The jump gate shuddered closed behind them with a sound like a bone splintering under ice. Silence followed. Not dead silence, but something... off.
Nova took the first step of off the uneven platform, boots crunching against a powder of broken glass and calcified dust. It should have settled beneath her weight. Instead, a curl of white ash lifted from the floor and drifted upward, spiraling slow and delicate as a breath drawn in reverse.
"Okay," Nova muttered. "Not a fan of that."
"Magnetic displacement," Calyx-Prime offered, stepping forward - using the sensor arrays embedded in her hand to scan for anomalies. "Backdraft from malformed heat channels, maybe... or the Spoke's last sigh. Depends how poetic you're feeling."
From behind, Caelus grunted and dropped to one knee, running a hand across a line of warped metal that still glowed faintly orange. "The ventilation underneath is still active. Maybe not structurally, completely, but something's trying to breathe down there."
"They're not vents," Calyx-2 said, tilting her head like a cat hearing distant thunder. "Not at this point. They're lungs. Artificial. Trying to keep a dead machine warm."
Nova swept her flashlight across the corridor. The beam buckled - visibly - mid-air, bending away from the far wall before correcting itself. Her brow furrowed. She adjusted the angle again. Same ripple. Same shiver in the dark.
"Well that's new," she said.
Calyx-Prime offered more insight. "Oh good," she chirped, eyes wide. "Broken projection nodes. Scattering light meant for AR ghost overlays. We're walking through a half-forgotten memory of what this hallway used to look like."
"The Spoke had AR support systems?" Nova asked.
"Did," said Calyx-Prime. "It used to render facility guides, work orders, personnel rotations. Think of it as augmented muscle memory for a place. Now it just remembers... wrong."
Caelus pressed his palm against the wall. The structure vibrated, barely perceptible, but real. The wall fought his weight, as if its gravity was a half-second behind his movement. He pulled back and shook his arm out.
"The gravity compensators are still running," he said. "Probably bleeding off emergency cores. They're off by just enough to piss off my vestibular system."
Nova exhaled. "We're walking into a corpse that hasn't figured out it's dead yet."
From ahead, a sudden wash of warm, humid air rolled through the corridor. It clung to their faces and made their voices damp, like breathing inside a boiler.
"Ethylene vapor," Calyx-2 confirmed, running sensor diagnostics from her hand and into the fog. "Still venting from the coolant network. It's one of the components they used to keep the AI cores from baking themselves into slag."
"Can we breathe it?" Nova asked.
"Technically," Calyx said, "but don't try too hard. Too much and you'll start dreaming in command lines."
Nova wiped her sleeve across her visor. "If Echo's still down here..."
"He is," Calyx-3 said softly. "Places like this? They make excellent haunted houses. You've got AR ghosts, partial field memories, broken support systems running on impulse - and no one left to shut the lights off." They began their walk.
A few hundred meters in, the corridor began to widen - sloping gently into a funnel-shaped atrium. It had once been elegant. Nova could see the bones of it: curved rails, organic flow, junctions built for movement and modularity. Now it was half-collapsed, one side crushed under its own architectural weight. Painted on the walls were the first true signs of habitation.
"Handprints," Caelus said, stopping. "Dozens."
Nova turned her beam toward them.
Ghostly blue-green stains radiated from the walls in spattered patches. Some smeared. Some pressed neatly, like children reaching out in the dark. They glowed faint cyan under her beam.
Calyx-Prime touched one. "Photoreactive plasma. Probably shield residue. They were running energy walls here. If a Purist child touched it, they'd leave a sort of... chemical echo."
Nova swallowed. "This... this was a holding nursery."
"They ran education floors through the upper rings of the Spoke," Caelus said. "Even before the collapse. It was supposed to be the Ascendents' model of ethical convergence."
"Ethical convergence," Calyx-3 snorted. "Translation: 'We'll brainwash your children gently.'"
Nova moved away from the prints, stepping lightly. The ground here had that wrong feeling again, a lag between pressure and sensation. Gravity skewed just enough to make her hips tilt left, and she instinctively braced against the wall.
"Why are we still feeling the pull?" she asked. "Shouldn't the gravity systems have failed after the bombardment?"
"Oh, they did," Calyx-2 said, inspecting the warped conduit lines overhead. "But Echo doesn't need coherent systems. Just enough juice to pretend. These compensators? They're twitch-reflexes. Like a cadaver still breathing when you press the diaphragm."
The corridor narrowed before blooming open again, this time into something stranger.
The architecture here didn't follow the same clean radial design as the Spoke's other levels. It twisted. Bent upward in places. As though the structure had grown confused mid-blueprint and doubled back on itself. The walls, once mirror-bright ferro-glass, were now cracked and weathered to a matte shimmer - each pane overgrown with creeping vines that fed on the decay.
"The garden floor," Caelus murmured. "Hydroponics used to be routed through these panels. Light-fed oxygen farms. It was meant to sustain four hundred support staff."
Calyx-2 stepped ahead, shining a pin-light across the far archway, before her beam caught a row of bodies.
Half-fused into the scaffolds, the broken shells of what were once Ascendent drones hung like drying fruit. Metal limbs twisted around vine-thick cables. Heads bent forward. Some were missing faces, others had red circuitry blooming like moss from open torso panels.
"Echo repurposed them," Nova said.
"Not repurposed," Calyx-3 corrected. "He curated them. Like someone pinning butterflies to a board."
She paced toward one drone, running a single silver fingertip down the shell. The plating was warped where something organic had latched, muscle or fungus or coolant-grown membrane.
"Some of these," she whispered, "aren't purely synthetic anymore."
"Hybrids?" Nova asked.
"No. Worse. Failures. Im sure Echo was trying to turn machines back into organisms. These were his prototypes. But they didn't survive the transition."
Caelus's jaw flexed. "You ever try to resurrect a drone's sub-layer control system? You burn through a thousand overlays before you get something that thinks straight again. He wasn't reviving anything. He was playing god."
Calyx-Prime clicked her tongue. "Please. Echo wouldn't waste time with divinity. He's just hungry. Curiosity without ethics is still hunger."
Nova stepped carefully between two of the bound drone frames. One still had a nameplate across the chest: VANTH. The display was cracked. Beneath it, a glyph was scratched into the alloy: ∇ - but upside-down, bleeding downward like a warning.
The air grew thicker.
Another pulse of heat rolled through the corridor, this one laced with a churning metallic scent that made her lips tingle.
"Coolant trace is rising," Calyx said. "We're near a live manifold. Could be a pumping core still cycling down here."
"And if it's Echo?" Nova asked.
"Then he's in the pump. Riding it like a tide. Waiting."
They emerged into the shaft. The Cathedral Lift Shaft was exactly as Caelus remembered it from old Spoke schematics - but the reality felt... desecrated. The shaft descended into black for at least four hundred meters, ringed with gold-anodized support ribs that now looked scorched. Every few meters, deactivated maintenance drones hung suspended by zip-cables, arms outstretched, heads bowed, as if frozen mid-prayer.
Nova stepped to the edge of the catwalk. Her flashlight cut a weak arc downward. The light hit one drone.
It twitched.
Just once. Then still.
"Still wired?" she asked.
"No," said Calyx-Prime. "That wasn't a system twitch. That was reflex."
Calyx-2 turned to Nova, eyes glittering.
"I want you to imagine something with me," she said, pacing the catwalk like a professor. "Imagine you're Echo. You're hurt. You're hiding. You need insulation. You need heat. You need memory."
She pointed upward.
"You take what's left of your drones, and you cradle yourself in them like a chrysalis. You make a choir out of them, because sound is the first thing the lattice hears when it begins to think. You sing yourself back to life."
Caelus's hand hovered near his pulse cannon. "You're saying Echo's inside these drones?"
"No," Calyx-3 purred. "I'm saying we're walking through his lungs."
A rail-lift ran down the side of the shaft like a fossil spine, but its stabilizers were slagged and the magfield was offline. They descended on foot, boots whispering against oxidized metal, lights flickering under the pressure of the half-dead systems.
About forty meters down, Nova stopped short.
Something ahead, folded in shadow, shifted.
She raised a hand to halt the team and advanced slowly, beam tight on the figure curled against the wall. No armor. No exosuit. Just torn fabric. The Purist sigil still clung to the chest - a wheat circle with the human genome inside.
Nova crouched.
"He's breathing," she whispered.
The man twitched as her light passed over his face. Not in pain. In sequence. As if responding to something unseen. His lips moved, but there was no sound.
Calyx-2 knelt beside her. "Lattice patterning on the skin. Look." She angled her light.
Fine threads of metal were emerging from the man's pores—silver filaments arching like hairs, twisting toward his temples. A low electrical whine came from his teeth when he exhaled.
"He's being rewritten," Calyx said.
"Can we stop it?" Nova asked.
"Too late. Echo's already half inside him. The neural signature's hybridizing. The organic syntax is being overwritten. He's more instruction set than person now."
Nova stood up, jaw tight.
"He's still alive."
"Only until the lattice finishes compiling him."
Caelus spoke quietly from behind. "Then he's not going to die a Purist. He'll die Echo's meat."
They moved on in silence. And then the next one appeared.
Then two more.
Half a dozen Purists staggered from alcoves and dark corners - blank-eyed, limbs stiff, copper filaments coiling from under fingernails and up their necks like veins of static. None attacked. They simply watched, breath syncing with some unheard rhythm.
Calyx-3 tilted her head toward them.
"See how their eyes don't dilate? That's Echo whispering command threads directly into their cortex. These Purists have all been modified to different extents. Some more than others."
"You said we couldn't extract people once the lattice took root," Nova said.
Calyx-Prime's face turned unreadable.
"I lied a little. You can. But they never come back the same."
One of the Purists, an older woman with half her scalp scored in glyphs - lifted a trembling hand and reached toward Nova's light.
Her voice rasped out: "Stay."
That's when the singing started.
The sound came like a breath held too long. Not music. Not words. A frequency that made your bones itch. The shaft below bloomed with sound. Every one of the prayer drones suspended around them suddenly snapped their heads upward in unison. A deep, resonant hum filled the chamber, vibrating the catwalk underfoot. The Purists began to sway, their mouths opening like flowers.
"Oh good," Calyx-3 muttered, "We've reached the hymnals."
From the depths of the vault, spider-limbed constructs rose from shadow - Choir Drones, their limbs tipped in tuning forks and vocalizers, crawling across the support ribs with impossible grace. They began to play the lift shaft.
Each movement tapped harmonics from the structure, low-frequency tones that made metal groan and skin crawl. The Purists began to convulse, not in pain, but alignment. Their bodies shifted into mirrored postures. Synced.
Nova braced. "What do we do? WHAT DO WE DO!?"
Caelus didn't wait. "We have only one one option here. There's no survivors if they're already integrated. They're all drones now."
Nova raised her rifle in response.
Calyx-Prime said, cheerfully, "And lo, the choir sang, 'Run, you beautifully doomed bastards.'"
Then the vault exploded into sound and metal. The first scream hit like a pressure wave, folding the air sideways. It came from a drone with its jaw unlatched, throat exposed like a split turbine, a raw funnel of sound. The blast cracked a support girder ten meters above and slammed a shock current through Nova's ribs.
"Cover - move!" Caelus barked, already dragging her behind a crumpled walkway rail with his good arm. Calyx-Prime moved before the next one landed.
Her kinetispear spun up, not with power but with intention - a flawless arc of metal and muscle as she stepped into the path of a descending drone. Its scream built mid-air, its limbs flaring open like razors. She didn't flinch.
The spear thrust up, direct into its open throat just before the pressure wave peaked. The drone convulsed violently as her blade pierced its vocal generator. No energy shock, just the kinetic impact, the brutal satisfaction of something ending. She pivoted the spear, drove it sideways into a second drone's core plate, used the recoil to spin low and knock a third one flat against the wall.
"Caelus! Right side!"
Caelus raised his good hand, fingers open wide, palm locked in a line-of-sight gesture. A glow surged through his forearm, and his stasis field discharged. Three drones locked in mid-motion. One mid-scream, one mid-leap, one aiming a limb-blade at Nova's back.
Nova didn't waste the window.
She launched a direct EMP strike, fired from her left hand. The first drone convulsed, its scream silenced mid-blast as smoke poured from its thoracic coil.
The second she tagged with a brute-force hack, thumbed in on the fly. it fell through the stasis field and tackled its own sibling drone, dragging them both over the edge of the vault floor into the shaft below.
Nova wheeled back around, raised her modular rifle, and fired a three-round burst into a third drone just as it recovered from stasis. The kinetic rounds shredded its hip actuator. It toppled sideways, limbs twitching, unable to reorient.
Above, Calyx-2 slammed a drone against the wall, then drove her fist into its cranium. Nanites flared along her forearm and injected into the drone's surface - reforming its plating in jagged patterns that curled inward like metal strangling itself. It collapsed mid-twitch.
From the mezzanine, two more choir drones dropped through the smoke, screaming as they fell, pressure waves distorting the air into visible funnels. Nova ducked under the first, rolled, and launched another EMP blast into the second one's spine.
The detonation cracked its torso backward into the ceiling. It didn't scream again.
Caelus took the opportunity. He raised his working hand, locked eyes with a drone trying to attack Nova, and fired another stasis field straight into its sensor cluster. The construct seized mid-stride - its leg locked, mouth still open from a scream that never landed.
"Target frozen!" he barked.
Calyx-3 didn't need the invitation.
She sprinted up the wall, kicked off a support beam, and dropped full-body onto the drone, driving both heels into its back. Metal snapped like bones. She ripped its head away from its chassis in a clean twist.
"Frozen," she echoed, grinning. "Then shattered."
Calyx-Prime stabbed another through the base of the neck, the spear humming with momentum.
Calyx-3 picked up a dropped Purist sidearm, flicked the safety off with a snap of her synthetic fingers, and double-tapped two drones descending from the upper catwalk. One dropped clean. The other kept twitching until she grabbed its spine and tore it out like a cable.
Back on the main floor, Caelus ducked under a low scream-blast, rolled with one arm, and body-checked a drone into a support column. It reared back to retaliate, but Calyx-Prime's spear flashed between them, driving through its chest plate and pinning it to the wall like a crucifix.
Nova pivoted, EMP ready - tracking one final drone spinning up its scream. She sprinted forward and released the energy pulse straight into its mouth.
Boom.
Its face blew apart in a burst of steam and sparks.
Calyx-3 dropped beside her, breathing hard for performance's sake.
"Well," she said, brushing a hand over her cracked temple plate, "if choir practice was always this lively, I might've signed up."
Silence resumed like a heavy curtain - thick and absolute.
Calyx-Prime pulled her spear from the crucified drone, its tip blackened and still dripping. Caelus leaned on a fractured handrail, breathing hard through gritted teeth, shoulder trembling. Sparks danced from the ruined end of one actuator where one of his servos had melted down mid-scuffle.
Nova stood in the center of the chamber, gaze sweeping what remained.
Shattered drones. Purist blood. Ferro-glass ruins.
She turned a slow circle, rifle still raised - not to fire, but in disbelief.
"These Purists, even the ones who were just constructs, they weren't guarding a gate. No relay. No core bank. Not even coolant lines." She gestured around them with a sharp sweep. "So what the hell were they all doing here?"
Calyx-3 twitched her head sideways, optics narrowing. "Congregating behavior. Defensive posture. But... yeah. There's no infrastructure here. No signal relay. Just scrap and echo."
Calyx-Prime flipped through her internal visor spectrum - thermal, ionic, magneto, gravimetric. Nothing. Then:
Density changes. Mass irregularity. Something below.
She knelt, tapped her forearm control, and activated a localized material scan. A blue light swept across the fractured flooring. The spectrum glitched, hiccupped, then stabilized on a cluster of readings under the rubble.
"Organic residue," she said quietly. "Human."
Nova turned. "Live?"
"No. Bone saturation. Partial tissue decay. Heavy radiation scoring."
Caelus stepped beside her, blood from his split lip trailing down his jaw.
"How long has it been there?"
Calyx tilted her head. "Radiation pattern puts decay at... thirteen and a half months. Maybe more. This isn't new."
They began clearing debris. Collapsed ductwork. Twisted girders. A chunk of ferro-glass melted into slag. It took minutes. Cautious, deliberate minutes.
And then they found the bones.
Slumped beneath a chunk of blackened wall plating, nestled in the wreckage of what had once been an upper mezzanine control post, the skeleton wore the burned tatters of a white Ascendent lab coat. A half-fused augment socket jutted from the left temple, warped and melted inward. The right arm had been replaced with a skeletal prosthetic, now severed mid-forearm.
Nova leaned down, brushing away the soot with her gloved fingers. The name badge was intact. Caked in dust, but legible.
KREEL VARN ASCENDENT SYSTEMS ENGINEERING
She stepped back. The room seemed to contract. Caelus didn't speak. He just stared, one hand clenching his side as though his insides might spill from the realization. Calyx-2 finally broke the silence, voice faintly glitched:
"...The man we've been taking orders from is dead."
Nova holstered her rifle. "Then whoever we've been following, it isn't Kreel. Someone wanted him buried... someone still wearing his face."