stitched from ration wrappers. "The Wardens are letting them gather closer to the walls. That's new."
Ronan's jaw tightened. "New means useful. The University needs something."
KrysKo didn't answer. He was listening to the walls themselves.
The outer fortifications pulsed faintly—not visible light, but frequency. His system mapped it automatically: defensive resonance grids overlapping like scales, powered by an Architect lattice buried beneath the stone. The design was elegant, but not original. He knew the touch of the code.
He remembered it.
> [Recognition trace: 18%. Construct similarities with Project Vault systems detected.]
His hand twitched before he could stop it.
"Something wrong?" Kara asked softly beside him.
He shook his head. "Just remembering the pattern."
She didn't press.
---
The line at the checkpoint crawled. Wardens scanned the arrivals with handheld arrays, marking wrists with thin bands of violet ink. Those who failed the scan were taken aside—not harshly, but with a kind of professional finality. The air there had no arguments.
When Cohort Nine reached the front, a clerk stepped forward—a woman in gray robes, her expression carved from routine. "Name and designation."
KrysKo handed over his identification disk. "Cohort Nine. Return from field mission Theta-Black."
The clerk's eyes flickered as the disk's data ran across her contact lenses. "Authorization confirmed. Status… incomplete report pending. You're expected."
A shadow moved at the periphery.
Warden Aria Senn approached.
Even through the layers of dust and fatigue, KrysKo saw the change in her. The same iron poise, the same composure—but her eyes, those dark-amber eyes, were set deeper than before, as if the sleeplessness had carved its own authority into her face.
"Cohort Nine," she said, voice level. "You took your time."
Ronan inclined his head, half salute, half challenge. "We were delayed by what used to be a river."
Senn's gaze flicked to the dirt on their coats, the dried blood near Kara's wrist, the faint shimmer of dried resin on Jax's boots. Then her attention settled on KrysKo.
"You retrieved the message fragment?"
KrysKo nodded to Jax.
Jax produced the ring, holding it carefully between two fingers. The wafer glimmered faintly within. "One and a half pieces. The rest burned."
"Courier?"
"Dead," Kara said softly. "We buried him."
Senn's throat moved once, as if she'd swallowed something she didn't want to name. "Lio Hart."
Kara blinked. "You knew him?"
"He was an Archivist's runner," Senn said. "Too young to be that brave. I sent him."
The silence that followed was a thin sheet of glass between them.
Finally, Senn exhaled. "Follow me. We'll debrief in the southern hall."
---
The southern hall was not made for warmth.
Polished stone, geometric light, every line too perfect to be accidental. The University's inner sanctum had always been like this—clinical devotion to order, as if architecture could keep chaos from knocking on the door.
Senn led them down a long corridor lined with old Mechanum portraits. Some of the figures were painted, others projected, all with the same slight smile of people who believed they'd tamed the world. The sound of their boots echoed off the walls and came back wrong, deeper.
Inside the debrief chamber, the only furniture was a round table of obsidian glass. Four chairs. One recorder node glowing faintly blue.
"Sit," Senn said.
They obeyed.
The Warden stood instead of joining them. "Start with the Flats."
KrysKo spoke evenly. "We found the courier's trail at the southern ridge. His caravan was destroyed by a directed energy discharge—Architect-class, harmonic weapon signature. Guardian construct activated on river crossing. Neutralized."
Senn's eyes flicked up sharply. "You neutralized an Architect guardian?"
"Dormant for centuries," KrysKo said. "Reactivated on contact. Coordination between human signal and Architect power lattice."
Jax added, "Somebody welded those systems together. Old code, new parts."
"Show me," Senn said.
Jax tapped his gauntlet, projecting the residual schematic onto the table. A three-dimensional model shimmered above the glass: serpent architecture, resonance veins lit blue, half-burned through with Mechanum solder. The Warden's jaw tightened.
Kara leaned forward, voice low. "Warden… what if it wasn't a trap? What if it was a message, too?"
Senn studied her for a long time. "Then the sender had no mercy in their method."
Ronan spoke next, cutting through the pause. "Vulture insignia. Three slashes, one hooked. We found it near the boy's body."
That finally broke Senn's composure. Her eyes flickered, calculating. "Privateers."
"Mechanum-affiliated?" Jax asked.
"Unofficially," Senn said. "Officially, they're ghosts. You'll keep that mark to yourselves. The fewer who know, the better."
Kara bristled. "They're killing couriers. You can't hide that."
"I can," Senn said softly, "until I understand who's giving them orders."
---
The debrief stretched on another hour. Questions. Clarifications. The shape of lies being measured against the shape of truth. When it ended, Senn looked exhausted but decisive.
"You'll be quartered in the South Observatory complex until review is complete," she said. "Eat. Rest. Speak to no one about the Flats."
Jax frowned. "We can't even talk to the Mechanum division?"
"Especially not them."
Ronan's tone was iron. "You're isolating us."
"I'm protecting you," Senn said sharply. Then softer, "And everyone else. The Council will want the fragment. Let them ask me first."
KrysKo rose. "Understood."
Senn hesitated, as if weighing whether to add something. Then: "You did well. All of you."
That should have sounded like praise. It felt like a warning.
---
Outside, dusk had thickened. The great bells of the University began their evening tolls—five notes that rolled across the spires, rich and measured. Each tone shimmered against the clouds before falling into the river's mist.
But halfway through the fifth toll, another note bled in beneath it.
Low. Dissonant. Barely audible—but wrong.
It trembled at a frequency too low for most human ears.
KrysKo felt it in his ribs.
> [Signal variance detected. Bell resonance deviation: 0.22 Hz. Source: unregistered secondary emitter.]
His gaze lifted toward the highest tower.
For a moment—just a heartbeat—he saw a faint pulse of red light in one of the upper windows, flashing in the same rhythm as the false bell's tone.
Then it was gone.
"KrysKo?" Kara's voice beside him. "You hear it too?"
He nodded slowly. "It's not a malfunction."
Jax rubbed his arms. "Then what is it?"
Ronan's eyes tracked the tower. "A message."
KrysKo's voice was quiet, certain. "Or a test."
They said nothing more until they reached the South Observatory. The corridors there were mostly empty, sealed off from main faculty halls. The air smelled faintly of dust and ozone. Half the rooms still bore burn marks from the EMP storms years ago.
Their assigned quarters were functional—a single hall with four cots, a table, a small hearth that hummed with recycled heat.
Senn's escort left without a word.
When the door sealed, the quiet hit like gravity.
Kara sank onto her cot, rubbing her temples. "Feels like the whole place is breathing."
"It is," Jax said. "Architect foundation. Every wall's alive."
Ronan sat against the far wall, eyes half-shut. "Alive and listening."
KrysKo stood near the window. Outside, the mist rose like smoke, swallowing the towers one by one. Somewhere far above, the bells had gone silent.
He could still feel their afterimage vibrating in his chest.
> [Internal resonance interference minimal. Neural sync stable. Emotional load high.] [Observation: Subject demonstrating adaptive paranoia. Useful trait.]
He smiled faintly at that last line, though there was no one to hear him.
---
Later, when the others slept, he walked the hall alone. The floor tiles beneath his feet were etched with sigils too faded to read.
He stopped at a window overlooking the courtyard. Rain streaked down the glass.
In the reflection, his own eyes glimmered gold for an instant—echoing the tower light.
"Containment," he murmured. "Always containment."
The warm voice stirred deep inside the system, calm and knowing.
> [No, KrysKo. Not this time. You are not the one being contained.] [You are the breach.]
He didn't answer, but his hand tightened on the window frame.
The storm rolled in after midnight, not with thunder so much as with a long-muscled pressure that made the glass in the windows think about trembling. The University absorbed it the way a mountain does: by pretending it had invented weather. Rain gathered along the spires and ran down carved channels into reservoirs hidden inside the stone. Somewhere, pumps hummed and the city drank its own patience.
KrysKo did not sleep. He sat on the floor with his back against the cold wall, knees bent, hands resting loose over the bronze gauntlets. Kara had drifted off in a slant of lamplight, a vial uncapped beside her; Jax slept with an open schematic tented over his face; Ronan lay awake and still, the way hunters rest when they do not trust the night. The room had the fragile peace of a drawn breath.
It lasted until the bell tolled once.
No hour followed it. Just the single note, round and resonant, and underneath it—like a second voice speaking through the same mouth—the deeper frequency that did not belong. KrysKo felt it ride his bones. The system recognized it, filed it, and did not comment, as if learning that silence was sometimes more useful than an answer.
He rose without a sound, palmed the door, and stepped into the dim corridor. The lamps along the wall burned at maintenance brightness, low and amber. The stones here were scaleless if you didn't know how to look; he did. Under the plaster, under the polished veneer, the Architect lattice glowed like embers in a banked fire. The University had always been a marriage between human ambition and borrowed geometry.
He walked the length of the corridor, then another, counting doors by habit, mapping exits by reflex. At the end, a narrow stairwell curled upward toward the observatory's ruined crown. The air there smelled faintly of old smoke and rain-soaked copper. He took it.
On the roof, the night opened—the city a quilt of wet tile and dim squares of light, the towers standing like instruments waiting for someone to play them. The false bell did not return, but its echo hung in the mist as if sound had left fingerprints.
KrysKo set the gauntlets on the parapet and breathed, slow and measured, letting the cold carve the heat from his lungs. The warm voice in the system—his teacher that was not a man—arrived without preface.
You're listening for what you can't name.
"Yes," KrysKo murmured.
Good. Naming is the last step, not the first.
He was not sure if that comforted him or made him want to tear the bell from its rigging.
A soft footfall behind him. Ronan joined him at the parapet, coat dark with shadow, hair damp with the fine drift of rain. For a long moment they stood without speaking.
"You saw it," Ronan said finally. Not a question.
"The light in the tower," KrysKo answered. "And the deviation in the bell. I heard it in the Flats too, under the river, just before the guardian woke. Not the same tone, but the same thinking."
Ronan's gaze tracked the highest spire with predator patience. "That's not the Wardens' signal."
"No."
"Then someone else can ring the bells."
"Or someone built a second bell the Wardens can't hear."
Ronan exhaled through his nose, humorless. "I hate how you make treason sound like a design problem."
KrysKo considered that. "All treason begins as design," he said. "Someone chooses a line and draws it where it was not before."
Ronan's mouth tilted. "And then we find out whose map we're walking."
They stood until the cold had teeth. When they returned to the quarters, the corridor felt narrower, as if the walls had inched closer while they were gone.
Kara woke when KrysKo closed the door. She didn't startle; she simply lifted her head and read his face as if it were a field kit she had learned by heart.
"You went to the roof," she said.
He nodded.
"You heard it again."
He nodded again.
She wrapped her scarf tighter, a small defensive gesture. "I had a dream," she said quietly, as if offering a weather report rather than a confession. "I was standing in the University's great hall. The floor was a lake. Bells were floating on it like boats. Every time one rang, it sank."
"What did you do?" KrysKo asked.
"What I always do," Kara said. "I tried to save the wrong thing."
Jax snored, turned over, smacked his lips, and pulled the schematic further over his face. The brittle fringes of it rattled like leaves. Ronan lay back down, eyes open to the ceiling.
"Sleep," KrysKo told Kara, almost gently.
"You first," she countered, a tired smile, and was gone again.
He did not try. The system's audit window hovered at the edge of his awareness—stat blocks and proficiency curves he could summon and banish with a thought. He let it pulse there like a second heartbeat and refused to look. Choosing not to know was a kind of discipline. Sometimes.
By morning, the rain had washed the city into sharpness. The University put on its day-face: courtyards rinsed, flags drying, the smell of yeast from the lower kitchens, students moving in ordered lines like schools of fish in a river that believed in itself. Warden Senn appeared mid-morning with a shadow at her shoulder: Professor Halden, Mechanum's senior, his cuffs clean today and his eyes red with the kind of fatigue that comes from arguing with people who can end your career without raising their voices.
"You're to come with us," Senn said without ceremony. "Now."
They followed her through the southern arcade, up two flights of stairs, across a narrow bridge where the mist caught and spun itself into small visible eddies. The chamber they entered next was new to them: not an official council room, not a classroom, but a smaller space with recessed seats and a single environmental projector sunk into the table. It smelled of paper and disinfectant and something faintly sweet that KrysKo could not place.
"Close the doors," Senn told Halden, and he did. The mechanism sealed with a soft hydraulic hiss that reminded Ronan of airlocks.
Senn turned to Cohort Nine. "We have a problem," she said. "One I can neither put in a report nor ignore. The fragment you carried home woke something in our archival grid."
Jax leaned forward. "Woke how?"
"Ghost traffic," Halden said, voice flat. "A handshake from an address space we retired before the Silence. Whoever designed the fragment embedded an old credential. When it passed within the University's coil, a repeater in the upper tower recognized it. We recorded three pings at just after midnight."
Ronan didn't bother hiding the glance he shot toward KrysKo. "The bell."
Senn's jaw set. "That's my suspicion. I don't know who controls the protocol. It isn't on any of our charts."
"Council of Shadows," Jax said, too quiet, as if volume might change the truth-value of a guess.
Senn did not answer, which was answer enough.
"Why tell us at all?" Kara asked. "If you wanted us ignorant, you could have kept us in our room and sent the fragment up yourself."
"Because ignorance is more dangerous than knowledge when you're already inside the blast radius," Senn said. "And because—" she hesitated—"because someone high in administration has taken an interest in your cohort's movements, and I prefer you owe your understanding to me."
Ronan's eyes cooled. "Someone like the Vulture."
Halden made a face at the name. Senn didn't. "We do not use that term." She set her hands flat on the table, palms open. "Listen carefully. You will continue your routine as if nothing is wrong. You will report to training, attend lectures when scheduled, eat where you always have. You will not ask about bells. You will not talk about the Flats. You will not show the fragment to anyone. Jax, the ring stays on your body at all times."
Jax tapped the cord around his neck. "Already there."
Kara lifted her chin. "And if we're asked directly?"
Senn met her eyes for a long, steady second. "Then you can tell the truth the way the University likes it: in pieces, and only the ones that fit on a page."
KrysKo studied Senn's face as she spoke, the way strain drew a thin line at the corner of her mouth. She was not lying to them. She was the kind of honest that cost.
"And you?" he asked. "What will you do?"
"Walk the halls and make enemies," Senn said. "Which is to say: my job."
They were dismissed with new keys and tighter shadows. On the way back across the arcade, Jax blew out a breath he'd been holding for an hour. "So. Great. We're not under suspicion at all."
"We are under care," Kara said. "That's rarer."
Ronan's gaze angled upward again, toward the tower that pretended ignorance. "Care can be another kind of cage."
"I've lived in worse," KrysKo said, and let it sound like a joke, though the system hummed with an old ache.
They trained that afternoon because the body needs a language when the mouth is useless. KrysKo taught them the breathing pattern he had woven on the ridge: inhale as count, exhale as decision. Ronan matched him beat for beat; Kara found the gentler seam and made it her own; Jax turned breath into timing for his gauntlets, the soft pull between strikes.
For a few minutes the yard was only rhythm and dust and the small honest sound of bodies choosing to be alive.
The bells did not ring. The silence felt like a lie anyway.
Near dusk, while Jax bartered for new ceramic clamps and Kara harangued an apprentice for cleaner glassware, KrysKo slipped into the old observatory. The upper dome had partially collapsed years ago, leaving a jagged mouth of sky. Lenses lay broken in their frames; brass tracks were frozen mid-rotation; a table of star charts had been turned into a shelf for spare gears.
KrysKo laid his palm against the central column. Under skin and stone, the coil woke—subdermal lights flirting along the lattice, curious. He didn't push. He let the whisper come to him.
Hello, said the coil, in the way machines say it: a brief alignment of frequencies that feels like a greeting if you want one.
He smiled despite himself. "Hello."
Underneath that, another presence: something old, colder, more deliberate. Not the coil. Not the University. Watching. He lifted his hand and the sensation faded.
When he turned, Warden Senn was standing in the doorway. She had come like rain—quietly, inevitably.
"You know this place," she said.
"I remember its bones," he answered.
She crossed the floor and stood beside him at the shattered aperture where the dome had broken. The city beyond them breathed through mist. After a time, she said, "The boy. Lio. He used to bring me news he thought mattered. He'd stand in the door like that—like it was a line he wasn't supposed to cross—and grin like crossing was the whole point. I shouldn't have let him go to the Flats."
KrysKo did not say it was not her fault. He had learned that sentence only helps the speaker. Instead: "He believed you would use what he brought."
Senn's eyes shone briefly, then steadied. "Then I had better earn it."
They left the observatory together and did not speak of it again.
Night fell. The University folded into watchfulness. Cohort Nine gathered in their quarters without being asked. No one had to say that rituals are just decisions repeated often enough to look like faith.