Dock Seven screamed.

  The sound wasn’t metal. It was doctrine—thick bands of script along the walls jumping three glyphs at once, twisting out of alignment as if the whole array were trying to crawl out of its own skin.

  DOCK SEVEN CORE: SELF-ERASURE SEQUENCE – ACTIVE

  TIME TO ARRAY COLLAPSE: 05:47 … 05:46 …

  Red light pulsed along the rings in the floor, beating in counter-rhythm to the Genocide Timer in Rael’s chest.

  Echo whistled low. Well. You made an impression.

  Rael tasted copper. Some of it was blood in his mouth. Some of it was phantom—R-00’s memories still crackling across his nerves like a storm that hadn’t realized it should be over.

  They’d died here once already.

  Not Dock Seven specifically. But on slabs just like this one, under words just like those, in tests that had ended with FAILED BRANCH stamped across their soul.

  They were quiet inside him. No running commentary, no jokes. Just a constant, hollow pressure, like someone clutching the inside of his ribcage and refusing to let go.

  He was not going to let the Entity erase that twice.

  Chains rattled as emergency hooks partially released. The doctrine frame loosened around his wrists and ankles, but the clamps on his Timer stayed locked, bright and cold.

  Across the circle, Mereth staggered up, one hand on the console, hair coming loose from its perfect coil. A thin line of blood ran from one nostril.

  “Stabilize the field!” she snapped at the nearest technician. Her voice was hoarse but still had edge. “Route anything non-essential to buffer nodes—”

  “There are no buffers,” the technician gasped. His eyes were blown wide, pupils still full of Echo Field static. “Entity flagged the array redundant. All sub-nodes got rolled into the core at initiation. There’s nowhere to push the erasure to—”

  “Then slow it!” Mereth slammed her palm onto the console. “Manual dampers—”

  MANUAL OVERRIDE REQUEST: DENIED

  PRIVILEGE LEVEL INSUFFICIENT

  SELF-ERASURE DIRECTIVE: ABSOLUTE

  The console text didn’t flicker. It didn’t need to. The flat denial was worse.

  Mereth went very still.

  Ardan swore softly under his breath. The word didn’t sound like it belonged in a Dominion Justiciar’s mouth.

  “Your god decided you’re ballast,” Rael said.

  He wasn’t even trying to twist the knife. Not really.

  It slipped in on its own.

  Ardan’s gauntleted hand tightened. Doctrine plates along his arm flared, then dimmed as the leash tugged.

  “Asset,” he said. “Dock Seven still has staff aboard. We have to—”

  “escort the stress asset to the next phase site,” Mereth cut in, voice brittle. “That is the Entity’s directive. Decommission protocols assume staff evacuation through standard routes. If we follow procedure, we all survive.” She glared toward Rael. “Provided the anomaly doesn’t corrupt another field.”

  Rael let his head rest back against the frame.

  The Timer digits ticked on, indifferent.

  05:11 … 05:10 …

  The floor shuddered. Somewhere above, something heavy tore loose and crashed down. Distant screams echoed faintly through doctrine muffling.

  Echo stirred. She’s lying to herself, they said. Entity didn’t bother specifying staff survival. “Decommission” was the whole sentence.

  “I saw your status board,” Rael said. “Before your Entity turned it into a bonfire. You had seven observers watching. How many do you think are still paying attention now that I’m not doing tricks in the Echo Field?”

  Mereth’s jaw clenched.

  “This facility has served its function,” she said. “Our duty is to ensure the asset reaches the next site as ordered. Dominion doctrine is clear—”

  “Dominion doctrine,” Rael said, “is whatever that thing on the roof finds convenient this cycle.”

  The restraints bit into his wrists as the frame juddered again. Doctrine clamps around his Timer flared, trying to compensate for the physical stress.

  STRESS ASSET R-01: VITALS ABOVE THRESHOLD

  GENOCIDE TIMER LINK: STABLE

  ADAPTIVE STATE: DORMANT (TRIGGER CONDITIONS NOT MET)

  Dormant.

  Right. His little stunt with R-00 had shoved the Timer into an “adaptive” mode—but it wasn’t something he could flip like a switch. It had taken a whole Echo Field and the Entity itself pushing on him to make it crack.

  He would not be getting a convenient magic button every time things went loud.

  Good. Dependable power was a leash in its own way.

  He wanted something the Entity couldn’t predict.

  “Mereth,” Ardan said tightly. “What are our outbound options?”

  She didn’t look at him.

  “The primary liftworks are already retracting,” she said. “Array self-erasure clears everything attached to the core. Only the central spindle remains stable until collapse. That’s our route to the next phase site.”

  She tapped a command. A schematic flared in midair—a cross-section of Dock Seven like a dissected shrine. The circular platform they stood on sat at the top. Beneath it, a vertical shaft—the spindle—ran down through the fog and doctrine, ending in a cluster of symbols Rael couldn’t parse immediately.

  “Transit anchor,” Echo supplied. Entity’s favorite toy. It can shove you along the network like a bead on a string.

  “Anchor connects to the phase site gate,” Mereth said, words clipped. “We escort the asset down the spindle, attach him to the tether, and the Entity pulls him through. Standard protocol in case of local failure.”

  Ardan stared at the schematic. His eyes flicked to the red numbers counting down on the side.

  “Five minutes,” he said. “Less. Accounting for transit.”

  “Then we don’t waste them,” Mereth snapped. “Technicians, to the escape lifts. Non-essential staff evacuate on my mark. Doctrine core team with me for spindle escort.”

  Some of the robed figures started moving automatically, following command pathways burned into their nerves after years of service.

  Others didn’t.

  One technician—young, features still soft under the doctrine scars—looked up at the ceiling with an expression Rael recognized all too well.

  He’d seen it in Greymaw.

  In House Ardyn’s servants.

  In villagers who’d realized the Hero of Humanity wasn’t there to save them.

  “They’re not… they’re not going to—” the technician began.

  Mereth’s head snapped toward him like a blade on a spring.

  “You will obey,” she said. “Dock Seven remains Dominion property until the last glyph burns out. We complete the Entity’s directive.”

  The timer in Rael’s chest ticked.

  R-00 shifted inside him.

  Not in words. More like a memory bubble rising through thick water and bursting against his mind.

  Chains. A frame like this one. A handler’s voice reciting procedure while timers counted down another asset’s life. The dull, hollow knowledge that nobody watching considered the people on the slab people at all.

  Echo went quiet.

  “This is familiar, isn’t it,” Rael murmured.

  He didn’t specify who he was talking to.

  Mereth stiffened.

  “Our choices are clear,” she said. “Either Dock Seven fulfills its function, or we all die pointlessly in a failed array. There is no third option.”

  Rael smiled, thin and wolfish.

  “You should know better than to say that around anomalies.”

  The next tremor nearly threw Mereth off her feet.

  Doctrine lines in the walls flickered. One of the metallic pods above the chamber snapped a cable and slammed into the far side, crushing a console and the technician behind it into paste.

  The pod’s casing burst. Transparent fluid spilled across the glyphs, hissing where it touched active script.

  CORE INTEGRITY: 78% … 72% … 69%

  TIME TO ARRAY COLLAPSE: 04:21 …

  Ardan moved without thinking.

  He grabbed the nearest conscious technician—an older woman with doctrine scars like dried riverbeds—and shoved her out of the way of a falling shard.

  “Evacuate,” he snarled. “Now. Handlers can finish the escort.”

  The woman stared at him, then staggered toward the door with the others.

  Mereth rounded on him.

  “Justiciar, you do not countermand my orders in my own—”

  “Your Dock is dying,” Ardan said. His composure was fraying at the edges. “Your staff is not trained for transit under partial collapse. Get them out.”

  “My ‘Dock’ is the instrument the Entity entrusted to me,” Mereth shot back. “I will not abandon it half-used because one Justiciar suddenly discovers a conscience.”

  The word landed like a slap.

  Ardan flinched.

  Rael watched, chains creaking as he shifted fractionally.

  “I think,” he said conversationally, “this is the part where we all admit the obvious.”

  Both Dominion officials turned toward him like predators scenting a threat.

  “You can’t get what you want without me,” Rael said.

  Mereth’s eyes flashed.

  “The Entity’s parameters—”

  “—were written for a different Timer,” Rael cut in. “You saw the readouts. Your stress test broke. Your containment scripts misfired. The Genocide Timer isn’t behaving like your models anymore.”

  He jerked his chin toward the clamps biting into his chest.

  “Try to drag me through your anchor as if I’m still standard hardware and you don’t know what it’ll do. To me. To your phase site. To everywhere in between.”

  Mereth hesitated.

  He saw it. The tiny hitch in her breath. The way her hand twitched above the console as if resisting the urge to pull up diagnostics she didn’t have time to consult.

  “The Entity will adapt,” she said. “It expected anomalies. Dock Seven exists to measure them.”

  “Dock Seven existed,” Rael corrected. “Past tense.”

  Another shudder ran through the chamber. Hairline cracks spread across the doctrine rings in the floor, bleeding white light.

  Echo clicked their tongue. He’s right about one thing: if they try to run you through that anchor like this, it’s going to be… messy.

  Define “messy,” Rael thought.

  The kind of messy that ends with several hundred kilometers of doctrine infrastructure needing to be scraped off the sky, Echo said cheerfully. Possibly including you.

  R-00’s presence clenched tighter, phantom fingernails digging in.

  They remembered being “messy.”

  Rael let out a slow breath.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s pretend—for the length of one collapsing Dock—that I’m interested in everyone walking out of here with their organs in roughly the same configuration.”

  Mereth stared at him like he’d grown a second head.

  “You’re the stress asset,” she said. “Your risk rating just tripled. You think I’m going to undo your restraints because you’ve suddenly discovered altruism?”

  “Not altruism,” Rael said. “Leverage.”

  He tilted his head toward the far side of the chamber where R-00’s husk still hung in its secondary frame, head bowed.

  “You let your Entity turn my predecessor into scrap code,” he said quietly. “You turned all the results into reports and pat yourselves on the back for ‘partial success.’ Now you’re prepared to let the same god burn you with the rest of the trash.”

  Mereth’s lips thinned.

  “You don’t understand the scale we operate on,” she said. “There are billions of lives under the Entity’s purview. Odds and redundancy and collateral are—”

  “Spoken like someone who has never been the collateral,” Rael said.

  For a heartbeat, R-00’s memories surged again—overlapping his words with another voice, another handler, another doomed Dock. His throat tightened.

  He pushed through it.

  “Here are your actual options,” he said. “One: you keep me in this frame, drag me down the spindle, hope your anchor doesn’t detonate the whole phase network when my Timer pushes back, and pray your Entity still cares enough to catch me on the other side.”

  He nodded toward the ceiling, where doctrine pylons were starting to flicker irregularly.

  “Two: you acknowledge that I’m the only thing in this Dock that’s successfully hacked its directives in the last ten minutes, unshackle me just enough to let me divert some of this self-erasure into controlled paths, and we see if I can give your staff a fighting chance at not going down with their facility.”

  Mereth’s expression turned icy.

  “You would bargain with Dock Seven’s survival?” she whispered. “As if you have the right?”

  “I’m not the one who told it to die,” Rael said. “That was your god. I’m the one pointing out it didn’t bother specifying how many of you needed to go with it.”

  He let that sink in.

  Ardan looked between them.

  The tremor in his hand was back.

  “Mereth,” he said. “He’s right about one thing: the Entity never said staff survival was required. It doesn’t care. If the stress asset thinks he can—”

  “You would trust him over standard procedure?” Mereth hissed. “Justiciar, you are Dominion sworn—”

  “I’m leashed,” Ardan said, voice suddenly raw. “Not blind.”

  The admission seemed to shock even him.

  For a second, the doctrine glyphs in his armor flared, like the leash tightening in outrage.

  Rael saw a dozen ghost symbols flicker along Ardan’s spine: warning, deviation, potential.

  He smiled, thin.

  “Welcome to where leashes choose,” he said.

  The countdown ticked.

  03:12 … 03:11 …

  Dock Seven’s groaning shifted pitch as one of the outer pylons failed completely. Through a crack in the doctrine wall, Rael glimpsed the platform tilting. Carriages slid, chains snapping. One tumbled off the edge, dropping into the white fog below like a stone into a bottomless sea.

  Screams followed.

  Cut off abruptly.

  Mereth’s hands shook on the console.

  “Handler,” one of the remaining technicians whispered. “Orders…?”

  She stared at Rael as if trying to see the exact shape of the knife she’d been handed.

  “Genocide Timer,” she said slowly, eyes narrowing. “Show Dock Seven protocol compatibility.”

  The clamp on Rael’s chest pulsed in response.

  QUERY RECEIVED

  STRESS ASSET NODE R-01 – ADAPTIVE STATE

  PROTOCOL COMPATIBILITY:

  – STANDARD TRANSIT: UNRELIABLE

  – SELF-ERASURE REDIRECTION: PARTIAL

  – LOCAL FIELD MODULATION: POSSIBLE UNDER SUPERVISED CONDITIONS

  Mereth swallowed.

  “Supervised,” Rael echoed. “Hear that? Your god still thinks you matter. A little.”

  Her gaze flicked to Ardan.

  “Justiciar,” she said. “Entity directives require witness if we authorize an anomaly to touch core doctrine.” A bitter smile twisted her mouth. “Congratulations. Your leash just became your permission slip.”

  Ardan stared at Rael.

  At the scorched rings in the floor.

  At R-00’s limp form.

  He exhaled slowly.

  Then he stepped forward.

  “Release his limb restraints,” he said. “Leave the Timer clamps and neck brace.”

  Mereth looked like she’d bitten into something sour.

  “Justiciar—”

  “You want supervision, you have it,” Ardan said. “If he tries to break out instead of stabilizing the Dock, the leash will… respond.”

  They both knew “respond” might include snapping his bones from the inside.

  Rael inclined his head.

  “Fine by me,” he said. “If I wanted to run, I’d have used your self-erasure to cover it, not bargained for it to slow down.”

  Mereth hesitated a heartbeat longer.

  Then she keyed the release.

  Metal bands around Rael’s wrists and ankles loosened with a series of clanks. The frame still held his weight, but he could move his arms now, fingers tingling as blood rushed back in.

  Doctrine lines embedded in the cuffs burned like cold fire.

  RESTRAINT PRIORITY: REDUCED

  ESCAPE THRESHOLD: HIGH

  Ardan moved closer, sword unsheathed but held low.

  “Try anything,” he said quietly, eyes hard, “and I will make sure whatever’s left of you is no use to anyone.”

  Rael believed him.

  He also believed that Ardan didn’t yet know what “anything” looked like anymore.

  Echo hummed.

  All right, they said. Let’s see how much of the Entity’s toy chest we can borrow before it notices.

  Touching core doctrine felt like pressing his hand against the side of a god’s skull.

  The console’s script burned bright and sharp under his fingertips. Lines of code weren’t written in any language he’d learned as a Hero—they were deeper, closer to whatever the Entity used to describe reality to itself.

  Dock Seven’s layout unfolded in his mind like a three-dimensional diagram.

  Every pylon. Every support glyph. Every backup loop that had already been burned out by the self-erasure directive.

  At the center of it all, a throat of pure white light ran downward—the spindle—ending in a dense knot of symbols that pulsed in sync with something far away.

  The phase network anchor.

  Echo whistled. That’s… bigger than I expected.

  R-00’s remnant trembled, brushing against parts of the diagram Rael didn’t recognize at first—structures tagged with [R-00 STRESS SCENARIO MEMORY: DOCK FOUR], [DOCK TWO], [UNLABELED ARRAY].

  They’d died in more than one place.

  More than one Dock.

  The Entity had built and scrapped these things like lab equipment.

  Rage crept up Rael’s spine like slow fire.

  He pushed it down.

  Not gone.

  Just controlled.

  “Can you do it?” Mereth demanded. Her voice sounded faintly distorted, as if coming from the far end of a tunnel. “Field modulation?”

  “Yes,” Rael said.

  Probably.

  “Then—”

  “But not the way your manuals say,” he added.

  He felt more than saw her bristle.

  “You don’t have time to argue,” he said. “You want this Dock to die cleanly, or you want it to scream? Because right now it’s doing the second one, and it’s going to take most of you with it.”

  She bit down on a reply.

  “Asset,” Ardan said, warning in his tone.

  Rael ignored the word.

  He reached deeper.

  He could feel the self-erasure script crawling through Dock Seven like ice through veins—turning active doctrine into inert stone, shutting down pylons, collapsing fields that had held the array suspended.

  The directive was absolute.

  But absolute didn’t mean simple.

  Wherever something tried to delete itself, there was a moment—a fraction of a heartbeat—where it had to decide what it was.

  Structure or noise.

  Core or collateral.

  Redundant or preserved.

  Rael threaded the Bridge through those decision points, guided by Echo’s sharp instincts and R-00’s jagged memory of a dozen previous failures.

  He didn’t try to stop the self-erasure.

  He nudged it.

  “Rerouting core load,” he murmured. “Here. Here. And off this grid. You don’t need this corridor if the Dock is going to die anyway. Spin it down early, release the physical clamps on those lift pods up top, give them just enough thrust to clear the collapse radius…”

  Doctrine flared in response.

  One of the technicians gasped as their console suddenly lit with new paths.

  “Handler!” they cried. “Escape lifts just re-engaged! Auto-targeting routes to external safe altitude—”

  Mereth stared at Rael.

  “You’re diverting core power to lifeboats?” she said, disbelief warring with something like awe. “That’s—”

  “—efficient,” Rael said. “Dead staff don’t file reports.”

  Her throat worked.

  On the schematic, several lines turned from red to amber as lift pods detached and shot away from the dying Dock like sparks from a bonfire.

  He pictured the technicians and low-level staff strapped into them, doctrine restraints checking their vitals, screaming or praying or sitting in stunned silence as the only world they knew shrank behind them.

  For most of them, Dominion service was the world.

  Let the Entity find out how much trouble one surviving Dock’s worth of bitter ex-staff could cause when they realized who had written them off.

  He wasn’t just saving lives.

  He was seeding future cracks.

  “You still haven’t touched the spindle,” Mereth said.

  “Getting there,” Rael said.

  He focused on the white throat of light.

  The self-erasure directive treated it differently. Not as part of Dock Seven, but as a connection—a cable plugged into a bigger machine. Erasing the array meant retracting the plug, not melting it.

  The phase anchor at the bottom pulsed expectantly.

  Waiting.

  “Anchor wants to pull me through,” Rael said. “Right now, though, I’m half patched into your dying Dock. If it yanks, there’s a chance pieces of this place ride with me. Best case, I slam into your phase site trailing debris. Worst case, we get that ‘scrape doctrine off the sky’ scenario Echo is so fond of.”

  Mereth had gone pale.

  “You said you could modulate…” she began.

  “I can,” Rael said. “But I’m not going to let the Entity drag me like a crate across a warehouse floor. I choose where the spindle drops me.”

  “You don’t have that authority,” she snapped. “Phase routes are determined by the Entity—”

  “Mereth,” Ardan said quietly.

  She broke off.

  His expression wasn’t questioning anymore.

  It was resolved.

  He had made his choice.

  “If Dock Seven is already written off,” he said, “then so is anything tethered to it. That includes us. You can quote doctrine all you want, but the Entity isn’t watching this room anymore. He is.”

  He jerked his chin toward Rael.

  “Either we ride his anomaly and hope it lands somewhere survivable…” His mouth twisted. “…or we stand here and argue until the floor drops out.”

  The timer ticked.

  01:22 … 01:21 …

  Mereth closed her eyes for a heartbeat.

  When she opened them again, something had broken.

  Not her composure. That remained, brittle and sharp.

  Something underneath.

  “So be it,” she said. “Can you detach Dock Seven cleanly from the spindle while leaving the anchor intact?”

  Rael blinked.

  Of all the questions she could have asked, that one…

  “I can try,” he said slowly. “Why?”

  Her mouth thinned.

  “If the Dock collapses with anchor still fused, Entity will trace every deviation during self-erasure directly through the phase network,” she said. “Every unauthorized modulation, every anomaly—every thing you just did. If we sever cleanly and let the array die as uncontrolled failure, it may write off the data as noise.”

  Rael stared at her.

  “You’re trying to hide what just happened,” he said. “From your god.”

  “From its diagnostic subroutines,” Mereth snapped. “The Entity is not omniscient, no matter what the Dominion priests tell the masses. It notices what its tools report. If Dock Seven’s end is categorized as ‘catastrophic malfunction,’ its internal parsers will discard anything that doesn’t fit the failure pattern.”

  “Meaning,” Echo said slowly, “if we make the collapse messy enough, the interesting parts get buried in the rubble.”

  Mereth’s gaze locked onto Rael.

  “Can you sever the spindle?” she asked. “Leave the anchor clean?”

  He considered.

  R-00’s memories crashed again—a dozen dying Docks, anchors melted, phase routes corrupted, Entity attention descending like a white-hot blade.

  They had never been given that option.

  The Entity had owned those ends completely.

  “Remnant,” Rael thought. “What do you think?”

  They didn’t answer in words.

  But their pressure shifted—leaning toward the schematic’s anchor, then away, like a flinch. Fear. And something else.

  Hope?

  “All right,” Rael said. “Let’s cut your leash’s leash.”

  Severing the spindle felt like sawing through a spine with a knife made of your own bones.

  Rael sank his awareness deeper, following the conduit down. The further he went, the less Dock Seven’s structure mattered and the more he felt the phase network beyond—threads of doctrine stretching across the world, through sky and stone and whatever lay under both.

  A lattice of control.

  The Entity’s nervous system.

  Right now, one small strand of that system plugged into Dock Seven. The self-erasure directive treated the array like infected flesh. It wanted to cauterize and retract.

  Rael shoved the Bridge into the gap between “flesh” and “nerve.”

  BRIDGE STATE: EDGE INSERTION

  WARNING: PHASE TENSION AT 87% OF SAFE LIMIT

  “Echo,” he said through gritted teeth. “On my mark… pull.”

  Pull what?

  “Everything that isn’t the anchor.”

  There was a pause.

  Then a feral grin curled across his mind.

  Gladly.

  He exhaled.

  Then dragged the metaphorical knife sideways.

  Doctrine screamed.

  The spindle convulsed. On the schematic, the line connecting Dock Seven to the anchor frayed—splitting into a hundred flickering strands. Self-erasure surged, trying to flood the gap, to smooth out the irregularity.

  Echo pounced.

  They shoved Bridge-threads into the widening crack, giving the self-erasure other things to chew on—obsolete redundancies, old routing tables, debug pathways nobody had touched in years.

  Bits of the Entity’s own past clutter.

  R-00’s presence braced beside them, memory and scar tissue forming a buffer against the overload.

  For a heartbeat, Rael felt like he was standing at the edge of an endless drop, holding onto the world’s wiring with bare hands while a giant tried to yank the other end away.

  His muscles shook.

  Blood ran from his nose, dripping onto the glowing glyphs.

  PHASE TENSION: 94% … 96% … 89%

  SPINDLE STATUS: PARTIAL DETACHMENT

  ANCHOR STATUS: STABLE

  “Now,” he rasped.

  Echo pulled.

  Dock Seven lurched.

  Reality stuttered.

  The schematic in Rael’s head snapped—the array’s connection to the anchor finally tearing free like a severed nerve. For an instant, everything went brutally, impossibly silent.

  Then the world came rushing back.

  DOCK–ANCHOR LINK: SEVERED

  ANCHOR ROUTING: CLEAN

  DOCK SEVEN CORE: UNCONSTRAINED COLLAPSE

  TIME TO ARRAY DISINTEGRATION: 00:46 …

  Rael staggered.

  If not for the neck brace and Timer clamps still holding him to the frame, he would have gone to his knees.

  Mereth stared at the console, then at him.

  “You did it,” she whispered. Disbelief and something darkly exhilarated twisted together in her tone. “You cut Dock Seven out of the network.”

  Ardan’s jaw worked.

  “Which means,” Rael said, voice shaking, “whatever happens in the next… forty seconds… is just local noise, as far as the Entity’s concerned. It will see a Dock come loose, collapse, couldn’t retrieve the asset in time. Annoying, but not worth full audit.”

  He drew in a ragged breath.

  “And as for the asset…”

  He lifted his hand.

  The doctrine at his fingertips glowed, tracing a path—not down the spindle anymore, but sideways, along the collapsing shell.

  To a point where physical stone met the remains of a maintenance corridor.

  “Transit,” Mereth breathed. “You’re opening a local gate? Without the anchor—”

  “Anchor was for sending me where the Entity wanted,” Rael said. “I’m aiming lower.”

  He focused.

  The Genocide Timer inside his chest ticked louder, digits momentarily blurring into unfamiliar symbols before resolving again.

  GENOCIDE TIMER – ADAPTIVE STATE: FLUCTUATING

  STRESS OVERRIDE FLAG: PARTIAL ENGAGEMENT

  APPROVED ROUTE: LOCAL DISPLACEMENT ONLY

  Fluctuating.

  Fine.

  That would have to be enough.

  “Ardan,” he said.

  The Justiciar snapped his head up.

  “If you’re still interested in not dying on a disintegrating floating prison,” Rael said, “grab whoever you can convince in ten seconds and stand there.”

  He jabbed a finger at a clear patch of floor where the doctrine rings intersected in a stable pattern.

  Ardan didn’t hesitate.

  He sheathed his sword, grabbed Mereth by the arm, and hauled her toward the indicated spot.

  She jerked away on reflex, then realized where he was steering them.

  “What about—” she began, glancing at R-00’s husk.

  Rael’s throat tightened.

  “Already with me,” he said.

  Her eyes flicked to his chest.

  She didn’t understand.

  She didn’t need to.

  Technicians—those still conscious—stumbled toward Ardan’s barked commands. Three reached the circle. A fourth fell as a crack split the floor beneath him, doctrine flaring white before swallowing him whole.

  The chamber tilted.

  Chunks of ceiling tore free and crashed down, smashing consoles and pods alike.

  Dock Seven was coming apart.

  TIME TO ARRAY DISINTEGRATION: 00:19 …

  Rael took one last look at the frame that had held him. At the scorched glyphs that had tried to quantify his soul. At the husk of R-00, hanging limp but no longer alone.

  Then he shoved everything he had left through the Bridge.

  The doctrine under the designated circle twisted—not into an Echo Field, not into the Entity’s clean, controlled simulation, but into a rough, jagged tunnel of possibility.

  A local displacement.

  Messy.

  Imprecise.

  His.

  “Let’s step off the script,” he whispered.

  Again.

  The world shattered.

  For a moment, he saw Dock Seven from outside—platforms snapping, pylons flaring, fog boiling as the array’s carcass tumbled toward whatever lay below. Escape lifts streaked away like sparks. From far, far above, a distant eye turned almost back toward the noise…

  …and then dismissed it.

  Just another failed tool.

  Then the view inverted.

  Light roared past him, doctrine compressing into a tight spiral. Ardan shouted something wordless. Mereth clung to him with one hand and to the nearest technician with the other, knuckles white.

  Echo laughed like they were falling off the edge of the world.

  R-00’s remnant huddled close, bringing with it the faintest impression of somewhere else—a suggestion of coordinates that didn’t belong to Dock Seven, or Greymaw, or any place Rael had walked yet.

  The displacement tunnel buckled.

  LOCAL TRANSIT: DESTINATION – INDETERMINATE

  PHASE NETWORK CONNECTION: NONE

  ENTITY OBSERVATION: MINIMAL

  Perfect.

  They slipped.

  Fell.

  Landed—

  —somewhere that smelled of cold stone and older doctrine than anything the Dominion had ever carved.

  Rael’s knees hit solid ground hard enough to jar his teeth.

  The Timer in his chest flared, then stabilized.

  TRANSIT COMPLETE

  LOCATION: UNKNOWN

  DOCK SEVEN STATUS: OFFLINE (NO SIGNAL)

  Behind him, Dock Seven died without witnesses.

  Ahead of him, in the dim light of an unfamiliar chamber, glyphs older and stranger than Dominion script pulsed slowly to life.

  Echo went very quiet.

  …Rael, they said. You might’ve just jumped us off the Entity’s map.

  Footsteps echoed from the darkness beyond the glyphs.

  A new voice—calm, amused, and very much not Dominion—spoke.

  “Interesting,” it said. “The knife cut its own leash and still arrived on my doorstep.”

  Rael lifted his head.

  “Welcome to Phase Two,” the stranger said.

  And the Genocide Timer ticked on.