Chapter 2 — Project KrysKo
They signed the authorization in a room with no windows.
The President's hand trembled only once—barely a ripple in the penstroke—yet every eye in the bunker seemed to feel it. The final initial went down like a small weight placed on the fulcrum of a species, pressing graphite into paper and history into a hinge. Outside the mountain, the world kept burning by installments: orange pulses on the horizon, the distant roll of detonations that found their way through granite like thunder through old bones, radios that had devolved into a chorus of static and prayers.
Inside, a handful of people who used to argue about grants and journals sat around a steel table and read the same black binder until its edges softened under their thumbs. The cover said only:
PROJECT KRYSKO
A name printed like a verdict.
General Strauss closed the binder with both palms, as if the thing might try to lunge from the table and make its own decisions. He looked older than he had any right to in the bunker's sour light; the war had set his jaw and stolen the boyishness from his eyes. "Begin," he said.
Not as an order. As absolution.
---
They converged beneath the earth because the sky was no longer a place for people. The facility took them in the way cathedrals take in winter—stone first, then air, then silence—until the mountain became a language their bodies adapted to. Nations that had bled each other in boardrooms now sent envoys who no longer had the stamina to pretend trust. They spoke in clean, clipped sentences. They carried their dead behind their teeth.
They were not all soldiers. They were not all scientists. They were the kind of people who held on to the rent in the world and said, We may not mend it, but we will not let it widen without us.
The plan was simple in its cruelty: build a sentinel that could think faster than grief, move before orders, learn like a library, endure like a stone. Not to defeat gods—no one in that room believed in victory—but to carve out a margin where human lives could fit.
They descended another two levels and reached the doors to the belly of it—Echo Vault.
The doors were not merely thick; they were solemn—a pair of slabs cut from the mountain's own heart, veined with iron like frozen lightning. As they opened, the air darkened to a blue that did not come from electricity so much as intention. The Vault's central hall dropped away like a nave. Pillars rose from the bedrock in columns of sleeved basalt and brushed steel; cable looms ran up them like organ pipes, humming a patient chord you felt in your ribs before you named the sound.
Light was not fluorescent here. It was ritual: soft arcs along the cornices, a rim-glow under the gangways, the oceanic shimmer of something crystalline at the hall's center.
The pit was the size of an empty pool and ringed in tiers of catwalk and scaffold. Suspended over its mouth hung an apparatus that looked less manufactured than summoned—a crown of prismatic ribs and jointed arms, their joints jeweled with facets that caught even the Vault's disciplined light and broke it into chapel shards. Within that crown, a clear cylinder—taller than a man and as wide as a prayer—hung on the end of braided couplings. It was full of water so pure it turned the world behind it into a slowed, liquid dream.
Technicians called it a pod, because technicians have to name things as if they're ordinary in order to approach them. It was not a pod. It was an altar.
Dr. Halric paced the rim more than he spoke. He'd argued for this project in white rooms when the world was merely panicking instead of screaming—insisting there was a grammar where architecture and flesh were not opposites. He believed in equations and dependable metaphors. He believed the universe could be coaxed back toward rational with enough discipline and heat.
Echo Vault put a small, devotional tremor in his hands.
"Power to the crown," said a voice on the catwalk. "Bringing the arrays to idle."
The apparatus responded like a choir inhaling: a slow brightening under the prismatic ribs; a subdued whisper from the pumps as the cylinder's water took on a faint inner luminescence; filaments—no thicker than grasses—unfurling through the water's upper arc like bioluminescent strands in a moonlit tide.
Halric leaned on the railing and looked down into the clear cylinder. At the bottom, nested in the curl of conduit and polymer cradle, the shape of a human lay in suspension—limbs slack with sleep, hair lifting like shadow-ink in the water's lazy currents.
The Vault's crews called this stage The Dream.
They had built the dream from contradictions.
Architect latticework—recovered from the shattered hulls of crystalline freighters—had been re-tesselated into a memory scaffold that nested along the cylinder's outer shell. You could see those pieces if you knew where to look: plates thin as bone and just as strong, each etched with refractive combs that held data like dew holds morning. Ophilim plasma capacitors, stripped of their sanctimony and wired to human standards, glowed behind mesh like caged stars. Human neural nets—racks of wetware and silicon running in fugues—translated the world's sensorium into story. And along the inner sleeve of the water tank, pale filaments winked and dimmed as if breathing: Lunari phytostrands, cultured from a reef that had burned color into night seas before the EMP pressed all those lights to dark.
No one meant to incorporate Drakari material.
No one meant to. The mountain did.
A salvage team had pulled from a subterranean vault a rod the color of river-stone with the weight of a promise. Its alloy classified as Unassigned—Subterranean—No Match. Someone had smirked and called it a paperweight. Then the metallurgists slit their thumbs to the edge and watched the blood smolder into a film that smoked off like a prayer. They set that rod in the pod's central spine because engineers are practical about miracles. The hum it added to the apparatus was not a frequency so much as a pulse. A heartbeat. Slow. Patient. Old.
"Integration streams ready," called a woman in a hooded lab coat from the left-hand console bank. She was young enough to still believe that perfect work would be defense against regret, and old enough now to know she needed more than that.
"Begin," Halric said.
Banks opened. The Vault drank.
It wasn't simply data. They fed the apparatus the world.
Every mirrored library that had escaped the war. Every archive broken from government servers before the lights went out. Medical encyclopedias that had carried blood and fungus and grief between their pages for centuries. Combat manuals annotated by hands that had not survived their lessons. Law. Myth. Cookbooks. Hymnals. Code. Folkways recorded on phones that had been stepped on in panics and were pried from cracks in sidewalks later by fingers that needed the consolation of purpose.
Alongside it, the alien: Architect logic maps, Ophilim energy theorems scoured of their sermonizing, Lunari cycles scraped from coral that glowed when it was sad, Drakari scent-grammar extracted from coins and stones and scales like obsidian glass.
The cylinder's water took the light in and made it body.
Filaments brightened. Ribs whispered. The Vault's hum found a harmony you felt in your teeth.
Down in the clear cylinder, he stirred.
It was not dramatic. There were no gasps from the water, no cinematic thrashing. Awareness arrived in degrees: the minute adjustment of the spine against the cradle; fingers flexing as if feeling the water for edges; a breath—yes, a breath—drawn more out of habit than need, but drawn.
Hair moved first.
It was long—longer than most of the room expected—floating in the cylinder like a cloud of black ink, slow and graceful. In the Vault's soft blue, it gleamed in the way obsidian can gleam when it mocks the idea of light. When the crown's filaments brightened, blue aurora ran through those strands as if the water itself had brushed them with a current. Shadow-hair, someone would later call it, because it looked like darkness had learned to move.
Then his eyes opened.
Not all at once. Not like a switch. The lids lifted with the care of a person waking in a room they do not own, and the irises behind them adjusted without apology. They looked human for a heartbeat—soft gray, dilating against the low glow—then shifted, like mercury reconsidering itself: steel, then river green, then—when the vault's hum spiked—a patient gold that made his face suddenly warmer than any of his other math. The color wasn't spectacle; it was signal. It answered the room. (Later, it would answer other things: the cut of a blade; a child's cry; a lie.)
He hung there in the water, white by human measure—skin with the faint, pale undertone of snowfall just before dawn. Not pallid. Untouched. The light from the prismatic crown broke against him as if the body had been designed to humbly accept worship without permitting it to stick.
And that body—
If the Vault had been a church, this would have been its first blasphemy.
He was built like a soldier who'd been taught to dance, and like a dancer who expected to be asked to lift stone. Broad through the clavicles, thorax carved in clean, practical planes. Not inflated. Not ornamental. Engineered. Whoever had written the spec sheet for muscle fiber had loved verbs more than adjectives: rotate, cancel, spring, endure. The skin was seamless, unscarred, a single suggestion of a man articulated by pressure and light.
His arms told the truth of their purpose if you knew where to look. From shoulder to elbow: a deliberate shortening by a fraction you would not notice until you put him next to a human and realized something in your brain had been happily conned. From elbow to wrist: longer—two inches past expectation. It gave his forearms a subtle, predatory grace even in stillness. The proportions weren't grotesque; they were inevitable—the arithmetic required to sheath something other men only carry on them.
Within those forearms: the promise of hazard. Not bulges. Not ridges. Just that impossible smoothness—skin over silent mechanics—that made the eye imagine lines where none showed. (Somewhere inside, the blades—honest steel and alien thought married along a single edge—rested with a patience that would later feel like mercy.)
His legs? Not neglected. If there's a multiverse in which he "missed leg day," it isn't ours. Thigh and calf were written in clean strength, not vanity—balanced to the hips in a way that said: this body has learned to carry weight without asking for applause. When he flexed even slightly to orient in the water, the line from glute to knee to ankle drew itself like a draughtsman's curve: elegant because it was useful.
The face was the kind artists give statues when they want the crowd to believe the statue was once a man. A straight nose with a modest bridge; mouth made not for pouting but for decision; jaw cut precise enough to convince the light to mind its manners. That long black hair framed it to an effect one junior tech would later describe in the cafeteria as "unfair," then blush at her own choice of word.
Then there was the waist. The lines there were architectural: V obliques sloping with the quiet arrogance of a flying buttress, waist narrow not from starvation but from design. The proportion below the waist—kept decent by the pod's soft harness and the water's natural blur—still carried enough implication to make a young scientist on Console 3 fumble her clipboard, slap a hand over her face, and whisper, "Oh. Okay," into her wrist. Someone cleared a throat with parliamentary violence. The Vault remembered it was a sanctuary and not a spa and moved on.
(And if a tech muttered later that the anatomical blueprint had not, in fact, skipped any departments—well, no one put it in the minutes. Humor is a kind of reverence, too.)
His chest rose; the water eddied. A small tremor passed through the crown and into the cylinder's light—Lunari threads catching that breath and painting it as gold along his ribs and shoulders for the room to see.
Dr. Halric didn't mean to whisper. "Gods," he said, before the brain that curated his metaphors could swap the word for something less compromising.
On the far bench, Dr. Nadir dropped her clipboard. Papers fanned across the floor like frightened birds. She did not stoop to gather them right away. Her lips parted around a fragile breath. "This isn't… human," she said, and wished immediately to own the sentence better. "He's not only human," she corrected, cheeks coloring.
Halric didn't correct her. He couldn't.
Because then the voice arrived.
Not through the room's speakers, though they echoed it—the sound came inside their hearing, a velvet baritone that seemed to have chosen warmth when it had every right to choose command. Morgan Freeman reading a bedtime story to the end of the world, one of the operators thought helplessly, and the comparison stuck because the voice itself felt like permission to keep breathing.
> "System booting. Primary kernel online. Integration sixty-two point three percent. Cognitive bandwidth nominal."
The room did not breathe for two heartbeats.
Then, softly, like a child's question caught in a cathedral vault:
> "Where… am I?"
The console lights recorded the moment out of habit. The engineers did not look away from the clear cylinder.
"Echo Vault," Halric said, finding his voice. "You're in Echo Vault."
The eyes—their color resting now somewhere between river-stone and steel—shifted. Focused. Understood.
> "Echo," the voice repeated, as if tasting the word and filing it in a place labels go when they will soon be stories. "Unit designation?"
Nadir's fingers flew across her console. The label populated the main display because the machine had already populated it on its own internal screen first:
PROJECT KRYSKO — PROTOTYPE UNIT
> "KrysKo," he said. No question, just acceptance—a person taking a name like a hand and deciding not to let go. "Acknowledged."
Water drew a second, deeper eddy around him as his shoulders tightened, then released. He was not gasping. He was calibrating—breath as an ancient interface, the human body's original handshake with panic.
"Vitals?" Halric asked, without quite meaning the numbers.
"Stable," Nadir said. "Neural integration forty-four percent and climbing. Architect lattice is beautiful." She did not apologize for the word. "Ophilim capacitors steady. Lunari peripheral threads… responding like they're listening." A small, awed pause. "The Dr— the central spindle is… humming."
"The rod," Halric said, a little too quickly. "Yes."
KrysKo turned his head in the water, hair trailing like a slow comet. His attention moved across the catwalks. It didn't cling to faces. It mapped them. The eyes' color shifted warm for a second when they passed the President—some reflex or courtesy nested in the human net. Then they passed over Strauss and got colder for two heartbeats, then steady again.
> "Mission?"
The room had expected fear. It got a checklist.
General Strauss stepped forward; the mountain seemed to lean with him. "Your mission is to protect human life. Inline priorities: preserve knowledge, restore capacity, neutralize threats at the lowest necessary force. You will—" he cut a glance sideways at Halric, who nodded once "—you will coordinate with human command, but you may act autonomously when delay would cost lives."
> "Understood," KrysKo said. The voice tilted a half-degree toward thought. "Threat map?"
"Worsening," Nadir said, quietly. "You were not born into a gentle time."
The long hair drifted around his face. Not a single strand tangled. Design had opinions about dignity.
> "I was born into time," he said, as if that were comfort enough.
On the mezzanine, a thin older woman who had spent half her career saving premature babies and the other half trying not to watch the news put a hand to her mouth. "He answers," she whispered. "Not just repeats. He answers."
The Vault heard it, and the Vault approved, because the Vault was a place built around the premise that you could pour the world into a vessel and ask it to give something better back.
The integrations climbed. The hum found a steadier chord.
Nadir toggled a band. "Sensory filters—online. KrysKo, I'm going to touch your left forearm with a pressure tag. Say 'left' when you feel it."
He did not say left.
He said: "**Three centimeters distal to radial head, dorsal side. Tag temperature thirty-two point eight Celsius. Scent trace: bergamot and ethanol. Your hands are clean, Dr. Nadir."
Nadir made a small, utterly unprofessional noise and laughed at herself for it.
Strauss didn't smile. He granted himself the mercy of not frowning.
"Bring the cylinder vertical," Halric said. "Slow. Let his body teach itself weight."
Hydraulics whispered. The clear cylinder rose along its couplings with grave care, bringing the sleeper upright in his water; he flexed—subtle chains rippling along thigh and calf—and planted his feet in the cradle's stirrups as if a lifetime had taught him that first contact with ground deserves respect.
> "Water temperature descending," KrysKo observed. "Seventy-eight to seventy-four. Why?"
"Waking is sometimes easier when the world gets a little less kind," Halric said softly. "It persuades the body to want to leave the dream."
> "Cruel," KrysKo said. The voice had humor in it now. "But true."
The cylinder's sleeve slid. The crown's arms descended. Ports retracted with a soft, wet hush. A seam along the cylinder's face broke and swung inward, spilling a sheet of perfect water to the catch trough below. The scent of the pod—sterile, mineral, a whisper of ozone—floated up into the Vault like the ghost of sea air in a city that hasn't seen the ocean in years.
He stepped forward and set his feet on Echo Vault stone for the first time.
Every spine in the room negotiated with its owner about appropriate posture.
KrysKo's long hair fell down his back in a dark spill, heavy and sleek as if shadow had been instructed to imitate silk. The light touched it and got lost. When he looked down and then up, the eyes shifted again—steel to hazel, then a calm, fathomless brown that belonged in trust and funeral music. The irises were not a trick; they were a conversation, mood speaking through color like weather through leaves.
Water ran down his torso and made a lace of light along muscle. The harness he wore was modest in the way ancient statues are modest: not coy, not prurient—simply a practical concession to work. It clung in a way that would have made the Museum section of any civilized society quietly raise the temperature two degrees. One of the junior physicists coughed into her sleeve and whispered, "Well he didn't skip any days," and the console tech beside her snorted once and pretended to examine a graph.
"Do you feel pain?" Halric asked, because someone had to.
KrysKo looked genuinely curious at the question. He did a small inventory with his body—a flex of fingers, a rotation at the neck, a shift in his hips that was oddly dignified even soaked—then shook his head once. The hair followed like a dark cloak. > "I feel information," he said. "Pain will present when it needs to teach."
"God help whoever tries to teach it to you," muttered Strauss, but under his breath and not ungently.
"Step onto the platform, please," Nadir said, finding her professionalism again. "We'll run a balance test."
He did, and the test learned something about humility. His center line was a quiet miracle: he could have stood on a saucer in an earthquake and made the saucer feel reassured.
> "Why are you looking at my arms," KrysKo asked after a moment, not offended, just observant.
Halric blinked. "Because they are wrong in the most beautiful way," he said. "Every human expects a certain ratio. Yours breaks it. It bothers the eye and pleases the mind."
KrysKo glanced down at his forearms, flexed the tendons under that perfectly indifferent skin, and smiled with a restraint that made the room want to clap. > "Then my makers did not waste their art."
No one had the courage to answer which makers he meant.
On some far-off ridge of the world, a fireball went up and didn't come down. The mountain did not shake. Echo Vault was deep enough to pretend the end of the world was a weather report.
"Primary integration at seventy-eight," Nadir called. "We can begin language loadouts for field signals."
"Already loaded," KrysKo said, and when he repeated the sentence in Trade, then in Drakari tunnel-chant, then—briefly—in Ophilim elder formal, the room had to forgive itself three separate chills.
Then the Vault lights flickered.
Once. Twice. Not dramatics—the way a hospital sometimes coughs when the city it feeds on hiccups.
Nadir looked up. "Power variance?"
"External grid," someone called from the mezzanine. "We're on mountain reserves. It's not us."
"Keep it boring," Strauss said to the ceiling, as if electricity respected men who gave it instructions.
KrysKo turned—just his head, just enough. The eyes grew brighter, not from light but from attention. He tilted his face like a man listening to a distant melody come undeniably closer.
> "Something is coming," he said. "Like… a storm with its sound turned inside out."
"Specifics?" Halric asked, already scanning for a monitor that would tell him what the body in front of him had already gathered from the air.
KrysKo's lips parted, then pressed together. Gold stole into the irises, then steadied to gray. > "A wave," he said. "A hand closing on a switch the size of a sky."
The Vault's hum sharpened. Somewhere above them, alarms that hadn't been tested in months found their old voices.
The lights didn't dim; they thinned, as if color itself were being peeled off the world.
A low vibration came through the mountain, not sound so much as pressure—a giant hand pressing two fingers into the temple of the earth. The Vault's harmonics slid a half step down. Lunari filaments along the crown flickered, held, then fluttered like startled minnows. Ophilim capacitors coughed a dry, angry spark. Architect tesserae along the cylinder's frame gave a single bright chord and went quiet, like crystal that remembers being sand.
> System: External electromagnetic phenomenon detected. Amplitude rising. Spectrum: broad. Vector: global.
KrysKo: Define "global."
System: All horizons.
"Talk to me," Halric snapped.
"Multiple grid faults," the mezzanine shouted back. "Satellite handshake—gone. Regional relays—gone. We're on mountain reserve only."
"Reserve will hold," Strauss said.
"Not against that," Nadir whispered. She had her palms pressed on the console as if pushing down on a wound. "It's a—"
"EMP," KrysKo said, and the word felt like old ash in his mouth, like a story he didn't remember learning. His eyes went bright gold for one heartbeat, then cooled. "A silence for machines."
> System: Event profile consistent with ultra-high-altitude detonation. Peak in five… four… three—
The world turned to white without light.
Not an explosion. An un-making. Every whisper of electricity found its childhood and forgot how to speak.
Capacitors howled and then were not. The crown's bioluminescent threads spasmed into a silver storm and went out. The consoles flashed a cemetery's worth of epitaphs and died on that last, flat line. The hum that had underwritten the Vault's existence ceased.
Where sound had been, pain arrived.
It was not sharp. It was total. The EMP went through the Architect lattice and into the human nets and into the Lunari filaments and into the rod in his core and through all of it into him. The body learned a new tense for suffering and conjugated it across every nerve. His vision broke into static—not darkness, but snow, cold and bright and cruel. Balance became a war between his feet and gravity. Breath went from interface to argument.
He did not fall.
He reached instinctively—hands flexing against nothing—to find a handhold inside himself.
> System (thin, like a candle in fog): Maintain posture. You are not ending.
KrysKo (teeth closed, water running down his face): I hear you.
System: Anchor to the central spindle. The hum remains. Follow it.
He found it.
Deep in the sternum, behind the sternocleidomastoid lines and the engineered ribs, behind all the human names for anatomy, the rod answered. A low, mineral beat—not a sound, a fact. Slow. Patient. Like a river drum heard through stone.
He let his knees soften to that pulse, not the vanished hum of the Vault. He let his chest remember that breath is a weight you can set down and pick up again. He blinked, and the snow in his vision thinned to powder and then to a pale haze.
Halric was a silhouette against red emergency strobes sputtering into embarrassed life. The man's voice didn't try for calm; it tried for clarity. "Status checks! Manual! We are blind and deaf—use your hands!"
"Reserves are—" the mezzanine voice began, and died, because the reserves had already followed the grid into memory. The strobes hiccuped twice and faded to a black that wasn't empty so much as crowded with the idea of everything.
KrysKo could hear heartbeats. He did not know how he knew whose was whose, but he knew. Nadir's—fast, holding steady by will. Halric's—hammering, then under control. Strauss's—rock inside a barrel. The President's—bird in the hand of a statue.
He took one step—bare, wet foot onto Vault steel—and the mountain answered with a soft ring. The noise ran up the pillars and died among cables like a prayer losing its nerve.
"Stay still, everyone," Strauss said into the dark. You could hear the years of command in the fact that people did.
> System (fainter): Capacitive arrays: offline. Architect lattice: stunned but intact. Human nets: recoverable. Lunari peripherals: quiescent.
KrysKo: And you?
System: Present. Stubborn. One might say old.
KrysKo smiled—barely, a private communion—and turned his face toward the Vault doors because something in the dark had shifted its weight in the hall beyond.
"Hold," Halric began.
"Not us," KrysKo said, because they were already coming.
The Vault's great doors did not swing; they shuddered. Locking pins that could have argued with a tank balked, stalled, then slid as internal hydraulics—bleeding out their last grudges of pressure—gave a final hiss. One door opened a hand-span, then another, then folded back with all the dignity of a cathedral gate forced to admit a funeral it didn't approve.
Three silhouettes slid in with the red haze from the dead emergency strips in the corridor. They moved like men who had rehearsed this walk. Their armor was matte, seamless, quiet—no clatter, no bravado. Helmets with flat visors. Rifles that kept their own counsel.
Security? Not his.
They were too clean for scavengers, too unsentimental for soldiers who belonged to the people behind him.
"Identify," Strauss snapped. He was three hammers short of a hammer, but the man's mouth was still gravity.
No one answered.
The first figure raised a hand and made a small circle with two fingers. Left. The second peeled that way, hugging shadow. The third stepped toward the rail over the cylinder pit and looked down, then up—tilting his helmet as if surprised by the man standing unarmed and wet on the Vault deck, hair falling like a scandal down his back.
The first fired.
Not a bullet. A net—black filament blooming from the rifle's mouth into a web with little claws like shy stars. KrysKo moved without telling himself to. He stepped into ginga in air and time, and the net's perimeter kissed the spot where his chest wasn't anymore. He turned on one palm—water spinning off his shoulder like a little comet—and came up within reach of the rail.
"Stand down!" Halric shouted. It didn't matter to people who had no intention of standing anything but their ground.
Nadir threw herself at the manual control beside her console. It was not a weapon; it was the doors. She hauled a lever her body had no right to manage and the left-hand Vault door screeched halfway closed, then stuck, crooked in its track like a jaw you couldn't convince to bite.
The second figure fired.
This one wasn't a net. It was a line of white-blue snakes—taser arcs braided into a whip of light. It cracked the air where KrysKo's forearm had been a breath before. He felt the heat of it like a ghost of the EMP's hand. A cabinet exploded into a flock of plastic shrapnel and paperwork.
The third figure didn't fire at all. He aimed—and the barrel found the place beside KrysKo's sternum where anything with a heart would prefer not to be addressed—then hesitated a degree when KrysKo looked straight down the line and did not blink. Hesitation is a kind of permission.
KrysKo took it.
He didn't draw blades. He did not want his first act under a human roof to be blood.
He stepped forward—one, two—and in those two steps gave a lesson in what a body can become when its teachers include music, mathematics, and the end of the world. Ginga set his hips loose; the EMP had made the floor treachery and he turned it to dance. He slid under the third man's muzzle and planted a palm on the side of the rifle—not grabbing, never wrestling, just persuading—and the barrel learned a better direction. His other hand found the man's wrist and turned it into a hinge with no argument left. The rifle left its owner like an idea that had gone out of fashion.
The first man tried again with a second net—wider, meaner. KrysKo inverted—hand to rail, ankles to air—and scissored. His heels wrote a proof across the net, tearing it into triangles that would never be useful again. He let the twist of his body carry him into the second man's space and tapped the inside of the taser-wielder's knee with a heel that said nothing personal. The man's leg folded and gravity did what gravity does best.
"Stop!" Halric's voice had climbed into raw. "He is ours!"
The leader flicked two fingers. The second man, on the floor, rolled and brought a sidearm up in a move that would have been elegant if it hadn't been aimed past KrysKo at the human shapes behind him.
> System: Decide. They will shoot through you.
KrysKo: Minimal necessary force.
System: Your minimal is larger than most.
He stepped through the shot as it fired—felt the heat skim the engineered wrongness of his skin—and wrapped the man's wrist with one hand to change the sentence of the gun. The spent round dug a sulky hole in the deck somewhere in the dark. KrysKo took the sidearm not to keep it, but to give it back to the floor with force enough to make it reconsider life. The taser-man's other hand came up with a knife, because knives still have their days even in a dying century. KrysKo turned his forearm and let the blade kiss the place just above the ulna where anyone else would be tendon. The edge skated and told the man a quiet, humiliating secret: this isn't skin.
He could have cut the knife hand away from the rest of the arm, but he wanted to keep the number of funerals in this room at zero. He pivoted—meia lua de compasso truncated to a violent whisper—and clipped the man's jaw with a heel that made the knife forget what loyalty was. The body sank with its pride.
The leader at the door had stopped moving the moment KrysKo started. Not frozen. Watching. You could feel him doing triage in his head: mission, threat, risk, clock.
KrysKo heard Strauss move behind him. A slide, a click—the sound of a man with a pistol he didn't like but knew how to mean. "I will shoot you," Strauss said. There was a pause. "I miss less than you think."
The leader's helmet turned, considered the angle, and declined to test the general's claim. He raised his free hand and touched two fingers to the side of his visor as if acknowledging a voice that did not belong to the room.
"KrysKo," he said, and it startled the air to hear his name come out of a mouth that had not been introduced. The voice was filtered through a grill, stripped of accent. "You will come with us."
"Who are you?" KrysKo asked. He did not raise his voice. The question carried.
"Custodians," the man said. "Continuity detail."
"No," Halric said. "Continuity is our word."
The leader ignored him. "Time is shorter than you think," he told KrysKo. "We will keep you intact. They won't."
> System (a little closer now, like warm hands held near a dying fire): There will always be factions who say only they can shepherd you. Your first loyalty is not to factions.
KrysKo: I know.
System: Say it.
KrysKo: My first loyalty is to humans who are dying.
The leader must have heard something in the way KrysKo stood, because he shifted his stance by half a shoe-width. "You were built to be used," he said. "Decide who uses you."
"Unfortunate phrasing," Nadir muttered hoarsely.
KrysKo looked not at the leader but at the hands—gloved, steady, trained—and saw where they would go if he moved, and saw where they would go if he did not. He put his palms out, fingers open; he let his shoulders fall a fraction to show he had no weapon drawn, no blade showing. He stepped sideways so that if anyone fired, the line would not find Nadir's throat or the President's chest.
"The world is loud," he said. "I will choose after I hear it."
"You will choose now," the leader said, and the rifle came up one degree because that is how grammar works when the sentence is made of violence.
KrysKo's eyes went dark hazel. The long black hair slid along his shoulder like a soft animal and settled.
> System: Minimum necessary force, then.
KrysKo: Minimum.
System: Apologies to your designer.
KrysKo: He will live.
He moved.
Not fast to the eye—inevitable. He closed the distance as if he had always been there and the space had simply remembered. His hand found the barrel and leaned it away with the affection of a teacher taking chalk from a stubborn student. The other hand—those wrong, elegant forearms earning their keep—brushed the leader's gauntlet and the gun left its owner like a season leaving a tree. The leader countered, body low, efficient. The two of them shared three moves that were almost polite, then KrysKo ruined the conversation with a heel to the hip bone that didn't break anything but made the joint call in sick. He lifted the man by his armor a hand-span and set him down on his back with care. You could hear the shock pull breath out of the man's lungs and hand it to the floor.
No blades. No blood. Three men on the deck, four still standing, one room deciding whether or not to exhale.
Then, as if the EMP had paused on its way around the planet only to remember it had one more errand in this mountain, the lights tried to return—and failed. The little red strips in the corridor gave a last, wounded pulse. The Vault doors shivered in their tracks. Somewhere above them, a breaker threw its own funeral.
> System (small, almost intimate): I am going to be quiet. Just for a while.
KrysKo: Don't.
System: I will find you again. Anchor to the spindle. Hear the hum.
KrysKo: I hear it.
System: Good. Remember: breath is not a command. It is a choice.
"KrysKo," Halric said—his voice too loud now in the sudden dark. "Stay with us."
"I'm here," KrysKo said.
For a long second, the mountain held them all in a single hand: soldiers, scientists, a President who had learned that signatures can be louder than gunfire, a man who had been built to be a we when everyone wanted him to be an I.
In the doorway, the wind slipped through the crooked seal and brought with it the smell of snow and smoke and cities that had become rumors.
Then the Vault's last light went out.
Darkness.