CHAPTER 33 – Shards in the Noise
The protest's second day.
The chant had grown roots overnight. What began as scattered rage at noon yesterday had crystallised into something harder, more dangerous—a movement that refused to dissolve when Public Safety's shields pushed it into the rails. The rejects who'd been fed and funded through channels they didn't question had held their ground, and by morning their numbers had swelled with sympathisers, the desperate, and those who simply wanted to watch the Republic bleed.
Mark Berry let the chant throb through his chest like a second heartbeat.
"The end of slavery has come! CCX will liberate us!"
The rejects pressed shoulder to shoulder, a sea of patched coats and broken sandals, their breath rising like steam in the afternoon heat. He wasn't here because he cared about their slogans. He wasn't a true believer in CCX or the mythologised saviour they'd constructed from three letters and desperate hope.
He was here because the sound made him feel alive.
Because losing himself in the tide was better than remembering how every door in this Republic seemed to close faster on him than anyone else. Three months of VR pod certification applications vanishing into bureaucratic silence. Three months of watching House-connected men—younger men, less qualified men—walk through doors that stayed locked for him. Weeks since his last scream into the failing pod, knuckles bloody against walls that never answered back.
The rage had calcified into something colder now. Not fury. Just the dull ache of knowing he didn't matter.
So he came here. To the only place where anger felt communal instead of isolating.
The banners moved like sails above the crowd, their strokes heavy and uneven, letters bleeding into woodcut shapes: CCX. The chant climbed, fell, then surged again, raw with desperation.
Mark was about to drift sideways towards an alley—already thinking about leaving, about going back to his empty flat and the broken pod—when a pocket of men and women huddled tighter in the middle, their voices lower but sharper, trading words the way gamblers trade secrets.
He leaned in, pretending to shout along with the chant, ears straining.
"...that foreigner, the one with the southern drawl."
Mark's pulse stuttered. He pushed closer.
"From Oversight, I tell you. Not like the others. He stopped. He listened."
Another voice, hoarse with excitement: "He didn't sneer. Didn't wave us off. Just stood there, quiet. Looked right at me when I told him about my brother starving in the blocks. Looked at me. Like I was real."
A third voice broke in, trembling with the fervour of someone who'd found religion in the rubble: "And then, weeks back, the channel in Oversight spat out that shard! Dead line for months, then bang—alive. You think that's a coin toss? Not me. He heard us. He did something."
Mark's stomach dropped like a stone through water.
Southern drawl. Oversight. Listened to rejects.
They argued about what they'd seen. Some swore it was a crystal, others called it a shard, but all agreed on one thing: it wasn't like anything they'd ever handled before. A five-dimensional quartz, colours folding over themselves as though glass and water had been braided together. They spoke of it like a miracle, a sign that the Vault itself had cracked for them.
And they linked it—casually, almost joyfully—to the memory of a man who had listened.
"Tall. Dark hair. Southern Commonwealth accent, clear as day. Worked a desk in 8B."
Mark's vision tunnelled. His mind caught on the words and wouldn't let go.
Chris.
It could only be Chris.
The chant rolled on, but Mark barely heard it. His thoughts staggered like a man after too much whiskey. He replayed every step—the bar fight weeks ago, Chris at his side, the way he never spoke much about his work in Oversight. How he'd always seemed wound too tight, like a man carrying something he couldn't share.
If the rejects are already telling this story in the open, then soon it won't be a story. It'll be a rumour with teeth.
Mark felt his pulse climb, hot and urgent. The rejects were weaving Chris into their mythology, branding him as the foreign-born clerk who'd listened when no one else would, who'd somehow triggered the Vault to spit out proof of CCX's existence. It didn't matter if it was true. It didn't matter if Chris had done nothing.
Once the rumour stuck—once it crawled from reject whispers into Bear investigation reports, into Serpent intelligence briefings—it wouldn't matter whether Chris was guilty. The Houses didn't waste time proving guilt. They just removed the variable and moved on.
He's dead if this spreads.
Mark shoved free of the march, curses following him as elbows dug into ribs and shoulders knocked hard. Boots hammered against wet asphalt. He tore down alleys strung with laundry, past shutters rattling against the chant. Even when he'd broken clear of the crowd, the sound stalked him like a predator he couldn't outrun.
CCX. CCX. CCX.
By the time the northern district rose into view, his chest burned with fire, lungs screaming for air he couldn't spare. Building A loomed like a concrete carcass patched and repatched, four flights of stairs that felt like a mountain.
He pounded on unit 412 until the door swung open.
Chris stood there, shoulders tight, eyes already wide with the look of a man who'd been waiting for disaster to arrive.
"We need to talk," Mark gasped, shouldering past him into the flat.
Chris frowned, confusion bleeding into alarm. "Mark—"
"They're talking about you." The words came out in a rush, still ragged from the run. "The rejects. I was in the protest, I heard them. They said a southern Commonwealth guy from Oversight came to listen. Stood there, didn't mock them, didn't walk away. And weeks back the Vault spat out a shard through a dead node."
Chris's hand shot out, gripping the back of a chair. His knuckles went white. "What shard?" His voice was flat, careful, the kind of tone a man uses when he's trying very hard not to break.
"They described it like it was alive." Mark stepped closer, lowering his voice even though they were alone. "A quartz that twisted colours over itself—five layers at once, like glass folded into water. They don't know what it means, but they know it came from Oversight. And they're already telling the story like it's gospel. Like you brought it into being just by listening."
The room seemed to tilt. Chris's breath came shallow and fast, chest rising and falling like he'd just run the same distance Mark had. The walls pressed closer. Every exit simultaneously sealing shut.
They know. They're connecting me to the shard. The Bears will hear this. The Serpents will hear this. Olivia—
"Chris?" Mark's voice cut through the spiral.
Chris forced himself to focus. The chair creaked under his grip. His vision swam at the edges, terror and exhaustion blurring together until he couldn't tell which was which.
"I'm not asking if it's true," Mark continued, his tone softer now, almost gentle. "I don't care. But if they're saying it, it won't stop. It'll spread. And when it does, you'll be finished. Leave your job. Maybe even the Republic. Because once this rumour sticks, the Houses won't waste time proving it."
Silence pressed down like a physical weight. The distant chant still echoed faintly through the walls—CCX, CCX, CCX—each syllable a nail being hammered into Chris's coffin.
Chris's eyes flickered with the kind of panic that comes when a man realises he's been running towards a cliff edge and just now seen the drop. His pulse hammered in his ears, drowning out everything except the image of Bear investigators storming Oversight, Serpent analysts pulling his records, patterns emerging that spelled his name in letters too clear to deny.
He gave a slow nod, stiff and mechanical, but his throat was too tight to speak.
Mark studied him for a long moment, seeing the confirmation in that silence. Then he clapped Chris's shoulder once—solid, brotherly, the touch of someone who understood what it meant to be ground down by systems that didn't care if you survived.
"Be careful," Mark said quietly. "Whatever you did or didn't do—it doesn't matter anymore. They've already decided what you are."
He left without waiting for a reply, the door clicking shut with the finality of a casket lid.
Chris stood in the quiet, pulse hammering in his ears.
The room felt smaller than it had five minutes ago. The walls closer. The ceiling lower. Every shadow a potential threat.
Elsewhere.
Olivia leant back in her flat, phone warm in her hand. The virus-coded input she'd slipped into his device days ago—tapped in alongside her number with quick precision whilst his attention was on her fingers brushing his—carried the conversation word for word to her.
She smiled faintly.
The rejects were connecting Chris to the anomaly. Not just as a witness, but as the cause. A southern Commonwealth clerk who listened, and then the Vault cracked open. The mythology was building faster than she'd anticipated, but the core was accurate enough to be useful.
He was unravelling faster than expected. The warning from Mark, the panic she could practically feel through the transcribed conversation, the walls closing in on him from every direction.
All she needed to do now was guide the fall. Be there when he broke. Offer the only shelter he'd have left.
She keyed in a note to her archive: Reject networks connecting subject to CCX manifestation. Timeline accelerating. Subject experiencing acute stress. Recommend immediate proximity contact to reinforce dependency before flight response triggers.
The console dimmed, leaving her reflection faint on the dark screen.
Tomorrow she would appear at his desk. Would smile at him. Would be the only constant in a world that was collapsing around him.
Professional cultivation. Standard intelligence practice.
Nothing personal.
In a dim storeroom across another district, Jamie Cash sat forward in his chair, ecstatic.
The monitoring software he'd embedded in the phone—the one he'd given Chris months ago with the two thousand dollar severance when the Bears shut down Wall Pod, the one that seemed like charity at the time—had just delivered intelligence worth ten times that investment.
His screen glowed with the transcript of Mark's warning, every word captured and timestamped.
Southern Commonwealth clerk. Oversight. Connected to the shard manifestation. Rejects building mythology around him.
Jamie chuckled under his breath, almost giddy.
The boy wasn't just trouble—he was leverage. Human intelligence, live and raw, tied to the very anomaly that had gutted his business. The Federation had paid him to keep tabs on Republic VR anomalies, and he'd stumbled into something far bigger than glitching pods.
He'd thought Chris was just collateral damage when the Bears shut down Wall Pod. Another foreign-born clerk grinding through Republic bureaucracy, barely worth the severance payment.
Now?
Now Chris was the centre of the Republic's greatest mystery. The variable that made impossible things happen. The foreign-born southerner who somehow bent the Vault's rules just by existing near them.
Jamie opened a secure channel, fingers dancing across the keyboard.
SUBJECT: Asset Update - Christopher Xiong
Classification: High Value Intelligence
Summary: Subject now linked by reject networks to CCX phenomenon. Multiple witnesses placing him at Oversight during manifestation events. Described as direct cause of anomaly manifestation. Recommend immediate escalation to primary handlers. Subject remains unaware of surveillance.
He hit send and leant back, satisfaction warming his chest.
The Republic thought it was hunting shadows. But Jamie had already tagged the prey, marked the trail, and sold the map to the highest bidder.
All he had to do now was wait for the Federation to decide what Chris was worth.
Back in building A, unit 412.
Chris sank into his chair, head in his hands.
Outside, the chant kept rolling, distant but unrelenting.
CCX. CCX. CCX.
Every syllable pressed heavier than the last, as though the Republic had already named him its prisoner.