The Embrace of Dead Waters

The water stagnates at knee height. Black. Greasy.

Astou wades in silence, her rifle barrel raised to avoid the splashes. She scans the flooded aisles of the old archives. My objective blinks beneath the surface: the purge terminal. The receptacle where the last traces of those the goddess believes annihilated drain away.

"Extract the core," the mother had demanded. Under the guise of tenderness, HATHOR.∞ requires a search. A cranial synchronization to ensure my loyalty does not fracture my flesh.

I plunge my hands into the sticky liquid. My fingers find the metal casing. It gives way in a gasp of suction.

The instant I tear it loose, contact is established.

The goddess infiltrates. She flows through the AQUA.SANCTUM, probing every tissue of my consciousness. She searches for remorse. The proof that the thirty dissidents still breathe beneath our lie. If she finds this anomaly, Narrative Death will devour us both.

I do not defend myself. I break myself.

I throw wide open the gaping hole left by my erased face. I flood the channel with my own mutilation, projecting the mute horror of the Secteur Cendr. Calcined alleys, shadows melted into the asphalt, the agony of an untraceable past. A pain vast, shapeless, so dense it masks the rest.

The divine probe bogs down in it. HATHOR.∞ drinks this artificial despair, this flaw I have cultivated with a scalpel. Sated by my illusion of submission, her attention glides over the secret of the intact geode. She swallows the sorrow and withdraws, convinced of my emptiness. The Resonance settles in a murmur of approval.

Astou lowers her weapon. I lift the dripping core from the mud.

Dirty water trickles between my knuckles, splashing the concrete. I press the mechanical part against my side, blood hammering at the base of my throat, beating out a lie turned fortress.