The Span pretended it was calm.
Arden could feel the lie in the pavement.
They'd closed three arterial tiers for the procession—sealed off transit lanes, rerouted mag-strips, flooded the route with uniformed bodies. Traffic hummed above and below, restless, like the city grinding its teeth around a shiny pill it hadn't decided to swallow yet.
He stood in the open back of the parade carrier, collar gleaming a regulation white-blue at his throat, and tried not to tug at it.
[PUBLIC EVENT: HEROIC RECOGNITION PARADE — UNIT Ø7.]
[BEHAVIORAL EXPECTATION: COMPLIANT / INSPIRATIONAL.]
The notification floated at the edge of his vision, soft and pastel, like an apology.
"Smile," Seraphine said under her breath. "You're scaring the children."
"There are children here?" Arden asked.
"Half the front rows," she said. "Veil's blurring them so you don't notice."
He glanced over the carrier's side.
Crowds packed the observation tiers that hemmed the route—Substrate workers in patched jackets, Crown aspirants in cheap lacquered ponchos, Judiciary clerks who'd taken their lunch breaks to watch. Faces blurred and sharpened as the Veil adjusted focus, smoothing out bruises, editing out contraband. Whenever his gaze lingered on someone too long, little info-tags tried to bloom around them: AGE RANGE, TAX BRACKET, COMPLIANCE SCORE.
He blinked them away.
Closer to the barricades, the kids were clearer. Teenagers mostly. A few younger ones sitting on shoulders. Broken-halo tattoos flashed in the crowd—inked at throats, wrists, under eyes. Some wore cheap replica collars, LEDs dimmed to suggest noncompliance. One girl's jacket carried a stylized image of a dog's head with a leash made of static.
Kai's fault. "Saint Static." The meme that wouldn't die.
The Underlayer overlays rode the official feed, blooming hearts and glitch halos around Ø7 whenever a camera lingered on them. On the giant screens ringing the route, the five of them strode in slow motion, collars flaring with soft focus glow.
The caption scroll read: CHAIN DOGS OF DIVISION Ø7 — PROTECTORS OF THE SPAN.
Right underneath, someone's pirated filter added a second line in flickering graffiti-font: GOD'S FAVORED PRISONERS.
Arden snorted.
"You see that?" he asked.
Kai, leaning against the carrier's interior wall with his hands hooked into the rail, didn't look up from his floating interface.
"I see everything," he said. "Unfortunately."
"Your fan club's getting bolder," Seraphine said. "They upgraded from 'murderer kink' to 'martyr chic.' That's character development."
"Brand synergy," Kai said. "The Directorate does the oppression, I provide the post-production. We're a team."
"Don't say 'we,'" Arden said. "I still remember who put the hearts around my neck on the public penalty feed."
"And you're still breathing because I made you too popular to dispose of," Kai said mildly. "You're welcome."
The carrier slowed as they approached the first plaza checkpoint. Ahead, the route widened into a ceremonial avenue lined with Judiciary banners. Drones hovered at polite intervals, lenses swiveling like insects tracking heat.
Above it all, the dome flickered.
Rain had been scheduled for atmosphere—light, visually pleasing, not enough to ruin anyone's hair. It came down in thin silver threads, catching the light from holo-banners, turning the air into a curtain of static.
Arden listened.
Not just to the crowd noise—the roar, the whistles, the periodic chant that tried to cohere into Ø7, Ø7 before dissolving into laughter—but to the hum underneath. The leash routers. The climate control. The faint, layered whisper he'd started hearing ever since Sleep Cycle: a not-quite-voice in the storm.
See through storms, Lyra had whispered. Then I'm not hallucinating alone.
The rain hit his face, warm and too clean, and felt like fingers on the glass between him and something watching.
Lyra stood at his left, close enough that their shoulders almost touched. Her eyes were tracking—up, not out. Following invisible paths across the dome's inner surface.
"Forecast?" Arden asked, quietly.
"There's a spike in observation protocols," she murmured. "Extra eyes in the system. They want this to look… smooth."
"Smooth like a knife," Seraphine said.
"Smooth like an apology," Lyra said. "The Span's telling itself a story about mercy."
Arden let his gaze drift back to the screens.
The official narrative played on loop: sanitized footage of Ø7 pushing through Rust Saint strongholds, collars glowing, weapons precise. In the clips, the Saints fell cleanly, like actors exiting stage left. No screaming, no rust-glow, no Shadow Host. Just righteous efficiency set to orchestral swells.
He remembered lit tunnels and glowing corrosion, a chapel made of scrap and error logs, Crohn wired to a cruciform rack, blood on Darius's hands that hadn't all been enemy. The Lattice Purge blazing through hardware and bone. Lyra's voice shaking as she anchored him to his own name.
The feed showed none of that.
Instead, a smiling anchor in Judiciary teal narrated: "Thanks to the decisive actions of Unit Ø7, the terrorist cult known as the Rust Saints has been suppressed, their illegal signal scrubbed from critical infrastructure. The Obedience Machine continues to keep us safe—"
Kai made a gagging noise.
"I didn't even optimize that script and I hate it," he said.
"Don't hack the commentator," Seraphine said. "We talked about this."
"Wasn't going to," Kai said. "I like to leave some evidence of organic stupidity in the wild."
Darius stood at the far end of the carrier, one hand braced on the support bar, the other resting near the rifle mag at his hip. He wore full armor, helmet off but clipped at his side—a deliberate choice, Silex had said. Human faces played better on the feed.
Right now Darius's face looked carved out of older stone than the rest of The Span.
His gaze moved slowly across the crowd, not searching for a specific threat so much as cataloguing patterns: clumps of too-still onlookers, hands reaching into pockets, the subtle shift of bodies about to surge.
"Hostiles?" Arden asked.
"Plenty," Darius said. "Most of them unarmed."
"Kids with tattoos," Seraphine said. "Old ladies with opinions. Teenagers who think we're hot."
"We're walking through a pressure cooker and calling it a parade," Darius said. "If something goes wrong, it'll go wrong everywhere at once."
"Comforting," Arden said.
"Realistic," Darius said.
The carrier rolled to a stop at the plaza's center.
"Presentation point," a disembodied voice said over the unit-link. Silex. Calm, precise. "Ø7, disembark in formation Omega-Three. Public address on my mark. Remember: your restraint is as important as your presence."
"Define restraint," Arden said.
"Not biting anyone who isn't actively shooting at you," Seraphine said.
"New standard," Kai murmured. "Proud of you."
"Move," Darius said.
They stepped down as one.
The pavement under Arden's boots was a polished composite that tried to look like stone. It reflected the dome-sky in distorted ripples, the rain turning the surface into a shallow mirror. His own collar gleamed back at him—bright, decisive, like punctuation.
Cheers rolled over them in a wave.
"Smile," Seraphine repeated, softer now. "They don't know what they're clapping for."
"That's most religion," Kai said.
Lyra's fingers brushed Arden's wrist, a quick, grounding contact. "Breathe," she said. "In case the title's literal."
He did.
The air tasted of ozone, disinfectant, and the faint metallic tang that meant blood had been washed away from this stone a lot more often than the Veil admitted.
Screens bloomed overhead, projecting their march from a dozen angles. Arden watched himself move—a taller, steadier version, HD-clean, collar-glow calibrated to be aspirational. The Veil smoothed the old scar on his throat, softened the lines at the corners of his eyes.
It left the Vultures of 41 tattoo on his forearm untouched.
Someone in Presentation had fought for that. Or forgotten.
The crowd noticed. A ripple moved through the nearest tier—fingers pointing, lips shaping the old gang sigil, mouths curling in recognition, fascination, disdain.
A boy at the front, maybe sixteen, held up a hand-lettered placard: DOGS OF THE SPAN = DOGS OF GOD.
"Subtle," Seraphine said. "Do we get royalties on blasphemy?"
"Only if it tests well in Crown focus groups," Kai said.
"Eyes up," Darius said.
Silex's voice slid into their ears, smooth as polished metal. "Unit Ø7. On my cue, stop, turn to Plaza Axis Four, and hold. Public address overlay will handle voice; you just have to look… emblematic."
"Define emblematic," Arden muttered.
"Don't define emblematic," Kai said. "He'll send a slideshow."
Seraphine's collar chimed, a light reprimand. She shut her mouth, but her smirk didn't go anywhere.
They reached the marked spot—a luminous circle pulsing faintly on the ground. They stopped as one, faces upturned toward the main screen.
"Good," Silex said. "Now let the city see what it bought."
The anthem started.
It wasn't an official anthem—not one Arden recognized, anyway. It sounded like someone had taken the old Judiciary promo stings and buried them under a slow, grinding bassline. Choir voices floated in and out, just sharp enough to feel like teeth.
As the music swelled, the screen cut to a montage: Ø7 moving through sewers and saint-chapels, boots splashing in black water, collars bright beacons in the dark. The footage pulled from real mission feeds, but every ugly moment had been polished. Rust glowed aesthetically. Blood looked like lens flare. Screams were edited down to convenient grunts.
Text crawled along the bottom: RUST SAINT INCURSION: NEUTRALIZED.
Arden's chest tightened.
On-screen, a slowed-down clip showed Darius dragging a civilian out of crossfire, shielding them from debris. Another showed Seraphine yanking a Rust Saint's weapon away and flipping them neatly to the ground, baton a blur. Kai stood in a shower of sparks, hands buried in a junction box, lines of code reflecting in his lenses. Lyra knelt over a wounded Saint, hand on their chest, collar glow syncing with theirs until they went still.
The clip cut before it showed whether that stillness was mercy or finality.
Then came Arden.
There he was, in full resolution, walking straight down the center of a Rust Saint congregation, weapon low, collar at maximum-spectrum brightness. Saints reached toward him in slow motion, mouths open in prayer or curse. Rust-heart shrines crackled around him.
The overlay wrapped static hearts around his head like a halo.
The crowd roared.
For a second, the sound hit him like a physical force. Not just volume—not just the sum of throats and hands and feet—but the weight of attention. Tens of thousands of eyes turning him into a story.
His collar pulsed in time with it.
[OBEDIENCE INDEX: ELEVATED.]
[PUBLIC SENTIMENT: FAVORABLE / FRACTURED.]
"Easy," Lyra murmured.
"I'm not doing anything," Arden said.
"That's the problem," she said. "They are."
He looked out at the crowd again.
In the second tier, a woman in a maintenance jumpsuit stood stone-still while everyone around her screamed and cheered. Her collar was old, the metal scuffed, the light a tired amber. She watched him with a flat, measuring gaze. No hatred, no adoration. Just recognition.
Beside her, a little boy bounced up and down, ecstatic, waving a plastic toy rifle. His collar was decorative—a hollow band of painted polymer. When his eyes met Arden's, he grinned so wide it looked painful.
Arden tried to smile back.
It felt like borrowing someone else's face.
The anthem shifted key. The screen cut to a composite—the five of them standing shoulder to shoulder, helmets off, collars bright. Overlaid text:
MERCY THROUGH STRENGTH.
STRENGTH THROUGH OBEDIENCE.
"Great," Seraphine muttered. "We're a slogan."
"We've been a slogan," Kai said. "Now we're merchandising."
Darius's jaw flexed. The rain had started to bead on his lashes, tiny spheres of filtered water magnifying the town of tiny scars around his eyes.
"Something wrong?" Arden asked.
Darius didn't answer immediately. His gaze had shifted, not outward this time, but up—toward the dome, toward the dense, roiling grey where the city's weather systems hid their machinery.
The rain had thickened.
Not by much. Just enough to shift the sound. What had been a slick, constant hiss turned granular for a moment, that same static texture Arden remembered from Gridblind Theta-9. Ghost Syntax in the rain. Halos screaming through the sky.
His collar pricked his skin.
[LEASH CHANNEL: NOMINAL.]
[UNDERLAY INTERFERENCE: LOW.]
The text insisted everything was fine.
Arden listened harder.
Beneath the anthem, beneath the crowd, beneath the hum of the Obedience Machine, something breathed. A long, slow inhale, like a giant filling its lungs.
"It feels like the city's holding something in," he said.
Darius huffed out a humorless breath.
"It never stops exhaling," he said. "We just get quiet enough to hear it once in a while."
That line wasn't for Arden. It wasn't even really for Ø7. It sounded like something Darius had been waiting years to say out loud, and the parade had finally gotten loud enough to make it safe.
The anthem cut off on a sharp note. The crowd noise swelled to fill the vacuum.
A disembodied MC voice rolled over the plaza, rich and warm, tuned to evoke trust.
"Citizens of The Span," it boomed. "Today we honor those who stand where we cannot. Those who carry our sins so we may sleep. Unit Ø7 of the Compulsory Asset Division—our Chain Dogs—have purged corruption from the underworks and restored stability to the Obedience Lattice…"
Arden stopped listening to the words.
The voice said what voices like that always said: necessary sacrifices, brave service, mercy wrapped in steel. He'd heard variations of the script at other ceremonies, usually from the wrong side of the weapon.
Instead, he watched the crowd.
Faces tilted up, mouths moving with the words. Some recited along, lips shaping the lines as if they were prayer. Others mouthed something else entirely—curses, slurs, private mantras.
In one of the balcony rows, a Rust Saint sigil flickered briefly on a poncho—rust halo, wire-heart—before the Veil blurred it into a smudge of brown. The person wearing it didn't move, didn't cheer, didn't boo. Just stood there like a glitch the system hadn't fully resolved.
Lyra's fingers tightened on Arden's wrist.
"Signal?" he asked.
"Yes," she said. "Quiet. Deep. Like someone listening to the listening."
"Kairos?" he asked, low.
She shook her head. "Not yet. But… adjacent."
Kai's voice buzzed in their ears. "Just for the record," he said, "they've spun up extra Architect-adjacent monitoring processes for this. At least Level Gamma-Plus oversight on the leash net. We're being watched by things that don't blink."
"Comforting," Seraphine said.
"If they decide we misbehave," Kai said, "the response will be… educational."
"They're not going to kill us in the middle of a parade," Arden said.
"Not kill," Kai said. "Redirect. Edit. There are worse things than death."
Arden thought of Sleep Cycle. Of upward rain and code-faces. Of a voice that had said his name like a variable in a system it already owned.
It will see through storms.
He looked up.
For a second, the rain froze.
Not physically—his skin still felt the patter—but visually. The drops hung in midair on the inside of his HUD, each one a tiny frozen line of static. Then they inverted, falling upward instead of down, crawling back toward the dome.
He sucked in a breath.
"Lyra—"
"I see it," she whispered.
Then the moment snapped. The rain resumed its proper direction. The HUD cleared.
His collar hummed, an almost soothing vibration.
[VISUAL ANOMALY: DISMISSED AS TRANSIENT.]
[RECOMMENDATION: IGNORE.]
He almost laughed.
On the screen above them, the MC's speech crested.
"…and so we invite you to join us in gratitude. Raise your hands. Show your faith. The Span breathes because the Obedience Machine does not sleep."
Hands rose.
Some in salute, some in fists, some in gestures that meant nothing and everything. From certain angles, in the flicker of rain and light, it looked like the city was surrendering. From others, like it was reaching.
Arden's collar brightened in response, syncing briefly with the crowd's gesture patterns. Telemetry pulsed along the leash trunk—a tide of emotional data, fear and adoration and disgust and curiosity all stripped of nuance and fed into the machine.
Lyra shivered.
"They're feeding it," she said. "Every cheer, every scream. It's all input."
"Everything's input," Kai said. "We're just more… caloric."
"Think they'll ever get full?" Seraphine asked.
"No," Lyra said. "That's the point."
Silex's voice cut back in, quiet and clipped after the MC's resonance.
"Unit Ø7," he said. "You will now perform the recognition salute."
"The what now," Arden said.
"Face Plaza Axis Three," Silex said. "Place right hand over collar, left hand open to the crowd. Hold for eight seconds. This gesture has tested well in simulations."
"Of course it has," Kai muttered.
"Do it," Darius said.
They turned in unison.
Arden's fingers found his collar, the metal warm under his touch. He lifted his left hand, palm out.
The crowd responded instantly—mirroring the pose, thousands of hands over imaginary leashes, thousands of palms raised. For a heartbeat, something in Arden's chest lurched.
From the right angle, it didn't look like obedience at all.
It looked like a city reaching for its own throat.
The rain softened.
The sound of it shifted again, from static hiss back to a more familiar patter. The dome lights dimmed a fraction, the simulation of stormlight easing. Somewhere overhead, pumps and fans changed pitch.
The Span adjusted its breathing.
The MC wrapped up. The anthem reprised in a shorter, cleaner version. Confetti cannons—biodegradable, of course—spat white and silver flakes into the air, each piece embedded with a tiny Helios sigil.
"Parade route resuming," Silex said. "Maintain formation. You've performed adequately."
"Is that his way of saying 'proud of you'?" Seraphine asked.
"If it is," Kai said, "we should never let him try for 'I love you.' The dome will crack."
They moved again.
As the carrier rolled forward to take them to the next plaza, the crowd began to thin. Some people drifted away, feeds satisfied, lunch breaks over. Others followed along the route, jogging parallel, trying to stay close enough for one more glimpse.
A little boy broke past a distracted barricade guard and sprinted toward the carrier, plastic rifle bouncing.
Arden saw it out of the corner of his eye and tensed, muscles ready for the inevitable tackle, the stun-baton, the cry.
Darius was faster.
He stepped to the edge of the carrier and simply… looked down at the kid.
The boy skidded to a stop, eyes huge. Up close, his fake collar looked even cheaper—spray-painted cardboard, edges fraying where sweat had soaked through.
"You're real," the boy blurted. "They said you're just—just actors, or like, filters, or—"
"We're real," Darius said.
His voice was softer than Arden expected.
The guard finally caught up, hand closing on the boy's shoulder, ready to yank him back.
Darius lifted one hand, palm out—not the recognition salute, just a quiet, open gesture.
"Easy," he said.
The guard hesitated. Looked up at Darius's face, at the collar, at the camera drones hovering nearby. His grip loosened.
"Back behind the line, kid," he said, less harsh now.
The boy hesitated.
"Do you—" he started.
He looked at Arden then, eyes bright with that terrible, raw hope kids got when they thought the story might make room for them. "Do you like it?" he asked. "Being a Dog?"
Arden's collar hummed like a warning.
He opened his mouth.
Say yes, the machine whispered, in the cadence of a thousand PR scripts. Say you are grateful. Say obedience saved you. Say—
"No," Arden said.
The word came out flat. Honest.
The boy blinked.
For a heartbeat, silence spread out from that word like a shockwave. The nearest section of the crowd went still. Drones tilted. Somewhere, a monitor logged a deviation.
Arden felt the collar tighten, just a fraction—a reminder of pain sequences, of Collateral Mercy, of what happened when he refused an execution order and Seraphine had overridden his leash and taken the hurt with him.
He kept going anyway.
"I don't like it," he said. "But I'm here."
He tapped the collar with two fingers.
"And this likes it when I keep walking."
The boy's face crumpled in a way Arden couldn't parse—disappointment, relief, confusion.
"Okay," the kid whispered.
Darius's hand brushed Arden's shoulder as the guard hauled the boy back behind the line.
Silex's voice slid into his ear, soft and razor-sharp.
"Ø7-∆-AR," he said. "That answer was not in the approved set."
"Neither was the question," Arden said.
A pause.
"Consider this your free anomaly," Silex said. "It tested… interestingly. Don't make a habit of it."
The line clicked off.
Kai exhaled a sound that was almost a laugh. "Congratulations," he said. "You just became a more expensive asset."
Seraphine was looking at him with a strange expression—half exasperated, half something like pride.
"Mercy in public," she said. "You really don't enjoy breathing easy, do you?"
"Not my brand," Arden said.
Lyra's fingers found his wrist again, a quick squeeze. "The machine noticed," she murmured. "But so did the boy."
"Great," Arden said. "We're corrupting minors now."
"Every kindness is contagion," Lyra said. "They can't firewall it forever."
The carrier turned off the main avenue, route looping back toward CAD towers. The crowds thinned further. Screens switched from Ø7's montage back to ads: debt forgiveness plans, sleep cycle packages, under-tier augment subscriptions.
Rain kept falling.
By the time they passed through the security choke back into the Directorate's shadow, the noise of the city had shifted back toward its usual register—less roar, more grind.
The parade dissolved behind them like a dream.
Inside the security tunnel, the light changed—white-blue, clinical. The carrier rolled into the waiting bay. Doors sealed. External feeds cut.
For the first time since they'd stepped out onto the plaza, Arden realized he'd been holding his breath.
He let it out.
The Span did not.
Somewhere above, the machine that ran the city drew in another slow, patient inhale, ready to turn everything it had just witnessed into data and doctrine.
Arden's collar hummed, slightly off-rhythm.
He listened anyway.
If the city was holding its breath, it wasn't in anticipation of his next move.
It was in anticipation of its own.