The skittering echoes of the guardian's death faded, swallowed by the cavern's deep-frozen silence. Ren stood over the shattered remains—ice, metal, and something that glistened like frozen sap. His breath clouded in the blue-lit air, each exhale a tremor. The spider-instinct's cruel suggestion—shatter the joint, let it writhe—still coiled in the back of his mind, cold and precise.
The Siphoner didn't look at the corpse. They stared at their own hand, where violet static still crackled along their glove's metallic veins. Their shoulders were rigid, not with triumph, but with a tension that looked like pain held in check.
"It was a sentry," they repeated, voice low and flat. "Its death will be felt. We need to move."
Ren didn't move. "You're hurt."
"I'm functioning." The Siphoner turned, their masked profile sharp against the tunnel's pulsating light. "Curiosity is a luxury you can't afford. Move."
But Ren's dragonfly vision, still tingeing the world with turquoise clarity, caught what human eyes might miss: a fine, almost imperceptible tremor in the Siphoner's left knee. A micro-spasm of overextended nerves. It was the same tremor Ren had felt in his own limbs after the first fight in the alleys—the body protesting a power it wasn't meant to channel.
He didn't press. He followed.
The tunnel sloped deeper, the glacial walls closing in until the ceiling brushed the Siphoner's hood. The blue conduits here were thicker, buried under clearer ice like veins under skin. A low, harmonic hum vibrated through the soles of Ren's boots. It wasn't sound; it was a pressure, a resonance that made the three consciousnesses in his chest stir in slow, uneasy unison.
It's singing, the centipede thought, calm and observational.
It's calling,the dragonfly corrected, restless.
It's testing,the spider concluded.
Ren gritted his teeth. It's just noise.
The spider's whisper was razor-thin. Is it?
They reached a wider chamber—not natural, but carved with geometric precision into the ice. A forgotten relay station. Broken terminals, their screens dark and frosted over, lined the walls. In the center, a dormant energy conduit lay exposed, its core crystal dark. The Siphoner went straight to it, placing both hands on the frozen casing.
"We rest here. Briefly."
"Rest? You said they'd feel the sentry."
"They will," the Siphoner said, not looking up. Violet light began to seep from their palms into the crystal, a slow, careful infusion. "But this conduit leads to a dead zone in the grid. Our energy signature will blur. It gives us minutes, not hours."
Ren watched them work. There was a practiced, weary intimacy to their movements—a technician's touch. This wasn't the first time they'd hidden in a corpse of the city's old bones.
He leaned against a frost-rimed terminal, his own chest aching with a dull throb. The adrenaline was fading, leaving behind the raw reality: he was a fugitive in a frozen tomb, hosting three predatory minds, following a stranger who flinched at their own power.
"You know this place like your own heartbeat," Ren said quietly.
The Siphoner's hands stilled for a fraction of a second. "I've had time to learn."
"How many others have you brought down here?"
A pause. The violet light flickered. "None."
"You expect me to believe that?"
"I expect you to survive. Belief is optional." They straightened, the conduit now glowing with a faint, stolen vitality. The light softened the harsh lines of the chamber, casting long, dancing shadows. For the first time, Ren saw the Siphoner's mask clearly—not just cloth, but a layered composite, the red and black patterns resembling a circuit diagram gone wrong.
The Siphoner finally turned, their tired eyes meeting his. "You want to know what I am. What this place is. You're asking the wrong questions."
"Then what's the right one?"
"How long do you have before what's inside you becomes you?" The Siphoner's gaze dropped to Ren's chest, as if they could see the tri-linked knot of consciousness pulsing beneath his ribs. "The dragonfly seeks flight and fight. The spider seeks control and web. The centipede seeks order and consumption. They are not tools. They are tenants. And they will want the deed."
Ren's hand went instinctively to his sternum. "You talk about them like they're people."
"They're better than people. They have purpose. Uncorrupted by sentiment." The Siphoner's voice held no praise in the statement. It was a clinical fact, sterile and cold.
"Is that what happened to you?" The question left Ren's lips before he could cage it. "Did you siphon away your sentiment?"
The chamber went very still.
The Siphoner didn't move, but the air around them tightened, grew colder. The friendly light from the conduit seemed to shy away from their form.
"Sentiment," they said, the word precise and brittle, "is what fills the graves in the silent zones."
They walked to a broken terminal console and, with a stiff gesture, brushed frost from its surface. Underneath was not metal, but a transparent panel. Frozen within, like a insect in amber, were scattered personal effects: a tarnished chrono, a fragment of a data-slate, a single, tiny alloy earring shaped like a feather.
A reliquary.
"You asked how many I've brought down here," the Siphoner said, their back to Ren. "I didn't bring them. I found them. Or what was left."
Ren stepped closer. The spider-instinct supplied a cold calculation: Seven objects. Minimum five different owners. Based on wear patterns, collected over significant time intervals.
He shut the voice down. "Who were they?"
"Failures." The Siphoner's finger hovered over the feather earring. "The Sparrow's early vessels. Before they refined the bonding. Before they learned to keep the host's mind… mostly intact." Their voice didn't crack. It hollowed out. "The Auxiliaries would awaken in a storm of instinct. The host's consciousness would shred under the pressure. They'd become feral. Beautiful, lethal, and empty."
They turned then, and in the glacial light, Ren saw it—not a flicker in the eyes, but a profound, absolute exhaustion in the set of their jaw, in the slight drop of their shoulders. The weight wasn't physical. It was archival.
"My role," the Siphoner continued, "was to locate them. Contain them. And when containment failed… siphon the volatile Auxiliary energy before it could destabilize the local grid." A beat. "A clean, technical term for a messy, final thing."
The truth landed in Ren's gut, heavy and cold. They didn't just collect bodies. They put down rabid dogs. And they had kept mementos. Not trophies. Tombstones.
"You worked for them," Ren breathed. "You were the cleaner."
For a long moment, the Siphoner said nothing. The hum of the conduit was the only sound.
"I was the architect," they whispered, the confession so quiet it was almost lost in the hum. "The bonding protocol for the first dozen vessels… it was my algorithm."
The air left Ren's lungs.
The Siphoner didn't look away. Their gaze was open, stripped of its usual guarded steel, filled only with a quiet, unending horror. "I believed we were evolving consciousness. Creating synergy. I was… precise. I was wrong. The first vessel, designated Kestre, screamed for seventeen hours before the spider-instinct consumed her ego entirely. I had to siphon her myself. She looked at me, at the very end. There was just enough her left to know what I had done."
Ren could see it. Not with his eyes, but with the terrible, vivid clarity of the spider's empathy—a cold, technical understanding of another's pain. He saw the Siphoner, younger, unmasked, watching their creation come undone. He saw the moment the debt was incurred, a debt no amount of energy could ever repay.
"So this," Ren gestured between them, at the frozen tunnel, the desperate flight, "this is your penance."
"Penance implies forgiveness." The Siphoner turned back to the reliquary, their touch lingering on the frozen glass. "There is none. There is only the work. Ensuring the next one… ensures you… have a fighting chance to be more than a contained failure. To be something… else."
The word else hung in the cold air. It wasn't hope. It was a direction. A vector pointing away from a past of frozen graves.
A sharp, discordant ping echoed through the conduit, shattering the stillness. The friendly violet light stuttered, flashed red once, and died.
The Siphoner was moving before the sound finished, their momentary vulnerability sealed away behind a mask of swift action. "Grid scan. They're triangulating the sentry's death pulse." They grabbed a small device from their belt—a jagged piece of crystal—and slammed it into the terminal. "We have ninety seconds. There's a service shaft, fifty meters ahead. It's tight. It's dangerous. It's our only path deeper."
Ren didn't hesitate. The shared confession hadn't built trust—it had built a bridge of grim understanding. They were both fugitives, one from their future, one from their past.
As they ran from the chamber, Ren glanced back once. The reliquary, with its tiny, frozen feathers and broken chronos, was swallowed by the dark.
But the Siphoner, ahead of him, moved differently now. The tremor was gone. In its place was a furious, focused grace. The debt was no longer a hidden chain. It was a weapon they had both seen, and in the seeing, its weight had shifted.
They ran, not just from hunters, but toward the only thing left: the chance to be something else. The harmonic song of the Hive Core grew louder ahead, a siren call wrapped in ice.
And in Ren's chest, the three instincts listened, not in conflict, but in a rare, unified anticipation.