Chapter 25: The Cost of Knowledge
The Comms Tower – Sade's Perspective
The questions were a form of torture. They came from Hacker, his voice a calm, relentless probe inside the sterile room they kept her in. He didn't ask about her feelings, her brothers, her loss. He asked about physics.
"Describe the sensation preceding the visual distortion. Was it auditory? A pressure differential? A temperature shift?"
"The unfolding—did it maintain Euclidean geometry? Were the angles coherent?"
"At the moment of your brother's deletion, did you perceive a scent? Ozone? Ionized air? Nothing?"
Sade answered as best she could, her voice a monotone. Each answer was a betrayal, a dissection of the most terrifying moment of her life for the cold curiosity of this man. She was a lab rat, and her trauma was the data. In return, she received food, water, and the chilling certainty that she was safer in this gilded cage than outside it.
Her only reprieve was the daily "physical assessment" conducted by Courier. It was less an assessment and more a silent inspection. He would enter, his presence sucking the air from the room, and put her through a series of drills—balance, reaction time, grip strength. He never spoke. He just watched, his wintery eyes missing nothing, his data pad recording everything.
One day, he didn't leave after the drills. He stood by the reinforced window, looking out over the ruined city.
"The Library-Fortress," he said, the name sounding like a foreign object in his mouth. "You know of it."
It wasn't a question. Sade nodded, wary. Everyone in the southern sectors had heard the rumors of the place that had broken the Keeper.
"They fight the shadows on the wall," he stated, his voice flat. "They build walls against the storm. They do not understand that the storm is now inside the house."
He turned his head, his gaze pinning her. "You have seen inside the house. That knowledge is a weapon. It is also a curse. They are not ready for it."
For the first time, Sade understood the silent bargain she had struck. She wasn't just an asset for Hacker's research. She was a canary in a coal mine for a war Courier was preparing to fight alone. And he was telling her that the hopeful, struggling Compact we were building was irrelevant. We were still worried about the locks on the doors, while he was studying the termites in the foundations.
The Athenaeum – Emeka's Perspective
The rumor of the "Unseen" spread through the Compact like a virus, eroding the fragile confidence our victory over the Keeper had bought us. Fear was a currency more powerful than bullets, and it was being spent freely.
Gabriel, ever the voice of panic, used it to his advantage. "First the Keeper, now this? Invisible monsters that erase you from existence? We are not equipped for this! Our alliance is a joke against such a thing!"
"It is precisely because of such threats that we need the alliance!" Uche argued, but the fear in the room was a tangible force.
It was Dr. Adisa who provided the only sliver of hope, a theory born of desperation.
"The phenomenon is a leak," he explained to the council, his hands sketching shapes in the air. "A tear in the fabric of our dimension. The Keeper was a patch, a crude one, but it held back the pressure. Our weapons are useless, but perhaps… perhaps the effect can be insulated."
"Insulated how?" I asked.
"The same way we insulated ourselves from the Keeper's influence. Refined metals. Certain electromagnetic frequencies. The Akudama," he said the name with distaste, "they understand this on an instinctual level. Their fortress is a Faraday cage against reality itself. We must learn to build our own."
It was a daunting task. We were survivors, not engineers of metaphysical architecture. But it was a direction. A purpose.
That night, I found Ade on the roof, his eyes fixed to the south, towards the distant, glinting needle of the Comms Tower.
"He's up there, isn't he?" Ade said, his voice quiet. "Courier. He knows what we're only just beginning to fear."
"He does," I replied.
"And he's not sharing."
"No. He's not."
Ade finally looked at me, and in his eyes, I saw the same grim resolve that had fueled his charge against Hacker. "Then we can't just build walls, Emeka. We can't just hide. We have to learn what he knows. However we can."
The mission had changed once again. It was no longer just about survival or even alliance. It was an arms race for understanding. We had to find a way to steal fire from a god who saw us as ants, while the very ground beneath our feet threatened to unmoor itself from reality. The cost of knowledge was rising, and we were dangerously close to being outbid.