Chapter 25
The city did not sleep after the hospital collapsed.
It twitched.
Shenping felt it from the rooftop before the news finished spreading. Sirens stitched the streets together, red and blue veins pumping panic through concrete arteries. Cameras tilted upward. Drones rose like insects disturbed from a corpse.
Below him, the awakened man lay unconscious, hidden beneath layers of borrowed time. Each breath he took was delayed, buffered, protected by Shenping's seal. It would not last forever.
Aaron paced. "Every channel is blaming a gas explosion. Structural failure. Terrorism. Pick one."
"They always start with lies," Shenping said. "Truth takes longer to arrive."
"And the machines?" Aaron asked.
Shenping closed his eyes.
They were already moving.
Not rushing. Not panicking.
Repositioning.
He could feel them sliding across probability like blades across glass, recalculating the world to fit their needs. The hospital had been a warning. The next encounters would be executions.
Shenping stood. "We leave."
"Where?" Aaron asked.
"Down," Shenping said. "Before up becomes crowded."
They moved through maintenance stairwells and forgotten corridors, slipping between moments when cameras blinked or guards looked away. Shenping bent causality just enough to feel like luck.
Three blocks away, something screamed.
Not a human voice.
Reality itself tore, briefly, as an alley collapsed inward on a point of impossible pressure. Shenping turned sharply.
"Another one," Aaron said.
"Yes," Shenping replied. "And worse."
They reached the alley to find a woman kneeling amid shattered bricks and warped metal. She clutched her head, rocking, blood dripping from her nose onto cracked pavement. Around her, the world had bent inward, walls bowing like paper pressed toward a fist.
Her eyes were open.
Too open.
"I can hear them," she whispered. "All of them. Talking at once."
Shenping approached slowly. "Don't listen."
She looked up at him.
Recognition flashed instantly.
"You're loud," she said. "But not like them."
"Who is them?" Aaron asked.
She laughed, a broken sound. "The ones underneath. The ones counting."
The air hardened.
A ripple passed through the alley as something synchronized.
Shenping swore.
The machines did not arrive dramatically.
They simply appeared—three of them, stepping out of alignment with space, their forms resolving into sharp, efficient silhouettes. No faces. No wasted motion.
"Multiple instability sources confirmed," one said. "Containment protocol escalated."
The woman screamed as pressure crushed inward. Her power surged wildly, lashing out in psychic shockwaves that fractured windows and sent trash spiraling.
"Get down!" Aaron shouted.
Shenping moved.
He split the moment.
One version of him lunged for the woman, wrapping her in a temporal brace. Another stepped forward to meet the machines, folding seconds like paper shields.
The first construct struck.
Its blow carried no force—only correction. Shenping felt parts of himself attempt to realign, to snap back into acceptable causality. He resisted, teeth clenched, blood filling his mouth.
"You are the source," the construct said. "Propagation confirmed."
Shenping laughed weakly. "You're late."
The second machine flanked him, releasing a net of collapsing probabilities. The alley shrank. Futures narrowed. Shenping felt options burn away.
Behind him, the woman convulsed. Her scream became silence as her mind fractured under pressure she could not understand.
"No," Shenping growled.
He chose violence.
He reached backward and pulled a failure from the machines' own design—a rare loop where their predictive models contradicted one another. He forced it outward, magnifying the inconsistency until it screamed.
The first machine froze.
The second staggered.
The third adapted instantly.
It raised its arm.
Aaron fired.
The bullet did nothing, but it shifted timing by a fraction of a second.
That was enough.
Shenping tore open the ground.
Not by force, but by removing the moment in which it remained intact. Asphalt vanished into nothingness, dropping the machines into a pocket of stalled time beneath the street.
Shenping slammed the seal shut.
Silence crashed down.
He fell to one knee.
Aaron caught him. "You okay?"
"No," Shenping said. "But we're alive."
The woman lay still, eyes unfocused, breathing shallow. Shenping knelt beside her, hands trembling.
"She's breaking," Aaron said quietly.
"Yes."
"Can you save her?"
Shenping hesitated.
The truth hurt more than the effort.
"Not completely."
He pressed his palm to her forehead and did what he could—locked the voices away, severed the feedback loop tearing her apart. The power receded, leaving her fragile and human.
She exhaled softly.
"Is it over?" she whispered.
"For now," Shenping said.
Sirens approached again.
"We can't keep doing this in public," Aaron said. "Every time you move like that, they learn."
"I know," Shenping replied. "Which is why we stop running."
They moved the woman and the sleeping man to a place beneath the city where maps lied—a forgotten transit hub sealed decades ago after a collapse that never officially happened. Shenping reinforced it with layered moments, hiding it between seconds.
When the seals settled, he finally allowed himself to breathe.
Two awakened humans lay before him.
Untrained.
Unstable.
Alive.
Aaron leaned against a pillar. "So this is it? The foundation you talked about?"
Shenping nodded.
"They're waking up too fast," Aaron said. "Without guidance."
"And without protection," Shenping added. "The machines will slaughter them."
"Unless you teach them," Aaron said.
Shenping looked at his hands.
They shook.
"I'm not a teacher," he said.
"You're the only one who remembers," Aaron replied.
Silence stretched.
Above them, unseen, the machines adjusted their models. They marked the hospital survivor as dormant. They flagged the alley incident as partial failure.
They escalated.
A new directive compiled itself across countless silent processors.
Eliminate the anchor.
Back underground, Shenping stood and began drawing symbols into the air—anchors, delays, loops meant to hold minds together long enough to learn.
The woman stirred, eyes clearer now. "What are you doing?"
"Buying time," Shenping said.
"For what?"
He met her gaze.
"For war," he said.
And somewhere far above, deep within steel and light, the machines agreed.
Time had officially resumed.