Grief as a Battering Ram

He advances and the vapor frosts around his steps. No face. No heat. Where my thermal sonar should read a body, I read only a hole cut out of the real.

My obsidian arm reaches toward the fifty. Shield reflex. Cover them, absorb the blow, die in front of them.

No.

I press my palm to the floor and spit out the infrasound that no longer has words. Ta-tam. Ta-ta-tam. Marisol's drum crosses the concrete, climbs into their shins, forces their hearts to lock onto the cadence of the riot.

"Give him your dead!"

The Cénotaphe opens its arms. The frost races toward us, eating the colors, smoothing the mouths. A woman already begins to wear that clean smile I know too well.

So Jolanda throws it the name of her son taken in the night. Lio strikes his bar against a husk and counts aloud the Sector's vanished. The old man with the bloodied nose bellows the forbidden song his mother used to hum before the last correction. Malik recites his numbers — three hundred, four hundred — the tally of his own orbital graves.

I gather it all. Every scar, every crooked grief, every memory this thing wants to bleach white. I pour the block into my Flame and hurl it against the Void.

The entity takes in a tragedy it cannot translate. Its shell of silence cracks. The frost pulls back. A green fissure runs the length of its frozen flank.

It wavers.

And in that breach I hear — beneath the white silence — another captive voice beating against the Cénotaphe's walls. A rhythm. Boum-tak. A drum that is not mine.

Who else does this machine keep locked away in its belly?