The Stuttering Metronome

— The smile can wait. We climb.

Jade doesn't argue. She wedges her tablet against her hip and dives into the column of fuchsia vapor.

The geyser swallows us. We rise. The Veines scroll past — welded pipes, rust, dead graffiti from a city we've forgotten. My arm bleeds. I watch the red trickle the way you watch a weather report that no longer concerns you. Curious. Distant.

The Métronome de l'Aube punches through the ceiling of the Veines. A needle of black iron beating the gray measure of three million skulls. At its base, the console. Jade throws herself at it, fingers racing over the caked keyboard.

— Thirty seconds. Less, maybe.

Above us, the Chiens de Chasse bark their coordinates. Their beams comb the pink haze.

The hatch pops. A nest of golden fibers pulsing to KARTIKEYA.X's tempo. Uzume murmurs the toll deep in my skull. My fear, I already fed to the Cœur Pneumatique. This time the mask wants something deeper.

I drive my hand into the fibers.

The cut on my arm goes out all at once. The cracking ankle, the burn, all of it falls silent. My body becomes an empty costume I wear without feeling it.

And I spit my symphony into their waves. Not a melody — a hiccup. The sound of a heart beating off-key, multiplied ten thousand times. The Métronome stumbles. The gray cadence breaks into a lopsided waltz.

Outside, the city misses a beat. Three million steps faltering together.

Jade stares at me. She's seen my fingers twist in the fibers, the bone bending while I don't even wince.

— You're breaking your hand. You don't feel it?

I look down. My index finger points the wrong way. Pretty. A punchline ready to serve.

How many pieces before all that's left is a mask laughing alone, on an empty stage?