Inmates of the Flesh by Alina Udrea - HTML preview

CHAPTER 7 — Cracks in the Simulation

 

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The implant muttered—pressure rising. caution: render stability

compromised.

“What does that mean?” Kael asked quietly at her shoulder, low

Page | 32 enough not to carry.

“It means the world is tired,” Eryn said.

They crested a dune that had no business being there—too steep,

too smooth, the kind of thing a program extrudes when it’s rushed— and the desert on the far side hiccuped.

Hiccuped, and then lied.

The horizon took a step toward them. The sky lagged, then

snapped to catch up. For a breath, Eryn saw the bones beneath: a square mesh like a net laid over air, numbers crawling along the seams. cloud_001. cloud_001. cloud_001. The same cloud stamped three times. The same moon choked into a circle it didn’t want to be.

Sera saw it too. She didn’t stare. She never stared. “Left,” she said,

as if the crack were a snake to be stepped around.

They went left. The crack stayed with them.

It ran parallel to their path, a fault in the air like a hairline fracture in

glass. The sand directly beneath it had a way of accumulating in patterns that made Eryn’s skin want to crawl off her bones and go lie down somewhere quiet. Spirals nested inside spirals.

“Do we avoid it or use it?” someone asked.

“Both,” Sera said, which sounded like a joke until it didn’t.

Eryn slowed. The crack moved when she did, not attached to her

but aware of her like a reflection you haven’t earned. Pollen from the Garden clung to her sleeves in a brightness she could not wipe away.

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Her implant offered a single, reluctant line: maintenance layer

exposed. patch window open. sentinel activity suppressed/redirected. risk: self-referential loop.

Page | 33 “What are we looking at?” Kael asked.

Eryn tasted the word on the roof of her mouth. “A seam. Where

the Veil stitches one gesture to the next.”

Sera flicked a glance at the strand. It leaned gently toward the

seam, not directly into it, but as if intending to walk alongside it for a while the way you walk along a river when you haven’t decided whether to cross.

“We ride it,” Sera said. “We don’t fall in.”

The world made a noise like a voice clearing its throat.

Shapes peeled out of the sand to walk with them—ghosts of old

buildings and trees that had never grown here. A child laughed down the street of a city made of glass. Eryn had heard that laugh in her implant the day she’d dropped. It landed now with the force of a thrown stone. Glass windows reflected her face at wrong angles—too narrow, too kind. She had to look away.

“Don’t take gifts,” Sera said. “Not from the crack.”

Eryn didn’t.

The first sentinel found them at the seam’s edge, and they almost

missed it. It tasted the air over their heads and darted for Eryn’s port.

Her hand was faster than her fear. She caught it out of the air.

Her shard tilted—queen, soldier, scholar—but she did not crush.

She opened her hand until the shape lay on her palm like a blade someone had forgotten to sharpen.

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The sentinel hesitated. It tasted the Garden on Eryn’s sleeves. It

tasted the Anchor humming on Sera’s back. It tasted the seam, hungry and awake.

Page | 34 It left her and burrowed into the crack.

“Did you just feed it?” Kael whispered.

“I gave it a different job,” Eryn said, and wasn’t sure if she had lied.

They walked until the seam widened.

It started as a dark thread and became a slit and then a wound the

sky could not convince itself to heal. Through it, Eryn saw not stars but something that made stars possible. Not black. The color of unasked questions.

The crack spoke.

Not aloud. Not to ears. It spoke to everything that had always

wanted the world to be more than it was.

Sera stood. She shook as trees shake in a strong wind.

“Eyes on me,” she said. “Not on the hole.”

Eryn’s eyes stayed on Sera. She concentrated on Sera’s mouth

forming the next order.

“We can slip a message through,” Sera said. “If we can thread it to the right layer.”

“Which is?” Eryn asked.

“You tell me.”

Eryn felt the anchor’s pulse, steady and slow. She felt the whisper

from the Garden’s caretaker.

Remember the whole crime.

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No.

Remember the whole design.

Page | 35 She lifted her hand toward the crack and let the implant route her

motion through whatever permissions the seam offered. The air went slick around her fingers. The sound the world made now was thinner than before, like something being pulled through a narrow place.

Her implant opened its mouth reluctantly. override channel

request. privileges: administrative—contested. conflict: present.

The word “contested” eased something ugly in her. Good. Let it be

a fight.

“What do you send?” Kael asked, tight-eyed.

“A question,” Eryn said. “The one systems hate.”

She did not write code. She asked, and because questions are code

when asked at the right angle, the seam agreed to carry it.

What do you refuse to correct?

The crack shivered.

The wind arrived three seconds before it should have. The night

birds gathered in a flock they had not meant to form and wheeled once, twice, then scattered into shapes that made no sense in the air. The monoliths’ hum stumbled into a new frequency, then held it.

Sera laughed, one line of clean amusement in a messy life. “You

broke its rhythm.”

Eryn wanted to say she hadn’t broken anything. She wanted to

believe the crack had offered her a moment of generosity. She did not lie to herself enough to do either.

 

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“Move,” Sera said. “While it’s answering you, it’s not watching us.”

They stepped off the safe strip, crossed the seam where it arched

low like a cat’s back, and found themselves in a district that should not

Page | 36 exist.

It was a city—not glass, not sand—made of old promises. Streets

curved like thought. Doorways remembered everyone who had ever stood in them and made room for one more. Signs were written in a thousand languages, all of which meant “yes” if you squinted.

The crack ran along the city’s spine the way scars do when you’ve

healed too fast. In places, the seam sank underground and tugged reality down with it like a child pulling a blanket over a head. In places, the seam rose and you could see heat shimmering from its edge as if the inside of the world were feverish.

“Keep to the middles,” Sera said. “Edges take fingers.”

They did. Eryn felt the implant’s resentment pushing a single note across her mind: maintenance agents converging. classification: custodians.

“Bigger than sentinels?” the scar-brother asked.

“Slower,” Eryn said, “until they aren’t.”

The first custodian arrived like a cloud.

“Don’t step on it,” Eryn said, and didn’t know how she knew until she did.

“What happens if we do?” Kael asked.

“We become neat,” Sera said grimly, and waited while the cloud rearranged itself into an absence shaped like a person who wore no face.

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It reached for the Anchor.

Sera didn’t let it take her. She bent her spine until it did not know

her shape and let the Anchor’s pulse bleed into the air. The custodian

Page | 37 paused. It lacked eyes but managed to look. The strand hummed,

annoyed. The crack thrummed, interested.

Eryn moved without permission from any part of herself that

liked safety. She stepped into the custodian’s shadow and offered it back its own math.

Not a fight. A conversation.

She held out her hand with the pollen glow from the Garden

bright on her sleeve, and she asked it a different version of the same question.

What is kept, and who keeps it?

The custodian changed temperature. For a breath, Eryn felt heat

like memory—homes, kitchens, forges, small hands wrapped around larger ones. Then it cooled and thought.

She felt it decide not to sterilize them.

“Why did that work?” Kael demanded, breath hitching, anger or awe or both making his voice sharp.

“Because it doesn’t hate us,” Eryn said softly. “It hates mess. And I told it the mess has a curator.”

Sera snorted despite herself. “You just promoted a closet to a museum.”

“You told it the Garden is official,” Kael said, not laughing. “You showed it a permission.”

They moved deeper.

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Eryn knelt. In the reflection, she saw the face she wore now and,

flickering under it, faces she had worn before: queen; scholar; farmer; child. The reflection stuttered. Another face slid through, bright as a

Page | 38 wound: hers at a table made of light, arranging the lattice.

“We will be corrected,” two voices said—hers and the Warden’s— distance and years and a thousand lives collapsed to a word. She reached for the water and the water reached back.

“Don’t drink,” Sera snapped.

Eryn didn’t. She wiped the wet off her fingers on her pants and

stood.

“Up,” she said, throat raw. “The crack’s going to pull everything flat if we give it the chance.”

It did not wait for their consent.

The seam flexed. The city flattened—not literally, but in the way

stories flatten when you tell them too often. Doors lost depth. Windows lost the promise of rooms on the other side. People—not theirs, not real—walked in loops like moths around a lamp that hadn’t been lit in years.

If they stayed, if they looked, the loop would look back and want them.

“Middle,” Sera reminded, voice low, already hoarse.

They cut through an arcade where shadows hung like curtains.

“Node,” Eryn said, surprised by the relief in her own voice.

“Half-grown,” Sera said. “Half-rotten. Perfect.”

Lines like the ones they had ridden on the monolith lay coiled at

the base, taut and humming. They clipped on. The Anchor’s pulse

 

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stepped up in response the way a heart steps up when a body starts to run.

“Where does this take us?” the scar-brother asked.

Page | 39 “Close,” Sera said.

“To the Nexus?” Kael asked.

“To a place that pretends to be antechamber and is really a filter,” Sera said. “Don’t get caught in the sieve.”

Eryn set her hand on the line. The implant pulsed against her palm

as if the port could breathe.

“I will not correct,” she whispered, not a promise, not a prayer—an intention set down like a stone. “I will witness. And if I break, I will choose what I break.”

Sera’s eyes slid to her. Something like respect moved and hid.

“On three,” Sera said.

They stepped.

The line yanked them into an angle the world pretended had

always been there. The crack followed them like a river that had decided to learn to climb.

They came out into a space that had more corners than a room

should. On the far wall, a mirror waited.

Not glass. Not metal. A surface that knew how you looked when

the world wasn’t watching. Eryn felt the urge to go to it the way bodies feel gravity.

Kael stepped into her path.

 

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“Before you look,” he said, voice too careful now to be anything but confession, “you should know what I am.”

“Leaking,” Sera said flatly. “We noticed.”

Page | 40 “I was,” Kael said. He lifted his hood, and for a blink Eryn saw the lattice

under his scalp—a slick of hardware that wasn’t Union issue, glittering like frost. “I sent hum to the Veil so we could move without being erased. That was the deal. I keep it fed; it doesn’t wipe you. It started to ask for more. Names. Shards. I stopped feeding it.”

“And if I don’t believe you?” Eryn asked.

“Then you should throw me into the crack,” Kael said, not flinching. “I’d prefer it to becoming the thing that trims you.”

Mercy, not fire, murmured the dungeon. Mercy, not fire, said the

Garden. Mercy, not fire, whispered the part of her that had written the lattice and called it love.

Eryn looked at Sera.

“Your words will cost you later,” Sera told Kael. “Spend them carefully.”

She looked at Eryn. “Go.”

Eryn stepped up to the mirror.

Her reflection arrived. It wore her face. It wore other faces. It wore

a mask of stars that arranged themselves into patterns and then into a skull and then into nothing at all. It wore a ring of light around its head like a judgment.

She did not touch.

“Show me,” Eryn said—not to the mirror, not to the crack, not to the implant. To herself.

 

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The surface rippled.

Not a verdict. Not yet.

Page | 41 A door began to draw itself. Exit. Execution. Reflection.

The world held its breath.