Zahir pressed a hand to the concrete and hauled himself up through a shattered maintenance duct, finally stepping foot back into an alley in the Slant.
Find an anchor—or your soul fractures.
Logos's final warning whispered through his memory.
Of course there was a catch. Story of his damn life.
He'd meant to ask what "anchor" meant—but the relic had gone silent the moment he left the chamber. Dead or dormant, he couldn't tell. If anyone could figure it out, it was Elai. Assuming Elai was still—
He shook the thought off.
Zahir shook the dust from his clothes, then staggered upright. His own funk hit him immediately—sweat and grime baked under city heat. Must, rust, and stagnant water. He needed a shower. Badly.
But what unsettled him more was the absence of pain.
Kasik had broken his ribs—he remembered the impact clearly. But when he pressed a hand to his side now, there was only a dull pressure. No sharp flare, no deep bruise. Just solid tissue where damage should've been.
Something had accelerated his healing.
He knew even latent Innovators showed subtle shifts—odd skin patterns, strange eye reflections, a shift in hair texture. But awakened Signatures went deeper: blood, bones, aura, neural rhythms.
He thought about his own Signature: Superposition. So far there were no visual tells. At least nothing he could spot without a mirror.
But Logos had named the principle: unresolved states. Probabilistic alignment.
Maybe his body was syncing to the most coherent version of itself. Cells duplicated, after all. What if the "better" copies were being chosen automatically? Could that happen on its own—or could he steer it?
He tucked that theory away in his mind as he walked out of the alley and on to a side street.
The Slant stretched before him like a tilted graveyard of architecture. Buildings leaned at impossible angle—some tilting so far they looked like they'd crash into each other. Metal walkways stitched rooftops together overhead, sagging under the weight of tarps, hanging laundry, and scavenged wiring.
Public transit floated overhead—sleek, rail-less pods held aloft by gravity-drives, humming like distant wasps. Some dipped to street ports, trading floods of passengers before lifting again. Others zipped across magnetized cables, hulls tagged with gang glyphs or faded warning seals.
The air was hot and foul—burning metal, old oil, and spiced meat drifting in from a grill cart blocks away. Tin stalls with torn curtains offered bootleg neon clothes and hot food in foil. A group of barefoot kids sat under a cracked screen, twisting wire into bracelets, trading scraps.
The whole street sloped steeply downhill. Nothing looked stable. Cracks split the pavement like spiderwebs. Rust leaked from gutters like blood. Graffiti covered nearly every surface—tags layered over old tags, some still glowing faintly, others scratched out and burned.
This was the only pocket of Calvessan Zahir had ever known. Six million people packed into a tilted edge of the city, hoping the ground wouldn't give out.
Daylight stabbed through the overhead tangle of cables. But something was off. Not the soft gold of dawn—this was the flat, white glare of midday, when upper sectors realigned their light grids.
The shadows barely stretched. No sun in this sky—just raw illumination, sourceless and oppressive.
Across the street, a glitching holo-banner blinked:
BREAKING: DIMENSIONAL COLLAPSE – VASKERA LOST – HUMANITARIAN CORRIDORS CLOSED
The words jittered with static, cycling every few seconds.
Beneath it, a news ticker crawled steady, crisp despite the corrupted projection:
"Day three of remembrance. Vyr Foundation announces matching fund for impacted families. Dimensional fallout risk: minimal, per IHI spokespeople…"
And beneath that, today's date.
Zahir froze.
If he was seeing things correctly, days, not hours, had passed.
"No, no—fuck," he whispered. "How long was I under?"
A dull panic tugged at his gut.
'The fallback. Check the fallback.'
He'd been gone for days. Days. That gave BQP more than enough time to connect the dots—and strike back.
One thing worked in his favor: they probably thought he was dead.
He needed to keep it that way.
He moved with purpose—quick, controlled strides. He followed every shortcut he knew, keeping to the shadows. As he turned the final corner, he saw the front of the fallback. The building's outer door had been forced open, half off its hinges. Above, graffiti tags: BQP.
He shouldered his way inside.
One flickering light painted the room in sickly hues. Everything else had been torn apart—chairs, slates, supplies. Shards and footprints marked the violence. His steps echoed hollow against loose metal.
Even at its worst, the fallback had felt…safe. A home he made for himself. He scanned the wreckage—a shattered chair Mekka had painted, now splintered, a console Elai had spent hours rewiring, gutted. It wasn't home anymore. It was a gaping scar.
His worst fears were confirmed. Guilt and regret clawed at his chest. But still, he needed to keep pushing forward and find out what happened.
Maybe Logos had recovered—whatever "recovery" meant for something like that. Now that he knew its name, he could summon the feeling more clearly, like pressing against a switch wired into his chest.
"Logos," he whispered. "Need a hand."
There was no reply. Just the faint echo of its presence, tucked somewhere beneath his sternum. Whatever energy had allowed it to speak before was now offline.
Fine. Then he'd do it the old way. He sighed and leaned against the wall.
From the outside, Zahir appeared to simply be scanning the room. But something else was happening.
Since reaching Base Rank, a new perceptual layer had begun surfacing—one tied to the passive property Logos had called Coherence.
In his Archive, it had only emerged under conscious effort. Now, however, it flickered on automatically in the background. Not constantly—just in bursts. Small, spontaneous forks of attention.
The effect was subtle. Every few seconds, his attention would split. A micro-decision—like whether to glance left or right—would briefly exist in parallel. His awareness darted down both paths for less than a heartbeat before collapsing into one.
From the outside, it might've looked like he was hesitating. But internally, he was absorbing twice the data.
There was no overlay. No interface. Just a vague but undeniable sense of directionality. One branch would fade. The other would hum faintly, like tension pulling in the right direction.
And when he followed that hum—he found what he needed faster.
The forks kept repeating. Every half-second or so, his attention would split—two possible points of focus, two options for movement or visual scan. Then one would resolve. The other vanished. Drift, collapse. Drift again.
In less than a minute, he had surveyed most of the fallback.
Near the far wall, his gaze landed on a scrap of violet and teal fabric jutting out beneath a toppled crate. He stepped closer, knelt, and pulled it free. It was a head wrap—Mekka's. Dried blood stiffened the folds.
He didn't react outwardly, but his pulse accelerated.
The visual confirmation snapped something into motion. From that moment forward, his reasoning began to accelerate as well. It wasn't just attention forking anymore. It was cognition tightening, forming a closed loop.
This new Coherence wasn't boosting his intelligence—it was reducing lag. Less time between awareness and insight. Each detail locked into place instantly, threads pulling taut between memory, instinct, and street logic.
His mind flickered back to one of Six's rules: Every contract is a blade. Sign wrong, and you're the one who bleeds. Zahir had signed wrong the moment they missed tribute—but only now did he grasp just how deeply it had cut.
The Wellspring had always been BQP's real target. Zahir's interference hadn't changed that—just handed them extra leverage. Another of Six's lessons rose sharply in his mind: Leverage speaks louder than loyalty. Mekka's family hadn't needed to be weak, only vulnerable—and Zahir had unknowingly provided that vulnerability himself.
He scanned the fallback again. This wasn't just destruction—it was theater. The scorch patterns were too precise, damage carefully placed. A spectacle. Another rule from Six echoed in his head: If your response ain't loud enough to hear from three blocks away, it doesn't count. This wasn't retaliation; it was a warning shot. A story BQP had written loud enough for the entire Slant to hear.
He glanced down at Mekka's bloodied wrap. Her injuries could've been from the tunnels, or they might've hurt her again. Probably not too severely—her parents' cooperation depended on Mekka staying alive—but the uncertainty twisted his gut anyway.
And no sign of Brin at all. Either he had managed to escape quietly or BQP had quietly snatched him up. Quiet moves weren't BQP's style, but Zahir allowed himself the faint hope that Brin had gotten clear.
Someone had clearly gotten Mekka out alive—Elai, most likely. Zahir felt his breathing steady, mind clearer, sharper than ever. Coherence was doing exactly what he needed it to: cutting through the noise, laying out each brutal truth in front of him.
But clarity wasn't comfort. Every detail fit perfectly into a single, undeniable picture: he'd underestimated BQP, misjudged the situation, and gotten everyone hurt.
Zahir stood slowly, exhaling a bitter breath.
As the pieces clicked into place, he caught something else. A flicker in the corner. His body had already shifted toward it before he even registered the glint.
Something was wedged beneath the collapsed remains of the rewiring console.
He crouched. Hairline cracks spiderwebbed the object's casing.
A slate.
He hesitated. Elai's slate. The one he always carried. And the kind of device Zahir's Glitch usually bricked on contact.
He reached out, let his hand hover just above the frame.
Two outcomes flared inside him—quick, instinctive:
The first: sparks, shutdown.
The second: nothing happens.
He didn't know exactly how he did it—only that he chose.
Not in the abstract sense. Not like wanting. Something subtler.
When he reached for the slate, he committed to one outcome. The branch that didn't end in a shorted-out screen. He didn't know how to suppress Glitch, not directly—but in that moment, it felt like he didn't have to. What he felt was an absence. No preemptive flinch or anxiety. No mental image of failure running in the background.
Just a steady, frictionless intention.
He made contact. The slate didn't spark and die. It just…rested in his palm, inert but intact.
And that was the tell.
There was something about the feedback—the clean handoff between thought and result—that gave him his first real reference point. Like discovering a muscle you never knew how to flex until it moved on its own.
He didn't think he could replicate it easily. Not yet. But the sensation was burned in now: that specific flavor of stillness, of not fearing the misfire. Of coherence, maybe.
And beyond the relief of not frying the slate, something else clicked into place—a glimpse, however brief, of what it might take to interface.
It wasn't just about avoiding damage. If this state could be sustained—if he could learn to hold that precise resonance—then he might eventually do more than just survive contact with Lattice tech. He might be able to use it. Access the system everyone else took for granted.
The idea felt distant, speculative. But the feedback loop had been clean—intention followed by result, without distortion.
He turned the slate over slowly, studying the casing. Most slates unlocked by syncing with your signature. Zahir had seen Elai do it maybe hundreds of times: two fingers placed along the lower edge, followed by a quick trace—a triangle, drawn smooth and counterclockwise, like muscle memory. The device would pulse once, verify the soulprint, and bloom open in a glowing gridded interface.
He mimicked the motion now, slowly, carefully.
Any time he tried this before, it would return an error code. This time, it responded. A faint line of light followed his fingers, tracing the shape like static clinging to glass. It didn't unlock. But it at least responded as if he were a regular person.
Progress.
He lowered the slate to his side, jaw set, thumb brushing his chin.
He knew Elai's obsession with encryption. He wouldn't be able brute-force his way in, not even with half-second attention forks.
But the fact that Elai had left it behind told him enough. If the fallback was abandoned and Elai's slate was here, something had gone seriously wrong.
He had been living here with Zahir. If he'd evacuated without the slate, it meant the situation turned critical fast—either Elai was forced out under fire, or dead.
Zahir weighed his options.
If Elai was alive, he'd fall back to a safe spot. There were half a dozen known spots—but Mekka's was the most logical next check.
He tucked the blood-stiff cloth and the slate into his pack, then scanned the room one last time.
Just as he was about to head out, he got another whiff of himself.
'Ugh.'
He wasn't about to show up at Mekka's smelling like a stray. Even if, in most ways, that's exactly what he was.
The fallback's washroom, miraculously, was still intact. Zahir stepped inside and took a shower—quick, cold, and purely functional. Afterward, he found a change of clothes and dressed without ceremony. He meant only to sit for a moment, to let his pulse settle and gather his thoughts.
But exhaustion had other plans.
Before he realized it, sleep had taken him.
Two hours passed.
When he woke, his body still felt ragged, but steadier. Urgency tightened in his chest like a belt. He'd already lost more time than he could afford.
He grabbed his pack and moved toward the back exit, slipping through the breach without a sound.
Time to find out what happened to Mekka.