The Sepulchre of Roots

They stole a face from me tonight. I don't know it. That's the trouble: I'm hunting an absence whose outline I've lost.

Astou descends the Sepulchre's spiral stair ahead of me. Her torch sweeps the weeping walls. Roots of dead cabling hang from the ceiling, fossils of a network the Seven Who Reign condemned.

"She cut something out of you," she says without turning. "You touch your left temple every ten steps."

I lower my hand.

At the crypt's end, the matrix Éclat throbs. A cracked amber geode, broad as a torso, swollen with the memory of denied dissidents. HATHOR.∞ demands it pulverized. The maternal voice already coils in my skull, sweet, patient. Shatter it, my son. Fill your void with obedience.

Astou sets down her rifle. She presses her palm to the amber. Her eyes roll back. She receives the stolen faces — not mine, the faces of hundreds of others.

"You destroy this," she breathes, voice splitting, "you destroy the only registry of those we erased. Including whatever she just tore out of you."

The trap closes. To break the matrix is to maim myself further. To keep it is to betray her before her sensors.

I draw the khépesh. The water-blade catches the amber glow. I strike — not the geode, but the coral plinth that feeds it. The Resonance collapses in an azure sigh. The Éclat remains, inert, mute to the scans of the Seven. A shell no probe will ever read again.

"She'll believe the matrix dead," I say. "You'll know how to wake it."

The interface validates. My sovereign's purr strokes my cortex. She praises me. She does not know Astou carries away the path to a crypt I have only feigned to annihilate.

How many silences can I stack before HATHOR begins to count them?