Inmates of the Flesh by Alina Udrea - HTML preview

CHAPTER 5 — Riding the Pulse

 

Page | 17 You wanted rescue and we gave you routine. You wanted absolution

and we gave you mirror. You asked for freedom and we gave you time.

When Eryn’s eyes opened, the world had turned the color of a

bruise. Dawn had not come yet, but the Veil had decided it might. The sky shimmered.

“Up,” Sera said gruffly. “We’ve got a window.”

People were already moving: harnesses tightened, clasps checked,

glyph-rings warmed against skin. Eryn watched as two men with matching scars along their scalps strapped the Anchor into a cradle at the center of a rig that looked like a rib cage made from antennae. It would sit between Sera’s shoulders, close enough to burn if it misbehaved.

“That goes on me,” Sera said, catching Eryn’s look. “You’ve got an implant arguing with God. The Anchor will only make it jealous.”

“You think it’s God?” Eryn said.

Sera almost smiled. “It doesn’t matter what I think it is. It matters

what it thinks I am.”

The rig settled onto Sera’s back with a weight that changed how she

breathed. The crystal’s pulse fell in with the monoliths as if it had meant to all along.

Eryn touched the base of her skull. The port was hot.

The implant read: recalibration sweep in t—00:46:19. node access probability: 31%. sentinel response: probable. advisement: remain small.

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“When did we ever get to be small?” Sera said, as if she could read Eryn’s mind.

They climbed the nearest monolith by way of a staircase chiseled

Page | 18 from its own side. The stone—or metal; or both—refused to show

welds. It rose and rose, a knifed line against a false dawn, until the wind burned cold and thin. At the top, a platform with no rails stared down into the desert like an unblinking eye.

From here, Eryn could see everything the Veil allowed: the seam

of the horizon; the skeletons of cities half-swallowed by sand; the burned arc of a drop-ship that hadn’t made it to ground whole; the faint glow of other spires, miles away, like campfires of gods.

“We ride the edge,” Sera said. “When the sweep comes, it scrubs— reality, memory, code. We hook our gear into that scrub and let it drag us sideways.”

Sideways.

Eryn’s mouth went dry. The words woke another shard: the

scholar, thin and blinking in lamplight, a paper cut bleeding silently into ink. He’d written “sideways” in a margin and circled it, twice. His supervisor had told him to burn the page. He had not burned it.

“Clips now,” Sera said. “Sing if you know the song.”

Eryn closed her eyes and added a note she didn’t know she knew.

The hairs on her arms lifted. The monolith shuddered, then softened, then shuddered again.

The world blinked.

Color inverted. Heat became pattern; cold became taste. Eryn’s

stomach tried to climb through her ribs and out of her mouth. The Veil scrub passed through them like a clean knife.

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“Now,” Sera said.

They stepped.

Page | 19 It was like stepping into a river crosswise.

The first thing Eryn lost was her weight. The second was her name.

The third was a memory she could not quite reach, and that hurt worse than any falling ever had. She kept her hands on the line they had bolted into the monolith’s flank, and though the line didn’t look like rope anymore and her hands didn’t look like hands, the act of holding was the only promise she had.

Then there was a floor. Not a floor. A plane. It ran like glass under

them, and beyond it was a space made of distances that did not add up.

“Don’t look outward,” Sera said, voice pinched, breathed fast. “Look where your feet will be.”

Eryn looked. Her feet would be on the next bright seam, then

the next, and if she kept her rhythm, the seams would keep being there. The camp was a ragged line of bodies and gear clipped into a reality that could decide at any moment that bodies and gear were stories it no longer wanted to tell.

The Anchor’s pulse intensified. Eryn felt it through the line,

through her teeth. Her implant pushed a warning hard enough to make her wince. anchor output rising. integration pressure building. caution.

“Quiet,” Eryn whispered to it. Or to herself. Or to both.

Shapes unfolded ahead—no color, only edge. A doorway without

walls. A thin door standing in a vastness. Sera angled toward it; the rest of them moved with her.

Sentinels greeted them at the threshold.

 

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They looked like dragonflies at first glance—fast, precise,

beautiful in the way knives are beautiful. Only when one leaned close to Eryn’s face did she see its true nature: an absence shaped like a thing,

Page | 20 a correction given wings. Where its eyes should have been was a hollow;

where its mouth should have been was a rule.

It spoke to her implant in a language she did not know she knew.

The implant flinched. reroute. quarantine. error.

Sera lifted a hand, two fingers splayed. The song in the camp’s

throats changed. The sentinels stuttered.

Eryn felt a shard tilt under her tongue, ready to break through—

soldier, queen, something with a blade. It would be easy to cut. It would be easy to burn.

Mercy, not fire, the dungeon memory breathed. Instead of

smashing the sentinel out of the air, she offered it the least threatening thing she had: her open palm, the way you offer bread to a skittish horse. Her implant hissed.

The sentinel dipped. It tasted the air above her hand. It tasted

the song. It tasted the Anchor’s pulse humming against Sera’s spine. Whatever math it did, did not end with them dead. It lifted, spun, and joined its siblings in a convergence that formed a brief, delicate arch.

“Go,” Sera said. “Before they remember what else they are.”

They slid through the arch into the Node.

It was a room in the way a dream is a room. Walls without corners.

A ceiling only because they insisted on one. Eryn felt the implant relax in relief and fear all at once.

The Node was not empty.

 

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A column stood at the center: clear, tall, filled with dust that

glowed as if someone had poured light into powder and told it to sleep. Names lay in the dust. Not written. Suspended. Every letter a firefly.

Page | 21 Every name a story you could pluck and wear like a scar.

“We take a strand,” Sera said, voice little more than breath. “One. We don’t get greedy. Greedy is how you get sterilized.”

“What’s a strand?” Eryn asked, because asking helped her not to look too hard at the walls that didn’t meet and the floor that didn’t hold except as long as she kept believing it would.

“The thread that leads to the door you want,” Sera said simply.

“And if we pull the wrong one?”

“Then you remember someone else,” Sera said. “And you forget yourself.”

Eryn stepped toward the column. The dust lifted and whirled as if

wind had found its way into the space where no wind was. She reached out a hand and the Names shifted to avoid her skin.

Her implant lit with information it should not have had. access

granted: shard-flag identified. caution. error. caution. The words came stacked fast, then strangled off into a hiss as if something larger had pressed a thumb to its throat.

The other voice—that whisper that was neither fully human nor

fully made—slid over the back of Eryn’s mind, warm as breath on a mirror.

Not that one, it said. Not yet.

“Which, then?” Eryn whispered.

 

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She didn’t expect an answer. She got one anyway—not as a word

but as a feeling, the way a road feels when it slopes downward toward water. She followed that tilt, fingers hovering over a thin braid of light

Page | 22 that quivered like a vein.

When she caught it, the Name shuddered in her hand. It didn’t

burn. It didn’t cut. It only felt like weight. She looked down.

The strand she held did not say Nexus. It did not say Exit. It said, in

a script that was and wasn’t Union code: Garden.

Sera’s jaw tightened. “We’ve heard that one before.”

“What is it?” Eryn asked.

“A place where the system hides what it doesn’t want to burn,” Sera said. “Soft deletes. Keepsakes. Mistakes it loved once.”

“Why does the Nexus need a garden?” Eryn murmured.

Sera’s eyes cut to her. “Why does a warden keep trophies?”

The floor trembled. Not much. Enough. The songs faltered. The

sentinels at the door remembered part of what else they were.

“Sera,” called a voice that Eryn did not like. A hooded man with a thermal hood—Kael, someone had called him—had his hand out toward Eryn as if he meant to help and also as if he meant to grab.

“Don’t touch her,” Sera snapped.

“We’re out,” another voice said. “Now.”

They pinned the strand to the Anchor without quite touching

either—the way people pin a rare moth without killing it, carefully, horribly.

They ran.

 

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The Node did not like them leaving with something it had decided

to let them see. The sentinels turned elegant and mean. The arch ahead closed, then opened again, then closed. The world flexed.

Page | 23 Eryn’s shard shifted again, faster than she would have chosen.

They burst back out through the doorway into the river of scrub. The pulse caught them and shook them hard enough to take two years off her joints and one name off the inside of someone’s skull. She heard the sound that terror makes when it gets tired of being clever and becomes only itself.

Kael’s foot missed. He hung from the line by one hand, wild-eyed,

the rest of him suspended above distances that were not distances at all.

“Leave him,” someone panted. “He’s a leak. He’s been sending the Veil our hum. He’ll bring a wipe on us.”

Eryn could see the truth of it. Kael’s hood hid hardware. His eyes

were wrong—too still. He had flinched when the Anchor had come out, not in awe or fear but recognition.

Mercy, not fire.

She unclipped with one hand—stupid; suicidal—caught his wrist,

and felt all of him in her grip. He was lighter than he looked. Or she was stronger than she had any right to be. The line sang.

The sentinel nearest them figured it out. It dipped, blade-edge

catching on the line. Eryn twisted her body and dragged Kael’s weight over the seam where a foot belonged. He stumbled, fell into Sera, who cursed and didn’t let him fall again.

“Thank you,” Kael gasped.

 

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“Save your thanks for a world that cares,” Sera said. She didn’t look at Eryn. “We move.”

They moved. They made the platform with knees that didn’t feel

Page | 24 like parts of their own bodies. The monolith regained mass. The sky

remembered it had a single color. The world fell back into the shape it had been pretending to be.

The camp collapsed around them, bodies skidding, laughter that

sounded like pain, someone sobbing freely into their sleeve where no one could see. Sera dropped to both knees and let the rig slide from her shoulders as if the Anchor weighed as much as the sky.

It pulsed—slow, now. Content, almost.

“We live,” Sera said to no one in particular.

“For now,” someone said, less rudely than it sounded.

Kael had his hands on his knees. He glanced up at Eryn. If there was betrayal in his face, it hid well.

“You didn’t have to,” he said.

“I did,” Eryn said.

Sera made a noise low in her throat. Approval or warning, Eryn

couldn’t tell.

They took the strand from the Anchor together. It had not

collapsed. It glowed, small and sure, inside a loop of wire. Sera held it like a rosary.

“Garden,” she said again, as if the word had a taste she was trying to place.

“What is a soft delete for a god,” murmured the man with the scars along his scalp, “except a secret?”

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They climbed down. The desert smelled like dust and something sweet—a trick of the nose after too long inside the Veil.

“Eat,” Sera said. “Then sleep. We go at dusk. The Garden’s on the move,

Page | 25 or it would be if places could move.”

Eryn looked at the strand. It shivered, as if laughing at the idea of

being a place at all.

Her implant stirred, faint and fretful. anchor residue clinging.

name-strand recognized. warning: proximity to nexus constructs may accelerate shard convergence. risk: breakdown. outcome: unknown.

“And here I was,” Eryn said under her breath, “thinking unknown was kinder than correction.”

If the implant had a sense of humor, it did not let her see it.

When she slept this time, the Tribunal came again. This time she

did not stand with the Overseers. This time she stood with the condemned. She turned her head to see who stood at the judges’ ring.

She saw herself.