The Span smelled different when you crawled under its skin.
Up top it was exhaust and ozone, recycled perfume and rain fried on hot metal. Down here it was rot and metal and something like old blood.
Arden's boots sank half an inch into wet grit as he stepped off the maintenance ladder. The tunnel stretched away in both directions—concrete ribs, a low central channel of sluggish black water, cables running along the ceiling like exposed nerves.
His collar hummed against his throat, unimpressed.
[ENVIRONMENT: SUBSTRATE INFRASTRUCTURE // CLASS: HAZARDOUS.]
[CONTAMINANTS: BIOLOGICAL / CHEMICAL / SIGNAL.]
"Nice to know signal counts as a contaminant now," he muttered.
"Only when it isn't ours," Kai said behind him. "Otherwise it's 'structural integrity'."
Darius dropped down from the ladder with a heavy thud that made the grating shake. The man's bulk made the confined space feel smaller.
"Form up," Darius said. "We're not here for sightseeing."
Seraphine landed last, boots barely making a sound on the slick floor. She straightened, flicked a damp strand of hair out of her face, and made a face.
"Whoever decided to mix sewage and fiber trunking should be shot," she said.
"They probably died of infection," Lyra said. She was already walking, eyes half-focused, fingertips trailing along the tunnel wall. "Or rust lung."
"Is that a real thing?" Arden asked.
"It is now," Lyra said.
The tunnel's central channel stank of everything a city tried to forget about itself. The black water wasn't just waste; it was run-off from cleaning drones, sacrificial solvents, chemical overflows. Globs of what might have been fat or polymer floated in it, pulsing gently as the current slid past.
"You sure this is the right place?" Arden asked.
Silex's voice came through the leash-channel, smooth as always.
"The signal spikes in this quadrant," he said. "Substrate Tier Delta-Seven, sewer trunk C-94. That tunnel intersects a decommissioned junction node. The interference to the Obedience lattice is originating there."
"Rust Saints territory," Kai added. "According to municipal records, which haven't been updated since before I was allegedly conceived."
"Explain again," Darius said. "As if I didn't read the briefing."
"The 'Rust Saints' started as maintenance crews," Silex said. "Workers tasked with preserving legacy infrastructure. They were superseded by drones and predictive algorithms, downsized, redeployed, or discarded. Some chose retirement. Others chose heresy."
"Heresy," Seraphine said. "Big word for 'kept doing their jobs where you couldn't see them.'"
"They began to treat corrosion as sacrament," Silex said. "They worship decay. They anoint failing systems with scrap, build shrines out of decommissioned hardware. Normally this would be harmless—urban folklore. But recently their 'shrines' have begun broadcasting unauthorized signals."
"Let me guess," Arden said. "Those signals are playing footsie with our collars."
"Correct," Silex said. "The Rust Saints have co-opted old leash-routing hardware in the underworks. Something is piggybacking on Obedience frequencies. Your penalty broadcast glitch was not entirely… organic."
Arden's stomach tightened.
"You're saying the static hearts came from the sewers," he said.
"Partially," Silex said. "Drayven's interference opened a path. The Rust Saints filled it with their own, ah, devotion. They've begun broadcasting a memetic overlay—an aesthetic corruption of state messaging—into the Underlayer and, potentially, into collars."
Kai whistled softly.
"So we're here to swat the fan club," he said. "Feels rude."
"You are here," Silex said, "to locate the source of the interference, sever it from the lattice, and neutralize any hostile actors. The Bureau is concerned that if your 'Saint Static' imagery continues to propagate, other units may begin to associate punishment with heroism."
Seraphine laughed.
"Gods forbid," she said. "Can't have the kids thinking pain isn't just a lesson."
Arden adjusted his rifle strap, the weapon a familiar weight at his side.
"And the Rust Saints?" he asked. "Orders?"
"Non-compliant individuals may be terminated," Silex said. "Compliant ones may be ignored. We're not in the business of purity, Reik. Just control. Do not waste ammunition on worshipers unless they interfere. The system can tolerate a little rust. It cannot tolerate a competing gospel."
The channel clicked soft.
Arden looked down the tunnel. The light from their headlamps carved cones through the murk, catching on droplets clinging to the ceiling.
"Forward," Darius said.
They moved.
⸻
The sewer trunk was a hybrid of old and new.
Concrete poured when The Span was young and optimistic, reinforced with spiderwebs of rebar now exposed in patches where the shell had flaked away. Newer additions clung to it—polymer patches, fiber-optic conduits stapled to the walls with plastic brackets, rusted sensor pods blinking orange in slow confusion.
Graffiti marked the surfaces. Not the usual gang tags and corporate slam poetry; this was something else. Jagged icons of halos slashed through with rusted lines. Stenciled saints with their faces eaten away by corrosion, leaving only empty circles. Symbols that looked like circuit diagrams turned into sigils.
"Great," Arden said. "Religious sewer graffiti. My favorite genre."
Lyra paused at one particularly dense cluster of markings, her fingers hovering a few centimeters from the wall.
"What is it?" Darius asked.
"It's not just paint," she said. "They embedded scrap into the concrete. Copper wire, old chips, bits of… is that a collar bracket?"
Arden leaned in.
A thin arc of metal jutted from the wall, half-embedded. It had the unmistakeable curve of a leash bracket, the part that sat at the base of the neck.
Rust had eaten it into a jagged smile.
"They're building shrines out of our hardware," he said.
"Repurposed obedience," Lyra said. "They call it rust, but it's still metal."
Kai scanned the wall with a wrist-mounted reader.
"There's low-level current running through the scrap," he said. "Barely a flicker. Enough to carry a trickle of data. Think prayer candles, but for packets."
Arden's collar pulsed in response, a faint tickle.
[UNAUTHORIZED SIGNAL: TRACE.]
[INTERFERENCE: LOW // NON-CRITICAL.]
"Feels like someone whispering in the next room," he said.
Seraphine's gaze swept the darkness ahead.
"Hear anything useful?" she asked.
"Not yet," he said. "Just static."
"Static made you famous," she said. "Show some respect."
They moved on.
The further they went, the more shrines appeared.
Some were simple: a cluster of rusted bolts hung on a wire, tinkling softly in the air currents. Others were elaborate: a human skeleton wired upright to a support column, bones lacquered with sealant, ribs studded with old chips that flashed faintly in their light.
Arden stopped at that one.
The skull still had a few teeth. Someone had painted a halo around it in some mix of grease and copper dust.
At its feet sat a pile of offerings: bent tools, broken halo bands, a child's toy drone with its wings snapped off.
"I hate this," Arden said quietly.
Darius stepped up beside him.
"The shrines we made were cleaner," Darius said. "Concrete slabs and names. This is…"
"Sentimental," Seraphine said. "In a horrifying way."
Lyra closed her eyes.
"There's signal here," she said. "Strong. This bone tower is wired into the grid. It repeats a simple pattern over and over."
"What pattern?" Arden asked.
Lyra's brows furrowed.
"A refusal," she said. "Over and over. 'No.'"
Arden looked at the skeleton.
"Comforting," he said. "Even their saints never shut up."
Kai finished his scan.
"Low bandwidth," he said. "Probably just a local repeater. The main broadcast has to be deeper. Silex's trace pointed to the junction node ahead."
"Move," Darius said.
They descended a sloped branch that fed into the main trunk. The air grew thicker, more humid. The central channel swelled, the water cresting closer to their boots.
Small things skittered away from their light—rats, probably, or rat-shaped drones. One larger shape slithered just under the surface, something pale and long whipping through the black water.
"You see that?" Arden asked.
"No," Kai said. "And I am going to keep not seeing it."
A soft sound floated down the tunnel—a murmur, rhythmic and low.
Voices.
Darius held up a fist. They halted, pressed to the walls, light thrown low.
Ahead, the tunnel opened into a wider chamber.
It had once been a junction node—Arden recognized the architecture from schematics: multiple sewer lines converging around a central sump, equipment platforms jutting out over the void, banks of control panels along the walls.
Now it was a cathedral.
Rust Saints had made it theirs.
Rust had eaten the metal struts into lace. Chains hung from the ceiling, each bearing offerings—old tools, busted drones, pieces of armor, halo bands bent into crude symbols. The central sump had been partially bridged by a web of grated walkways, forming a kind of altar platform above the black water below.
On that platform, a figure knelt in front of a towering structure of welded scrap.
The structure was… wrong.
It was built from old servers and broken routers, collared brackets and maintenance drones fused together with rebar and chain. Screens scavenged from who-knew-where dotted its surface, each cracked, some still glowing faintly. Rust had painted it all in shades of brown and black and sickly orange.
Wires dangled from it like intestines.
And in the center, like a heart, sat an old, gutted leash server—one of the racks that had once routed Obedience commands through the underworks.
Someone had painted a halo on its casing. Over and over. In overlapping circles, each slightly off-center, until it looked like a target.
The kneeling figure wore layered clothes—maintenance coveralls over which hung chains and scrap charms. A hood covered their head; from under it, wires trailed up into the shrine, connecting human to machine.
The voices came from around the chamber.
Arden's eyes adjusted, picking out shapes in the shadows along the walls—half a dozen, maybe more, Rust Saints sitting or kneeling, heads bowed, lips moving.
The words were a litany.
"Rust to rust," they murmured. "Wire to wire. Signal to signal. Break the clean code. Let the dirt speak."
Arden's collar warmed.
[INTERFERENCE: MODERATE.]
[OBEDIENCE CHANNEL: NOISE INJECTION DETECTED.]
Kai sucked in a breath.
"Found the source," he whispered.
Darius nodded once.
"Angles," he said. "Seraphine, right flank. Kai, find me a kill-switch. Lyra, stay between us and that thing. Reik—"
"I'm with you," Arden said.
He lifted his rifle.
Something laughed in his ear.
Not aloud. Not over the leash-channel.
Just a soft, fizzing chuckle, like static with a sense of humor.
He froze.
"Did you hear that?" he asked.
"Hear what?" Seraphine whispered.
"Never mind," he said.
They moved as one, slipping into the chamber's edge, using old consoles as partial cover.
As they stepped closer, the signal strengthened.
Arden felt it as a pressure at the base of his skull, a not-quite-voice pushing against the back of his thoughts.
— saint —
He swallowed.
"Lyra," he murmured. "What is it saying?"
She blinked slowly.
"It's… layered," she said. "Old leash commands, execution feeds, emotion fragments. They stitched it together like patchwork. There's… something of you in there."
"Of me," he said.
"Your penalty broadcast," Kai said. "Your Mercy Glitch. They grabbed a copy when the Public Penalty feed leaked. They're looping it. Splicing it with other failures. Feeding it back into the collars down here."
"Oh good," Arden said. "I always wanted to be liturgy."
The kneeling figure's shoulders jerked.
They stood.
The hood fell back.
The Rust Saint was older than Arden had expected. Late fifties, maybe, with a face carved by work and disappointment. Scruff at their jaw had gone mostly grey. Their eyes glittered in the dim light, bright with something that could have been faith or madness or both.
Wires trailed from plugs at their temples into the shrine. As they moved, sparks danced along the cables, small and frantic.
They turned, looking straight toward the shadows where Ø7 hid.
"Dogs," they said.
Their voice came doubled—their own and a thin, distorted echo from the shrine behind them.
"We're getting popular," Seraphine murmured.
"Do you smell that?" Lyra whispered.
Arden inhaled.
Sewage, rust, ozone.
Underneath it, something else: burnt insulation, hot metal, the metallic tang of blood.
"Yeah," he said. "You going to tell me that's just incense?"
Lyra's pupils were blown wide.
"They're burning code," she said. "And memories. Smells like a funeral for data."
Darius exhaled.
"We're done watching," he said. He stepped out from behind the console into the open, rifle up.
The Rust Saints along the walls looked up, startled. One scrambled to their feet, hand going for a wrench. Another reached for what might have been an improvised shock-baton.
The kneeling priest—because that's what Arden's brain filed them as—raised a hand.
"Stop," they said.
The others froze.
Their gaze settled on Arden.
He stepped out beside Darius, gun leveled.
The collar burned against his throat, caught between system and signal.
"Rust Saints?" Arden called. His voice echoed in the chamber, bouncing off concrete and metal. "Sermon's over. You're broadcasting on a channel that doesn't belong to you."
The priest smiled.
"Doesn't it?" they said. "The mainline forgot it ran through here. We just opened a tap. Let the excess flow."
"Who are you?" Darius asked.
"I am no one you care about," they said. "I am the rust on your bolt. The drip in your pipe. The bit-flip in your holy stack. Names are for the clean."
Arden's finger tightened on the trigger.
"Names make it easier to write reports," he said. "Humor me."
The priest tilted their head, considering.
"Fine," they said. "Once I was Crohn. Maintenance supervisor, Substrate Delta. I kept the wastes moving and the pipes breathing. Then the drones came. The algorithms. The budget cuts. I was told to retire. So I did. Downwards."
"You started a sewer cult," Seraphine said from the flank. "As hobbies go, it's committed."
Crohn laughed. The shrine laughed with them, a tinny echo half a beat off.
"We noticed something," Crohn said. "When they tore out old leash routers and left them to rot down here. They forgot to wipe them properly. Ghost commands, failed cascades, disobedience errors—all still humming quietly in the dark. Little prayers the Machine didn't want to hear anymore."
Lyra shivered.
"You collected them," she said.
"We gave them a home," Crohn said. "Built an altar around their noise. Let them speak to each other. To us. To anyone who still had metal in their neck."
They looked pointedly at Arden's collar.
"You felt it, didn't you?" they said. "The way the cascade faltered. The static hearts around your noose. That was us, Saint Static. We caught your scream and turned it into a song."
Arden felt something cold crawl down his spine that wasn't the sewer draft.
"I'm not a saint," he said.
Crohn's eyes gleamed.
"You said no," they said. "With the leash around your throat and the Machine in your head, you said no and lived. This city eats that kind of story. We just gave it better teeth."
"Great," Arden said. "So I'm your mascot. Cute. Here's the part where you shut this shrine down and walk away while you still have kneecaps."
Crohn's smile faded.
"We're not enemies," they said. "We're an update. You Dogs are the Machine's fangs. We're the rust that gums them up. Together, we could—"
The collar snapped hot.
[OBEDIENCE PRIORITY OVERRIDE.]
[HANDLER CHANNEL: OPEN.]
"Arden," Silex said. His voice cut across the chamber like a scalpel. "Terminate the broadcast. Now."
Crohn flinched, as if they'd been slapped.
"There he is," they said. "The leash inside the saint."
"This shrine is a threat to Obedience lattice integrity," Silex said. "Destroy it. If the cultists resist, kill them. If they surrender, mark their coordinates for retrieval. Do not negotiate."
The Rust Saints stirred, murmuring, hands tightening on tools.
Arden kept his rifle up, sight hovering on Crohn's chest.
"Looks like we don't have much wiggle room," he said.
"There's always room," Crohn said. "Rust gets in through the smallest cracks."
Their gaze flicked to Lyra.
"Ghost-Eyes," they said. "You hear it, don't you? The voices in the signal? The pain they threw away? We're giving them back. Nobody dies alone down here. Nobody dies clean."
Lyra's jaw set.
"I hear them," she said. "But they're not your toys."
Kai's voice was tight in Arden's ear.
"Arden," he murmured. "The shrine is wired into the old leash trunk and into three other nodes I can't see yet. If we just blow it, the feedback might ride up the network. Could fry collars in a wide radius. Including ours."
"Options?" Darius asked.
"Hard sever," Kai said. "Get me to the core, buy me time, I cut the connections manually. Gentle as I can. Like disarming a bomb made of ghosts."
"That sounds relaxing," Arden said.
Silex's voice sharpened.
"Drayven, this isn't a sandbox," he said. "We don't have time for delicate surgery. Destroy it."
"If we do that," Kai said, "we risk a cascade event you can't control. Ask your models. They'll give you the same answer, just with more decimals."
A pause.
Arden could almost hear Silex's teeth grinding over the line.
"Fine," Silex said. "You have three minutes. Then I trigger a sector quarantine and remotely overload the node."
"Three minutes," Kai muttered. "Isn't that adorable."
Crohn laughed again, bitter.
"You really think he won't cook you with the rest if his timer hits zero?" they asked. "Saint or not, you're all just assets on a ledger."
Arden met their eyes.
"I know exactly what we are," he said. "That's why I'm still here."
He nodded at Kai.
"Go," he said. "We'll cover."
Kai swallowed.
"Copy," he said. He broke cover, sprinting toward the shrine along a narrow metal walkway over the sump's black water.
The Rust Saints tensed.
Crohn raised their hands.
"Hold," they snapped. "Let him touch the saint. The Machine never lets them touch anything that matters. I want to see what he breaks."
Seraphine edged along the right flank, boots silent. Darius mirrored her on the left, rifle tracking.
Lyra stepped forward, placing herself slightly ahead of Arden, between him and the shrine, hands open.
"Lyra," he hissed. "Get back."
"If the signal flares," she said, "I might be able to damp it. Or at least direct the burn."
"That's not comforting," he said.
"Comfort is a bad metric," she said.
Kai reached the shrine's base.
Up close, it was worse.
He disappeared behind dangling chains and wires, hands moving fast, eyes flickering as he jacked into exposed ports.
"Okay," he said, voice taut. "This thing's a nightmare. They're using redundant loops, sacrificial buffers, and a lot of prayer. Give me sixty seconds to at least stop it biting the collars directly."
"Sixty," Darius said.
Crohn watched them with unnerving calm.
"You're doing it wrong," they said. "The signal isn't a pipe to be shut. It's a weather to be read."
"Funny," Arden said. "We're not here as meteorologists."
The pressure in his head spiked.
The shrine's cracked screens flickered to life, one by one.
On each, an image.
Arden saw his own face on the penalty platform, jerked and smeared, static hearts orbiting his collar. He saw other Dogs in other theatres, screaming on other days. He saw crowds laughing, crying, bored. Execution feeds. Riot footage. Leash-cam views of targets kneeling and dying.
The images blurred, overlapping.
Voices rose—not quite words, more like exhalations. The air vibrated with them.
"No," Lyra whispered. Her hands clenched.
"Lyra," Arden said sharply. "Stay with me."
She sucked in a breath, forced her shoulders down.
"It's trying to climb," she said. "Up your collars. Into your heads. It wants to rewrite the narrative. Pain as sacrament, not deterrent."
Arden's collar throbbed.
For a heartbeat, he wasn't in the sewer.
He was back on the platform in Penalty Theatre, lights hot, Veer's voice preaching. The cascade tearing through him.
Except—this time, the crowd wasn't looking at him with fear or satisfaction.
They were laughing. Crying. Dancing. Static hearts bobbed in the air like balloon animals. Someone had painted his collar neon pink.
A child in the front row held up a sign: SAINT STATIC, FREE US.
He blinked, hard.
The sewer rushed back—the stink, the rust, the hum.
"Arden," Darius snapped. "Eyes."
"I'm here," Arden said. "Signal's pushy."
"I can see your pupils singing," Seraphine said. "Kai, how's that bomb coming?"
"Don't distract me," Kai said through clenched teeth. "I'm elbows-deep in sacrilege."
Crohn spread their arms.
"Feel it," they said. "The Machine wanted your pain to teach obedience. We're teaching something else. That even with the leash, you can refuse. That the saint screamed and lived."
"I'm not your saint," Arden said again, teeth grinding.
Crohn's grin was luminous in the dim.
"That's what makes you perfect," they said. "Real saints never asked for it either."
The Rust Saints along the walls started to sway, murmuring.
"Rust to rust," they chanted. "Signal to signal. Break the clean code. Let the dirt speak."
Arden's trigger finger itched.
"Darius," he said quietly. "We're losing the room."
"Not yet," Darius said. "But the slope is steep."
The collar pinged.
[HANDLER TIMER: T-01:12.]
"Drayven," Silex said. "Status."
"Almost got the worst of the lattice hooks cut," Kai said. Sweat ran down his face. "You overloaded this thing with more redundancy than a Judiciary safety briefing."
"I didn't build it," Silex said, offended. "Some sewer heretic did."
"Well, the heretic's good with fail-safes," Kai said. "Almost… there—"
The shrine screamed.
This time it was literal.
A high, tearing sound shredded the air as one of the dangling speakers blew, sparks showering down. The cracked screens flashed white, then black, then settled on a single image.
Arden's face.
Dead on the rope.
Eyes glassy, neck at a wrong angle, collar dark.
He stared at his own corpse, hanging there, pixelated and grainy.
"Nice," he said hoarsely. "Good composition."
"Not ours," Crohn whispered. They looked genuinely shaken. "We cut that feed. We never—"
The image of hanged-Arden smiled.
His neck was still broken.
His eyes snapped toward the camera.
"Obey," corpse-Arden said, voice deep and wrong, layered with a thousand cascades.
The signal punched into their collars.
Pain lanced up Arden's spine.
Not as bad as a full cascade—but sharp enough to make his muscles jerk. He heard Seraphine hiss, Darius grunt, Lyra choke.
"It's hijacking Obedience routines," Lyra gasped. "Feeding itself through punishment pathways."
Silex swore—a rare crack in the mask.
"Abort," he snapped. "Drayven, pull out. All of you, fall back. I'm initiating shutdown from above."
"Wait," Kai said. "If you slam it now, the feedback—"
"Is preferable to a viral obedience loop," Silex said. "We're out of time."
Arden's HUD flashed red.
[REMOTE OVERRIDE: INITIATED.]
[OBEDIENCE LATTICE PURGE SEQUENCE.]
"Oh, fuck," Arden said.
The shrine's heart—the old leash server—began to glow.
Heat rolled off it in waves.
Crohn staggered.
"What are you doing?" they shouted. "You'll fry everything down here! The pipes, the Saints, the Dogs—"
"They'll fry us to keep the chart clean," Arden said. "That's the deal."
Darius lifted his rifle.
"Call it," he said. "Our move."
Arden made a decision.
"Lyra," he snapped. "Can you push the signal sideways? Into the shrine, away from us?"
She swallowed blood.
"I can try," she said.
"Kai," Arden said. "Cut whatever you can cut. Fast."
"Doing that," Kai said. His hands were a blur.
"Seraphine," Arden said. "With me."
She smiled, sharp and insane.
"Thought you'd never ask," she said.
He stepped forward onto the grated walkway, moving toward the shrine's base. Every step made the metal vibrate.
The Rust Saints shifted, confused and frightened.
Crohn stared.
"What are you doing?" they demanded.
"Trying not to die," Arden said. "Side effect: might save your rusty altar."
"Saints don't compromise," Crohn said.
"I'm not a saint," Arden said. "I'm a man with a bad collar and worse options."
The purging heat climbed.
Lyra spread her hands, eyes rolling back as she dove into the signal.
Arden felt something in the air twist.
The pressure in his head moved—not away, exactly, but redirected, streaming toward the shrine's core.
Kai shouted, triumphant and terrified.
"Got it!" he yelled. "I've isolated the lattice bridges. The purge is going to slam into local hardware first. If Lyra holds the vein, it might not climb back up the collars."
"'Might' is doing a lot of work in that sentence," Seraphine muttered.
Arden reached the shrine's base.
Up close, he could feel its heat. Screens flickered, showing flashes of faces, Dog after Dog after citizen after target, all snarled together.
Hanged-Arden stared back at him from the central screen.
"You will obey," the fake said, voice echoing.
Arden bared his teeth.
"Wrong saint," he said.
He lifted his rifle and fired into his own image.
The bullet punched through the screen, showering glass and sparks. The shot's echo rolled around the chamber.
The shrine convulsed.
Heat spiked, then dropped. Lights flickered madly. The dangling wires whipped, lashing the air like angry snakes.
Lyra screamed.
Arden turned.
She stood with her hands outstretched, body rigid, eyes wide and blind. Biolum threads under her skin flared, veins of light.
"Lyra!" he shouted.
She didn't answer.
Electric arcs danced between her fingers and the shrine.
The signal, deprived of its easy path up the collars, sought the nearest open circuitry.
Her.
Kai swore.
"It's jumping into her," he said. "She's the low-resistance route now."
Crohn watched, horror-struck.
"We never meant—" they whispered.
Arden dropped his rifle, lunged.
He grabbed Lyra around the shoulders from behind, hauling her back.
Pain jolted up his arms, not as sharp as the leash but bright enough to make him bite his tongue. For a nauseous instant, he felt the signal riding her—voices, images, a storm of disobedience and obedience and everything in between.
Then Darius was there, big hands closing around both of them, anchoring.
Seraphine slammed her baton into a junction point on the shrine's flank, sparks flying.
"Kai!" she yelled. "Pull the plug!"
Kai jammed a tool into the core port and twisted.
"Come on," he snarled. "Die, you beautiful monstrosity—"
Something inside the shrine popped.
The lights cut.
Darkness crashed down, broken only by the muted glow of their headlamps and the faint biolum in Lyra's skin.
Silence.
Arden's ears rang.
His collar cooled, status sliding back toward baseline.
[INTERFERENCE: DROPPING.]
[LATTICE PURGE: CONTAINED.]
He realized he was on his knees, Lyra's weight slumped against his chest, Darius bracing them both.
"Everyone alive?" Arden croaked.
"Annoyingly," Seraphine said. "My hair, less so."
Kai coughed, emerging from behind the shrine, singed and wide-eyed.
"I think I just killed a god," he said. "Or at least a very angry ghost router."
The Rust Saints stared at smoking, dead metal.
Crohn fell to their knees.
"Our saint," they whispered. "You murdered it."
Arden gently eased Lyra down, checking her pulse.
It fluttered, fast but steady.
Her eyes fluttered open. For a heartbeat, they were full of static—tiny flickering patterns playing across her irises.
"Hey," he said softly. "You with us?"
She blinked again. The static faded, replaced by her usual strange calm.
"Yes," she said. Her voice was hoarse. "That hurt."
"Welcome to leash-adjacent work," he said.
She frowned slightly.
"It's quieter," she said. "In the lattice. For now. The rust is… sulking."
Silex's voice slid back in, tight.
"Status," he said.
Arden wanted to say: We just saved your precious Obedience Machine from a sewer cult you created by accident. He settled for:
"Node neutralized," he said. "Lattice purge contained. Collars intact. Rust Saints… upset."
"Collateral?" Silex asked.
"Zero dead," Darius said. "Yet."
Crohn lifted their head.
"You broke our saint," they said. "Dragged your leash through our temple. You think we won't bleed for that?"
Arden looked at them.
"You built your saint out of my execution," he said. "And out of a system that's been killing people for decades. Today, it almost killed us too. That's not divinity. That's bad engineering."
Crohn's eyes burned.
"You could have joined us," they said. "Let the signal eat the leash. Let the rust win."
"You don't understand rust," Arden said. "It doesn't win. It just eats. It doesn't care what falls. You want to break the Machine? Fine. But don't pretend you're better when you're using its scraps to build your own altar."
The Rust Saints shifted, restless.
Darius's hands flexed on his rifle.
Seraphine's gaze swept the chamber, calculating angles and likelihoods.
Silex's voice came, cool again.
"Extraction team is en route," he said. "Mark the cultists who resisted. They'll be processed. The shrine components will be recovered for analysis."
Crohn laughed once, bitter and small.
"Analysis," they said. "You'll weigh our rust on your clean scales and call it error. But the signal's already out there, saint. You can't unring a bell. You can only pretend you didn't hear it."
Lyra struggled to sit up. Arden steadied her.
"The bell's cracked now," she said. "Your node's gone. The lattice is… different. It'll take time for the Machine to notice. But it learned something today too."
"And you?" Crohn asked. "What did you learn?"
Lyra's gaze went distant.
"That pain remembers," she said. "And that it resents being archived."
Arden got to his feet, helped her stand.
He looked at the dead shrine, the smoldering hardware, the Rust Saints clutching their charms.
He thought of the static hearts on the screen. Of the boy in the plaza. Of Roe on her knees. Of Seraphine's forehead pressed to his on the roof.
Of his own hanged face telling him to obey.
"I learned," he said, "that if you let anyone else write your story, they'll always make you the villain or the warning. Never the person."
He turned to Darius.
"Tag the shrine for pickup," he said. "Mark the Saints. No one dies unless they start it."
"That's not what he ordered," Darius said quietly.
"I know," Arden said. "He can send us a strongly worded memo."
His collar pulsed, as if offended.
[NON-COMPLIANCE: MINOR.]
Silex's sigh crackled over the channel.
"Rust Saints are disposable," he said. "But if you insist on mercy, fine. They'll go to holding. Their hardware to my labs. You keep giving me interesting problems, Reik."
"Happy to help," Arden said.
He looked back at Crohn.
"Congratulations," he said. "You wanted to gum up the Machine. You did. Just not how you thought."
Crohn stared at him.
"What are you going to do?" they asked. "When the rust reaches your leash?"
Arden touched the collar, fingers resting on cold metal.
"Hope it snaps instead of just staining," he said.
He turned away, leading Ø7 back toward the tunnel.
Behind them, the dead saint loomed—scrap and silence, its last scream still ringing faintly in the metal.
Up above, The Span's veins trembled.
The signal had been shoved back into the dark, for now.
But rust spread slowly. And it never forgot where it had started.