Inmates of the Flesh by Alina Udrea - HTML preview

CHAPTER 4- Inmates of the flesh

The whispers drew her. At first, they came like static in her implant.

But the closer she got toward the spires, the clearer the voices became. They were people in the flesh. Not illusions.

Other inmates.

Eryn pressed herself against the jagged edge of a metal pillar,

looking down into a hollow where the earth had split open. Fires burned low and gathered around them, men and women with skin

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marked by alien glyphs- all prisoners of the Veil, each a shard stitched into human form.

“Inmate”, one of them rasped from the shadows, “Fresh from the drop”.

Page | 12 “Shard”- she said flatly.

The word carried weight. Shards were unstable. Some feared them.

Some pitied them. Dozens of eyes fixed on her.

The whisper died. The hollow listened.

A woman stepped into the fire-light. Her hair was short, her eyes the color of metal rubbed thin. Glyphs glowed faint under the skin of her throat—burn-marks, not ink.

“Names later,” she said. “Hands where I can see them.”

Eryn raised them. The camp closed in: hard faces, hollowed cheeks,

wrists banded with scavenged tech. Someone behind her lifted the back of her collar, found the port at the base of her skull, and hissed.

“Union socket,” a man said. “Exile-grade.”

Another voice, dry: “Exile-grade don’t hum like that.”

Eryn felt the hum even now, a moth caught under glass. Her

implant pulsed once—irritated—and went quiet, as if choosing to play dead.

“Shard,” she repeated, keeping her voice level. “Unstable.”

Murmurs rippled around the fires. The word carried weight. A

boy with a crescent cut into his cheek made a warding sign over his heart; a woman with a jaw tattoo watched Eryn with a pity that was worse than suspicion.

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The woman studied Eryn a heartbeat longer, then jerked her chin.

“I’m Sera. If you’re a plant, the Veil will take you before we do. If you’re not, you just walked into a storm with no roof. Either way, you’ll earn

Page | 13 your heat.”

“I didn’t come for heat,” Eryn said.

Sera’s mouth twitched in something not quite a smile. “No one

does.”

It was easy to forget the world was wound tight around them

until the monoliths reminded you. They hummed now, the way a buried heart would hum if you could lay your ear on the ribs of the earth. The spires threw long, black knives across the hollow.

“Pulse window at dawn,” someone called from the far side of the

pit—tall, narrow, and wearing a cloak stitched from the skins of old parachutes. “Twenty-one hours. Maybe less.”

Sera glanced up. “Less,” she said, as if tasting the air. “We’ve got a

run to prep.”

“To where?” Eryn asked. “You can ride the Pulse?”

“We can scrape sparks off it,” Sera said. “Sometimes enough to pry into a Node and live.”

“Live” sounded negotiable.

“First,” Sera said, “you prove your hands can do more than shake.”

She led Eryn to the lip of the hollow where a crate stood. It was an

old Union courier module—bristling with dead locks, its surface studded with sigils that had meant authority once. The edges had been burned and re-burned. Someone had bled on it, too; the stains looked old.

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“Thing’s a problem,” Sera said. “It’s got teeth nobody here wants

to test with their hands. But the Forgotten drop rumors like crumbs. They say there’s a key in it. Something to make the Nexus less… final.”

Page | 14 Eryn knelt. Her palm hovered a breath above the crate. The metal

hummed back at her, faint and wrong. The locks were layered— physical, magnetic, then something else: an almost-music woven through the seams.

Her implant stirred, offended and alert. It coughed up a line of

cool text against her thoughts: calibration drift rising.. voltage unstable. do not—

“I need quiet,” she said.

Silence fell, sudden and deep. Even the fires seemed to lean away

from her, as if flame, too, could watch.

She closed her eyes and let the shard come.

Not forcing it—inviting it. A different breath. A different spine.

A cell of damp stone. Her fingers thinner, skin softer, cracked at

the nail-beds. A lock not so much made as grown from iron and spire. She tasted mold. Heard the slow drip, drip of time. And the voice of a man she had hated and chosen not to burn, his words a rasp through the bars: Mercy, not fire. Start there.

Eryn opened her eyes. Her hands moved.

Pressure in, pressure out. The first latch whispered loose. The

second bared teeth and then opened. On the third—hidden under the skin of the crate—she felt the tripline twitch when her nail brushed it. She exhaled, turned her wrist to bleed charge into the metal rather than trigger it. The hum faltered.

She looked up once at Sera. “When it opens,” Eryn said, “step back.”

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Sera didn’t budge. “You step back.”

Eryn smiled without humor and slid the final latch.

Page | 15 The crate sighed like a chest unclenching. The lid broke its seal.

Cold light washed her hands.

Inside lay a fist-sized crystal-like glass with veins inside it: thin

black threads like hair in frost. It pulsed almost imperceptibly in time with the monoliths, as if the stone could hear the same far heartbeat they did.

“Anchor,” someone breathed. The word moved around the circle

on the mouths of people who had only heard stories. “Mnemonic Anchor.”

Eryn’s implant flared so bright she tasted copper. anchor detected.

integration probability: +13%. instability risk: +21%. caution.

Sera reached to touch, then didn’t. She looked at Eryn. “Can you

carry it?”

It wasn’t a question about muscle.

Eryn could see her reflection in every plane of the crystal—dozens of

Eryns, each shifted a hair out of time. No constellation-face now. No Tribunal ring. Just her, multiplied, frayed at the edges.

“I can try,” she said.

Sera ignored him. She slid a rag under the Anchor, cradled it as if

lifting an egg, and set it gently into a wire cradle made of braided salvage. Then she nodded at Eryn’s collar.

“You’re wired,” Sera said. “That makes you dangerous and useful. I

don’t trust either one. So you’ll sleep here, in sight of everyone, and in the morning, you’ll ride the Pulse with me. You open what needs to

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open. We get inside a Node. We steal a map or a rind of code that points to the Nexus in more than whispers.”

Eryn didn’t answer right away. The implant was a low rumble in

Page | 16 her bones now, a bulldozer idling. And under it, a whisper—neither

mechanical nor wholly human—licked the back of her mind.

Not the Warden. Not quite.

Remember the whole crime, it breathed. Or you will make it again

with better tools.

Eryn shut her eyes until the crystal-multiples of her face went

away. “I ride,” she said softly.

Sera’s nod was small. “Good. If you’re bait, we’ll find out

together.”

The camp exhaled some of its attention and, like any living thing,

turned toward its daily survival. Fires were fed. Water was measured. Someone with steady hands stitched someone else’s wound. Under it all, the spires sang.

Dawn, Eryn thought, and tried to match the rhythm of her lungs to

the monoliths’ pulse. Dawn and a storm with no roof.

When sleep took her, it took her fast and mean. The dream came

with it—always the same at first: the Tribunal ring, the star-eye, the Warden’s voice like smooth stone. And then it changed.

This time, she was not at the center. This time she sat with the Overseers, her hands folded the way a judge’s are folded when a verdict has already been decided.

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