The God had cancer.
Kaelen stood at the invisible border of Sector 4, his boots resting on a seam where the orderly, rusted plating of the Ribs gave way to something obscene. He adjusted the heavy lead straps of the apron he'd stripped from a dead radiologist three decks up. The apron was cold, smelling of ancient antiseptic and the stale sweat of a man who had died in a panic.
Kaelen tightened the buckles until the lead plates bit into his shoulders, a necessary penance for the path ahead.
To the Church, Sector 4 was a site of Divine Mystery—a "Holy Zone" where the deity's will was too complex for mortal minds to parse. They claimed the flickering lights and the warping of the walls were signs of a transubstantiation in progress.
To Kaelen, it was a tumor. A massive, weeping failure of structural integrity.
The air here was a thick, yellow-green fog that tasted of wet pennies and hot vinegar. It didn't just sit in the lungs; it crawled along the lining of the throat, seeking a way to settle. Kaelen checked the seals on his respirator. The three green lights on his collar flickered, casting a sickly luminescence against the glass of his mask. He tapped the dosimeter taped to his wrist. The needle trembled in the yellow, clicking softly like a frantic insect chewing on a tin can.
Tick. Tick-tick. Tick-tick-tick.
"Resonance inverted," he noted. The words were a dry rasp, muffled by the filter.
In the Ribs, the "Static"—the ambient hum of the Consensus—was a constant, drilling screech in Kaelen's frontal lobe. But here, as he stepped across the seam, the Static began to fray. The tissue of the God was too sick to listen to the prayers of the faithful.
Here, reality was losing its grip. If a Projector walked into this fog believing the air was clean, their lungs would liquefy before they realized their prayer had failed to reach the world's ears.
It was the only place in the Ark where Kaelen felt a semblance of peace. Here, the lies were dying.
He stepped into the fog. The floor beneath him was no longer metal. It was a chaotic, bubbling mass of black iron and calcified protein. Massive boils of metal pushed through the deck-plating like cysts, leaking a neon-green fluid that hissed and spat when it touched the recycled oxygen of the vents. He moved with a deliberate, slow-motion grace, his eyes scanning for the "Hum" of the ship.
It was distorted. Instead of the steady, cardiac thrum of the upper decks, the ship's heartbeat was a stuttering, broken sound—a mechanical arrhythmia that vibrated through the soles of his boots.
Thump-hiss... thump... hiss-hiss.
The Perimeter
Vesper did not wear a lead apron. She wore faith, and she wore six hundred pounds of white ceramic-composite plating.
She stood at the primary airlock of Sector 4, her hydraulic hammer resting on the grating. The weapon was a block of solid tungsten, etched with scriptures she no longer bothered to read, its handle wrapped in the cured hide of a deep-deck scavenger.
"Readings are lethal, Paladin," a junior acolyte stammered behind her. He held a sensor-wand that chattered in a high-pitched, frantic panic, its blue light reflecting off Vesper's blank white visor. "The membrane is calcified. We need a Choir. We need the Litany of Permeability to sing it open. If we force it, the Dissonance—"
Vesper turned her head. The movement was slow, heavy, and utterly devoid of hesitation. "The relic is inside," she said. Her voice was a low-frequency vibration, amplified by the vox-caster in her gorget. It didn't sound like a woman speaking; it sounded like the ship itself grumbling. "The Church demands we plug the leak. We do not wait for a Choir to find the right key while the world bleeds out."
"But the physics—"
Vesper ignored him. She unslung the hammer. She didn't pray. She didn't ask the world for permission to exist. She planted her feet, the servos in her greaves whining as they locked her into the metal grating, creating a tripod of undeniable mass.
She swung.
CRACK.
The impact sounded like a thunderclap in a sealed vault. Chips of bone-matter and shards of rusted iron flew like shrapnel. One jagged piece sliced a red line across the acolyte's cheek. He flinched, dropping his sensor-wand, covering his face in a useless gesture of self-preservation.
Vesper didn't stop. She swung again. And again. A rhythmic, brutal cadence of kinetic energy applied to a square foot of calcified protein. The wall shattered under the weight of a truth she carried in her shoulders.
She stepped through the ragged hole, her boots crunching on the debris. A mutated tendril of flesh, thick as a man's thigh and laced with copper wiring, lashed out from the ceiling. It sought the heat of her armor. Vesper caught it in her gauntleted hand and squeezed. She felt the wet pop of biological tissue and the sharp snap of fiber-optics. Black ichor sprayed across her chestplate.
"Stay close," she ordered, wiping the sludge from her glove onto the acolyte's robe as she passed. "If you start hearing voices that aren't mine, shoot yourself. It's faster than what the radiation does to the brain."
The Inner Canker
Kaelen moved through a hallway that shouldn't have existed.
The floor was metal grating, but the walls were weeping biological tissue that pulsed with a slow, rhythmic throb. Pipes—some mechanical, some clearly arteries—wove through the ceiling like tangled vines. The air was getting colder, the yellow fog thinning into a fine, crystalline mist that sparkled in the light of his shoulder-lamp.
He stopped at a pool of neon liquid. Above it, a rock the size of a carriage floated in mid-air, rotating at a constant fifteen degrees per second.
A localized Dictum glitch. The laws of gravity had forgotten to apply to that specific mass because the people who had lived here fifty years ago had died in the middle of a prayer for weightlessness. Their belief had outlived their bodies, echoing in the metal.
Kaelen picked up a rusted bolt and tossed it at the pool. Hiss. The metal frothed, bubbled, and vanished in three seconds. Strong acid. pH below 2. The floating rock drifted to the left, then suddenly slammed into the acid with a deafening splash, sending a spray of death into the air. Then, slowly, it began to float again.
A loop. The reality here was stuttering like a broken record. A believer would see a miracle. Kaelen saw a math problem.
Up. Spin. Drop. Interval: 4.2 seconds.
He waited. He watched the rock rise. He watched it spin. He felt the needle of the dosimeter on his wrist clicking faster now.
Tick-tick-tick-tick.
The radiation was cooking his cells, a silent, invisible fire he could feel in the marrow of his shins and the roots of his teeth. He couldn't wait for a better window.
The rock slammed down. Splash.
"Now."
He sprinted. He used friction and leg strength. He leaped over the acid pool just as the rock began its ascent. He landed on the other side, his boots skidding on the slick, weeping composite of the floor. Behind him, the rock crashed down again, missing his heels by a breath.
He rounded the corner and stopped.
Embedded in the wall of flesh was a pristine, chrome sphere. It looked alien compared to the bolted, bleeding infrastructure of the Ribs. No rust. No decay. Just sterile permanence. And a console.
Kaelen approached it. The air here was freezing, the "Static" in his head completely gone. It was a silence so profound it felt like pressure against his eardrums.
He pulled the black card from his pocket. His fingers were shaking, the skin of his fingertips already beginning to peel from the radiation. He slid the card into the slot.
The screen flickered to life.
[ ACCESS LEVEL 4 RECOGNIZED ]
Text scrolled across the glass—fragmented, corrupted lines of code in a sharp, angular font that looked more like schematics than language. A wireframe map appeared. It showed the entire world—the Ribs, the Spine, the Skull.
A dotted red line traced a path from where Kaelen stood, up the spinal elevator, ending at a flashing red X somewhere deep in the brain of the Crown City.
[ PRINTING KEY... ]
A slot at the base of the console opened. A small, heavy metal cylinder rolled out. It was smooth, cold, and etched with microscopic circuit patterns that caught the light like fish scales. Kaelen grabbed it. The metal was so cold it felt like it was burning his palm.
Suddenly, the lights in the room turned a violent crimson. A siren began to scream—a mechanical, digital wail that had nothing to do with the howling of souls.
[ BREACH DETECTED. PURGE IMMINENT ]
Kaelen pocketed the cylinder and the card. He spun around, his hand going to the sulfuric acid at his belt.
From the hallway he had just come from, he heard a sound that made his blood freeze.
CRUNCH. CRUNCH.
Heavy boots destroying debris. The sound of a hunter who didn't need to hide.
"You have nowhere to run, rat," a woman's voice echoed down the steel corridor. It was calm, bored, and absolutely lethal.
Kaelen's stomach dropped. He knew that voice from the market reports. They called her The Anvil. The woman who didn't arrest heretics; she simply removed them from the census.
He looked at the console, humming with heat as it tried to process the wake command he'd initiated. The circuitry was glowing orange, the smell of ozone filling the small chamber.
"Thermodynamics," Kaelen whispered to the empty room.
He pulled a pressurized canister of thermal regulator fluid from his belt—scavenged from a broken refrigerator unit in the slums. He jammed the nozzle into the console's exposed wiring array and twisted the valve open.
Liquid nitrogen hissed into the superheated circuitry.
CRACK.
The console broke and exploded with steam—a massive, blinding cloud of expanding white fog that filled the corridor in a heartbeat.
Kaelen pulled his respirator tight, dove into the cloud, and slid past the silhouette of the giant woman who was already raising her hammer to crush the space where his head had been.
He didn't look back. He ran, the cylinder heavy and cold in his pocket, as the siren wailed into the dark.