The steam not only blinded, it froze.
The supercooled fog expanded instantly, dropping the corridor's temperature by sixty degrees in a heartbeat. The metal walls groaned as they contracted, shedding layers of frost like dead skin. Kaelen didn't run; he slid. He threw himself flat against the wet grating, using the momentum of his dive to skid under the layer of rising white vapor.
He was a shadow moving through a cloud of his own making.
CRASH.
Above him, the air displaced with the force of a cannon shot. Vesper's hammer slammed into the wall where his head had been a second ago. The impact ruptured the biological tissue beneath the metal. Black ichor sprayed into the fog, freezing into obsidian shards before it even hit the floor.
She wasn't seeing him. She was triangulating him by the sound of his boots on the grating.
Kaelen bit his tongue to kill a scream of pain as his shoulder slammed into a protruding pipe. He scrambled on hands and knees, his breath fogging thick inside his mask. He knew the layout of the Canker better than she did; he had spent years mapping the places where the God's mind had rotted. Twelve meters forward. Sharp left at the ruptured artery. Jump the acid.
"Cowardice calculates," Vesper's voice boomed from the white void. It was clinical, devoid of anger. "But it always subtracts. You are running out of numbers, rat."
Kaelen reached the corner. He grabbed a hanging pipe, swung his body around the turn, and released. He hit the ground running, his boots splashing through shallow puddles of condensate.
He checked his wrist. The dosimeter needle was buried in the red. His gums tasted like copper, and his fingernails looked gray—the capillaries dying from the inside out. The radiation kills you by unraveling your DNA while you walked.
He had four minutes to reach the perimeter airlock. It was a simple math problem. Distance over time. A cold equation where the remainder was his life.
The Aftermath
The fog began to dissipate, sucked away by the massive, ancient ventilation fans of the ship's respiratory system. Vesper stood amidst the wreckage of the console. The machine was a ruin of twisted metal, shattered glass, and thick layers of frost.
The acolyte, who had been cowering in the hallway, peeked around the corner. His robes were singed, his face pale behind his visor. "Did... did you get him, Paladin?"
Vesper walked to the destroyed terminal. She ignored the alarms still wailing in the distance. She reached out and touched the exposed wiring. It crumbled under her finger, frozen brittle by the nitrogen.
"Liquid nitrogen," she murmured.
She looked at the floor. She saw the scorch marks from the acid pool, the long scrapes from Kaelen's slide, and a discarded canister with a pressure valve hacked open. This wasn't the work of a Projector. There was no residue of the Dictum here. No smell of burnt sugar or the ozone of a forced miracle. Just the clean, chemical scent of thermodynamics.
"He didn't use a spell," Vesper said, wiping frost from her gauntlet. "He used a phase change."
She looked at the empty slot in the console. The key was gone. The "Wake" protocol had been initiated, but the physical drive was missing.
"Secure the perimeter," Vesper ordered, turning back to the hallway. "And seal this sector. Nothing comes in. Nothing goes out. I want a full scan of every soul in District 9."
"But the Relic?" the acolyte asked, pointing deeper into the facility where the true vault lay. "The Manual of Pre-Deity Physics? If he has the key—"
Vesper paused. She looked at the acolyte, her iron-gray eyes visible for a moment through the flicker of her HUD.
"It's safe for now," she said. "The rat didn't take the book. He took a key he doesn't know how to use. He's holding the ignition to a car he can't find."
She picked up the empty coolant canister Kaelen had dropped. She crushed it in her gauntleted hand until it was a puck of scrap metal.
"Let him run. He'll die of radiation sickness before he reaches the Ribs. And if he doesn't..."
She dropped the metal puck. It clanged heavily against the grating, a final, metallic period. She smiled, though the acolyte couldn't see it.
"..then I have a new hobby."
The Decompression
Kaelen collapsed as soon as he cleared the final airlock.
He fell onto the rusted catwalk of District 9, tearing the mask from his face. He rolled onto his side and retched. Nothing came up but bile and a thin string of dark blood. The air here was filthy—thick with smog, the smell of unwashed bodies, and the ozone of the Ribs—but it wasn't radioactive. It felt like heaven.
He lay there for a long time, staring up at the distant, flickering lights of the spinal elevator. His body felt light, hollowed out. The "Null" physiology resisted the Dictum, but it couldn't stop gamma rays. He needed iodine. He needed a chelating agent. He needed sleep.
But first, he needed to know what he was holding.
He sat up, his hands shaking so violently he had to press them against the metal deck to steady them. He reached into his coat pocket. The cylinder was cold against his palm.
He held it up to the dim light of a flickering streetlamp. It was intricate. The etching on the surface shifted as he turned it, catching the light in ways that seemed to defy the angle of the bulb. It was a data drive. A 12-pin array. Old Tech.
He pressed it against his wrist-terminal experimentally. Nothing. The ports were incompatible by design—a lock that required a specific reader.
Kaelen cursed softly.
He had the ignition key, but he didn't know how to drive the car. He had the truth, but no way to speak it.
He pulled out the black card. The map flashed in his mind. The red X in the Crown.
Wake the Pilot.
To do that, he needed to plug this cylinder into something. But without the schematics, without the operating codes, this piece of metal was just a very expensive paperweight.
He closed his eyes, and the pieces clicked together. The manual Vesper had been guarding. The Manual of Pre-Deity Physics. It wasn't a religious relic. It was a user guide.
Vesper wasn't there to protect a god. She was there to protect the instruction manual for the machine they were all living inside.
He stood up, using the railing for support. His legs felt like lead, his vision swimming with gray spots. Logic dictated that trying to break back into a Church stronghold while dying of radiation was suicide.
"Good thing I don't believe in fate," Kaelen whispered to the dark.