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Chapter 13 - Gravewire Refuge

The wind aboveground had started to scream.

Not like a storm. Not like weather. But like a warning system embedded in the earth itself, too old and too forgotten to follow the laws of sound. Each gust carried a tone that didn't fit into the human auditory scale. It settled in the teeth, behind the eyes, vibrating something deep in Zayn's bones that hadn't felt stable since the Null had touched him.

He and F-13 moved without speaking. Her stride had shortened, slightly uneven, like some of her internal calibrations were misfiring. He noticed her right hand twitching in a repetitive loop... subtle but mechanical. Not pain, not hesitation, just an unnatural loop trying to resolve. She hadn't mentioned it. She never really did. That, more than anything, worried him.

They found the hidden service hatch half-buried beneath rusted panels and a mound of burnt plant matter. F-13 scanned it. The lock accepted her credentials with a delay, the panel light flickering from red to green, then back to amber before the old metal hissed open. The tunnel beyond breathed out heat and dust, the smell of aged oil and forgotten circuits pressing against their skin.

The two of them stepped inside, and the world outside disappeared behind the grinding bulkhead door.

The ducts stretched for kilometers underground. Once used for cargo transport and personnel movement between CoreTech substations, now they were mostly collapsed, crumbled under decades of neglect and whatever atmospheric instability the Null had introduced. Still, F-13's mapping algorithm traced an intact route to an isolated node... Gravewire Junction, tagged only in encrypted records not meant for civilians or even standard operatives. It was off-grid, pre-catastrophe. A temporary refuge station that had never officially existed.

The walk was slow. The ground sloped downward, the tunnels narrowing, walls breathing faint heat from ancient capacitors buried in the mesh beneath their feet. Zayn felt the pull of fatigue growing heavier with every step. The kind of tired that wasn't solved by sleep. It came from inside the marrow... a dull ache that couldn't be outrun.

When they finally arrived, the junction revealed itself like a buried lung exhaling. The tunnel opened into a central core, the chamber wide and half-lit by flickering ceiling nodes. Metal scaffolding hung overhead, rusted cables like spiderwebs frozen mid-drop. A collapsed control station leaned against one wall, broken monitors still flickering with half-formed diagnostics. A small maintenance sub-room branched off the main core, intact. Inside, a functional medical module. Cots. A wash station. Even a sealed supply cabinet, its lock requiring nothing more than a fingerprint scan, which F-13 bypassed with a short pulse from her forearm node.

Zayn stood in the center of the space and just breathed for a few minutes.

It was quiet here. No hum of the city, no screams of dissonance from the sky. Just the low click of cooling metal and the hollow air of a place meant to be forgotten. He removed his outer gear, heavy with grime and Null dust, and laid it across the cot's edge. He rolled his shoulders once, wincing as muscles protested. He hadn't noticed how stiff his left arm had become. A small cut under his collarbone had opened again, blood dried into a patch of sticky, dark fabric.

The wash station had water. Cold. No filtration, but F-13 scanned it and confirmed no immediate contaminants. He cupped it in his hands and splashed it over his face, the shock forcing a gasp from his throat. He peeled off his shirt and stared at his reflection in the cracked mirror above the basin.

The veins along his ribs pulsed with faint illumination. Not bright. Not even visible in full light. But in this half-shadow, he could see them. Laced through his body like faintly glowing vines, the Null mark spreading further than he'd realized. His left eye looked sharper, the pupil dilated too wide, the iris shimmering like oil on metal. He rubbed at it... then stopped. What was the point?

He cleaned the blood. Treated the cut with a basic field sealant. He found a pack of protein rations in the supply unit, expired by years, but preserved well enough to eat. It tasted like paper soaked in salt. He forced it down anyway, not that he could get hungry... He just wanted to do something normal.

F-13 hadn't spoken in nearly twenty minutes.

She sat near the med unit, head tilted slightly to the side, listening to something only she could hear. Her eyes weren't unfocused... they were scanning. Calculating. But every so often her hand twitched again, that same looping tremor.

Zayn sat down on the floor beside the cot, leaned back against the cold metal frame, and closed his eyes.

Sleep didn't come.

But memory did.

He remembered the first time he'd seen someone like him... really seen. Not the broken Nullbloods who came at him with twitching limbs and shattered minds, but Velon... calm, composed, already halfway gone. Zayn had seen the madness in his eyes before the words had ever reached his ears. And now... sitting here, covered in dust and half-broken from the inside out... Zayn began to understand it.

The deeper you sink into the Null, the more you stop recognizing the boundaries that define yourself. Identity becomes slippery. Intent becomes shared. Even your own memories start to echo in unfamiliar voices.

F-13 stood suddenly.

Her movement was abrupt... too precise. She turned toward the side panel of the room, the one Zayn hadn't noticed before. A wall-mounted lockbox, half-buried in dust. She reached out and pressed three points on its surface, seemingly at random.

It opened.

Inside was a small capsule, round and black, no larger than a clenched fist. She handed it to Zayn without a word.

"What is it?" he asked.

She blinked once... slowly.

"Memory log. Null class. Hybrid operative."

Zayn felt a chill rise through his back. "You're saying this is from another one... like me?"

She didn't answer. Her hand dropped to her side.

Zayn activated the capsule.

It flickered to life in the air above them, projecting a dim blue light that formed the outline of a man. Young. Early twenties. Gaunt. Wearing an old CoreTech field uniform patched with personal mod-gear. His voice started slow.

"This is subject OX-94. I'm stable... I think. I've passed all internal calibrations. The pulse no longer distorts my vision. But... I don't know if that means I've adapted, or if I've stopped resisting."

The hologram glitched briefly.

"I hear them... not as voices... but as shapes. Intent shaped like architecture. They don't speak. They design. I feel myself being drafted... like blueprints inside my mind."

Zayn sat very still.

"I tried to record dreams... they come too fast now. I woke up bleeding from my nose and the wall beside my cot was melted. I don't remember doing it. But I see the pattern. I know it means something."

The final segment triggered.

"I met another like me. Briefly. He said I reminded him of himself... then he begged me to kill him. Said he'd been stuck between pulses too long. That's when I realized..."

The figure leaned forward.

"We don't evolve. We fracture until one version survives."

The log ended.

Zayn stared at the capsule for a long time.

F-13 was no longer sitting. She had backed against the wall, hands clenched. Her breathing was shallow, head jerking slightly with each breath. Zayn rose quickly.

"F-13?"

She looked at him. Her pupils had narrowed into slits. Her voice was quiet, mechanical.

"Multiple instance overlay. Conflict detected. Please align timeline."

Zayn stepped closer. "You're glitching... let me stabilize you."

Her body spasmed once. Then she collapsed.

He caught her before her head hit the ground. Her frame was light, but twitching with low-energy surges... Null pulses too deep for him to read without hurting her.

She mumbled in her sleep. Not words. Patterns.

He couldn't understand them.

But they sounded like math. Like language rebuilt from raw code.

The room's lights flickered once. Then again. A low vibration passed through the floor.

The signal had reached them.

Zayn carried F-13 to the cot, placed her down gently, and turned back toward the hallway.

Something was whispering from the lower tunnels.

A voice not meant to be heard by any human throat.

He followed it.

Zayn stepped carefully through the dim corridor, the floor beneath his boots reverberating with a low, constant pulse... like a heartbeat woven into the walls. Dust coated the air. The tunnel lights had long failed here, leaving only the faint blue glow from his blade hilt, which pulsed gently at his side, reacting to the Null signature nearby.

He didn't know what pulled him deeper.

There was no threat, no sound of movement, no pressure to chase or flee. Yet something inside the fractured rhythm of his thoughts aligned with the current ahead. Every step into the dark was like stepping back into a memory that didn't belong to him... one he only remembered because the Null wanted him to.

He passed a collapsed archway and entered a second chamber.

This one was partially sealed by debris, but the path through was just wide enough. The chamber beyond was small, cylindrical, its walls lined with cables, like veins grown outward from the central point. In the center...

A body.

Suspended upright by cables, arms spread slightly outward, feet dangling inches above the floor, throat wrapped in crystalline wire that pulsed with faint light.

Zayn froze.

The figure looked human, but his skin was partially translucent, patches of it flickering like broken glass panels. His eyes were shut, mouth half open, chest rising and falling in shallow, unnatural rhythm.

Still alive.

Still trapped.

Zayn took a cautious step forward.

The wires reacted. Not aggressively, but slowly tightening, winding in tiny, calculated increments... like they were reading him, deciding how much threat he posed.

The man stirred.

Then he spoke.

"You're late."

His voice wasn't cracked. It wasn't dry. It was smooth, haunting... practiced, as if the words had been said many times before, waiting to find the right echo.

Zayn stared. "Who are you?"

The man's eyes opened slowly, revealing irises like melted metal, too bright for the room's low light. His mouth formed a smile, thin and joyless.

"Prototype. Failed. But not deleted. That's rare."

Zayn stepped closer. "What happened to you?"

"Same thing happening to you," he whispered. "Only... slower."

The wires shifted again, curling tighter against his ribs. They made no sound. Just the soft scrape of crystal on bone.

"I was made to hold it," the man said. "The Null. A container. I told them it wouldn't work. But they insisted. So I tried... and I failed."

Zayn asked quietly, "Why are you still alive?"

The man laughed softly.

"Because I haven't chosen which version of myself gets to die yet."

Silence hung between them.

Then the man looked directly at Zayn, head tilting slightly.

"But you're different."

Zayn didn't speak.

"You weren't made for it," the man continued. "You survived it. That's the difference. You didn't come with a plan. You came with instinct. That's why you're still moving."

Zayn whispered, "How do I stop it?"

"You don't."

The man's eyes dimmed, then brightened.

"You anchor it. You become... the weight."

Zayn's chest tightened. "I don't know what that means."

"You will."

The man exhaled slowly. His breath formed frost in the air, despite the heat.

Then he looked down at his own chest. The wires had begun sinking deeper, slowly fusing with the bone.

"Don't save me," he whispered. "You'll fail. I'm already forgetting which body I'm in."

Zayn stared at him for a long time, then stepped back.

The man didn't speak again.

As Zayn left the chamber, the air behind him grew cold.

Back in the main room, F-13 sat upright on the cot.

She looked alert. Awake. But different.

Her pupils had returned to normal, but her voice was slower, measured.

"You saw it," she said.

Zayn nodded once. "One of us."

She stood. Her body still trembled slightly, but her movement was fluid again.

Zayn checked the systems on the wall. The refuge was deteriorating. Not structurally... but metaphysically. The Null signal was threading through the circuitry, rewriting command layers. Even the station's digital voice had gone silent.

Then, without warning, the floor beneath them shifted.

A low rumble rose through the ground. Monitors burst into static. The power grid surged, then flatlined. Overhead lights blinked in irregular patterns, forming a sequence Zayn couldn't translate, but somehow understood.

The station was no longer a refuge.

It was a signal node.

And Zayn was the broadcast.

F-13 moved to the console, quickly ejecting the stabilizer core from its housing.

The hum stopped.

Silence returned.

But not peace.

Zayn turned toward the hatch. "We need to leave. Now."

F-13 nodded, her face unreadable.

They ascended through a maintenance shaft just as the station began collapsing inward... not physically, but spatially. As if its structure was folding into itself, being reclaimed by a memory that didn't belong in this world anymore.

They emerged into daylight.

Or what remained of it.

The sky above was choked with storm clouds, but one break in the gray revealed something unnatural.

A spiral of red light hovered above the atmosphere... wide as a city, silent and slow... pulsing inward, as if looking.

Zayn stared at it.

It pulsed once.

Then again.

He felt it in his chest.

Not just recognition.

Welcome.

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