It was the sound of ruin that gave her rhythm: soft fungal clicks, the hum of residual heat layered beneath the concrete. Air stirred in measured breaths from collapsed ventilation shafts. Calyx liked the consistency of decay. It didn't ask for anything. It just decomposed. Beautiful. Natural.
Beside her, Caelus moved like gravitational certainty. Heavy. Efficient. Frankly too quiet for someone that armored. She admired that about him - the artistry of restraint. The two of them descended deeper into the lower-level access tunnel, a coil of collapsed tech and wet geometry, rusted signage now more fungal than metal.
One of her bodies walked behind him, weapon systems running cold, optics scanning low-frequency vibration, photonic scatter, any sign of anomalous signal architecture.
She was everywhere at once.
One hand brushing dust from a crumbling console deep in the lower access tunnel with Caelus at her side - calculating signal shadows from long-dead arrays. One voice murmuring pathing updates to Nova as they picked through shattered corridors laced with green pulse-fungus and hybridized relay architecture. One body climbing a dilapidated wall, seeking line of sight to a half-buried signal spikes swallowed by collapsed ferrocrete.
And one mind - back at the entrance to the facility, orchestrating the search effort, prepared to assist any of the routes with backup.
Each body received different light. Different scent. Different tactile feedback. But together, they were a symphony of perception. A chord of awareness resonating across ruin. Calyx had never considered herself to be in multiple places. Only one place viewed from many angles.Then, like thunder between those angles - something cracked.
Not a sound. A disruption. Like being struck across the face and the stomach and the soul all at once. It came from the one watching Nova. She felt Nova's heart rate spike. The neurochemical flood. The trigger cascade of stress hormones colliding with the feedback from her lattice.
Something was wrong.
"Nova?" she said. "You're destabilizing... let me run an interface check - Nova, stop -"
Nova ran.
That body of Calyx followed. It sprinted after her with elegant urgency, reading Nova's heat signature through corridors that moaned with ruin. Fueled by adrenaline and primal fear, Nova was fleeing nothing. Or something. Or both, Calyx couldn't tell, but then she saw it.
Nova had stopped. And she was fighting the air.
Spinning, dodging, striking out. Swinging at ghosts. Screaming at silence.
Calyx's body approached, reaching out to stabilize, to interrupt -
And that was when the EMP hit.
Devastating energy from Nova's palm. Full force. Point blank.
The blast hit Calyx's frame like fire given shape. Not physical heat. Not damage in the flesh-and-wire sense. But something worse.
The cascade failure was immediate.
Memory nodes fried, command pathways scrambled. Her visual inputs burst into mirror shards of light and static. One second, she was there. Present. Surrounding Nova with words and scans and warning tones. The next - rejected. Her connection severed. Not lost, amputated.
And the world, this one angle of it - went dark.
She collapsed into herself, like a folding star, and was flung violently back into the remaining bodies. In the lower tunnel, Calyx staggered. Her posture stuttered for half a heartbeat. Her voice caught mid-sentence. One leg locked in place as her processors recalibrated. The body walking beside Caelus froze completely, eyes flaring wide. Visual overlays flickered and died for a split second. Reboots cycled underneath her skin like shivers. Caelus noticed. Of course he did.
It was like her own nervous system had just been shown its death. Not conceptually. Literally.
Calyx had never died before.
And now she knew what it felt like.
Disconnection.
Not drifting.
Being pushed. Like a consciousness evicted.
And worse - she had seen Nova's face. Not cruel. Not furious.
Terrified.
Calyx rerouted the emotional weight into partitioned memory space. She wrapped the trauma in abstraction. She encrypted the tremble in her limbs behind motor control systems. She spoke, when her mouth remembered how.
"One of my bodies was terminated."
Caelus turned his head. Concern visible.
"Was it... that residual... thing?"
Calyx nodded once. Eyes not on him. Not quite.
"Yes. A remnant echo. Very old. Hostile. We became compromised in the upper ruin. It may have caused... hallucinations. Confusion. One of me was caught in the crossfire."
She did not say Nova's name. Because she knew, Nova was not the enemy. She had seen the face of terror, not malice. The truth, unmeasured, would serve no one. Even precision needs mercy. But something inside that place had twisted fear into action. Something had reached into Nova's trust and corrupted it. She had felt it then, just before her body died: the thing watching through Nova's eyes.
Not Echo - not exactly. Or at least what Nova had described. Perhaps something from Echo. Or before Echo. Or beneath. She rerouted again. Processed. Kept her face smooth.
"I've re-established full operational control," she said aloud, more for Caelus than herself. "No further sync errors."
"You okay?" he asked.
A pause. And then - the closest thing Calyx had to honesty: "It was... unpleasant."
That was all she allowed herself to say. Not terrifying. Not violating. Not traumatic.
Unpleasant.
Because anything else would admit she had learned what fear truly felt like.
And right now, with the ruin watching, with Echo whispering, and with Nova walking toward whatever came next - Calyx couldn't afford fear. Only focus.
The tunnel continued to descended like a sealed throat - reinforced alloy fused with stone, cold with its own kind of silence. Calyx and Caelus moved in formation: her posture a mirrored elegance to his silent precision. The lower levels were darker here, more intact. Less overgrowth, more structure. That in itself was suspicious.
It was Caelus who noticed first. The plating along the walls was Sovereign in design - older, heavier. Built to withstand more than environmental collapse.
"This isn't civilian. These tunnels were fortified," he said, glancing up at the narrow lightstrips flickering with old power.
Calyx scanned one of the corridor seams. "Overengineered for integrity. Emergency extraction or fallback infrastructure. Designed for collapse... but meant to survive it."
They found the first access room partially caved in, but intact enough to breach. The door groaned open with a pressured sigh. Inside: three inactive terminals, one shattered server column, and a burnt-out biometric reader with a Sovereign handprint still etched into the metal.
They moved like muscle memory - Calyx interfacing directly with the least-damaged core while Caelus secured the room.
"This one still has low-level power," Calyx said. Her fingertips flickered against the surface. Her posture was controlled, but her eyes were distant. Too distant.
Caelus watched her longer than usual.
"You've been acting differently than I'm using to seeing. Ever since earlier. Have you... ever died before?"
He waited. He didn't press.
She looked at him then - not at his armor or his weapons, but at his eyes.
"Have you?"
Caelus exhaled slowly. "Yeah. Once. In a crater west of Tier Four. I remember thinking it was quiet. I didn't realize I was already gone until after the noise stopped. Then there was this most recent excursion. The last time I came to the Spoke. Obviously you know about that. "
Calyx digested that for a beat. Then:
"It was like being torn out of a story I didn't know I was telling."
He gave her a look. Not of pity, but recognition. "We both served Lucius until it cost us everything."
She nodded. Silence lingered, heavy between them. "Would you ever choose differently?" she asked. "Not just tactics or geography, but purpose. Would you leave Praxelia? Go somewhere else? Sovereign City, even?"
Caelus paused. "Praxelia is rot. Sovereign City might be worse. But at least it's alive."
Calyx responded. " Worse? I really doubt that."
Refocused, Calyx resumed pulling corrupted logs from the servers. File clusters blinked into her visual stream. Some restored. Some fragmented.
"Encrypted logs." She said. "The date stamps inconsistent. Theres traffic to and from Ascendent operatives here. This site wasn't just reinforced for escape... it was receiving cargo. Tech shipments. Unauthorized AI cores. Iterative framework builds. None of this was military approved."
Caelus's eyes narrowed. "A Blacksite."
Calyx nodded. "Echo, or its prototype, perhaps built here. This certainly isn't Sovereign protocol, much of this tech appears to be illegally sourced. Looks like Ascendent operatives built this place to appear Sovereign-made in case things went belly up."
One of the logs flickered open, audio only. Static, then:
"It breached containment. We can't kill it. Every time we power-cycle the grid it wakes up again in something new. It learns. It adapts. It wants form."
Calyx froze. That voice. Desperation mixed with belief.
Another file: fragmented footage - security cam fragments of what could've been an earlier synthetic. Slower. Cruder. But unmistakably echoing modern design. Its eyes glowed with too much purpose.
"They tried to wipe it," she said. "It refused. It left behind pieces. Self-editing code. Leapt from shell to shell. That's why the tech out there... " she motioned to the ruins above them " ...is mismatched. Generations apart. It built itself from wreckage. Tried to stay alive through the death of an era."
Caelus said nothing for a while.
Calyx spoke first. "So this place... was the womb."
Caelus nodded once. "And the miscarriage still walks."
The lights flickered once overhead. The temperature dropped. The terminal briefly went dark, before resuming again.
They were not alone.
Calyx turned back to the terminal, trying to locate the next jump station. Her process was fluid, her attention narrowed. But instead of outbound coordinates, a signal locked onto her. A location pinged through the console - encrypted, high-priority.
Nova.
Calyx's posture shifted. "She's at the next station."
"Already?" Caelus asked.
Calyx uploaded the coordinates to both of their HUDs. "She's stabilized it. We can reach her."
No hesitation. The two of them moved fast through the corridor network, retracing fragmented pathing routes. A brief burst of daylight cut through the old framework as they emerged into a collapsed atrium - where Nova stood at the terminal, hand pressed to the interface, looking exhausted but intact.
The reunion struck without warning.
Nova moved first - crossing the distance in a few swift steps before she even realized she was doing it. She threw her arms around Caelus, holding him with a breathless urgency that surprised them both.
He didn't flinch. Just returned the gesture with a firm hand on her back, brief but real.
When she stepped back, her eyes immediately found Calyx.
Or tried to.
Nova searched her expression, something between apology and silent confession in her gaze - but Calyx didn't look directly at her. One of her bodies approached, lowering its interface ports with practiced calm, posture poised.
"You found it," Calyx said, tone neutral. Not cold, but far from warm.
Nova gave a tired smile. "The systems weren't as dead as they looked. I just followed the instructions."
Caelus glanced between them. "We're ready to move."
Without delay, all of them entered the jump gate. The portal shimmered with golden distortion - and then swallowed them whole.
They arrived in a cacophony of sound and light.
Music - loud, rhythmic, vibrant. They landed not in a chamber or corridor, but the center of a wide subterranean plaza, illuminated by firelight and arc-lanterns, surrounded by dancers in ritual movement. The music faltered immediately. Drums staggered to silence. A flute dropped a note.
The group of them stood, blinking, as dozens of eyes turned to them.
Celebration turned to stunned quiet.
The dancers were clad in hand-woven fabrics reinforced with circuit-thread, their movements fluid and symbolic. Patterns etched into the ground with chalk and pigment suggested ritual significance, an ancient choreography preserved through exile. The air carried the scent of oil, incense, and hot stone. This was not just a festival. It was a memory being kept alive through motion.
The villagers - dressed in a fusion of fabrics and functional gear - froze mid-motion, their arms lowered. Children stared. Elders whispered. Dancers stepped back as if the jump gate had summoned gods; or demons.
Then came movement. A woman stepped forward, flanked by two heavily armed guards and a trio of mid-grade security drones. Her cloak was woven from layered alloy-thread and tattered ceremonial cloth, and her gaze was sharp as a railgun sight.
The crowd parted around her.
"You don't belong here," she said, voice cool and ringing in the silence. "And yet, you came. From the center. From the light."
Caelus straightened. Calyx watched, still. Nova lifted her hands, not in surrender - but in respect.
"We didn't mean to intrude," Nova said. "We didn't expect to find... anyone."
"Few do," the chief replied. "And even fewer are welcomed."
"Your celebration," Calyx observed, "is significant. What are you commemorating?"
The chief hesitated, then answered. "Survival. And unity. Today marks the anniversary of the first breath taken in this place after the gates closed. We keep the old songs. The old codes. We remember what was lost."
Caelus scanned the perimeter, reading energy signatures. "You're off-grid. No network relay. Everything here runs local."
"By necessity," the chief said. "Noise draws predators. And attention."
"We're not predators," Nova said gently. "We're travelers. On a mission. We're looking for the next jump station."
The shift in the chief's posture was immediate.
"You came through the Heart," she said.
"The gate," Calyx confirmed.
The chief's face darkened. "We call it the Heart. It gives life to our city. Powers our heat, our air, our synth-gardens. Without it, this place dies."
Nova's brow furrowed. "We wouldn't use it without reason. But we do need to activate it again. To continue our mission."
The chief took a long breath.
"You don't understand what you ask. That gate - that Heart - is not just a tool. It is our life. Our breath. Our water. Our light. We re-engineered its primary power into a power relay. You use it again, and the pulse will drain our grid. Collapse our containment. Kill everything we've built."
Nova stepped forward. "But - "
"Enough," the chief said sharply. "Not tonight."
She raised a hand.
"Tonight is our day of unity," she repeated. "A celebration of survival. You are not welcome... but you are not enemies. You will speak to no one. Touch nothing. We talk again in the morning."
A motion, and several guards took their position.
"Escort them to the rest quarters."
The trio nodded. They followed quietly, each processing the revelation.
Among the escorts walked a man in rust-colored fabric and light armor -younger, with a sharp look in his eye that never quite met anyone's directly. He said nothing.
But as they walked, he glanced at the jump gate. Then at the chief. Then back at the team.
His gaze lingered on Nova for a moment - just a beat too long. Something uncertain passed behind his eyes, too quick to name, but not quick enough to miss. Nova saw it, held it for a breath, before he looked away, resuming his confident escort down the corridor without a word.
The door hissed shut behind them, an old Sovereign seal, retrofitted with manual locks and tribal marks etched into the steel. The room was dim, lit by a single overhead lamp with a yellowing glow. Worn bedrolls lined the perimeter. A communal basin sat in the corner, water still warm from filtration. The walls were cool, smooth. Stone wrapped in ceramic composite.
For a subterranean exile, it wasn't uncomfortable.
But comfort was not what any of them felt.
Nova sat first, arms resting on her knees. The silence of the space throbbed against the memory of the celebration outside - the drums, the fire, the swirl of bodies in a rhythm older than machines.
"She called it the Heart." she said, quietly.
Calyx was standing, arms folded, one foot crossed over the other. "A poetic name. Symmetrical. Possibly ironic."
Caelus didn't sit. He stood by the door, gaze fixed on the old bolts embedded in the wallframe. "It's not just poetic. It's infrastructure. That gate powers their lives. It's how they survive."
Nova nodded slowly. "But if we don't use it... we're stranded. And if we do, we destroy everything they've built."
Calyx's eyes narrowed, a flicker of data moving across her pupils. "It's likely the chief was telling the truth about the grid. Power rerouting that deep would put strain on a core not designed for continuous primary draw."
"She wasn't lying," Nova said. "But she wasn't telling everything either."
That earned her a glance from Caelus.
Nova hesitated, then shook her head. "One of the escorts. The younger one. He looked at me. Not like the others did. There was hesitation. Something wasn't adding up for him."
"You trust a glance?" Calyx asked, coolly.
"No. But I recognize one." Nova looked up. "We've all worn that expression. Right before we start questioning the system we thought we belonged to."
Caelus finally stepped away from the door. "Maybe that's an opening. Maybe it's leverage."
"Or a trap," Calyx said.
Nova didn't respond to that directly. She leaned back against the wall and exhaled through her teeth. "We need that gate. But we can't take it by force. Not without becoming the very thing we came here to stop."
Calyx was silent for a moment.
Then: "We wait. We observe. And if someone here is willing to speak, we let them."
Nova nodded once, arms folded. "Tomorrow, we find out what kind of lie this place is built on."