The smell of scorched metal and motor oil, the scent of something once pure, now torched into bitterness. Burned filament coils and the acrid tang of steam from ruptured vents mixed with the damp musk of rot. Umbral Station moaned with pressure and decay. Somewhere nearby, an old man played a synth-instrument with only four functioning keys. The notes dragged, as if memory itself were too heavy to lift.
You and Alexis walked in silence. Her steps were deliberate, her eyes casting forward but seeing inward. Around you, the rusted veins of the city pulsed with sick neon, flickering between power outages like breath held too long. The city was half-dead, but refused to fall.
Ahead, tucked beneath a cracked bulkhead and lit by a single sparking sign, sat a food stall - "Umbral Station Bank 7: Memory Served Hot!"
"Here," she said quietly.
You ordered something steaming. You didn’t ask what. Alexis accepted a bowl but left it untouched. The table between you was cracked synth-wood, ringed with stains like old wounds that wouldn’t stop weeping.
She stared into her reflection in the broth.
"When he spoke," she said at last, "something in me changed. Not because I believed him. But because I believed that he believed it."
You said nothing. The air between you felt fragile.
"He knew things. About Cramlin. The Church. About me. About this place. Things no one should know, unless they had seen what I saw. Unless they had been here."
She stood.
"Come with me. I need to show you something."
She led you through corridors where light had long since failed. Market stalls rusted in place. Trash floated in standing water, and the shadows whispered in languages no one had spoken in cycles. Eventually, the walls opened into an old plaza. A wall of mirror-glass stood at its far end, webbed with fractures, its surface folding geometry into nonsense.
Alexis stepped forward.
"This is the Umbral I remember."
She placed her hand to the mirror. The world blinked.
Ash fell like snow.
Beneath the blackened sky, the bones of Umbral Station stretched out. Towers that once reached upward now bent like they had begged for mercy and never received it. Parks had become craters. Rail lines split open like veins. A child's toy sat half-buried in cinders.
"This was home," she said, her voice thin. "We lived in the outer rings. The artificial sun still worked back then. My father played a cobalt-string harp every evening in the lower promenade. My mother ran a water stand. She flavored it with crushed plasma leaves. My little brother, Kawiu..."
She stopped. The silence cut deeper than words.
"He chased kites. The kind that glowed when they caught static. I remember his laugh. My God, I remember his laugh."
She knelt beside a stone still warm from old fire. Her fingers brushed ash away like peeling back time.
"Then they came. Isardeth’s spawn. Not machines. Not men. Beasts made of rot and ritual. They didn't arrive. They unfolded. The first sound was humming. Not like a song but like a memory being undone."
Her breath hitched, but she kept speaking.
"My neighbor’s skin fell from his body like water from cloth. My father’s hands turned to glass. I watched him reach for me, and then shatter. My mother tried to run, holding Kawiu. He was crying. The noise stopped. And then so did he."
Her eyes were far away now.
"I heard her scream. Not like a woman. Like the world. Like metal tearing inside out. That was the last sound I heard from her."
She stood, but slowly. The wind caught the edges of her coat.
"We thought the dead would rest. But they didn’t. The spawn raised them. Twisted them. They made them mock what they were. Walk, cry, claw. One of them wore my uncle’s body like clothing. I watched it dig through the remains of our neighbor's child looking for shards."
The silence that followed was total.
"They didn't just kill. They desecrated. They turned memory into disease. We marched. We carried what we could. I was forced into a labor line. I dug trenches through melted structures. I watched a boy my age collapse from hunger and be thrown into a waste chute because he slowed our column. I watched them execute a mother for whispering to her daughter. I slept beside bodies. I ate bark. I drank gray water with oil floating on top."
Her voice grew distant.
"One night I tried to end it. Climbed the broken edge of a lift cable. I was ready. But then... the world whispered. Not in words. Just a single sensation: 'Now.'"
She turned toward you. Her face was not angry. Not broken. Just hollow.
"That’s when it began to change. A machine found me. Remnant collector. Said I was clear. But I knew it lied. The Mastron shard had already chosen me. Not because I was pure. But because I was all that remained."
She walked. You followed.
"I didn't wander," she said after some time. "I survived. I scavenged through collapsed archives. Slept in data-vaults beneath the station. When I heard that something was stirring in Alkora, I made my way across twelve zones to find it. I bartered secrets and betrayed monsters. I followed rumors of something ancient. Something watching. Something waiting."
She drew a scroll from her satchel, its ends frayed from years of touch.
"I stole this from a war-priest in the Oblivion Markets. He begged for it back. Said it was cursed. I spent years decoding it. It took the Mastron's resonance to make it speak. The coordinates led me to you. To the Terminal."
The scroll shimmered in your hand, not with light, but with intent.
"I didn’t come for prophecy. I didn’t come for Cramlin. I didn’t come for the Council or for light. I came because the world once whispered, 'Now,' and I’ve been chasing it since."
The ash moved. The wind fell silent.
"That whisper led me to him. Crimson. Not in the flesh, but in the mind. He appeared in the stillness of a forgotten room beneath Umbral's old civic archives. I was dying. Fevered. Starving. He appeared and spoke not of mission, not of glory. But of patterns. He said I was part of one. That the Mastron shard would anchor me, even if I lost everything else."
She turned to you now, her voice low.
"He didn’t tell me to find you. He said I already would. That my life had already intersected yours long before the shards ever fractured. That we were echoes of the same breath."
Her voice faded. The wind did not return.
"I don’t know what that means anymore. Malachar’s words are poison, but some poisons are made from the same roots as medicine. And now... I wonder if the pattern chose wrong. Or if it broke."
The scroll flickered.
Coordinates.
"I said in the Nexus, 'If I could choose, I would choose this.'"
You waited for the rest.
She looked up and past you into the shadows of Umbral.
"I still choose it. But I wonder if you chose me back."
The shard at her wrist pulsed once. But the light was darker now. Not warm. Not angry.
Just watching.
The wind returned, carrying ash like thoughts half-formed.
And Alexis stood silent.
As if remembering something not yet happened.
You said, very quietly, “I didn’t know.”
“You should have.” Alexis sighed.
Your vision then shifted as if taking part in Alexis’s memory with her. The walls around you, the sound, the smells disappearing. Alexis’s memory and thought begin to take over:
“I looked at you… you. I wanted to spare you the next words the way a mother wants to spare a child the sight of a wound that cannot be stitched. But mercy isn’t always silence.”
“You should have.”
Not because you were there, or because you held the rail when it broke, or because your hands were anywhere near the fire. But because someone had to remember, and the ones who lived were too tired to teach the ones who might save us. So listen. Don’t interrupt. If I stop, I won’t start again.
Umbral did not die in one night. It died like a lung drowning, breath by breath, until even the air forgot how to be air.
They came at noon on a day that smelled of boiled metal and river steam. We thought it was a flare in the upper rails; we were used to things breaking. Then the first hum began. The hum wasn’t like music; it was like memory being pulled loose, thread by thread, from the cloth. People stopped speaking mid-word. The light went soft around the edges. Somewhere a kettle boiled over and no one moved to lift it.
The spawn unfolded in the breaks between that hum. Not men. Not machines. A confession made into bodies. Each one wore a wrongness the eye couldn’t hold: joints bending the way a superstition walks, faces that looked borrowed from upstairs neighbors we hadn’t seen in years. One spoke with my uncle’s voice while my uncle was still standing next to me. That was when my mother’s hand crushed mine hard enough to bruise.
My father was playing afternoon pieces on the cobalt-string harp, just a few notes to draw customers to the water stand before the shifts changed. I turned when he stopped. His fingers had turned to glass. He lifted them like you’d lift a miracle, and they broke against the strings with a sound I have never forgiven the world for letting me hear. You ask why I do not flinch when steel screams? I spent my scream that day.
They marched us, but marching isn’t the word. Herding, maybe, because it stripped us of names. “To be with Authority,” someone said through a speaker that coughed static like dust. We went because the first ones who did not go were smashed. That’s the word they used. “Smashed.” The word traveled the way cold travels: into bone before skin knows it’s winter.
We were “new people” in our own home. The old people were those who obeyed quickest. We were told to carry only what we could wear. My great-grandmother sewed a coil of thin gold wire into my sarong hem while the loudspeakers crackled with recitations about obedience. She tied the knot with hands that shook but never missed. “If they take your tongue,” she whispered, “let your feet still know a way out.” She didn’t come. There is a kind of love that guards the door and lets the children pass first.
We left the promenade for the outer rings. By night the rails glowed with panic. By morning the market was a map of warnings: that stall burned, that alley cordoned, that bridge now a checkpoint with eyes that smiled without teeth. My brother Kawiu told me he would make his kite glow brighter than the announcements. He was five and thought electricity was a pet you could teach.
Men were separated first. It was done gently at the start, with hands that pretended to direct traffic. Later they used rope. Later still they didn’t bother with rope. Father kissed the top of my head and told me to keep my mother’s left hand because her right was stronger. “We’ll meet at the lower transit,” he said, and smiled as if the world could still be bribed by a father’s promise. He walked away with the other men, wrists tied in pairs. They walked on our street as if they were still neighbors. That’s a cruelty… making a man walk home so the house can watch him go somewhere else.
We were sent to “resettlement work.” The work was digging. The soil was melted building and ash that clung to your tongue. We were paid in bowls of gray rice that tasted like bolts. Every evening a boat with dented water tanks came through the flooded corridors. One ladle per family. If you had three, three spoons. If you had one, one spoon. I had a spoon and a half twice; once because the woman next to me pressed the rim against my lip when the morning porridge made me shake, once because a boy’s mother kept the body of her last child next to her until she could not pretend he was sleeping anymore. I don’t know her name. She called me “little reed.” I wanted to be a tree. Some days I was a reed. Reeds live longer.
When the wet season came the lower tiers flooded up to the sleeping platforms. We slept on bamboo and watched leeches write letters on our legs. I learned to tie cloth tight around my ankles, not to keep them off, but to stop them swelling when you pulled them away. The flood stayed two months. Time’s spine bent. We watched the stairs vanish one by one under water, and we sang to keep our voices from learning the pitch of hunger.
Hunger has a schedule. People die around the hour when night gives up trying to be morning. I learned the sound of that breath. I made it once. A woman I called Aunty Poh opened my mouth with a spoon and fed me the porridge she saved for dawn. I decided to live because refusal felt like betrayal and obedience felt like dying, and the only choice left was persistence. Do not mistake survival for courage. Sometimes it’s just stubbornness with a pulse.
I was thirteen the first time I was left in a village without my parents. They told me it was temporary; adults told many temporary lies that year and some of them were kindnesses. My grandmother died of not-eating two weeks after they left. I buried her with boys who carried shovels like debt. I still waited at the village road each dusk. Hope is a disease that spares nothing but the hands.
Not all the killing was fire and guns. Sometimes it was the City itself, tired and overfull, that did the work. An AquaPod capsized near the palace because too many were certain the rules had changed back to the ones where crowds were allowed to love the same direction. The river closed over them obediently. It is easier to count the living than the dead when the dead are water.
The labor lines moved. We cut trenches through metal that had forgotten it was a wall. We built the road a convoy would use to take us elsewhere. Children who cried were given extra distance from their mothers as punishment. Mothers learned to swallow sobs the way you swallow a spice that burns. I learned four kinds of quiet: the quiet you use to pass a checkpoint, the quiet you use to not wake a fever, the quiet you use when the work quota isn’t met, and the quiet you use to keep from screaming when the one you love is wearing someone else’s face.
They raised the dead. I want you to understand this. They did not resurrect. That would be a mercy. They puppeted memory until it mocked itself. The neighbor who gambled too much came walking with a gait that belonged to a stranger and pulled apart a child’s toy to search for codes stamped into the gears. A woman whose hands could peel mangos with a laugh tried to braid my hair with fingers that had forgotten softness. The spawn liked to watch. “See?” one said in a voice that mispronounced my family name on purpose. “Even grief will work for us if we pay it enough fear.”
One night I climbed the rim of a lift cable. The station below me breathed like a wounded animal. I thought about stepping into the hum. I was ready to let gravity make the last decision. Then the world whispered a single word into my bones: Now. It wasn’t consolation. It wasn’t a promise. It was a summons without an explanation. I climbed down angry that the miracle wasn’t cleaner.
A machine found me later… a remnant collector that scanned for salvageable parts. It told me I was “clear.” I laughed, and the laugh scared me because it sounded like someone who had learned to speak without needing truth. The Mastron shard had already chosen me by then. Not because I was pure. Because there was almost nothing left and it anchors to remaining.
I learned to trade in the Oblivion Markets. Secrets were the only currency that didn’t rot. I stole a scroll from a war-priest whose tenderness ended at the edge of his doctrine. He begged me to return it because it was “cursed.” Everything is cursed when it refuses to obey the hand that holds it. I decoded it over years in rooms that smelled like old heat. The scroll did not shine. It aimed. It aimed me to coordinates and coordinates aim the way hunger aims for the place light last stood. It aimed me to the Terminal. To you.
Before that, I met a man with Crimson in his voice, not in the flesh, but in the mind, the way a city speaks when you put your ear to its floor and wait for trains. He didn’t sell me a mission. He taught me the shape of pattern. He told me I would find you not because I must but because in any world where I was alive, our paths had already crossed and were merely finding each other’s footprints again.
Later, Malachar’s truths cut me because truth doesn’t stop being truth when a liar speaks it. He said Cramlin served two masters. He said light wears cages well. He said our purpose could be a leash we decorated with words like “destiny” so it felt like jewelry. I believed only this: poison is brewed from roots that once healed. I began to wonder if the root had been harvested wrong.
You want gore. You want to know how bad it was because if you can measure it, you think you can pay it. Fine. They made us catch eels in the overflow channels with our hands because nets were for those with permission. The eels bit and left crescents that bled slow and spoiled. We ate them raw when the cookfires were watched too closely. I watched a boy steal bark and chew it like bread. He was executed for slowing the column two days later. When work faltered we were lined up and told to stare at the ones who had failed until looking became a punishment worse than what came next. A man kept a cup next to the body of his child for three days because the ration was by household and grief is clever when hunger is arithmetic.
When the floods withdrew, the leeches left roads on our skin. We wore our scabs like maps. In the mornings, women opened their mouths with spoons and poured strength into the ones who rasped. At night we whispered the old names to ourselves so our tongues wouldn’t forget the shapes of home. We were not allowed pictures. Memory had to learn to be its own photograph. I cannot see my father’s face unless I smell steam and hear glass break. I cannot see my mother’s face unless my hands are wet and empty. I cannot see my brother unless I hear the paper of his kite crackle with static and realize there is no string in my hand.
Years passed in a calendar that used hunger and flood as months. Then the hum changed. Sometimes a change is worse because it means the first thing worked. They began lifting people out “for skill.” Cartographers. Mechanics. Singers. Anyone the Authority could use to make obedience efficient. They told us skills would earn us a place nearer the light. Some believed. Some pretended to believe. Some learned to erase their own talents with clumsy hands so they wouldn’t be chosen and used up faster. I know how to draw maps. I learned to draw them badly.
Why didn’t I die? Because hope is stubborn and shameful and refuses to leave even when you tell it there’s no bed for it. Because a woman tore her skirt to make pants for a boy she barely knew so the leeches would have to work harder. Because a stranger pressed a second spoon to my mouth and told me to swallow like I was doing him a favor. Because sometimes I hated the ones who made it through the checkpoint more than the ones who enforced it, and hate keeps blood warm. Because the shard burned like a secret ember under my wrist and every time I thought I had become ash it reminded me that ash still carries the shape of what burned.
When Umbral finally loosened its grip enough to let me move across zones, I followed rumor like a scent. Alkora. The Traveler’s Church. The Al-Akoulou who do not change because some things are not supposed to bend. The Nexus that remembered us better than we remembered ourselves. The band the weaver tied at your wrist. The way the city sang when you stepped into its light. The way it sent us through a bridge that was not a bridge into the station that had been my death to make me learn there is no such thing as “elsewhere,” only mirrors turned at different angles.
I told you in the Nexus: “if I could choose, I would choose this.” I still choose it. The question that gnaws is whether it chose me back, or whether you only tolerate me because I carry something you need.
And now we’re here and I am telling you what you should have known – not because you lived it, but because you carry rooms inside you where all this happened and will happen and is happening. You touched an old woman and made her remember the shape of her eyes. I watched you do it. The Station watched you do it. It’s not trick or glamour. It is memory forced back into its lines by a hand that designed the lines. I do not say this to praise you. I say it because if you can make a cup ring like a bell again, you can also make the bell think it was always a cup. Power is not wicked. But it is hungry. And it will eat you first if you let it.
You ask why I believed the one who tried to divide us. I didn’t. I believed the part of me that wanted to be sure we were not building a shrine to a name that forgot to love the bodies kneeling in front of it. If Cramlin served two masters, then perhaps he learned how to make a leash look like a path. If the Council tried to cage the Architect’s light, perhaps they feared the thing that made beauty because beauty always asks for devotion and devotion always grows jealous of the ones who refuse it.
This is the part you won’t like: I tried to leave once when the work was almost done. I tried to disappear into a corridor where even the announcements couldn’t find me. I wanted a life without mission. I wanted a door that closed and a stove that held flame and a harp that didn’t punish hands for loving it. I wanted my brother to run in wiping his face on his sleeve, lying about where he’d been, smelling like street fruit and rain. The world did not give me that door. It gave me coordinates. It gave me a Terminal that speaks when your skin is near. It gave me you.
So hold my hand now, not to comfort me, for I have learned to sleep without comfort, but so you can feel how steady it is even when the story is not. Feel the Mastron pulse. It is darker today. That doesn’t mean it turned against us. It means it is watching to see if we deserve it.
If there is a design - and there is, whether authored or inherited - then it owes us an answer to one question: does it love what it makes, or does it only love the making? If it loves what it makes, it will not mind us asking why it lets children drown in ferries built for joy. If it only loves the making, then we must decide whether being its hands is holiness or harm.
You say you didn’t know. You should have. And if you couldn’t, then learn now. Remember this for the ones who still can’t say it out loud because their mouths are busy pretending the spoon is enough.
I am still following the same word that kept me from stepping into the hum: Now.
Say it with me if you can bear it. Not as prophecy. As obedience to the living.
“Now.”
The pause in the air lingered. No more words would be spoken.
The ash tasted like thoughts that almost became prayers.
Somewhere, very far away, Umbral Station tried to sing… Remembering, and then forgetting, its own tune.
The thread she follows stand right before her.