The service shaft was not a tunnel. It was a wound.
The walls were raw, unfinished crystal and jagged ice, scraped open by ancient glacial movement. It was barely wider than Ren's shoulders. He had to move sideways, his back scraping against one frozen wall, his chest inches from the other. The blue glow of the Undercity didn't reach here. The only light came from the Siphoner's glove—a stingy, concentrated violet beacon that made the ice gleam like jagged teeth.
The air was thin, sharp with the taste of ozone and millennia-old cold. Every breath felt stolen.
"Keep moving," the Siphoner's voice was a tight echo ahead. "Don't touch the walls with your bare skin. The residual Volt-energy can induce neural feedback."
Feedback, the spider-instinct supplied, analyzing. A euphemism. It means your mind will try to sync with the memories trapped in the ice. It will hurt.
Ren tucked his hands into the rough fabric of his sleeves. The spider's clinical tone was a constant, chilling companion. The dragonfly was quiet, its attention turned outward, mapping the treacherous path with a hyper-alertness that made every crystal facet seem significant. The centipede was a low, regulating hum, keeping the other two from expending energy on panic.
He focused on the Siphoner's back. Their movements were efficient, unerring, even in the crushing dark. They didn't hesitate at forks or turns. This wasn't just a route they knew; it was a path they had walked, deeply and personally.
Forty-seven meters in, Ren's dragonfly vision caught it.
A faint, hairline fracture in the ice-wall to his right. Not a natural crack. It was a symbol, etched with a fine, desperate precision: a looping, interconnected spiral, ending in a sharp downward stroke. It was familiar.
His breath hitched. He'd seen that symbol. In the fragmented, burning memories of his awakening—scratched into the rusted metal of his supposed 'home,' doodled in the margin of a forgotten digital pad. A subconscious tic from a life that wasn't real.
"You recognize it." The Siphoner's voice wasn't a question. They had stopped, their light fixed on the etching.
"It's… mine. From before." The words felt wrong. Before was a lie. "From the memories they gave me."
The Siphoner was silent for a long moment. The violet light trembled, just once. "It's not yours," they said, their voice stripped of its usual guarded edge, revealing something raw and terribly tired. "It was theirs."
Ren's blood went cold. "Theirs?"
Instead of answering, the Siphoner reached out. Not to touch the etching, but to place their palm flat against the ice an inch away. The violet light from their glove bled into the crystal. For a second, nothing happened.
Then the ice remembered.
A phantom resonance, not sound but a vibration in the mind, pulsed from the wall. A wave of static—not auditory, but emotional. It was a cocktail of fear, dizzying hope, and a crushing, profound loneliness so acute it made Ren's eyes water. Woven through it was a singular, sharp cognitive signature: a mind that thought in spirals and connections, that saw patterns in chaos.
It was the same pattern of thought he'd felt in his own head when the spider-instinct analyzed a threat.
"What is this?" Ren whispered, his voice choked.
"An echo," the Siphoner said, their own voice thick. "The strongest memories, the sharpest emotions… they can imprint on the conductive ice. Like a fossil. This one is… persistent."
The Siphoner's light flickered, and for a heartbeat, Ren saw their reflection in the ice—overlaid with another, fainter image. A younger face, sharp-eyed and fierce, smiling with a challenge. The image was gone in an instant, but the ghost of it hung in the air.
Kai, the spider-instinct whispered, pulling the name from the emotional residue like plucking a thread. Designation: Kai.
"Kai," Ren breathed aloud.
The Siphoner recoiled as if struck. The violet light snapped off, plunging them into absolute blackness.
"Don't," the word was a blade in the dark. A plea and a command.
In the sudden, suffocating dark, the echo didn't fade. It grew. The loneliness solidified into a specific, targeted yearning. Not a general sadness. A missing. A missing of this—the close, shared darkness, the silent understanding, the scent of ozone and frost that was on the Siphoner's cloak.
Ren understood. The clarity was a punch to his soul.
"They were with you," he said into the black. "You came this way with them. The first tri-linked vessel. The one you… lost."
The silence that followed was absolute. It was the sound of a wound being reopened.
When the Siphoner's light re-ignited, it was dimmer. Their posture was defeated. "Kai," they confirmed, the name a sacred, painful relic. "They called it a breakthrough. A perfect tri-partite synergy. Dragonfly agility, spider cunning, centipede resilience. Not a hierarchy, but a council. It was… beautiful to witness." They traced the air near the etching, not touching it. "Kai was beautiful. A storm in a human shape. They carved this here. Said it was a 'waypoint for the lost.' A joke." The Siphoner's laugh was a dry, broken thing. "They were always making light of the dark."
Ren leaned his forehead against the cold ice, away from the etching. He could feel it now—the ghost not just in the wall, but in the space between them. In the Siphoner's precise knowledge, in their desperate need to guide, in the way they sometimes looked at him and saw a shadow.
"What happened?"
"The Hive Core." The Siphoner's voice was monotone, a recitation of a catastrophe. "We were mapping its neural lattice. Kai's connection was too pure, too strong. The Core didn't see a visitor. It saw a missing piece of itself. It… sang. A binding song. Kai's consciousness started to harmonize, to unravel and weave into the greater network. They were being assimilated."
The shaft felt like it was shrinking, the walls pressing in with the weight of the story.
"I tried to pull them back. I siphoned at the connection point." The Siphoner looked at their glowing hand, their expression one of deep horror. "It was like trying to drain an ocean with a cup. And I… I hurt them. The feedback, the severing… in their last moment of clarity, they looked at me. Not with fear. With apology." They finally met Ren's eyes, their own gleaming with unshed tears held back by sheer will. "Then they were gone. Not dead. Absorbed. A vibrant, brilliant storm, dissolved into the static of the Hive."
The truth settled over Ren, colder than the ice. The Siphoner wasn't just seeking penance for creating monsters. They were on a rescue mission for a ghost. And Ren was the only key that fit the same lock.
"You think because I'm like them, I can reach them. Pull them out."
"No." The Siphoner's denial was swift, fierce. "I think because you are like them, you are in the same danger. I am trying to keep you from becoming another echo in the walls." They pushed away from the ice, their mask of practicality slamming back into place, but it was cracked now, and the pain bled through. "Kai is part of the song now. To try and pull them free would destabilize the Core, and likely shatter what's left of their consciousness. Some graves… you do not disturb."
But Ren heard the unspoken conflict, the desire that warred with the logic. It was in the way they had said the name. Kai.
A new, different ping echoed down the shaft, not from their conduit, but from above—a mechanical, scanning pulse.
"They've found the shaft entrance," the Siphoner said, urgency overriding grief. "We move. Now."
They pushed forward with renewed, almost frantic speed. Ren followed, his mind reeling.
The ghost was no longer an abstraction. It was a spiral etched in ice, a specific loneliness, a name that caused a crack in the Siphoner's armor. And it was a warning. The end of his path wasn't just control or death. It was dissolution. Becoming part of the beautiful, terrifying song.
As they scrambled out of the shaft into another cavern, this one strewn with the colossal, fossilized ribs of some ancient beast, the harmonic hum of the Hive Core was deafening. It wasn't outside him anymore. It was in his teeth. In the marrow of his bones.
The three instincts inside him were no longer just listening.
They were answering.
A low, sub-vocal thrum rose in his chest, a harmony to the Core's song. The dragonfly's wings (that did not exist) buzzed. The spider's legs (that were not there) tapped a rhythm. The centipede's segments (woven into his nervous system) pulsed in time.
We know this, the spider thought, and for the first time, the thought was not cold, but full of a terrifying, reverent recognition. We remember.
Ren clutched his chest, his heart hammering against a cage of instinct and borrowed memory. He looked at the Siphoner, who was watching him with a new, desperate intensity.
"It's calling them," Ren gasped. "Not just me. The Auxiliaries… they remember the Hive."
The Siphoner's expression hardened into grim resolve. "Then we don't have days. We have hours. The Sparrow will throw everything at us to get to the Core first. To get you first."
They looked from Ren to the vast, dark throat of the cavern ahead, where the song originated. "We need to find a way to shield you. Or to make you… unpalatable."
Ren's instincts recoiled at the word. The ghost of Kai swirled in the static between them, a silent testament to all the ways a person could be consumed.
The hunt was no longer a chase. It was a race towards a feast, and Ren was the main course.