I woke to the smell of solder, fungus, and something cooking.
The deep, subsonic hum of the Kiln was the first thing I felt, a vibration in the bones of the dump, in the metal pallet beneath me. My body was a catalogue of complaints: the throbbing in my ankle had settled into a dull, persistent ache, the cut on my forehead was tight and itchy, and every muscle protested as I pushed myself up on the packing foam. I was stiff, cold, and ravenously hungry.
The Mender's workshop was bathed in the soft, multi-colored glow of her fungal lights and LED strings. She was at her workbench, but not tinkering. She was cooking on a small, flat heating element, tending to a pan where something sizzled. The smell was… good. Savory, with a hint of something earthy and unfamiliar.
"You snore," she announced without turning around. "A low, glitchy warble. Interesting. Sit up. Eat."
Silas was perched nearby, his pages open to a complex, hand-drawn map of subterranean conduits. The Kiln stood sentinel by the cavern entrance, its forge-light dimmed to a gentle hearth-glow.
I limped over to a makeshift table—an old server door laid across two crates. The Mender slid a metal plate in front of me. On it was a kind of patty, crispy on the outside, with what looked like shredded root vegetables and mycoprotein. A dense, dark bread roll sat beside it.
"What is it?" I asked, my stomach growling loudly.
"Food," she said flatly, sitting opposite me with her own plate. "Mushroom cultivated on data-mold. Root tubers from the hydroponic leakage zones. Spices salvaged from a derelict cargo pod. It won't kill you. Probably."
I didn't care. I took a bite. The texture was firm, almost meaty, and the flavor was deep, umami-rich, with a peppery kick. It was the best thing I'd tasted since… well, since I couldn't remember. I ate ravenously, the simple act of chewing and swallowing a profound, grounding pleasure.
"The hum is working," Silas scripted into the quiet, his pages not moving from his map. "I HAVE DETECTED SEVEN DISTINCT SUB-SONIC RESPONSES IN THE PAST FOUR HOURS. ALL FROM WITHIN A THREE-KILOMETER RADIUS. THEY ARE… CURIOSITIES. INVESTIGATING THE SOURCE."
"They're coming?" I asked around a mouthful.
"Poking their heads out," the Mender corrected, stabbing her own food with a fork made from a filed-down screwdriver. "The lost and the broken. They've been alone in the dark so long, a friendly vibration is either a miracle or a trap. They're being cautious."
Lyra's voice crackled in my earpiece, making me jump. "Kael? Status." She sounded tired.
I swallowed. "Alive. Eating. The hum is drawing attention. What's it like up there?"
"Quiet. Too quiet. The Gardeners have gone from active pruning to deep analysis. Patrols are less frequent, but more… observant. They're studying the glitch-patterns, not just containing them. It's like they're preparing for something."
"Or someone," I muttered.
"Elara is safe. She's feeding me low-level logistical data—supply routes, energy grid fluctuations. Nothing major, but it helps." A pause. "Are you… are you safe down there?"
I looked at the Mender, who was glaring at a misbehaving component on her bench. At the Kiln, a silent mountain of potential. At Silas, a repository of lost causes. At my plate of scavenged food.
"We're in a garbage heap being hunted by cosmic bureaucrats," I said. "But we have a roof, and the food's not bad. So, relatively."
A faint, staticky sound that might have been a laugh came through the earpiece. "Good. Keep your head down. I'll check in tonight." The line went quiet.
After eating, the Mender insisted on checking my ankle. Her hands were deft, her multi-lensed eye zooming in on the swelling. "Healing. Slowly. Your body's prioritizing basic system integrity over localized repair. Interesting metabolic triage." She re-wrapped the brace. "Now, you're going to help. Your glitch-sight. I want you to look at something."
She led me to a back section of her workshop, behind a curtain of hanging cables. Here, on a pedestal of fused plastic, was her most delicate project.
It was a bird. Or it had been. Now, it was a fusion of biology and machine. One wing was original, feathered, though the feathers were iridescent with a faint data-shimmer. The other was a beautiful, intricate construct of copper filigree and polymer membrane. Its head was mostly organic, a sharp-beaked songbird, but one eye was a perfect, tiny camera lens. It lay on its side, breathing in quick, shallow bursts. A soft, pained glitching sound came from it—a warble that would cut in and out with static.
"She fell down a data-vent," the Mender said, her raspy voice unusually soft. "Tried to integrate a piece of rogue code she found. A melody. It was… incompatible. Now her soul is out of phase with her shell. I can fix the shell. I can't realign the soul. That's your department."
I knelt beside the pedestal. The bird's organic eye looked at me, full of animal fear and intelligence. I could see the problem. The bird's core identity string—a simple, beautiful thing about flight and song—was tangled with a foreign strand of code, a haunting, complex digital melody about loss. The two were knotted, pulling against each other, tearing the tiny creature apart from the inside.
"I don't know how to fix this," I whispered. "I break things. Or I connect big, abstract things. This is… small. And alive."
"So be small," the Mender said, not unkindly. "Don't edit. Don't command. Just… listen. And then introduce a third thing. A bridge."
I remembered the Prayer-Smith. The ember and the prayer. A third thing.
I closed my eyes and reached out, not with a command, but with my perception. I focused on the two tangled strings: the pure, joyful concept of flight-song, and the complex, sorrowful melody-of-loss. I didn't try to untangle them. I just… appreciated them. The bird's simple joy was real. The melody's grief was also real.
I needed a bridge. A concept that understood both joy and loss.
I thought of the view from my old apartment window. The city lights. The silence after the scream. The feeling of saving a life and forgetting a sister.
Memory. Not just happy or sad. The act of remembering. The bridge between what was and what is.
Gently, so gently it felt like breathing, I nudged a thread of that concept—memory-as-bridge—toward the knot. I didn't force it. I offered it.
The two tangled strings sensed this new, neutral presence. The joyful flight-song hesitated. The sorrowful melody paused.
Slowly, carefully, they began to use the concept of memory as a common ground. The knot didn't untie. It reconfigured. The joy of flight became tinged with the bittersweet knowledge of past winds. The melody of loss gained the lift of remembered skies.
The bird on the pedestal shuddered. A flurry of glitching static erupted from it, and then a clear, beautiful, heartbreaking sound: a birdsong that was both a trill of joy and a sigh of absence. It was a duet sung by one creature.
Its wings—both the feathered and the filigree—fluttered. It pushed itself upright, blinked its two different eyes, and looked at me. Then it hopped onto the Mender's outstretched finger and let out another, softer song.
The cost was subtle. I felt a distant, quiet snip. I waited for the loss. What went this time?
Then I realized. The memory I'd used as a bridge—the specific, vivid memory of the view from my old apartment—was now… generic. I knew I'd had an apartment. I knew I'd looked out a window. But the specific pattern of the lights, the exact feeling of the sill under my elbows, the particular quality of the night air… it was gone. Smoothed over. A personal memory had become a conceptual tool, and in the process, ceased to be mine alone.
It was a fair trade.
The Mender stared at the bird, then at me. "Huh. So that's what a Primordial does. You don't fix. You… facilitate misunderstandings." She said it with a tone of professional approval.
The moment was broken by Silas. "CONTACT. SOUTH-EAST CONDUIT. APPROACHING WITH CAUTION. SINGLE ENTITY. SIGNATURE IS… FRACTURED."
We moved to the workshop entrance. The Kiln's hum remained steady, an open invitation. From the dark mouth of a large drainage pipe, a figure emerged.
It was a man. Or had been. He was tall, painfully thin, wearing the tattered remains of a Neovalis civic engineer's uniform. But his body was… transparent in patches. Not invisibly, but like poorly rendered glass. You could see the junk-pile wall behind him through his chest and left leg. In his transparent hands, he carried a tool that glowed with a soft, persistent blue light: a reality-solder, used for patching minor dimensional cracks.
He saw us and froze, his eyes wide. One of them was solid, normal. The other was as transparent as his chest, showing the gears and optics of a prosthetic implant behind it. His tag flickered:
"I…" his voice echoed, as if coming from a distance. "I felt… a solid hum. A warm frequency. In the… the cracks." He looked at the Kiln with a mixture of awe and desperate hope. "Are you… maintenance?"
The Mender stepped forward, her hands open. "We're something like that. I'm a Mender. This is the Kiln. The hum is ours. You're fading, son."
Cas looked down at his transparent hands. "I was fixing the old infrastructure. The codes beneath the streets. I found a… a weakness. A place where the world was thin. I tried to patch it. The patch… held. I didn't." He hugged himself, a shudder passing through his semi-corporeal form. "The Gardeners logged me as 'ambient structural degradation.' They didn't try to fix me. They just… fenced off my sector."
He had sacrificed his place in reality to shore up reality itself. And the system had thanked him by writing him off as a casualty.
"You can stay," I said. The words came out before I thought. "The hum… it's for stability. For things that don't fit. You can help us. You know the foundations. The real ones."
He looked at me, his transparent eye whirring. "You… you see the strings too. But yours are… brighter. Messier."
"I'm Kael."
He nodded slowly, then his gaze fell on the Elegy Sparrow, which had fluttered to the Mender's shoulder and was singing its complex song. He listened, and a tear, perfectly solid, traced down his opaque cheek. "It's… it's still beautiful. Even broken."
That was our first recruit. Not a warrior. A fading engineer who loved the world enough to become part of its cracks.
Over the next few hours, two more arrived, drawn by the hum.
A young woman named Tali, whose glitch was sensory inversion. She tasted colors and heard textures. The Gardeners had marked her for "recalibration"—a process that would have left her a numb, functional shell. She was an artist, and her perception, while chaotic, saw harmonies in the dump we were blind to.
And a thing that called itself Glimmer. It was the sentient echo from the Memory Bazaar in the Underworld, the one whose tag had said
Our sanctuary was growing. A mechanic, an artist, a librarian, a forger, an engineer, an echo, and me.
As night fell in the world above, we sat together in the fungus-light. Cas was already pointing out weak spots in the dump's structure on Silas's maps, suggesting reinforcements. Tali was describing the "symphony of corrosion" she heard from a particular pile of junk, which the Mender found fascinating. Glimmer hovered near the Kiln, weaving tiny, illusory flowers from the memory of sunlight.
It wasn't an army. It was a workshop. A support group for the cosmically displaced.
I sat with my back against a warm server rack, my stomach full, my ankle braced, listening to the murmurs of collaboration. The ember in its vial was quiet, its light a satisfied, steady pulse.
Lyra's check-in came, her voice a whisper in the dark of my ear. "All quiet here. You?"
I watched Tali try to explain the color of the Kiln's hum to a fascinated Silas. "We're… building," I whispered back. "Slowly."
"Good. Build strong, Kael." A long pause. "I wish I was there. To see it."
"You will," I said, and I realized I believed it.
After the call, the Mender handed me a blanket stitched from scraps of insulation foil. It crinkled, but it was warm. "Get more sleep, Glitch. Tomorrow, we start building in earnest. Your engineer friend has ideas about tapping the old geothermal vents. Power. Real power."
I lay back on my pallet. The hum was in my bones. The strange, new community murmured around me. The threats above were real, the Gardeners were coming, the System was dying.
But here, in the dark, in the trash, we had made a place where a transparent man could be solid, a broken bird could sing a new song, and a glitch could close his eyes and, for a few hours, just rest.