The lullaby was thin and tinny, a fractured melody weaving through the oppressive silence of the maintenance tunnel. Ren pushed himself off the wall, his senses still swimming in the wake of the [System Lag]. The distorted music was a hook in his mind, pulling him forward. Behind him was a sealed door and a monster that unmade reality. Ahead was… this.
He chose the song.
The tunnel was a gut in the city's underbelly, a place Gammas like him were born to inhabit and the Betas above pretended didn't exist. Pipes hissed with escaping pressure, and the groans of stressed metal were the only constants. But Ren knew these spaces. The shadows here were not a threat; they were a comfort.
He moved forward, hugging the wall, his boots making soft, squelching sounds in whatever foul liquid coated the floor. The music grew louder, clearer. It was a simple, gentle tune, the kind a mother might hum to her child. Here, in the tomb-like silence, it sounded like a funeral dirge.
He found the source around a sharp bend. A small, palm-sized data player lay on the floor, its screen cracked but still glowing faintly, the lullaby looping on repeat. Next to it, slumped against the wall, was a skeleton.
It was clad in the tattered remains of a Gamma technician's uniform, identical to his own. The bones were clean, picked over by time and the city's vermin. In one skeletal hand, it clutched a standard-issue datapad.
A cold dread, entirely different from the panic of the Aberration, settled in Ren's stomach. This wasn't a recent death. The dust and decay spoke of years, maybe decades. He had always been told the Fracture was a new phenomenon.
He cautiously picked up the datapad. Most of the files were corrupted beyond recovery, but he managed to access the final log entry. The text was fragmented, the writer clearly in a state of panic.
[Entry Date: Cycle 7.4.28] … containment failure in Sub-39. They're calling it a Resonance Cascade. Lies. It's not a failure, it's a… a culling. The glitches are… they're not random. They learn. Saw one… it had Joric's face… oh gods, they sealed the shafts. They're not letting us up. They're leaving us to…
The rest of the entry was a garbled mess of corrupted characters.
Cycle 7.
They were in Cycle 9. This had happened before, twenty years ago. The Alphas had covered it up. The Fracture wasn't a sudden, tragic accident. It was a recurring symptom of a terminal illness. And the cure had always been the same: amputate the lower levels and pretend the body was healthy. His entire life, his entire world, was built on a foundation of rot and lies.
The brief flash of triumph he'd felt after opening the door curdled into a bitter, familiar resentment. He hadn't won anything. He'd just escaped one layer of the cage to find himself in an older, forgotten one.
He was about to pocket the datapad when he froze. The lullaby was still playing from the small device at his feet. But now, he could hear it from another direction, too.
From the tunnel ahead, a new version of the melody echoed back at him. It was distorted, filled with static, and pitched just slightly wrong, as if being sung by a machine that didn't understand music. It was a mimicry. A recording of a recording.
The log entry flashed in his mind. It had Joric's face.
The Aberrations learned.
The lullaby ahead was not a recording. It was bait. And the thing that had killed this long-dead technician was still here, still hunting.