The vision came without warning, like a stone dropped into a pond he didn't know was there.
Kai was not asleep—he had learned not to trust sleep—but the world folded like a page. Light thinned; the canister at his hip grew impossibly heavy and then weightless, as if gravity itself were arguing with him. The tunnel around the Crucible hummed, and in that hum the fragment unfurled a song so old it remembered the shape of silence.
He saw sky.
It wasn't the sky anyone in Caelun knew—a smooth vault of ash and auroras. This sky was a wide, raw mouth of darkness crusted with living points of light. Each star burned like a name. They moved in slow, dignified orbits, and between them the air smelled of salt and apology.
A hand reached into that heaven. Not a fist—deliberate, reverent. The hand belonged to something both too large and too carefully made for the world: an arm of brass and bone, wrapped in letters that were not letters but echoes. Fingers brushed a star. It did not snap or falter. The star folded into the palm like paper, and as it bent it screamed—not with noise, but with the sensation of a thousand good-byes.
Kai felt that scream in his throat. He knew, distantly and intimately, the taste of those good-byes—iron and sweet smoke.
The scene changed and he was standing on a cliff of glass. Below him, the world had been folded onto itself: cities nested within cities, moons hung in staircases. A child knelt, hands cupped, crying out. The child's tears spun into tiny stars that fell into the palms of those around him. When the crowd took the stars, each grabbed a small memory that wasn't theirs—a laugh, a first step, the edge of a lullaby—and they swallowed it like fruit. The memory kept them warm for a little while and then it became cold inside them, and they needed another.
A thought—an idea more than a sentence—uncoiled inside Kai: We harvest to remember. We remember to live. We must keep the rhythm.
The scene snapped. He was inside a cathedral of glass, and a great machine inhaled light. Around the machine, people knelt and read from slates so old the ink had become teaspoons of dust. Above them hung a map—the heavens, fractured into pieces with lines like veins. One name on the map pulsed, brighter than the rest. He knew it somehow: not as a spoken name but as a pressure against his ribs.
Then the vision bent and trapped him, showing instead a single, small act: a woman—wild-eyed and gentle—lifting a shard to her mouth and whispering a promise. The shard brightened. She released it, and it flew upward, leaving a thin trail like smoke. The promise struck the sky and then broke. The sky shuddered, and a sound like a glass bell cracked over the whole world.
Kai came back to himself with a cry that tore his throat. He was on the catwalk in the Crucible again; lights shimmered below like a small unhealed wound in the earth. The fragment lay on the table between his hands, its surface trembling as though recovering from the exertion of memory.
He pressed his forehead to the casing. "What are you?" he whispered—a plea and an accusation both.
The response was no longer an image but a pressure—a bargain forming around the edges of his mind. The fragment offered nothing in words. It offered implication: We remember the things that are dangerous to remember. It left him with the sense that someone once tried to repair the sky and failed deliberately, that the stars were not stolen but hidden—sealed against something worse.
Before he could turn the feeling over, the Crucible itself announced company.
Footsteps—close, measured, not the Guild's ponderous march but thin and fast, like knives threaded on a wire. Shadows moved along the cavern wall, cleaving the soft halo of the suspended fragments into bars of dark. A whispered call cut the tunnel air, and it was not a voice as much as a keyed instrument: precise and tuned to the metal of his bones.
Kai stood, breath sharp. The woman from the tunnels—her cloak damp with the Crucible's mist—had unshouldered a weapon he had not noticed before: a long, lattice-barbed pole that sang quietly when she shifted it. Her eyes met his and for the first time the blue beneath her hood was not curiosity. It was calculation.
From the deeper shadow of the catwalk, figures emerged. They were not armored like Guildmen, nor robed like Churchmen. They moved in the manner of hunters: bodies wrapped in scavenged mesh, masks with single, narrow slits for vision, and tethers coiled like snakes at their belts. Where their boots struck the metal, the suspended fragments pulsed as if in alarm.
"You brought a signal into the wrong room," the leader said. His voice was muffled by a face-guard, but his words had the precise cruelty of a blade. "You could have sold it. You could have saved your sister. Instead you brought us company."
Kai's mouth went dry. "Who are you?" he managed.
The leader stepped closer. In the light, Kai could see the strange pattern scored into the man's glove—concentric moons with tiny teeth. "Names are expensive," he said. "We are collectors. We clean up after the Guild when they fail to be careful."
Around them, the suspended fragments vibrated like a nerve under stress. The fragment at Kai's hip answered him—soft, pleading—and that pleading felt almost human.
The leader smiled. "And you, boy, you sing in a way we can hear. Give it to us and no one need be hurt."
Kai's hands closed on the casing until the knuckles whitened. The crate below trembled. The Covenant of his life pressed in: Mira's face, pale under the birthmark; the memory of their father's hands; the debt-list pinned under his mattress.
He felt the fragment inside him—warm, insistent.
You can sell me, it seemed to say. You can buy back what you've lost. But at what cost.
Kai could have handed it to them. He could have traded the echo of the falling sky for a sack of lumen and a promise. He could have bought time.
Instead, he did something he had never done before: he lied to the thing that was keeping him alive.
He tucked the casing inside his jacket, stepped forward, and smiled—sharp and quick and empty of trust.
"Maybe," he said slowly, "but maybe it's mine."
In the instant he spoke, the tunnel sang.
The tunnel sang — a single note that shouldn't have existed.
It came from the casing against Kai's chest, a sound too pure to belong underground. For an instant the air shimmered; then everything that was metal began to tremble, as though remembering the shape of flight.
The leader of the collectors tilted his head. "There," he said softly. "The shard likes you."
The woman beside Kai moved first. Her polearm unfolded with a hiss of old machinery; arcs of static climbed its spine like silver insects.
"Move," she breathed.
He didn't argue.
The first lash hit the catwalk where he had been standing. It wasn't a bullet — it was resonance, a ribbon of invisible pressure that shredded the air itself.
Shards of suspended light burst and rained down as motes; the whole Crucible flickered between colors, each pulse a heartbeat too fast.
Kai ran.
The fragment's hum pressed directions into his skull — left, down, duck — and he obeyed them on instinct. Around him, the collectors moved like a school of knives: silent, perfect, their movements measured by rhythm rather than sight. Each strike landed where a human thought he would be next.
The woman fought differently. Her movements were jagged, improvised; she didn't seem to care if she bled. Every swing of her polearm tore a temporary void in the mist, a brief hole where sound died.
"Don't stop," she snapped.
"I wasn't planning to!"
They reached the spiral staircase — rusted, half-eaten by old acid rain. Kai jumped the last six steps, hit the platform below, rolled hard enough to split his lip. He glanced back once.
The collectors didn't follow in a line. They folded down the spiral, weightless, like gravity had agreed to bend for them. Their masks gleamed with the reflections of the falling fragments — each reflection slightly wrong, as if showing a future already broken.
Kai fumbled the casing open. The fragment pulsed, desperate. A whisper formed in his head: Sacrifice, small, quickly.
He didn't ask what that meant. The stairwell was narrowing, their pursuers closing. He pulled the fragment out — a miniature star burning in his palms — and slammed it against the wall.
The world blinked.
Light flooded out, not blinding but remembering. For an instant he was standing in the open, wind in his hair, Mira laughing beside him under the rusted bridges of Old Vale. The memory was too vivid, too perfect. He tried to hold it — and the fragment took it.
The vision vanished. So did the laughter.
When he looked up, the metal wall had melted into a new passage, raw and glowing. He stumbled through. The woman followed, breath ragged. The opening sealed itself behind them, solidifying into opaque glass.
Kai sagged against the wall. "What—what just—"
"You traded something," she said. Her voice had softened, maybe from pity. "That's how they work."
"I didn't mean to—"
"No one ever does."
They stood in silence. On the other side of the wall, the collectors' footsteps stopped. Then the leader spoke — muffled, amused.
"We'll find you again. Every star leaves a signature. Yours sings beautifully."
The sound faded with their retreat.
Kai pressed a shaking hand to his chest. The fragment lay quiet now, almost sleeping. He searched his thoughts for Mira's laughter, the exact sound of it. He could recall her face, the shape of her smile — but the sound was gone. The absence hurt more than any wound.
He slid to the floor. "I thought I was saving her," he whispered. "I didn't think I'd start losing her instead."
The woman knelt beside him, eyes shadowed beneath the hood. "You can't keep the sky," she said quietly. "You can only borrow pieces of it."
He wanted to argue. Instead, he stared at the faint glow still pulsing through the glass wall, like the heartbeat of something ancient trying to wake.
Outside, far above the drowned district, the night sky flickered once — a single star pulsing where none had been before.