Mara wakes to the rhythm of a machine pretending to be her heart.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
Too fast for sleep, too slow for panic. The rate they like when they're watching you.
She lies still and catalogues damage.
Left shoulder: deep, blunt ache.
Ribs: bruised, tender along three ribs that must have met a wall or a floor at speed.
Throat: raw, as if she's been shouting or strangled.
Mouth: metallic, sedative film on her tongue.
Right leg: nothing.
Nothing is normal. The real leg burned in a stairwell years ago. The replacement only hurts when she asks it to.
She opens her eyes.
Null-white ceiling, hairline cracks running like thin rivers where the building has been holding its breath too long. A sedative lamp above her, petals half-closed; they didn't knock her fully out. They want answers, not bliss.
She turns her head.
Restraint straps lie loose on her wrists, buckles open, as if a decision was made and then unmade. A small kindness. Or an experiment.
The med-bay is empty except for one chair in the corner.
Gabriel sits in it, coat off, shirt sleeves rolled to his forearms. He looks like he hasn't slept in a day, which in Null-time could mean three.
The tablet in his hands is dark. He is here just to be here.
"Morning," he says.
"How many," Mara asks.
He doesn't ask "how many what." He just exhales once, slow.
"Nine dead so far," he says. "Two more in surgery. Fifteen hurt."
"Names," she says.
He reads them. Clerks. A tech from Routing. A runner from Records. One internal auditor whose job had been to be annoying, not brave. She recognizes every name. Coffee-line neighbours. People who'd once passed her tools or jokes or extra sugar packets.
Harsim is third on the list.
Her chest tightens.
"I liked him," she says, and hates how small the words sound.
"I know," Gabriel says.
Mara stares at the ceiling again.
"I don't remember it," she says.
There is a small pause.
"That's not going to help in the hearings," he says, not unkindly.
"I didn't say it should," she says. "I said I don't remember."
What she remembers is pressure. White behind her eyes, not the good empty, the one full of code. Her own thoughts suddenly running in a foreign accent. Words jammed into her synapses that taste like ash and metal.
Cleanse.
Contain.
Correct.
Her father's three commandments, written into architecture and limb.
"The cameras," she says. "Show me."
"They're embargoed," Gabriel says. "For now, I have to be your version of them."
She closes her eyes, focusing on the beep-beep, on the feeling of the sheet against her fingers.
"Your version is biased," she says.
"Every version is," he says. "That's why we log them."
"Tell me anyway," she says.
He shifts, the chair creaking softly.
"You bypassed three separate containment locks," he says. "You opened a weapons locker in Routing you officially don't know exists. You walked through the north access corridor, and for fifteen seconds, every camera in that corridor showed static."
"And then?" she asks.
"Then the static cleared," he says. "You were standing with a knife in your hand and Harsim on the floor."
For a moment she can smell the corridor: coffee, dust, old plastic. Harsim's laugh from the week before, when she'd sworn at a vending machine.
Mara's fingers curl on the sheet.
"I wouldn't kill him," she says. She means it. She also hears the thinness in her own voice.
"You killed eight others after," Gabriel says quietly. "With guns, blades, your hands. You moved… wrong. Like someone wearing you who didn't quite understand gravity."
Her leg tingles. The phantom limb, not the metal one. The old fire runs up it like a memory.
"What about the cage," she says.
He doesn't pretend not to know.
"The chamber under Routing," he says. "Where you kept the daemon your father wrote. The building didn't have a label for that room until last night."
"And now?" she asks.
"Now it calls it LEGACY CONTAINMENT," Gabriel says. "Status: compromised."
Of course it does.
She forces herself to breathe evenly.
"Is it loose?" she asks.
"We don't know," he says. "Whatever rode your leg used the same root channel you built to watch it. The architecture shows a spike and a bleed, not a clean escape."
"So we're both leaking," she says.
He almost smiles at that, but doesn't quite make it.
"Why am I not restrained?" she asks. "If I'm a risk."
"If that thing decides to walk you around again, leather isn't going to stop it," he says. "And you woke up and didn't try to run. That counts for something."
He stands and walks to the smart-glass panel the med-bay pretends is a window. Outside: a generic skyline, chosen for low anxiety. The real Null tower is absent.
"Null-01 is under quarantine," he says. "External has flagged it as 'under review'. Great End channels are narrowed to one-way. Your little outburst came at a very inconvenient time."
"For who," she asks.
"For everyone still trying to pretend the project is about comfort," he says.
She watches his reflection in the glass.
"When I was a kid," she says, "I thought being smart meant being safe."
He turns slightly, listening.
"My father never said I was clever like a person," she goes on. "He said my brain was an 'asset'. He tuned it. He fed it. He gave it puzzles like vitamins. I thought that was love."
"Later you realised it was calibration," Gabriel says.
"Yes," she says.
She remembers chalk dust and burnt coffee and his handwriting on the walls. She remembers the day he showed her the first draft of the cleansing daemon, proud as if he'd built a child.
"We saw the file," she says. "In the ruin. Noor, Samira, Echo. 'Artificial fetus'. Codename 'Mara'. Mass-produced for traitor detection in Null-002. Angelus's pet project."
There. It's out loud now.
Gabriel's face doesn't change much. The corner of his mouth tightens.
"I was afraid you'd find that line," he says.
"I've been living in that line my whole life," she says. "Now I just have the footnote."
She flexes her right toes. The prosthetic responds with perfect obedience, servos humming so quietly the monitor barely notices. Under the skin of the leg, the same root channel she once used to listen to the architecture hums back, patient and waiting.
"He made me smart to serve his code," she says. "I used that smartness to cage his code and sell it to Null as a safety feature. And now the cage bit back and I killed people I liked."
"You also stopped his original daemon in the second Null," Gabriel says. "You burned your leg for that."
"And then kept the ashes and wired them into the main project," she says bitterly. "I'm a very consistent failure."
He doesn't contradict her. That hurts more than if he had.
"Angelus assigned Mikheil to Null-002," she says. "They'll be delighted to know his work is still running."
"There's nothing 'delight' about Angelus," Gabriel says. "But yes. Somewhere up the ladder, someone is calling this an interesting anomaly instead of a reason to stop."
The monitor beeps on, indifferent.
Mara stares at the ceiling until the cracks blur into one pale web.
"You said once that you wanted doors, not cages," she says. "You wanted Noor's case to be a door."
"I remember," Gabriel says.
"Feels like I'm the cage," she says. "His path is walking through what my father built."
He doesn't answer.
In the silence, she feels it.
A pulse, deep under the floor. Not the reconciliation heart's regular drum. A smaller, sharper thud. Like a trapped animal hitting the bars once, hard.
Her leg twitches.
The monitor hiccups.
Beep-beep-beep—
"Did you feel that?" she asks.
Gabriel glances back at the glass.
"Architecture spike," he says. "Probably another quarantine protocol."
Mara shuts her eyes.
She can see the cage in her mind: metal ribs, cables running down into ancient concrete, symbols Tesse scratched into the door when she thought no one was looking. Inside, line after line of her father's code, knotted into a daemon too stubborn to die.
Saint Elmo, she'd named it once. Patron of sailors and those who walked too close to fire.
"I'm not sure how much longer I can hold it," Mara murmurs.
"Hold what?" Gabriel asks.
"Everything," she says.
He doesn't move to comfort her. Instead, he says, "Then we'd better make sure we're using the time it has left for something that's actually ours."
The next pulse rolls through the floor, subtle as a skipped heartbeat.
Far away from the med-bay, deep in the spine of Null-01, something old and bright and furious stirs in a cage built by a man who thought he could clean a city by killing it more neatly.
Noor – the split
We are three points on a line that doesn't know it's about to break.
Gabriel called it a "recalibration run." Just a quick trip back to Null-01 to report, re-anchor, then jump out again into the Great End. Simple on paper.
Nothing is simple when the system is chewing on itself.
Echo bounces on their heels beside me in the transit bay, jangling nerves into motion. Samira stands very still on my other side, the stillness she uses when she's two seconds from bolting or punching someone.
I watch the device.
Pilot-03's relic is set into the floor now, in a ring of caution tape and temporary ritual. It looks wrong here, in a clean bay carved from Great End architecture. It's older than everything around it, all sharp edges and spectral metal, like an artifact dragged in from a darker story.
The rails arc up and over the platform in a half-circle, still scorched from the first time we used it. Someone—Riya, probably—has taped a handwritten note to the side:
DO NOT STEP IN WHILE THINKING ABOUT MULTIPLE DESTINATIONS
– THIS MEANS YOU, HALE
Echo had pretended to be offended. They still smile when they see it.
Samira checks the coordinates on the panel for the fifth time.
"Null-01 anchor only," she says. "No branch access. No translation layer. In and out."
"In, murder is happening, out," Echo mutters. "Just a little light genocide check-in."
"Not helpful," Samira says.
I look at the coordinates. Null-01's signature glows amber. Around it, other nodes hover, gently pulsing: Null-002, Null-03a, Null-06b. Systems like pearls strung on the thick, invisible rope that is the Great End.
From here, they all look small.
The first time I stepped into this device, I thought I was making a choice. Now it feels like being pulled along an existing sentence.
"Ready?" I ask.
Echo nods. Samira hesitates, then nods too.
"I'm not afraid," she says.
"That sounds like a lie," I say.
"I didn't say I was honest," she says.
We step onto the platform together.
Pilot-03's tech wakes with a shudder. The rails hum, metal remembering how to be a throat. Light crawls along the edges of the circle, mapping out a diagram we still only half understand.
"Channel open," the Great End attendant calls from behind the glass. "Null-01 link confirmed. You're clear."
The air inside the ring thickens. My teeth buzz. Echo grabs my hand without asking; Samira's shoulder brushes mine.
There is always a moment, just before the jump, when the world seems to inhale. Like a city waiting at a red light.
I should be thinking about coordinates. I'm thinking about people.
Mara in some steel room, staring at a ceiling. Riya with ink on her fingers. Clerk Harsim's name on a casualty list I haven't seen yet. The girl in the paused street, orange scarf bright as a wound.
I want to go home.
The device doesn't care what I want, but it listens.
Light climbs higher, threads crossing overhead, weaving something like a net. The hum inside my bones rises. Pilot-03's last scratch in the metal echoes in my head, the sentence we found in their box:
NO ONE DESERVES TO BE TURNED INTO CONTENT.
"Hold on," I say, and I'm not sure who I'm talking to.
The world flips.
It's not movement, not really. It's more like being rephrased. The bay dissolves into a smear of colour and thin white noise. For a moment I am sound again, like when the daemon touched me in the reconciliation chamber.
Then something goes wrong.
There is a second hum under the first. Darker. Off-key. Coming not from the device, but from somewhere far along the line we're trying to reach.
Null-01.
The net of light overhead shivers.
"Do you hear that?" Echo says, voice warped by the transit fall.
"Yes," Samira says. Her hand tightens on my arm. "That's an internal lockdown tone."
"We should abort," I say.
The device disagrees.
A warning flashes somewhere out of sight. I feel it rather than see it.
CONNECTION UNSTABLE
TARGET SYSTEM: QUARANTINE – PATTERN BREACH
"Pull them back!" someone shouts from very far away.
The platform under our feet splits.
Not physically. Not yet. Something in the channel fractures. Instead of one smooth curve into Null-01, I feel three sudden branches yaw open, like doors being kicked in different directions.
One smells like cut concrete and river fog.
One tastes like static and old blood.
One feels like a room full of people I've never met saying my name at once.
"Hold on!" Echo yells.
The light overhead tears.
For a heartbeat, I see it.
Not with my eyes. With whatever terrible sense the Great End has been growing in me.
Three lines of possibility, all bright, all demanding.
In one, I am in the Null-01 we know, pulled straight into a corridor washed with emergency lights, sirens howling. Mara's scream tangled with daemon-song.
In another, I am somewhere else entirely—an empty city with familiar tram lines, towers full of dead screens, the sky too low. The girl's scarf a slash of orange at the edge of my vision.
In the third, I fall into a Null that never got built. The Great End's scaffolding stands where our tower should be, bare metal ribs around a dark heart. People walk under it without seeing it. I am a ghost there, more echo than man.
The device is supposed to choose one reality and deliver us as a unit.
Instead, something in the Great End takes the opportunity.
You asked for doors, I think I hear Gabriel say in some old room. You didn't say they all had to lead to the same place.
The line snaps.
The pressure around us spikes so fast it knocks the air out of my lungs. My hand rips out of Echo's. Samira's grip tears away.
For a split second our eyes meet, three faces held in a bolt of white.
Echo's mouth forms my name. Samira's eyes are furious and terrified in equal measure.
Then we're gone.
Not together.
The world shreds.
For a moment I am nowhere, just a bundle of threads someone dropped. I feel the Great End's structure rush past me, all those systems, all those Nulls, their signatures like fingerprints.
I reach for Null-01. For home, in the broken way I use that word.
Something colder catches me by the throat.
A voice I half-recognise and half-imagine whispers along the channel, amused.
Noise, it says. You're very good at making it.
The branch that smells like river fog and concrete slams shut around me.
I fall.
Not physically. Just in the sense of being pinned to one sentence.
Air smacks into my lungs again.
I stumble forward onto cracked pavement.
Cold.
My knees hit asphalt. My palms scrape on grit.
When my vision clears, I am kneeling in the middle of an intersection under a sky the colour of dirty glass.
Traffic lights hang above me, blinking dutifully from red to green to yellow for nobody. Tram wires slice the air in neat lines. Windows stare down at me from silent buildings.
I know this corner.
I've never stood here like this.
My chest aches in a way that has nothing to do with transit.
"Okay," I say, voice rough. "Fine."
I look around.
No Echo. No Samira. No device humming behind me. Just the city that waits, wearing the exact same pause as the last time.
Wind lifts a scrap of paper down the street. Far off, a fridge hums through a wall I can't see.
I stand up slowly.
"You win," I tell whoever thinks this is funny. The Great End. The daemon. The girl. Myself.
The traffic light clicks over my head, a tiny, precise sound in the quiet.
Green.
Somewhere behind my ribs, the 4% the building refused to erase stirs.
I take a step toward the bakery wall where she sat last time.
If I'm going to be split from everything I know, I might as well walk toward the one thing that told me the truth.
Act Thirty-Fourth's End - "wihtint the daemon, gate to angel death."