"Everything falls," the Architect repeated. He didn't shout it. He said it like he was reading a weather report.
Rook peeked out from behind Lyric's shoulder. "Okay, quick question. Is 'everything falls' a metaphor? Like, stock prices? Or do you mean the floor? Because we just climbed ninety floors, and I really don't want to do that again."
The Architect at the desk didn't blink. The other five Architects standing around the room didn't move either. They were like statues in cheap suits.
"It is literal," the Architect said. "The Isolation Protocol isn't just a cage, Unit 7. It is a load-bearing wall for the city's psyche. You saw the riots. You saw the chaos. The Wall is the only thing containing the memory overflow."
Lyric tightened their grip on the ceramic sword. "You poisoned the water to give people brain damage, and now you're claiming you're the only thing holding them together? That's rich."
"It is efficient," one of the Architects by the window said. His voice was identical to the one at the desk.
"It is necessary," said another by the bar.
"They're syncing," Valerius whispered, stepping up beside Lyric. He held the blank notebook tight. "They aren't clones, Lyric. They're a RAID array. Redundant drives. If you kill one, the data just transfers to the next."
"So how do we stop them?" Lyric muttered. "I can't erase six of them at once."
"We don't target the bodies," Valerius said, eyes scanning the room. "We target the server. The desk. It's the terminal."
The Architect at the desk sighed. He picked up his fountain pen.
"Disappointing," he said. "I expected you to appreciate the symmetry."
He tapped the pen on the desk. Click.
The white marble floor beneath Lyric's feet suddenly turned into mud. Thick, sucking swamp mud.
Lyric stumbled, boots sinking instantly. "Woah!"
"Rook! The cutter!" Lyric yelled, trying to pull a leg free.
Rook scrambled onto a leather sofa that was miraculously still on solid ground. "What do I cut? The floor is soup!"
"The desk!" Lyric shouted. "Cut the power to the desk!"
The Architect by the window raised a hand. He drew a line in the air.
The air in front of Rook turned solid—a sheet of bulletproof glass appeared out of nowhere, boxing him in on the sofa.
"I am rewriting the environment," the Architect said calmly. "You are merely typos. And typos get deleted."
He pointed his pen at Lyric.
The mud began to harden. It turned to concrete, setting instantly around Lyric's ankles.
"I can't move!" Lyric gritted out, hacking at the concrete with the sword. The ceramic blade chipped the stone, but it was too slow.
Valerius was the only one free. He stood in the middle of the room, looking frantically between the Architects.
"Valerius Veyne," the Architect said. "You have a unique mind. We could use you. Join the design. We can upload you."
Valerius looked at the notebook in his hand. Then he looked at the Architect.
"I'm not a file," Valerius said. "And you have a bug in your code."
"A bug?" The Architect raised an eyebrow.
"You said you're a hive mind," Valerius said, walking toward the desk. The other Architects turned to watch him, but they didn't attack. They were curious. "Which means you share data. Real-time."
"Correct."
"So if one of you reads something," Valerius held up the notebook, "you all read it."
"That notebook is blank," the Architect scoffed. "Your sibling erased it."
"Not completely," Valerius said. "Lyric erased the ink. But the pressure of the pen is still there. The indentations. And I have hyper-thymesia. I remember every pattern I see."
Valerius grabbed a heavy crystal decanter of whiskey from the bar cart. He smashed it against the notebook.
Alcohol soaked the pages.
"What are you doing?" the Architect asked, his calm cracking slightly.
"Wet paper becomes translucent," Valerius said. "And the indentations… they show up."
He slammed the wet notebook onto the desk, right in front of the Architect.
"Read it," Valerius commanded.
The Architect looked down. He couldn't help it. It was data. He was programmed to process data.
The alcohol had soaked into the paper, making the pressed lines of the previous writings visible as dark watermarks. It was a chaotic mess of geometric shapes, recursive loops, and paradoxes the Architect had scribbled during his earlier panic in the elevator.
"It's a logic loop," Valerius said. "A paradox. 'This statement is false.' 'Design a wall that cannot be climbed, then climb it.'"
The Architect's eyes went wide. "Syntax error."
The Architect by the window blinked. "Syntax error."
The one by the bar dropped his glass. "Syntax error."
All six of them froze. Their heads twitched in unison.
"Now, Lyric!" Valerius shouted.
Lyric didn't waste the moment.
Lyric placed both hands on the concrete trapping their legs.
Erase.
Lyric erased the hardness. The concrete turned back into dust.
Lyric burst free, sprinting toward the desk.
The Architect at the desk was shaking, caught in the mental loop Valerius had fed him.
"System… rebooting…" the Architect stuttered.
Lyric jumped onto the desk, boots sliding on the polished surface.
"Reboot this," Lyric snarled.
Lyric drove the ceramic sword down—not into the Architect, but into the desk itself. Right through the center of the touch-interface.
CRUNCH.
The sword pierced the glass screen and went deep into the machinery below. Sparks sprayed up, burning Lyric's face, but they held on.
Lyric reached down with their bare hand and grabbed the shattered hole in the desk.
Erase.
Lyric didn't target matter. They targeted the connection.
Erase the network.
A shockwave of white silence blasted through the room.
The six Architects gasped in unison. Then, like televisions being turned off, they collapsed. They didn't die; they just slumped over, their "programs" disconnected from the server.
The blue force field dome outside the window flickered.
It buzzed once, a sound so loud it shook the glass of the penthouse.
And then, it vanished.
The sky cleared. The rain poured in, unhindered.
"It's down," Rook cheered, kicking the glass wall that had trapped him (which had dissolved back into air). "The wall is down!"
Lyric pulled the sword out of the smoking desk and hopped down, chest heaving.
"Is it over?" Lyric asked.
Valerius walked over to the unconscious Architect and checked his pulse.
"The field is down," Valerius said. "But look at the city."
They walked to the window.
Below them, the city wasn't celebrating.
Without the blue light of the force field, the true state of the city was visible. Fires were burning in every district. The streets were black with people—riots moving like rivers of ants toward the Spire.
And in the distance, beyond where the wall had been...
Lyric squinted.
"What is that?" Lyric asked.
Beyond the city limits, where the horizon should have been, there was nothing but gray fog. A swirling, dense wall of mist that stretched up into the clouds.
"The Fog," Rook whispered. "Like in the Graveyard. But… everywhere."
"The World That Forgets You," Valerius murmured. "The Guild wasn't just keeping us in. They were keeping the world out."
A siren began to wail inside the penthouse. A red light strobed.
CRITICAL FAILURE, a mechanical voice announced. CONTAINMENT BREACH. PERIMETER COMPROMISED. INITIATING PROTOCOL: SCORCHED EARTH.
"Scorched Earth?" Rook squeaked. "That sounds worse than 'Purge'."
"It means they're going to destroy the Spire," Valerius said, his face pale. "If they can't control the city, they delete it. We have to go."
"How?" Lyric asked. "The elevator is full of guards. We can't climb down ninety floors."
Rook ran to the window. He looked down, then looked at the helipad on the roof of the adjacent tower—about a hundred feet away and fifty feet down.
"We fly," Rook said.
"We don't have a car," Lyric reminded him. "Our car is in the lobby."
"We don't need a car," Rook said, pointing to the wall of the penthouse. "We have parachutes."
"We do?"
"No," Rook grinned wildly, grabbing a heavy curtain from the window. "But we have expensive silk drapes and a lot of duct tape in my backpack."
Lyric looked at Valerius.
"He's joking, right?"
Valerius looked at the red strobing light and the countdown timer that had appeared on the wall screens: 05:00... 04:59...
"Physics says it's a bad idea," Valerius said, grabbing a curtain rod. "Survival says it's our only option."
"Cut them down," Lyric ordered, sheathing the sword. "We're jumping."