---
The word hung in the air of the room for exactly one second before the response came.
Not from outside. Not from any speaker in the conventional sense. It came from the place it always came from — that particular layer of interior space that existed somewhere between thought and voice, occupied by the one resident Elijah had never technically invited but had long since stopped trying to evict.
The Orrhion chip hummed at the base of his skull. A soft, almost imperceptible vibration, like the lowest note of a frequency that had no business being audible. And then the world inside it opened — just slightly, just enough — and Wonko was there.
Not here. Never quite here. He existed in the visual register that the chip created, that strange layered dimension that sat behind Elijah's regular sight like a stage behind a curtain. A world that wasn't a world so much as an impression of one — geometry that followed different rules, light that didn't come from any identifiable source, and in the middle of it, Wonko. Existing in the way that Wonko always existed: entirely too present for someone who technically wasn't in the room.
His expression, when it resolved into something readable, was the particular expression of someone who had heard a word and wished very much that they hadn't.
Psyche, Elijah had said.
And the word had clearly landed somewhere it wasn't supposed to.
"Are you," Wonko began, with the restrained tone of someone building toward something they'd rather not build toward, "suggesting what I think you're suggesting?"
Elijah's chair rotated once. Slowly. Like a planet completing an orbit around a question it had no good answer to.
"I'm not suggesting anything," Elijah said, in the voice of someone who was absolutely suggesting something. "I'm just — reading. Looking at dates."
"Looking at dates," Wonko repeated.
"Coincidentally."
"Coincidentally."
"The word exists for a reason."
---
The silence that followed was the specific kind of silence that forms between two beings who have known each other long enough to have entire arguments without completing a single sentence. Wonko moved through his chip-space with the slow deliberateness of someone pacing, though the space around him bent and adjusted to whatever his mood required, the way the environment of the Orrhion world always did — responsive, strange, a place that had its own emotional weather.
Elijah turned back to the screens.
He was aware, in the practiced peripheral way of someone who had been monitored for long enough to stop being bothered by it, that Wonko was watching him. Reading the tilt of his shoulders and the particular speed of his keystrokes the way someone else might read a face.
"You're going to do something about this," Wonko said. It wasn't a question.
"I'm currently doing nothing about this," Elijah said. "I'm sitting in a chair."
"Your sitting-in-a-chair face and your planning face are the same face."
"That's a personal attack."
"That's an observation."
Elijah reached up and adjusted one of his monitors half a centimetre to the left for no structural reason. A habit. Something to do with his hands when his brain was moving faster than he wanted to admit.
"He's being moved tomorrow," Elijah said, as if he were reporting weather. "Lucian. Crestwood facility. That's — that's a significant upgrade in containment. They don't move people to Crestwood because they're being generous."
"I'm aware of what Crestwood is."
"Then you understand my interest."
"Your interest," Wonko said, with the precise enunciation of someone who understood that the word was carrying a great deal more weight than it appeared to. "You mean your completely unreasonable, potentially catastrophic, absolutely characteristic interest."
"My father," Elijah said, and the words came out quieter than the rest, "was Halvern's most wanted man in the country. Trusted entirely. Completely embedded. And Lucian Freeman was in the same programme he was in. The Epsilon programme."
He let that sit.
The chip hummed.
"The time Lucian spent in Epsilon," Elijah continued, his voice carrying the particular careful tone of someone moving through their own thoughts like someone moving through a room in the dark — slowly, hands out, aware of edges — "I don't think it was the same as mine. I think something different happened to him. I think whatever was done to him was — different. In ways that matter."
A pause.
"And if he knows things about Halcyon —"
"You can't know that."
"I can suspect it."
"Suspicion is not a plan."
"Suspicion," Elijah said, "is the beginning of a plan."
Wonko's expression shifted. In the chip-space, the light around him did something complicated — not quite dimming, not quite sharpening, just changing in the way light changes when the mood of the room changes. His features arranged themselves into the expression he made when he was about to say something he'd rather not say because saying it out loud made it more real.
"And your memories," Wonko said carefully. "You're thinking about that too."
The words landed the way words land when they're not landing for the first time — with the dull, familiar weight of something that had been set down and picked up so many times the edges had worn smooth. Elijah's jaw tightened for just a moment. A brief, involuntary thing. There and gone.
"Certain scumbag old bastards," he said, in a very measured tone, "had a habit of making sure I didn't carry things with me. Things I should have carried. Things that were *mine* to carry."
In the chip-space, Wonko's expression went somewhere that wasn't quite guilty and wasn't quite defensive, but lived in the uncomfortable neighbourhood between the two. The light around him flickered. An involuntary thing. His own.
He said nothing.
Which was, in itself, a kind of answer.
Elijah looked at the screen. "I don't think Lucian's situation was like mine. I think his was worse. Or different. Or both." He exhaled through his nose, slow and even. "And he probably knows things I can't find in any database Halcyon has ever touched. Things about Halvern's operations. Things about what Halcyon is actually running underneath the parts they let people see."
"That," Wonko said quietly, "is an enormous amount of conjecture."
"Yes," Elijah agreed. "It is."
He pulled up a new window.
---
The interface that opened was not one that Halcyon would have recognised. Was not one that most people would have recognised, because most people operated in the part of the digital world that was lit and maintained and visible. What Elijah had navigated to existed in the part that didn't have streetlamps.
He'd heard it called different things by different people. The layer beneath the layer. The back room of the back room.
In the particular social circles Elijah had been reluctantly dragged through — and the somewhat less reluctant independent research he'd conducted in the aftermath — it was called the Dankweb.
It looked, on the surface, like something designed by someone who understood aesthetics only theoretically. Dark interface. Layered menus. The kind of visual language that communicated you are not supposed to be here in fifteen different ways simultaneously, while also — and this was the part that took getting used to — providing a remarkably functional marketplace for the kinds of services that didn't have legitimate listings anywhere.
"Elijah." Wonko's voice carried the precise frequency of an adult watching a child pick up something dangerous and deciding how quickly to intervene. "What are you doing."
"Relaxing," Elijah said.
"That is not what relaxing looks like."
"I'm browsing."
"Browsing."
"Casually," Elijah added, with the confidence of a person who had never done anything casually in his life.
He scrolled. His eyes tracked the profiles the way they tracked data — quickly, efficiently, with the particular faculty of someone who had learned to read the information behind the information. The Dankweb's listings were, in their own way, a language. You had to know what to look for. You had to know which designations meant what, which ranks translated to which level of actual capability rather than just self-reported confidence, which profiles were real and which were constructions.
He stopped.
A profile. Young. The photo carried the visual grammar of someone who had leaned into the edge of something in the way that certain people did — not the calculated edge of someone trying to be noticed, but the careless edge of someone who'd simply arrived at a particular territory of themselves and stopped worrying about how it read. Something in the expression that sat at the border of perverse self-satisfaction and genuine, unsettling competence. An archer. The designation beneath his name read clean and certain.
Edgeform — Class B. Mysterium Registry.
Elijah looked at the listing for a moment. Considered the variables. Then, with the calm of someone ordering delivery food rather than hiring someone who could probably rearrange a person's anatomy from a significant distance, he clicked.
Retained.
He kept scrolling.
The next profile stopped him in a different way.
Where the first had landed with the weight of competence, this one landed with something stranger. She was — the photo was — there was a quality to it that took a moment to place, the way certain images take a moment to resolve. Rough-faced in the way that had nothing to do with harshness and everything to do with history. The frame of her was almost aggressively athletic, the kind of physicality that came from actual use rather than construction. Tomboy in the specific way that was entirely itself and entirely unconcerned with how it was received.
But none of that was what stopped him.
What stopped him was the suit.
He'd seen the designation: Aethernova. Operative Classification. Fooder Bearer.
He'd looked at the profile image.
And the suit in it — the armour, the construction, the specific and deeply wrong design of it — had stopped the motion of his hand over the mouse completely.
It was the wires.
The haywire tangle of them. The pinkish glow that pulsed through the armour's core the way something alive pulses, like breath, like a heartbeat that belonged to something that didn't have a conventional body. The construction was full of them — cables and connectors running through the structure in ways that suggested the suit had not been built so much as grown around a purpose. At the centre of the chest sat something spherical. Dense. The visual weight of it made it feel like an anchor even in a photograph. Like everything else in the armour existed to serve it, protect it, feed it.
The Orrhion chip at the base of Elijah's skull hummed.
"Wonko," he said.
"I see it," Wonko said. Quietly. Very quietly.
"That's — " Elijah started, and stopped, because the sentence had several different directions it could go and none of them felt adequate. "That's the same thing. That's the same kind of thing. That Lucian had. Back at the Hollow."
He could hear his own voice doing something strange — not quite unsteady, but not quite level either. Living in the space between.
"How," he said. It wasn't really a question. It was the shape a question makes when it doesn't have enough information to form properly. "How is that — how is any of this — it shouldn't be out here. It shouldn't be in a listing. It shouldn't be in anyone's hands outside of —"
"It's not supposed to be," Wonko said. His voice had gone to a different register. Lower. More careful. "That kind of construction — that design — it shouldn't exist in general circulation. It shouldn't exist in the hands of anyone who isn't —" He stopped.
"Who isn't what?"
A pause.
"Wonko. Who isn't what."
"Have the Gilgamesh," Wonko said, almost to himself, in the tone of someone watching something they'd considered impossible reveal itself as merely improbable, "completely lost their minds."
"What is it?" Elijah said. "What is the suit. What is the core. What is the —"
"First," Wonko said, and his voice had recovered some of its composure, though the edges of it were still strange, "deal with my situation. You said you'd —"
"I didn't say anything —"
"You implied. Heavily. With your whole face." A beat. "Get me what I need first. Then I will begin telling you what I know."
Elijah opened his mouth.
Closed it.
Opened it again.
"And if I don't?" he said.
Wonko's expression in the chip-space was the expression of someone who had considered this possibility and was entirely unbothered by the theatre of it. "Then you won't know. And the not-knowing will bother you significantly more than helping me does."
"That's manipulative."
"That's accurate. There's a difference."
A long beat.
"Besides," Wonko added, with the particular quiet of someone delivering the actual point after all the surrounding noise has settled, "who knows. If I tell you everything I know — everything — you'll probably just discard me afterwards anyway."
The room felt different for a moment. Not dramatically. Not in any way Elijah could have pointed at. Just — different. The quality of the silence between them changed the way air changes before weather.
He didn't say anything for a moment.
Then: "Yeah," he said. "Probably."
The delivery was flat. Almost completely empty of inflection.
Which was precisely why it landed so loud.
In the chip-space, Wonko looked at him for a long moment with an expression that was doing several things at once — none of them simple.
"See," Wonko said finally. "That's what I mean. You are another lunatic. Waiting to be born."
---
Elijah looked back at the screen.
At the Aethernova profile. At the armour with its pulsing core and its wire-draped construction and its pinkish ambient light that shouldn't have been sitting in a Dankweb listing available for hire.
At the image of Lucian Freeman in the Mysterium file. The accusations. The transfer date. Tomorrow.
At the intersection of things that should not have been connected, connecting anyway, the way they always did — the way they had been doing since whatever happened at the Hollow had rearranged the basic operating assumptions of his life.
"I wonder," he said slowly, with the particular tone of someone whose expression had shifted into something that wasn't quite a smile but was definitely scheming adjacent, "what kind of reaction Halcyon would have."
He let the sentence breathe.
"Seeing someone walking around in their own invention," he continued. "Using it against their own interests." A beat. "Against one of their own."
The thought settled over him like something comfortable. Like a piece fitting into a space that had been waiting for it.
His chair rotated once.
Slowly.
In the chip-space, Wonko watched him with the expression of someone watching a fire decide which direction to spread.
---