Kaelen's head throbbed.
It wasn't the dull ache of dehydration or the sharp spike of a fever. It was the Static.
Every time a Projector forced a lie onto reality, the air vibrated. For the faithful, it felt like a warm embrace, a confirmation of the divine. For Kaelen, it felt like a fork scraping against the inside of his skull. The stronger the lie, the louder the hum. In a city built on a billion collective delusions, the noise was never-ending.
He moved through the steam tunnels of the Ribs, pressing a palm against his temple to steady his vision. The walls here were weeping—thick, oily condensation that smelled of rust and ancient, rotting rubber.
He checked the gauge on his wrist. Six hours of air left.
He didn't run. Running attracted the White-Bloods, the Church's hounds who could smell a racing pulse from three decks away. He walked with the heavy, defeated slump of a man who had accepted his place in the dark.
He reached into his coat, his fingers brushing the stolen velvet pouch. Inside, three shards of Marrow-Glass clicked together. The sound was wrong. It was too hollow, too brittle.
He pulled one out. The shard was a murky, bruised purple, shot through with black veins.
"Decayed," Kaelen hissed.
The Magister had been using "Dirty Dictum"—magic fueled by fear and pain rather than pure devotion. It tainted the Marrow, turning the Ether into something volatile and toxic. It was worthless on the legal market, and dangerous on the black one. He had risked execution for radioactive waste.
District 9 – The Impact Zone
Vesper stood in the center of the crater where the Magister had fallen.
The air here smelled of burnt sugar—the signature scent of a shattered Dictum. The crowd had long since vanished, leaving only the rats and the armored Enforcers securing the perimeter. The sodium lights overhead flickered, casting long, twitching shadows across the metal floor.
"Magister Lorn is in shock," a White-Blood officer muttered. His voice was muffled by the heavy ceramic helm of his armor. "He claims the gravity... refused him. He says the heretic walked through the weight as if it were wind."
"Gravity doesn't refuse," Vesper said.
She knelt by the twisted iron railing. It wasn't bent by will. It was bent by torque. She ran a gloved hand over the floor plating. The metal was pitted and smoking, the surface eaten away by a corrosive agent.
"Sulfuric acid," she noted. Her voice was a low, resonant alto that carried the weight of absolute certainty. "Crude. Effective."
"Witnesses say the attacker was a ghost,"
the officer continued, his voice tight with unease. "They say he wasn't connected to the Accord. No resonance. No soul."
Vesper went still.
She stood up, towering over the officer. She was six feet of kinetic potential wrapped in white ceramic armor, a hydraulic hammer strapped to her back like a cross. She didn't need the Dictum to be terrifying; she was a physical fact in a world of metaphors.
"Lock down the district," she ordered.
"On what charge, Paladin? Heresy? Theft?"
Vesper looked at the dark expanse of the slums, at the thousands of people living in the gaps between the machine's teeth. "Contamination."
She didn't explain. She didn't need to tell the grunt that men born without the receptor for faith—the Nulls—were supposed to be extinct. The Church claimed they had been purged fifty cycles ago to stop the "infection" of logic from spreading through the Consensus.
Clearly, the Church was a liar.
"If you find him," Vesper added, turning away, her cape snapping in the recycled draft. "Do not speak to him. Do not listen to him. Just break his legs and wait for me."
The Black Market – "The Cyst"
The Cyst was a tumorous growth on the inner wall of the third rib, hollowed out and filled with the desperate and the damned. It smelled of cheap incense, unwashed bodies, and the ozone of failing electronics.
Kaelen pushed through the crowd. The Static was deafening here. A thousand people praying for food, for warmth, for the pain to stop. Their collective delusion kept the lights flickering, but it made Kaelen nauseous. This was the cost of his immunity: he was the only sober man in a room full of screaming drunks.
He slammed the Marrow-Glass onto a counter made of scavenged engine parts.
Griz, a fence with an optical lens grafted into his left eye socket, didn't look up. He was busy counting prayer beads. "You're late, Kael. And you smell like a battery."
"Trade," Kaelen said. "Three shards. Violet grade."
Griz picked up a shard with tweezers. He held it up to the flickering light, his mechanical eye whirring as it zoomed in on the black veins. He sneered, dropping it back onto the counter with a disdainful clack.
"Trash," Griz said. "The inflation rate on miracles is up 200% this week. The High Priest cured a plague in the Upper Spine yesterday, now everyone thinks healing is cheap. This buys you two air filters. No food. No meds."
"Two filters doesn't get me through the week," Kaelen said, his hand tightening on the edge of the counter.
"Then stop breathing so much." Griz threw a box of filters onto the counter. "Or get me something real. I have a buyer looking for Old Tech. Not the magical junk. The metal stuff. The stuff that works without prayer. The stuff that remembers what it was before the God died."
Kaelen took the filters. "I'll keep an ear out."
He turned to leave. A shadow blocked his path.
A figure in deep crimson robes stood there. A Silent Observer. They had no mouths, only a single, painted eye on a porcelain mask that covered the entire face. They were the Church's secret police, the ones who listened to the thoughts people were too afraid to pray.
The Observer tilted its head at Kaelen.
Kaelen held his breath. If the Observer scanned him, it would feel nothing. A void where a soul should be. A hole in the world.
Don't look at it. Just move.
The Observer paused. The painted eye seemed to bore into Kaelen's skull, searching for a resonance that wasn't there. Then, slowly, with an agonizing deliberation, it stepped aside. Its robes brushed Kaelen's arm—a cold, silk-like texture that made his skin crawl.
Kaelen didn't exhale until he was three streets away, lost in the steam of the industrial vents.
The Safehouse
He reached his bolt-hole—a maintenance closet hidden behind a massive, grinding ventilation fan. He locked the heavy iron door, shutting out the noise of the market. The silence was instant bliss.
He sat at his workbench and ripped open the stolen velvet pouch, checking for any overlooked dust or smaller shards.
His fingers brushed a seam that felt wrong. It was too stiff, too intentional.
Kaelen grabbed a scalpel and sliced the lining. A card fell out.
It wasn't parchment or bone. It was a synthetic polymer. Black. Sleek. Cool to the touch. It was impossible to manufacture in the Ribs. It looked like it had been birthed from a machine that hadn't existed for a thousand years.
On the front, printed in silver: [ ACCESS LEVEL 4 ]
Kaelen stared. No runes. No prayers. No religious iconography. Just a series of silver lines that looked like a schematic of the spinal elevator.
He flipped the card. Printed on the back, in a font so precise it looked alien, were three words:
WAKE THE PILOT.
Kaelen looked up at the ceiling, toward the distant, beating heart of the world. The Church taught that the God sacrificed itself to house humanity. A divine corpse that provided air and light through its own decay.
"Pilot?" Kaelen whispered.
The word felt strange in his mouth. It wasn't a religious title. It sounded... functional. It sounded like a job description.
He ran his thumb over the black card. It didn't hum with Marrow. It didn't vibrate with the Static of the Consensus. It hummed with something colder. Something deadlier.
Electricity.
For the first time in his life, the Static in his head stopped.