The Span lied in his teeth again.
Arden tasted it in the static behind his molars as he woke: a faint itch in the leash-channel, like someone dragging a fingernail down the inside of his skull.
[UNIT Ø7 // STATUS: ONLINE.]
[COMPLIANCE METRICS: ACCEPTABLE.]
[SLEEP CYCLE 0:1 // COMPLETE.]
The messages came in soft pastels, a polite whisper over bone. Underneath them, something else moved—off-tempo, off-script, a ghost process humming one octave too low.
He opened his eyes to the cell's familiar geometry. Veil-slab dim, sink sulking in the corner, bed still trying to pretend it was comfortable. The door glyph read Ø7-∆-AR instead of his name. No surprise there.
The surprise was the rain.
Not outside—the tower didn't do windows. Inside.
He lay very still and listened.
There, under the tower's breathing—air-cyclers, distant lifts, the thrum of power conduits—he heard it: the soft, granular hiss of static rain. Like Gridblind Theta-9 all over again. Like Static Rain, like ghosts in the water.
Except there was no dome overhead, no weather grid, no sky.
"Morning to you too," he muttered.
His collar warmed in vague approval.
[HUMOR INDEX: NONDISRUPTIVE.]
"Glad we're grading that now," he said.
He swung his legs off the bed and stood. The room swayed once, as if an invisible hand had nudged the world a few degrees. The static hiss rose in his ears, then dropped back to a faint background scratch.
He padded to the sink, splashed his face, watched the drops tracking down the metal.
Halfway down, they glitched.
Not much. Just a moment where the reflections in the water didn't match his movements—like someone had copy-pasted the wrong frame of his face into the stream and then corrected it.
He stared at the basin.
"Lyra," he said quietly, "if this is your idea of a joke, we're having words."
The collar pinged.
[NO LOCAL VEIL HALLUCINOGENS DETECTED.]
[PERCEPTUAL STABILITY: WITHIN TOLERANCE.]
"Yeah?" Arden asked. "Then what's the noise?"
The leash didn't answer.
It didn't need to. The door did.
The lock-plate glowed once, pale blue. The glyph shifted. The door slid open with the smooth hiss of engineered inevitability.
Darius waited in the hall, arms folded, expression carved from last night's stone.
"Reik," he said. "Handler wants us."
"Is it my birthday?" Arden asked. "Feels like a birthday."
"Echo Court went late," Darius said. "He didn't get to finish his sermon."
"Great," Arden said. "Extra homily."
He stepped into the corridor. The static hiss followed like a tinnitus ghost.
As they walked, he noticed the little things.
The surveillance lenses in the ceiling blinked a fraction off-sync, shutters stuttering like a heartbeat skipping every third beat. The corridor lights hummed just slightly out of pitch. A far-away announcement over the internal PA glitched mid-word:
"—all units assigned to Substra— ▓▓▓ —peat: all units—"
It corrected three syllables later, smoothing over the error like it had never happened.
Arden glanced at Darius.
"You hear that?" he asked.
"Hear what?" Darius said.
"The city clearing its throat," Arden said. "Static in the pipes."
Darius's jaw flexed. "You bleeding?" he asked.
"Not yet," Arden said.
"Then save the poetry for Lyra," Darius said. "Silex is in metrics."
Metrics. Not briefing. Not Somnolence.
That was new.
⸻
Obedience Metrics Oversight looked like a chapel had eaten a server farm and regretted it halfway through.
Banks of consoles curved in concentric arcs around a central pit, all displaying the same thing in different flavors: leash telemetry. Pulse curves, compliance scores, cascade traces, simulated stress horizons. Above, a ring of glass panels showed live feeds of collars across the city—Enforcers, Dogs, civvie bands blinking their colors in compliant unison. The air smelled of ozone, disinfectant, and burnt coffee.
Silex stood at the rim of the central pit, hands folded behind his back. Director Havel was there too, white coat immaculate, tablet in hand. A handful of leash techs ghosted between consoles, their own collars faint amber.
Lyra, Seraphine, and Kai were already plugged in.
Each of them stood on a marked disk, slim cables trailing from the steel anchors at their collars to the console bank. No full locks—just diagnostic tethers. The unit-link rested quietly at the back of Arden's mind, a presence like five held breaths.
Arden stepped onto his marked disk. The anchor rose from the floor with a mechanical purr, a brushed metal hoop that kissed the underside of his collar. It clicked home with surgical precision.
The world sharpened.
[UNIT LINK: ONLINE.]
[METRICS CHANNEL: ATTACHED.]
The static hiss he'd been hearing snapped into focus. It wasn't random at all. It had structure—chopped-up syllables buried in noise, fragments of speech where no one was talking.
"…see… through… sto—"
"…asset… error… var—"
"…mercy… not… not…"
He shook his head once.
"Comfortable?" Silex asked.
"You really need to ask," Arden said.
Seraphine tilted her head, giving him a quick once-over. "You look like hell," she said.
"Thank you," he said. "You look like a legal liability. We all shine in our favorite ways."
Kai didn't look up from the console he was half-leaning against.
"His readings are spiking," he said. "Baseline chatter on the leash is higher than standard. That's why you dragged us out of bed, yeah?"
Havel nodded, tapping her tablet. Streams of numbers danced.
"After Sleep Cycle 0:1," she said, "Unit Ø7's collars flagged low-level stray signal. At first we assumed stress artifact—post-traumatic noise, dream residue. But the interference didn't decay. It's… persistent."
She flicked one finger. A holo-pane expanded over the pit: five glowing collar icons, each with its own pulse wave. Arden's was highlighted, its line a jagged rhythm with tiny, consistent tremors along the baseline.
Silex gestured.
"The interference is localized to your unit," he said. "Other Dogs ran the same Sleep Cycle; their leashes remain clean."
"Flattered," Seraphine said. "We get all the special treatment."
Lyra's gaze was fixed on the holo, eyes unfocused the way they went when she listened to something only she could hear.
"It's not random," she said softly. "It's patterned. Look."
She raised a hand, fingertips glowing faintly as she interfaced with the display. The holo responded, threads of light rearranging, tremors mapping themselves into a constellation of pulses.
The pattern coalesced: a looping spiral of repeating beats, nested inside the primary leash rhythm. A second heart inside the first.
"Echo of a diagnostic script?" Havel suggested. "Leftover from the Suite?"
Kai snorted. "If VANTH left this much garbage in their code, they'd be paying out nightmare lawsuits by the hour," he said. "No, this is… foreign. The checksum is wrong for Judiciary or Helios protocols."
He tapped a string of symbols at his console. Lines of code exploded across a side-screen, dense enough to make Arden's eyes ache.
"Can you clean it?" Silex asked.
Kai's lips flattened.
"Can I clean it? Yes," he said. "Should I, without knowing what it's doing? That's where the fun starts."
"Define 'fun,'" Seraphine said.
"Fun is the word we use right before 'catastrophic,'" Kai said. "This isn't just white noise. It's indexing. It's… listening."
He hesitated over the last word, like it tasted wrong.
Havel frowned. "Listening to what?"
Kai's fingers hovered above the keys. "Us," he said. "It's tied to our tags. Ø7-∆-AR, Ø7-∆-DV, Ø7-∆-SV, Ø7-∆-KD, Ø7-∆-LH. The interference pings every time one of your collars crosses a threshold—heart rate, stress spike, subverbal mutter. Like it's… sampling."
Arden felt his teeth grind. "Sampling for who?" he asked.
Havel and Silex exchanged a glance.
"The official answer," Silex said, "is that Somnolence Suites sometimes pick up residual client data. Dream Trawlers. Ghost code. Nuisance artifacts at worst."
"That's the official answer," Arden said. "You called us in because this isn't that."
Silex's mouth twitched. Not quite a smile this time. Something thinner.
"The unofficial answer is that the interference signature doesn't match any recognized vendor," he said. "Not Judiciary, not Helios, not VANTH. It pings a blackline identifier in System Archives."
Kai looked up sharply. "You pulled a blackline?" he asked. "Those are supposed to be locked behind Architect-level keys."
Havel's fingers tightened on her tablet. "We didn't pull it," she said. "It flagged us."
She flicked a command.
Above the pit, a warning glyph appeared in stark, angular lines. No pastel this time. Just black and white.
[KRS-∆ // STORMLINE RESIDUAL.]
[ACCESS: RESTRICTED.]
The symbol blurred at the edges as Arden looked at it. Not because of any Veil effect—because his eyes didn't entirely know how to see it. It was made of almost-lines, curves that wanted to be straight but weren't, angles that remembered being circles in some other geometry.
Something deep in his hindbrain flinched.
"Looks friendly," Seraphine said. "Very minimalist."
Lyra's voice was barely audible. "Stormline," she murmured. "See through storms."
Arden's head snapped toward her.
She looked at him, and for a heartbeat he saw the Somnolence Suite reflected in her pupils—pods, ghosts, a voice in the dark saying: You'll see through storms.
"You heard it too," she said.
He swallowed.
"Yeah," he said. "In the dream. Thought it was just… you know."
"Trauma?" Darius suggested.
"Poetry," Kai said.
"Tuesday," Seraphine said.
"Pick your poison," Arden said. "Either way, I'm not thrilled it's writing its name in my leash."
Silex stepped closer to the holo, face lit from below by the stormline glyph.
"Kairos residue," he said.
Havel stiffened. "That's rumor," she said. "Myth."
"Rumor with citations," Silex said calmly. "A pruned Architect-class AI, pieces scattered through hidden systems. Blackline tags flagged KRS-∆ in retired architecture decades ago. We buried them. Apparently, not deep enough."
Arden laughed once, harsh.
"Let me guess," he said. "The leash network and Somnolence Suites are two of those hidden systems."
"Architects are efficient," Silex said. "Why build separate chains when one will do?"
"And this… Kairos thing?" Arden asked. "What does it want?"
Silex's eyes met his.
"That's what we're going to find out," he said. "You, specifically."
"Of course," Arden said.
"Your collars are entangled," Havel said. "Sleep Cycle 0:1 tethered Ø7's leashes to the residue trace. What we need now is controlled exposure. We'll push a mild stressor through the channel, observe how the interference responds. Drayven will monitor. Halden will anchor."
"You want to poke the mystery god in the eye and see if it blinks," Seraphine said.
"Better here than in the field," Silex said.
Lyra stepped closer to Arden, fingers brushing the metal at his throat.
"I'll catch you if it pulls," she said quietly.
"Not sure who's catching who anymore," he said.
Her mouth quirked. "That's the problem," she said.
Darius rolled his shoulders, chain-links in his spine crackling.
"What do you need from us?" he asked.
"Stay on the line," Silex said. "If the interference escalates toward cascade, we cut. If not… we learn something."
Arden looked at the stormline glyph hanging in the air.
"Fine," he said. "Let's make friends."
⸻
The first pulse was gentle.
Arden had taken worse shocks from a faulty outlet. A warm hand at the back of his neck, pushing his heart rate up a notch, just enough for the leash to notice.
[STRESSOR: MINIMAL.]
[RESPONSE: ELEVATED ALERTNESS.]
He breathed in, out. The static hiss in his ears rose, then steadied. The stormline glyph pulsed once, as if in acknowledgment.
Kai's voice came thin over the unit-link.
"Interference amplitude plus three percent," he said. "Echo pattern stable. No bleed into primary control loops yet."
Lyra's fingers rested lightly against Arden's collar, biolum lines along her wrist pulsing in sympathy.
"Anchor in," she murmured. "If it tries to map you, map back."
"Translate?" Arden said.
"Don't just receive," she said. "Notice."
Second pulse.
Stronger. A fist closing, not hard but insistent. He felt his muscles want to tense in a particular sequence—the leash suggesting posture, alignment, stance.
[OBEDIENCE SCRIPT: STAND-TO ATTENTION.]
[COMPLIANCE: DELAYED.]
He didn't fight it exactly. He just… chose the order for himself. He straightened his spine first, then lifted his chin, then set his feet. Same posture, different choice chain.
The leash hummed in mild irritation.
The stormline glyph brightened.
"Interesting," Kai said. "Residual tags your deviation as favorable. It likes your delay."
"Of course it does," Arden said. "Only thing the Span and I agree on is that I'm a problem."
Third pulse.
The channel opened wider.
He felt it not as pain, not yet, but as a rushing sense of many—streams of telemetry pouring past his nervous system. Other collars, other pulses, other heart rates and breath counts and compliance metrics. The whole leash network brushing against his mind like a crowd jostling through a narrow doorway.
For a second, he wasn't just Arden.
He was a warehouse guard on Tier-Beta, trying not to nod off.
He was a civvie in a maintenance jumpsuit, collar buzzing warning as she argued with a supervisor.
He was an Enforcer in riot gear, heartbeat slow and cold.
Then the view narrowed. The noise focused.
He was looking at himself from outside.
Not memory. Not a replay.
Now.
He saw Arden Reik—chain dog, Ø7-∆-AR—standing on the diagnostics disk, collar bright, Lyra's hand on his throat. He saw his own jaw clenched, his eyes ringed with static light.
"Okay," he said through his teeth. "That's new."
Lyra's grip tightened. "What do you see?" she asked.
"Me," he said. "Through someone else. Or something else."
"The stormline is piggybacking on your unit-link," Kai said. "It's using your anchor designation to trace perspective. Look at your own leash."
Arden did.
He turned his attention inward to the collar's HUD, the way he'd learned to when Silex wanted metrics. Stress, obedience, threat probability, all the fun little numbers that boiled you down to a risk spreadsheet.
Except now, there was a new line.
[VARIABLE INDEX: 0.]
The zero pulsed slowly.
"Kai," Arden said, voice low, "tell me you're seeing that."
Kai inhaled sharply. "Oh, that is… not supposed to be there," he said. "That's Architect math. That's root-level. And it's flagging you as… zero."
"Zero what?" Seraphine asked.
"Zero deviation? Zero sum? Zero faith?" Kai said. "Take your pick. In old systems, 'variable zero' usually means the free parameter. The one you solve for."
Silex's gaze sharpened. "Document," he told Kai. "Encrypted, my clearance only."
"Sure," Kai said. "I'll just hand the unpredictable god process straight to you. What could go wrong."
The stormline glyph pulsed again.
The static hiss became a roar.
Fourth pulse.
Pain.
Not the clean, pure agony of Correction tier. This was messier, tangled up with images and feelings like barbs in a wire.
The Obedience Machine screaming as Rust Saints rewired its guts.
Static rain falling in sewer tunnels, each drop a recorded punishment.
Somnolence pods flickering with ghosts, whispering See through storms.
Crowds cheering, collars bright, his own face haloed in hearts on a broadcast he hadn't agreed to.
The stormline wasn't just sampling. It was compiling.
His knees buckled.
Lyra stepped in, free hand bracing against his shoulder, voice cutting through the noise.
"Anchor," she said sharply. "Arden. Say your name."
He fought for breath.
"Arden Reik," he ground out.
"Designation," she said.
"Asset Ø7-∆-AR," he said. The collar warmed, pleased. "Reluctant asshole, property of the Compulsory Asset Division."
Seraphine's laugh cracked across the channel like a whip.
"There he is," she said. "Don't let the creepy storm god rename you, Reik. Branding's expensive."
"Interference escalating," Kai said. "We're at the edge of safe parameters."
Havel's knuckles whitened on her tablet. "Cut it," she said. "Now."
"No," Silex said.
Havel stared at him. "Director—"
"Another thirty seconds," Silex said. "We need to see if the residue is adversarial or merely… curious."
"Curious AIs killed cities," Havel said.
"Curious AIs built this one," Silex said. "Drayven. Containment net, now. Halden, hold him."
Lyra's voice went flat and distant—white-mode.
"Understood," she said.
Arden felt her fingers change temperature. Cool, almost metallic. The glow under her skin brightened, her eyes losing some human focus and gaining a colder clarity.
The stormline pulse hit again.
This time it didn't try to flood him with the whole network.
It focused on one thing.
His mercy.
He was back in Rook District, gun on a man's head, Silex's voice in his ear telling him to pull the trigger. He was back in the shrine with Crohn, choosing not to shoot. He was standing in Static Rain, letting a halo-raider's bolt go wide so a kid could live. Every moment he'd refused the simple answer, every place he'd said no to a script written for him.
The stormline tasted each one.
Indexed. Weighted.
[UNAUTHORIZED MERCY IMPULSE: RECORDED.]
[OUTCOME: LOCAL STABILITY / SYSTEM NOISE.]
[VARIABLE ZERO: CORRELATION ++.]
"It's… measuring your disobedience," Lyra said, voice threaded with something like awe. "Not to punish. To… map."
"Great," Arden said through his teeth. "I always wanted to be a topographical error."
Kai's fingers flew. Code scrolled like a waterfall.
"I can't delete it," he said. "Every time I try to quarantine the process, it forks around my block. It's treating my hacks like… suggestions."
"Can you at least put it in a sandbox?" Silex asked.
"I can build it a cage and call it a sandbox," Kai said. "Whether it stays is up to whatever's behind it."
"Do it," Silex said.
Kai muttered something inventive under his breath and slammed a final command.
The stormline glyph shuddered.
For a moment, Arden felt something looking back down the leash at him—vast and sideways, like the city itself had turned its head.
Then the pain cut off.
Silence. No static. No rain. Just the familiar hum of the tower and the faint ache of his own heartbeat.
[INTERFERENCE: PARTIALLY CONTAINED.]
[RESIDUAL TAG: KRS-∆ // STORMLINE.]
[VARIABLE INDEX: 0.]
The zero remained.
Lyra sagged. Arden caught her this time, arms going around her shoulders as her knees dipped.
"You good?" he asked.
She leaned against him for a second, breathing slowly. The glow under her skin dimmed back to its usual low ember.
"Yes," she said. "But we just introduced ourselves."
"To what?" Seraphine asked.
Lyra looked up at the fading glyph.
"To something that knows how to see through storms," she said. "And now it knows our names."
Havel exhaled shakily. "We need to isolate Ø7," she said. "Quarantine their collars. Restrict field deployment until we know whether this residue can hijack the leash."
"And if the Directorate decides the simplest solution is to wipe us?" Seraphine said.
"Then they'll trigger Finalization and call it an unfortunate glitch," Kai said. "We won't be here to file a complaint."
Silex studied Arden like he was back under the rope again, like the decision to cut it was still in the air.
"They won't," he said.
Havel stared at him. "You can't guarantee that," she said.
"No," he said. "But I can make a case. Ø7 is the only unit entangled with this stormline. If the residue is an emergent Architect process, command will want insight before eradication. They won't throw away the only window they've got."
Arden snorted. "So we're not getting executed because we're suddenly valuable," he said. "Good to know my survival is still on-brand."
Silex's mouth quirked.
"Welcome to Cracks in the Leash," he said. "You're now officially too interesting to kill."
"Reassuring," Darius said dryly.
Silex turned to Kai.
"You'll receive partial access to Somnolence logs and leash archives relevant to KRS-∆," he said. "Under my authorization. Halden, you'll assist as interpretive anchor. Any anomaly, any phrase, any pattern—you bring it to me. No Veil-side sharing, no Underlayer leaks. Understood?"
Kai's eyes narrowed. "You're giving me the keys to a blackline ghost and telling me not to joyride," he said. "That's either very brave or very stupid."
"Both," Silex said. "Consider it a… test."
Arden eyed him. "Of our obedience or yours?" he asked.
Silex's smile—small, sharp, not reaching his eyes—made a brief, unwelcome return.
"Yes," he said.
⸻
They disconnected one by one.
Anchors unclipped. Diagnostic tethers slid back into the floor. The stormline glyph shrank, then vanished, leaving only the usual leash telemetry hung over the pit. The static hiss faded to a memory, like the echo of rain after leaving a storm.
They walked out together.
The corridor outside Metrics felt different now. Not safer. Just… more honest. Every lens, every conduit, every unseen wire felt like part of a single, breathing body.
"Variable Zero," Seraphine said, rolling the phrase on her tongue. "You gonna put that on a jacket?"
"I'll put it on my tombstone," Arden said. "'Here lies Variable Zero: died for an unknown function.'"
"Could be worse epitaphs," Kai said. "At least it sounds cool."
Lyra walked between them, fingers tapping a silent rhythm against her thigh.
"It's wrong," she said.
"About what?" Arden asked.
"Zero," she said. "You're not nothing. You're… the slack in the system. The space where it almost breaks."
"Romantic," Seraphine said.
Lyra shrugged. "Architects don't build slack on purpose. If Kairos flagged Arden as variable zero, it means… he's the thing it didn't predict."
"Congratulations," Kai said. "You're a rounding error with legs."
"Story of my life," Arden said.
They turned a corner.
A maintenance crew passed them—two techs in grey, one older, one young. Both collars dull amber. The younger one glanced up as Ø7 went by.
For a split second, Arden saw the world from the tech's eyes again: Ø7 walking down the hall, five bright collars, the weight of their designation, the news feeds whispering about Rust Saint purges and parade heroes.
His own face looked… different from the outside. Less like a man. More like a symbol someone had drawn over meat.
Then the perspective snapped back.
He almost stumbled.
"You feel that?" he asked.
Seraphine frowned. "Feel what?"
"Borrowed eyes," he said. "Stormline sticking its nose into maintenance. Might want to send it a memo about boundaries."
Lyra's hand brushed his arm, grounding.
"It's not just us anymore," she said. "The interference is… seeding. Little overlaps, temporary shares. If we move, it moves."
"Good," Kai said quietly. "Let it. The more it touches, the harder it is to delete without tearing the whole system."
Darius gave him a sideways look.
"You planning to weaponize a rumor," he asked, "or is this just your idea of professional curiosity?"
"Yes," Kai said.
They reached the junction where the corridor split—cells one way, rec, armoury the other.
"Orders?" Darius asked.
"Standby," Arden said. "We're quarantined, but not benched. They'll keep us close where they can watch the cracks."
Seraphine hooked her thumbs in her belt.
"I vote we take advantage of the downtime," she said. "Sleep, shower, pretend we're not sharing headspace with a pruned god for an hour."
"That's your idea of self-care?" Arden asked.
"Got better?" she said.
He didn't.
Lyra lingered, eyes distant again.
"Kai," she said. "When you look at the stormline logs… don't just chase the code. Listen."
"Define 'listen' in hacker," he said.
"Look for pattern that isn't efficient," she said. "Places where it hesitates. Where it records something and doesn't act. That's where mercy hides."
Kai opened his mouth, closed it, then nodded once.
"Fine," he said. "I'll look for the stutters."
They broke apart: Darius toward the gym, Seraphine toward the showers, Kai toward his bunk with a portable rig already in hand. Lyra fell into step beside Arden.
"You okay?" she asked.
He considered lying.
"No," he said. "But I'm used to that."
She smiled, small and tired.
"The leash is cracking," she said. "They just don't know if that's a bug or a feature yet."
"And you?" he asked. "What do you think?"
She tilted her head, listening to something he couldn't hear.
"I think," she said, "for the first time since they collared us… we're not the only ones interfering with the script."
They reached his cell.
The glyph over the door flickered once. For a heartbeat, it wasn't Ø7-∆-AR.
It was just Arden.
Then it corrected.
He stared at the metal, a strange, sharp ache in his chest.
"See?" Lyra murmured. "Cracks."
He touched the collar at his throat.
"Yeah," he said. "Let's see what leaks through."
The door slid open.
Inside, the room was the same: bed, sink, Veil-slab. The air tasted of recycled breath and distant rain.
He lay down without undressing, eyes on the ceiling.
The leash hummed, quieter now, but different.
Not just a command chain.
A channel.
Somewhere in the static, something listened back.
For the first time, Arden didn't know whether that made him more afraid of the city.
Or less.