The holding cell before Echo Court was nicer than the one before his execution.
Different smell, for a start. Back then it had been damp wood, institutional fear, the faint copper edge of old rope. Here it was filtered air and antiseptic, recycled coffee from the corridor, ozone bleeding in through the vents where the Veil's cabling ran like exposed nerves.
Same collar, though.
It hummed softly at Arden's throat, syncing his heart to a tempo somebody else owned.
On the opposite wall, a glass panel played the loop again.
Rust Saints. Sewer chapel. Darius.
Edited.
They'd already cut the worst of it: the long frames where Shadow Host wore Darius's body like a well-loved coat, the shots where cultists were more mist than person, fragments of bone kicking along the wet floor. The sound mix had been smoothed, too—no high, wet shrieks, no ragged gasps from Ø7 as the chapel came apart.
But the bones of it were still there.
The saints kneeling in front of the rust-glowing altar, hands clasped, mouths moving.
The rust-lit icons on the wall, half melted leash hardware wired into crucifixes.
The first muzzle flash. The first body.
Arden watched himself on the screen, dragging Darius back by his harness, shouting something the edit had muted. His face was a wet mask of rustwater and reflected neon. He looked older. Or maybe that was just the pause-frame.
"Still think I should've smiled more?" Seraphine asked behind him.
She was sprawled on the bench under the panel, boots kicked out, one heel tapping a silent rhythm on steel. Someone had finally forced her into a fresh set of CAD blacks, but she wore the jacket open like it bored her. A shallow cut traced the line of her collarbone where Rust Saint shrapnel had kissed her; whoever did the stitches had been competent but not kind.
"The camera loves you either way," Arden said.
"Camera loves blood," she said. "Faces are just garnish."
Lyra stood close to the door, palms pressed lightly against it as if she were feeling a pulse. Her eyes were unfocused, pupils dilated past normal. Tiny threads of light moved under her skin, slow and exhausted—leftover code from the Heartline.
"They're rehearsing," she murmured.
"Who?" Arden asked.
"In there," she said, tilting her head toward the Court beyond. "The judges. Silex. The narrative architects. They're running the feeds through simulation to see which versions of us play best."
"Good to know we test well," Kai said.
He sat cross-legged on the floor with his back to the same wall as Seraphine, an interface slate resting on his knees. His fingers tapped idle patterns on the glass—code without commitment. His hair was still damp from the med-shower, curling at the ends, making him look younger than he ever let himself act.
"I got a peek at the routing," he went on. "They've prepped three packages: 'Necessary Purge,' 'System Glitch,' and 'Cultic Contamination.' All of them end with Rust Saints erased and us as either heroes or hardware you don't mention at parties."
"And Darius?" Arden asked.
Darius leaned in the corner nearest the door, arms folded. He hadn't said much since the chapel. He hadn't said much during the chapel.
He said nothing now.
Lyra answered for him.
"In Package One," she said quietly, "he's a precision instrument. They cut his eyes when they go wrong. In Package Two, he's a malfunction to be corrected. In Package Three, he's… background."
"They make the massacre a footnote?" Seraphine asked.
"Collateral," Lyra said. "Under the Mercy Credit threshold."
Arden's jaw ached. He realized he was grinding his teeth and forced himself to stop.
"I thought that's why we were here," he said. "Echo Court. You screw something up, they drag you in front of a panel and decide whether to decommission you or upgrade your leash."
Kai snorted. "Echo Court is where they make sure the story doesn't screw up," he said. "We're just there for set dressing."
The door hissed.
"Unit Ø7," a disembodied voice said. "Proceed to chamber."
The collar warmed in answer.
[OBEDIENCE PRIORITY: HIGH.]
[VENUE: JUDICIARY REVIEW THEATRE / ECHO COURT.]
Arden rolled his shoulders once, like he could shrug the designation off. He couldn't. He led the way anyway.
⸻
Echo Court looked less like a courtroom and more like an operating theatre built by someone who'd seen a church once and misremembered it.
Tiered seating rose in a semicircle, rows of black chairs occupied by silhouettes in Judiciary grey and Crown white. Their faces were dark behind Veil-filtered visors, each badge projecting faint glyphs above their shoulders—Departments, Committees, Boards. A full house of people whose job descriptions were verbs: audit, discipline, sanitize.
In the center of the room, a circular well of light held a raised platform. Not wood. Glass. Under their boots, footage ran in a slow, silent loop: sewer tunnels, Rust Saint shrines, the Drainage Chapel before the blood. A halo of projectors ringed the platform, ready to throw history into the air.
Around the platform's circumference, four smaller plinths held collar anchors. A fifth sat slightly apart, darker metal, alloy thick enough to stop small arms fire. The kind of post you used when you expected trouble.
"Cute," Seraphine murmured. "They got us the premium version."
Silex waited near the anchors with two Bastions flanking him—armored enforcers in expressionless helmets. His hands were clasped behind his back, posture at parade rest, collar a dull pulse at his throat.
"Asset Ø7," he said. "Positions."
The leash knew what that meant before Arden could react. His collar tugged, a soft but unarguable pull toward the nearest anchor. He stepped forward because anything else would have hurt worse.
The others moved with him. Darius took the heavy post without comment. Lyra slid into her place like she'd already rehearsed it in some private sim. Kai made a show of rolling his eyes but hooked his collar in one smooth motion. Seraphine took the last anchor and leaned into it, like the tether was just another piece of jewelry.
When the collars locked, a faint hum rose from the floor.
[UNIT LINK: SECURED.]
[ECHO FEED: LIVE.]
The ring of projectors flickered on.
A voice, genderless and flattened by processing, filled the chamber.
"Echo Court convened," it said. "Case designation: RUST SAINT INCIDENT / SUBSTRATE AUX-CHANNEL B12 / SAINT'S MERCY."
Somebody had a sense of humor.
"In attendance," the voice went on, "Directorate Oversight, CAD Command, Bureau of Repurposed Sentences Delegate, Public Morality Board, Crown Liaison Node."
"No actual public," Kai muttered. "Morality bought tickets instead."
Arden's lips twitched despite himself.
A figure in Judiciary white stepped to the edge of the tiers, high above. His robe glowed faintly with embedded circuitry; glyphs scrolled down his stole. Bureau priest. His shaved head caught the light like polished bone.
"Chain Dog Unit Ø7," he intoned, "you stand under internal review following a mission that resulted in the termination of eighty-three unregistered citizens, twenty-three registered dependents, and nine collateral Substrate workers."
The number hit Arden like a physical thing. He curled his fingers into fists.
"That count includes Rust Saints who had wired their nervous systems into illegal hardware," the priest said. "It also includes children sleeping in adjacent maintenance alcoves."
Silence pressed down. Somewhere in the tiers, someone shifted. A chair creaked.
The priest let the pause widen, like a wound.
"This Court recognizes," he went on, "that you were deployed under active handler oversight, pursuant to Leash Protocol and Civic Sanitation statutes. This is not a question of guilt, but of calibration."
"Translation," Kai murmured. "Nobody's asking if we did it. They're asking how useful it is that we did it."
Arden swallowed rust that wasn't there.
"Director Silex," the priest said, turning. "Your summary."
Silex stepped forward into the glow. His expression was neutral, edges clipped as if the room itself had edited him.
"Unit Ø7 was dispatched to investigate a signal anomaly in Substrate Aux-Channel B12," he said. "Rust Saint activity. They identified an unregistered transmitter grown from legacy leash hardware, now designated Manifold Heart. They neutralized it."
The projectors threw the Heart into the air: the rustwired server trunk blooming out of concrete, cables like veins, the glow in its core pulsing in time with an invisible pulse.
"Subsequent readings indicated continued contamination," Silex continued. "Ø7 pursued the signal to a secondary location—the Drainage Chapel. At this site, they engaged hostile cult elements attempting to weaponize Rust Saint ritual against the Obedience network. During combat, residual Shadow Host conditioning in Agent Darius Kell triggered a resonance cascade."
All eyes—behind visors, behind lenses—shifted to Darius.
He looked straight ahead.
"The cascade resulted in unsanctioned escalation of force," Silex said. "This Court must now determine whether that escalation was an acceptable malfunction, a necessary purge, or grounds for asset retirement."
"Retirement," Seraphine mouthed. "That's cute."
Arden's collar pulsed in warning.
He kept his mouth shut. For now.
The priest nodded to Silex. "We will now review the echoes," he said. "All images presented are extracted from CAD telemetry, collar feeds, and Underlayer bleed. Objections will be recorded and considered at the conclusion."
Lyra's fingers tightened on her anchor. Arden felt the unit-link tick over his skin—a ghost of shared heartbeat.
The floor went dark.
Then the chapel rose around them.
⸻
Echo Court didn't just play footage; it made you stand in it.
One moment Arden was on the glass platform, tethered under bright theatre lights. The next, the clamp of the collar shifted, remapping his sensory priority. The chamber blurred. The Drainage Chapel slammed into focus.
Rust stink. Wet stone. Hymns in binary echoing off the curve of the ceiling.
The saints knelt in rows, backs bent, halos of improvised circuitry flickering to the rhythm of the litany. Their shrine—central, obscene—pulsed with repurposed leash metal, error codes scrolling in rust.
Arden heard his own voice, replayed from leash-record:
"Stand down. You're sitting in an aneurysm."
He watched himself step forward, rifle low, trying to sound like authority instead of a man who'd nearly died on a similar stage.
Behind the echo, the real him stood, heartbeat double-tracked, collar buzzing.
"Pause," a voice from the tiers said.
The image froze.
A female avatar shimmered into view—Crown Liaison: a stylized face made of glass shards and fine print, eyes bright with legal text.
"Note," she said, her voice silk over static. "Chain Dog lead attempts de-escalation. Mark for public version."
"Public version?" Arden said sharply.
"Quiet," Silex said under his breath. The collar nipped in agreement.
The echo rolled on.
The Rust Saint Templar rose from the front row—a tall woman with rust-streak tattoos and a collar made of stripped conduit. She spread her arms wide, mouth opening to deliver their gospel.
In the real version, she'd been mid-quote when the first shot hit. In this cut, the audio ducked under the rising rumble of the Heartline. The projectors washed the shot in white flare so you couldn't see who fired.
"Pause," Lyra said suddenly.
The command shouldn't have worked; she wasn't on the control list. But the echo stuttered, glitching. For a second, the Templar's face flickered through three expressions—fury, exultation, a weird calm acceptance—before freezing.
Lyra lifted her gaze to the tiers.
"You're cutting frames," she said. "You're trying to hide where the signal spiked."
The priest frowned. "This is a curated echo for clarity," he said.
"You're lying," she said. Voice flat. Not angry; just stating a bug report. "The Heartline wasn't the only thing that surged. The Obedience lattice did, too."
Murmurs rippled around the chamber.
Arden felt the collar compress, a warning squeeze at his throat.
"Lyra," Silex said.
She tilted her head, listening to something only she could hear. When she spoke again, her tone smoothed into something almost gentle.
"If you cut that surge, you lose the cause," she said. "Then all you have left is the effect. Just a man killing people. That's not a calibration problem. That's a narrative you can't sell."
Crown Liaison's avatar flickered, legal text shifting.
"Point taken," she said. "Add ten frames preceding cascade back into internal cut. Restricted audience."
The echo unpaused.
They watched the moment in all its ugly truth.
The Heartline's rust glow spiked, throwing shadows sharp. Error codes screamed across the shrine, the Rust Litany twisting mid-line into raw Obedience commands. Arden saw Darius in the front rank, trying to cover both flanks. His collar light flared, overload-white.
[SHADOW HOST IMPRINT: RESONANT.]
[LATTICE PURGE: CASCADE RISK.]
Then the Host came.
On the platform, Darius shifted his weight. Metal clinked softly as his gauntlets brushed the anchor.
The echo Darius moved like the leash had taken the brakes off. No wasted motion. Each shot chose a target and removed it. Saints toppled, bodies scattering like dropped icons. The sound mix tried to flatten the screams; they still bled through in high, thin threads.
Arden watched himself again, wrestling Darius backward, shouting into his face, trying to get him back.
"Enough," he said hoarsely. "Stop. You're done. We're done."
The echo Darius's eyes were wrong—both too bright and dead. Then, slowly, they focused. His gun dropped a fraction.
Echo froze.
"Here," Silex said. "This is the pivot. Chain Dog lead reasserts control. Shadow Host recedes."
The Bastion on Silex's right nodded once, as if to himself.
"In any other unit, that would have been a full breach," he said. Voice low but amplified. "We'd be hosing them off the walls."
"In this unit," Silex said, "containment occurred in seven-point-three seconds. That speed is… informative."
Arden stared at the still frame of his own hands on Darius's harness. In the echo, his fingers were white-knuckled. In memory, they'd been slipping on blood.
The priest spoke again.
"The metrics of obedience are clear," he said. "Your Dogs executed the directive beyond intended scope. But they did so in the direction of the threat. Rust Saint signal contagion has been reduced to background static. The Manifold Heart is destroyed. The leak is staunched."
"At the cost of children," Arden said.
The Collar flared.
Pain tore through him—clean, electric, right down the spine. His knees buckled before he could stop them. The leash's voice slid into his teeth.
[TIER TWO FEEDBACK.]
[SPEECH OUT OF TURN.]
He tasted metal and burned ozone.
Silex's gaze didn't move.
"Reik," he said mildly. "Stand."
Arden forced his legs to straighten. The pain faded to a hot ghost along his nerves.
"Speak when questioned," the priest said.
"Question me, then," Arden rasped. "Ask how many of those saints weren't holding weapons. Ask who green-lit sending a man with a faulty bomb in his head into a chapel wired with old leash commands."
"Asset," Silex said. A warning.
"No," Arden said.
The word came out small but hard, a stone on glass. Every visor in the chamber tilted a degree.
"You want calibration?" he went on, voice rough. "Here's a slider for you: you built a thing to kill on command, you broke the command, and then you're shocked it kills anyway."
"You're out of line," the Bastion said.
"The line moves," Arden shot back. "Every time you call it mercy."
The leash fired again, hotter. His vision went starred for a second. He held onto the anchor with both hands, knuckles burning.
Somewhere above, a new voice cut in. Feminine, bored, with the faintest hint of amusement.
"Enough," it said. "You paid for his defiance. Let him spend it."
The tiers shifted, a ripple of bodies turning toward the source.
Arden squinted through the afterimages. A woman stood two rows back in the Crown block, visor retracted. Dark hair in a severe twist, mouth the color of old wine, eyes like they'd been grown for reading contracts. A Crown Representative, if he had to guess; the kind that didn't usually bother to show skin.
"Sara Quinn, Civic Optics Liaison," Lyra murmured over the link. "She chooses what the city sees."
Quinn smiled faintly, as if she'd heard.
"The footage you're about to cut," she said, to the room at large, "has already leaked in fragments. Rust Saint sympathizers scraped the underlayer hard before your purge went through, Director. They have just enough to turn this into a martyrdom reel. Unless…"
She let the word hang.
"Unless what?" Silex asked.
"Unless we give them something better," Quinn said. She nodded toward Arden. "A Chain Dog who breaks leash to pull a comrade back from Host. A team that risks the wrath of the machine to stop it from overcorrecting. That plays well."
"We're not props," Arden said.
"You're absolutely props," Quinn said comfortably. "You're just useful ones."
"Ms. Quinn," the priest said. "This is not a branding committee."
"Everything is a branding committee," she said. "But fine. Let's talk calibration. My office recommends reclassifying the Rust Saints from 'heretical contagion' to 'contained irregularity,' sealing the specifics of the massacre, and promoting Ø7's role in neutralizing the signal. Internally, we flag Shadow Host instability as a standing risk. Externally, we sell them as… necessary monsters."
Seraphine chuckled softly. "Finally, an honest job description."
"And the children?" Arden asked.
Quinn's gaze ticked from his face to the projector freeze-frames still hanging in the air: small bodies under emergency blankets, the spill of tiny shoes abandoned in the rush.
She didn't flinch.
"Collateral," she said. "Mercy is for the next batch. We give them a story about how you saved ten thousand other kids from Rust Saint indoctrination."
Something in Arden's chest tried to come out through his teeth.
"That's bullshit," he said.
Quinn's smile thinned. "Of course it is," she said. "But it's useful bullshit. If you want the truth, you can keep it in your nightmares. The city will get the draft I sign off on."
His collar started to warm again. Lyra's hand moved, subtle as breath, brushing the back of his wrist. The contact was nothing physically; in the unit-link, it was an anchor.
"Arden," she said quietly, not out loud but in the shared channel. "Pick your battle."
The leash cooled by a degree.
He closed his eyes once, hard, then opened them.
"Fine," he said. "Tell your story. But he doesn't die for it."
He jerked his chin toward Darius.
All at once, the focus of the room shifted.
Shadow Host. The bomb that wore a uniform.
The priest cleared his throat. "The question of Agent Kell's continued deployment remains," he said. "He is an asset with known volatility. The cascade nearly compromised the mission."
"Nearly," Silex said. His voice had acquired a new edge. "It also cleared the chapel in record time. Without the cascade, the Rust Saints' litany might have spread into auxiliary collar channels. We could be sitting here discussing how forty thousand collars in the Substrate were whispering prayers instead of orders."
"Is that your professional assessment?" someone from Oversight asked.
"It is my risk assessment," Silex said. "You hired me for that."
Quinn folded her arms. Seraphine shifted slightly, lips parting as if to speak—then thought better of it.
Arden watched Silex's profile, trying to parse where tactical pragmatism ended and something like… possessiveness began. Ø7 was his project. Killing Darius would be like admitting his own equations were wrong.
Above them, in the back row of CAD Command, a handler Arden didn't recognize leaned in to murmur something to a colleague. Seraphine's eyes tracked the motion.
"I can get you more than risk assessment," she said suddenly.
All attention in their quadrant dropped to her.
"In terms of…" the priest began.
"In terms of leverage," she said brightly. "Director?"
Silex's eyes narrowed a fraction.
"Vega," he said. "Not the time."
"Exactly the time," she said. She shifted her weight so the court lights caught the curve of her throat, the shine of her collar. Every angle was calculated, every twitch of her mouth deliberate. "If you want a cover story that sticks, you need texture. You need a villain you can afford to lose."
"Seraphine," Arden hissed.
She ignored him.
"Give me five minutes off the record with your favorite internal leak," she told Silex. "The one who got the judiciary hardware into the Rust Saints' hands in the first place."
Murmurs again.
"You're suggesting entrapment," Oversight said.
"I'm suggesting efficiency," Seraphine said. "You've got someone upstairs selling leash tech to sewer cults for fun and profit. You can burn Darius to make a point and hope the leak doesn't spawn three more in his place, or you can let me find the rot and make sure the next tribunal seats have different faces."
Quinn's eyes lit a little.
"This would play," she said.
The priest frowned. "We do not barter justice."
"We absolutely barter justice," Kai muttered.
Silex's gaze had gone distant, calculating.
"You think you can get a confession," he said, "and tie it cleanly to the Rust Saint transmitter chain?"
Seraphine smiled slow.
"I can get him to brag," she said. "And if I can't, Lyra can see where his signal trembles and Kai can follow the money. You keep Darius on the leash and off the chopping block, we give you a narrative where the real villain wears a badge and you look heroic for gutting your own corruption."
Lyra spoke, voice quiet.
"You also reduce Shadow Host's churn factor," she said. "Kell is an anchor. Remove him, Unit Ø7's stability curve drops. You will get more cascades, not fewer."
Quinn looked at the priest. "You wanted calibration," she said. "This is calibrated."
The priest's mouth worked for a second, like he was tasting something sour.
"This is irregular," he said.
"This is The Span," Quinn said. "Irregular is our business model."
Silex took a breath.
"Echo Court ruling," he said, without waiting for the priest. "Agent Darius Kell will remain active under enhanced oversight. Shadow Host imprint is to be monitored; any further unsanctioned cascades will result in immediate termination, unit-wide penalty."
Arden flinched. Unit-wide. Again. The collar thrummed, as if remembering the last time they'd discussed shared punishment.
"In exchange," Silex went on, "Unit Ø7 will assist in an internal investigation of hardware leaks to unsanctioned cult elements. Findings will be routed through my office and Ms. Quinn's for narrative integration."
"Crown concurs," Quinn said. "With the stipulation that public materials emphasize Ø7's restraint and loyalty."
"Restraint," Arden repeated under his breath.
Lyra's fingers brushed his again.
"It's not justice," she said, quiet enough that only the link heard. "It's triage. Take the blood they're offering."
He closed his eyes. Saw the chapel. Opened them again.
"Fine," he said. "But that leak talks. And I'm in the room when he does."
Silex's gaze flicked to him. Something unreadable passed there.
"We'll see," he said.
⸻
Formalities took another hour. The priest read clauses. Oversight stamped approvals. Public Morality flagged certain frames for "sensitivity re-edit." The collar stayed warm around Arden's throat the whole time, a reminder that the reprieve had teeth.
By the time the leashes unlocked, the world outside Echo Court felt too bright.
They filed back into the corridor. The door sealed behind them with a soft click that sounded more final than any verdict.
Kai exhaled hard.
"Well," he said. "We didn't die."
"High bar," Seraphine said. "Proud of us."
Darius hadn't spoken during the walk. He hadn't spoken since the Host receded. Now, in the quiet of the corridor, he finally looked at Arden.
There was no Host in his eyes now. Just a man who knew exactly what his hands had done and had to live with them.
"You shouldn't have argued," he said. Voice low. "They'd have let it land on me and left the rest of you alone."
"You're terrible at gratitude," Arden said.
"Not what I meant," Darius said.
"I know," Arden said. "I also don't care."
They stared at each other for a beat.
Kai watched them, expression unreadable.
"Silex wants you in maintenance Bay Nineteen," he said to Darius. "Recalibration and… chat."
"Both of us," he added after a second. "Apparently I'm your logic chaperone."
Darius's mouth twitched.
"Great," he said. "Therapy with wires."
"Don't blow up the bay," Seraphine said.
"Don't hack my leash," Darius said to Kai.
"No promises," Kai said.
They moved off together, two shadows heading toward the guts of the tower. The door swallowed them.
Lyra and Seraphine drifted away in the other direction, murmuring about schedules and access levels. For a moment, Arden was alone in the corridor, just him and the city's breath in the walls.
His collar hummed, a low, satisfied purr.
[VERDICT: ASSET VALUE CONFIRMED.]
[OBEDIENCE METRICS: WITHIN ACCEPTABLE VARIANCE.]
He pressed two fingers against the metal, feeling its heat.
"Collateral mercy," he said under his breath. "All the kindness you can stand, as long as it keeps the machine running."
The leash vibrated once, like it was laughing.
Arden pushed off the wall and went after his unit.
The Obedience Machine hadn't stalled. It had just learned a new trick: how to pretend it had a conscience.