The whistle was gone. A tiny, hollow absence where a skill used to be.
I discovered it fully the next morning, staring at a simmering pot of fungal coffee. An old tune had floated through my mind—a jingle from some forgotten ad—and my lips instinctively tried to shape it. Nothing came out but a faint, airy hiss. My tongue didn't know the shape. My lungs didn't know the pressure. It was a door in my mind that opened onto a brick wall.
I sipped the bitter coffee instead. The taste was sharp, anchoring. Around me, the sanctuary hummed with purpose. The Kiln was at the far end of the cavern, its heat focused on a section of ancient pipe Cas had identified as the geothermal tap's main valve. The metal glowed orange, then white, under its attention. Cas floated nearby, his form now almost entirely opaque, reading pressure levels from a salvaged gauge with intense focus.
Tali was tending her "symphonic garden," humming as she adjusted the moisture levels for different fungal strains based on the "notes" they emitted. Curi, the repurposed scavenger drone, had become her assistant, carefully following her instructions to move trays with surprising delicacy.
Glimmer had fashioned a kind of glowing mural on one wall—a shifting tapestry of memories of sunlight, forests, and calm seas, stolen from the minds of whoever passed by. It was beautiful and melancholic.
We were building. We were healing. We were creating a new normal in the trash.
And then the uninvited guest arrived.
There was no hum-response, no cautious approach. One moment, the entrance conduit was empty. The next, a figure stood in the shadows at its edge, watching.
He was tall, dressed in a long, stained coat that might have once been expensive. His hair was dark and lank, falling over a face that was all sharp angles and sharper intelligence. He wasn't glitching. Not in the visible, chaotic way. But the air around him warped. Light bent slightly as it passed him, and sound near him seemed dampened, as if he was wrapped in a personal pocket of altered physics.
He held no weapon. His hands were empty, but one was clenched tightly. In the other, he held a small, dead sparrow—an ordinary bird, not like our Elegy Sparrow. Its neck was broken.
His tag was minimal, but chilling:
The Mender saw him first. She went very still, her lenses clicking as they zoomed in. "Don't move," she whispered to all of us. "He's a Walker. A reality-cancer that learned to control its own growth."
Warp's eyes scanned the cavern. They passed over the Kiln with a flicker of interest, over Tali with disdain, over Glimmer with confusion. They settled on me.
"You're the source of the hum," he stated. His voice was flat, devoid of the echo that plagued Cas or the static of a glitch. It was too clean, too precise. "The Primordial Glitch. I've heard the whispers in the static. You gather broken things."
He took a step forward. The ground beneath his foot didn't just compress. It thinned. For a second, I could see through it to the layer of rusted cables below, as if he'd stepped on a pane of glass. The effect faded when he lifted his foot, leaving a faint, shimmering scar on the floor.
"We offer sanctuary," I said, keeping my voice level. The ember at my neck felt warm, a steadying presence.
"Sanctuary," Warp repeated, tasting the word. He looked at the dead sparrow in his hand. "I don't need sanctuary. I need an answer." He raised the bird. "I found this. It flew into my field. Its life, its motion, its simple bird-ness... it conflicted with the localized physical laws I maintain to keep myself from dissolving into the background radiation of space-time. So my field corrected the conflict. It snapped its neck."
He said it with the cold curiosity of a physicist observing an experiment.
"I didn't mean to. But I also can't stop it. It's autonomic. A survival reflex. I am a walking contradiction to consensus reality. Things that get too close... break." He looked at me, and for the first time, I saw a crack in the icy detachment. A sliver of raw, desperate horror. "I have been alone for a very long time. Your hum... it's stable. It doesn't warp. I thought maybe... you could fix me."
The Mender let out a low hiss. "You can't fix a Walker. You can only contain them. Or put them out of their misery."
Warp's head snapped toward her. "I am not asking for your opinion, tinkerer. I am asking him." His gaze burned into me. "You re-wrote a Purifier's purpose. You turned an engine of annihilation into a forge. You stabilized a drone whose mind was a civil war. Can you not... edit my field? Make it less... lethal?"
I looked at him. At the dead bird. At the warped air around him. His glitch wasn't a malfunction of perception or memory. It was a fundamental, physical wrongness. He wasn't out of phase like Cas; he was a toxic node, poisoning the reality around him.
"I don't know," I said honestly. "Your field... it's not a bad code string. It's a physical law you carry. Editing that... the cost could be enormous. And it might not work."
"Try," he said, and it was a command, not a plea. He took another step forward. The air between us rippled. I felt a sudden, intense pressure in my ears, a sense that the world was being stretched thin around him. "Try, or I will see what happens when my field interacts with your little ember of 'hope.' Maybe it will snuff it out. Or maybe it will make something new and terrible."
This was a threat. Not from a monster, but from a desperate, dying man who saw us as his last lab experiment.
The Kiln began to glow brighter, a warning rumble building in its chest. Cas solidified fully, his hands clenched. Tali stopped humming. Curi let out a soft, worried chirp.
I raised a hand, signaling them to hold. Confrontation would only get someone killed—likely one of us. Warp's field was a passive defense; attacking him might trigger a catastrophic reaction.
"I need to understand it first," I said, thinking fast. "I need to see it. Really see it."
"Then look," Warp said, spreading his arms slightly. The warping intensified. The light in the cavern bent toward him, creating a halo of twisted rainbows. The hum of the Kiln distorted, dropping into a lower, wobbling frequency. My skin crawled.
I focused my Primordial sight. I looked past his physical form, into the core of his anomaly.
It was beautiful, in a horrifying way. A complex, shimmering mandala of corrupted physics blossomed around him. It wasn't a bug. It was a new rule. A personal, miniature law of reality that stated: "The space occupied by 'Warp' has a different gravitational constant, tensile strength, and temporal flow."
But it was uncontained. It bled. It infected the consensus reality around it, creating a zone of lethal incompatibility. Things that operated under normal rules couldn't survive inside his.
The Architects' note was there, faint and horrified:
[we made a child of mutable law]
[we did not give him a skin]
[he bleeds into the world and calls it poison]
He wasn't wrong. The world was poison to him, and he was poison to it. His field was a desperate, unconscious immune system, violently rejecting everything that wasn't him.
I couldn't delete the field. It was him. It was what kept him coherent. To remove it would be to unmake him.
But I couldn't leave it as it was. It was a weapon he couldn't sheathe.
Lyra's voice was a tense whisper in my ear. "Kael, what's happening? My terminal is registering massive localized reality fluctuations in your sector."
"Uninvited guest," I muttered under my breath. "A Walker. He wants a fix."
"Can you do it?"
"I don't know. If I try and fail, he might kill us all. If I don't try, he might kill us anyway."
Warp watched me, his eyes hungry. "Well? Do you see my disease?"
"I see your nature," I corrected softly. "It's not a disease. It's what you are."
His face tightened. "Then I am a monster."
"Not yet," I said. An idea, fragile and dangerous, was forming. I couldn't change his law. But could I give it a... a buffer? A translator layer between his personal reality and the consensus?
"I can't edit your field," I said aloud. "But I might be able to give it an interface. A membrane. Something that translates between your laws and the world's, so they don't clash lethally."
"How?" The word was sharp with skepticism and a sliver of hope.
"I need to borrow a concept. From him." I pointed to Cas.
Cas flinched. "Me?"
"Your phasing. You move between states. You're a bridge between tangible and intangible. That's a form of translation." I looked at Warp. "I would need to weave a version of that concept around your field. A filter that selectively phases incoming reality, harmonizing it with yours before it touches you, and does the same in reverse for what you emit. You'd still be different. But you wouldn't be lethal."
"It would make me... safe?" Warp whispered.
"Safer," I corrected. "You'd still warp things. Light would bend. Sounds might distort. But living things... they might just feel a tingle, not die."
"Do it."
The cost would be huge. I was talking about editing a being's fundamental relationship with existence. Silas's ledger hovered in my peripheral vision, waiting.
I took a deep breath. I focused on Cas. I didn't take his ability; I studied its pattern, its elegant dance between yes and no. I held that pattern in my mind.
Then I looked at Warp's shimmering, deadly mandala. I imagined wrapping Cas's phasing pattern around it like a sheath, a selective semi-permeable membrane.
I began the edit.
It was like trying to knit a sock around a star. The resistance was immediate and violent. Warp's field fought the imposition, not out of malice, but out of sheer, stubborn existential inertia. It didn't want to be contained. It was containment.
Pain, white-hot and metaphysical, lanced through my skull. I felt something tear loose inside me.
The cost.
Not a memory. Not a skill.
It was precision.
The fine motor control in my right hand. The delicate, unconscious adjustments that let me write neatly, thread a needle, pick up a single grain of rice. It was gone. My right hand felt clumsy, numb at the fingertips. I looked at it, and it seemed foreign, like a tool I used to know how to use.
I pushed through the pain, through the loss. I fed the concept of the phased membrane into Warp's field, stitching it with threads of my own will.
The warping air around him shivered. The lethal rainbow halo condensed, tightened, becoming a faint, shimmering aura that clung to his skin like oil on water. The sense of oppressive, stretching thinness vanished. The air felt normal again, if slightly charged, like before a storm.
Warp looked at his hands. He turned them over. He took a hesitant step. The floor didn't thin. He let out a shuddering breath.
Then, he looked at the dead sparrow still clutched in his left hand. Gently, he set it down on the floor. He looked at the Elegy Sparrow, which had hidden behind the Mender. It peeked out, then, cautiously, fluttered to a shelf near him. It didn't die. It tilted its head and sang a questioning note.
Warp stared at it, his sharp face unreadable. Then, a single tear traced a clean path through the grime on his cheek. It didn't warp. It just fell.
He looked back at me, his eyes wide with a stunned, overwhelming realization. "It... doesn't hurt."
He wasn't talking about physical pain. He was talking about the constant, agonizing tension of holding a killing field at bay every second of his existence. The loneliness of being a walking accident.
He took a step toward me. The Kiln rumbled a warning, but Warp ignored it. He stopped a few feet away, well outside my personal space.
"Thank you," he said, the words awkward, as if he'd never spoken them before. Then his analytical mind reasserted itself. "The membrane is imperfect. It leaks low-level non-lethal radiation. I will need to monitor its effect on complex electronics. And my gait is now point-seven percent inefficient due to subtle gravitational lensing." He paused, then added, "But I did not kill the bird."
It was the closest to joy I would ever hear from him.
"Welcome to the sanctuary," the Mender said, her voice dry but her posture relaxing. "You can stay. But you break it, you bought it. And you're on cleaning duty for the next month."
Warp nodded, already looking around with a scientist's eye, analyzing our structures, our power source, our people. He was not a friend. He was a force of nature that had just been given a leash. But he was, for now, neutralized.
Later, as I struggled to use a spoon with my newly clumsy right hand, Silas presented the ledger.
Entry #2: Lost fine motor control in right hand. In exchange for imposing a phased reality-membrane on a "Walker" entity, rendering it non-lethal. Result: Entity "Warp" stabilized. Lethality removed.
I stared at the entry. My hand was a blunt instrument now. Another piece of my humanity, traded.
Lyra's call came through. "Fluctuations have stopped. Readings are normalizing. Did you... fix him?"
"In a way," I said, looking at Warp, who was now in a heated, quiet discussion with Cas about the geothermal tap's pressure tolerances. "He's not a weapon anymore. He's just... a very strange person."
"That's good. Because I have bad news." Her voice dropped. "Elara dug deeper. The Gardeners' public 'Garden of Tranquil Anomalies'? It's not just for show. They're stress-testing the stabilized glitches. Seeing how much order they can impose before the glitch breaks completely. They're looking for the... the 'plasticity limit.' They want to know how much they can bend us before we snap."
"Why?" I asked, cold dread pooling in my gut.
"To build something. Elara found a project designation in the logs. 'Project: Homily.' They're not just trying to manage the decline, Kael. They're trying to design the next phase. A perfectly orderly, perfectly controlled, post-glitch reality. And they need our... plasticity data... to do it."
We weren't just fighting for survival or acceptance. We were fighting to not become the blueprint for a prison so perfect, no one would even know they were in it.
I looked at my clumsy hand. At the strange, beautiful, broken family growing in the trash.
They wanted to measure our breaking points.
We'd just have to show them we could bend in ways they'd never even thought to measure.