I spend the hours until 2300 trying to sleep and failing.
Every time I close my eyes, I'm somewhere else.
Claire's apartment. Smoke filling the hallway. The heat pressing against my skin.
Marcus's last mission. The scope pressed against my eye. The moment before the bullet hits.
My own memories—or what's left of them—scattered between like broken glass.
At 2200, I give up. Get dressed. Check my gear.
The injectors Jin gave me are still in my vest. Emergency fragmentation suppressants. Three doses of chemical clarity in exchange for potential neurological damage.
I hope I don't need them.
I grab my notebook. Add today's entry.
My name is Silas Kaine. I'm twenty-eight years old. I have two fragments. Claire Mendez and Marcus Rivera. I can still remember my father's laugh, but not what he looked like. I can still remember my college roommate's name (David) but not his face. I'm losing pieces faster now. Small things. The color of my childhood bedroom. My favorite song. Whether I liked coffee black or with cream.
Tonight I'm going into the deep underground. To find the central nexus. To understand what's harvesting us.
If I don't come back—if I fragment completely or die down there—I want whoever reads this to know: I chose this. Not because I'm brave. Because I'm terrified of what happens if I don't.
That has to count for something.
I close the notebook. Leave it on the desk where someone will find it.
Then I head to sub-level three.
The sanctuary has five official sub-levels. Maintenance, storage, utilities, water treatment, backup generators.
Sub-level three is mostly abandoned. The equipment down here is old, outdated, from before the Veil tore.
The maintenance corridors are narrow. Poorly lit. The kind of place you don't go unless you have to.
Maya is waiting at access point seven. She's not alone.
Father Mikhail is with her.
The priest looks different outside of his robes. Practical clothes. A heavy coat despite the climate control. He's carrying a pack that looks too heavy for someone his age.
"Father," I acknowledge.
"Mr. Kaine." His voice is quiet. Measured. "Dr. Zhao informed me of your expedition. I volunteered to accompany you."
"This isn't a spiritual mission."
"All missions are spiritual when you're descending into hell." He almost smiles. "Besides, I read ancient Greek and Latin. If whatever's down there has inscriptions or ritual text, you'll need someone who can translate."
"You think there'll be text?"
"Thaumaturgic circles always have invocations. Commands. Bindings." Maya checks her equipment. "If someone built this deliberately, they left instructions. Or boasts. The ego required to reshape reality tends toward verbosity."
She's wearing a tactical harness loaded with equipment I don't recognize. Recording devices. Sample containers. What looks like a modified Residuum detector.
"Anyone else coming?" I ask.
"No. The fewer people who know about this, the better." She pulls out a map. "I've been studying the sanctuary infrastructure. There's an old maintenance shaft that was sealed after the Veil. According to the original blueprints, it descends another fifty meters below the official lowest level."
"Why was it sealed?"
"Officially? Structural instability. Unofficially?" She looks up. "Three workers went down there in the first month after the Veil tore. None came back up. Leadership sealed it and declared it off-limits."
"That's not ominous at all," I mutter.
"If you want safe, go back to your quarters." Maya's voice is sharp. "But if you want answers—if you want to understand what's eating us from below—this is the only way."
She's right.
I hate that she's right.
"Let's go," I say.
Maya leads us deeper into sub-level three. Through corridors that haven't seen maintenance in years. Past equipment covered in dust and corrosion.
The air gets colder the deeper we go.
Finally, we reach it.
A heavy steel door. Multiple locks. A faded warning sign: CONDEMNED - NO ENTRY BY ORDER OF SANCTUARY LEADERSHIP.
Maya pulls out a set of tools. Starts working on the locks.
"You've done this before," I observe.
"Three times. I've been mapping the deep underground for two years." She doesn't look up. "Looking for Lily. Her Residuum. I thought maybe it migrated down here somehow. Into the deep places where the living don't go."
"Did you find anything?"
"Fragments. Dozens. Hundreds." Her voice is tight. "But none of them were her. So I kept going deeper. And the deeper I went, the more I noticed... patterns. Structures that shouldn't exist. Residuum arranged in geometric formations. Signs of deliberate construction."
The last lock clicks open.
Maya pulls the door wide.
Beyond is darkness.
And cold air. Colder than it should be this deep underground.
I can smell something. Ozone. And underneath it, something organic. Decay.
"Lights," Maya says.
We activate our flashlights. The beams cut through the darkness, revealing a shaft descending into black. Metal rungs embedded in the wall form a ladder.
I can't see the bottom.
"How far down?" Father Mikhail asks.
"Fifty meters to the first junction. Maybe another hundred below that." Maya secures her pack. "Stay close. Watch your grip. If you fall, there's nothing to catch you."
She starts climbing down.
I follow.
Father Mikhail comes last, moving slower but steady.
The descent is endless.
My arms burn. My shoulders ache. Marcus's conditioning helps, but even military training has limits.
Down.
Down.
Down.
The walls change texture as we descend. The metal gives way to concrete. Then to stone. Older. Rougher.
This wasn't built for the sanctuary.
This is older.
Much older.
"Maya," I call down. "How old are these tunnels?"
"Pre-sanctuary. Maybe pre-city." Her voice echoes strangely. "I found dates carved in some of the walls. 1800s. Earlier. Someone's been digging down here for a very long time."
We reach a platform. A junction where the shaft opens into a horizontal tunnel.
Maya consults her map. "This way."
The tunnel is narrow. We have to walk single-file. Our lights reveal walls covered in something that might be mineral deposits or might be something worse.
Crystalline growths. Small. Just starting to form.
Like the structures we saw around the western nexus.
"It's spreading," I say. "The nexus influence. Growing up through the earth."
"Or down from above." Maya runs her fingers over the crystals. "It's hard to tell which direction the growth is moving."
We push deeper.
The tunnel branches. Maya navigates by memory and map, leading us through a maze of passages.
I'm completely lost within ten minutes.
If she leaves us down here, we'll never find our way back.
I choose to trust her anyway.
We descend another level. And another.
The air is thin now. Harder to breathe. We're deep. Deeper than any sanctuary infrastructure should go.
And the crystalline growths are getting larger.
They're not just on the walls anymore. They're growing from the ceiling. The floor. Creating formations that look almost intentional.
Almost artistic.
"We're close," Maya whispers.
"How do you know?"
"Because I can feel it." She touches her chest. "Like pressure. Weight. Something vast pressing against the inside of my ribs."
I feel it too.
We all do.
The tunnel opens into a chamber.
And we stop.
Because the chamber is impossible.
It's massive. Easily a hundred feet across. The ceiling is lost in darkness above. And the walls—
The walls are covered in text.
Thousands of lines. Multiple languages. Some I recognize—English, Spanish, Chinese. Others I don't. Ancient scripts. Symbols that hurt to look at.
And in the center of the chamber—
The nexus.
But this isn't like the ones above ground.
This is... evolved. Complete.
A sphere of compressed light twenty feet in diameter, rotating slowly. But unlike the others, this one has structure. Internal geometry. I can see patterns in the chaos—fractals, sacred geometry, mathematical precision.
And around it, growing from the chamber floor, crystalline structures form a perfect circle. Seven pillars. Each one pulsing with light.
Six of them are glowing bright.
The seventh—the one directly ahead of us—is dim. Still growing.
"The six surface nexuses," Maya breathes. "They're feeding this one. The central processor."
Father Mikhail is staring at the walls. At the text.
"What does it say?" I ask.
He approaches slowly. Runs his fingers over the inscriptions.
"This is... Latin. Greek. Hebrew. Sumerian." His voice shakes. "It's a binding ritual. A summoning. An apotheosis invocation."
"In English, Father," Maya says.
"Someone's trying to become a god." He steps back. "Or rather—someone succeeded. Seven years ago. This ritual—it didn't just tear the Veil between life and death. It allowed something to ascend. To transform from human into something else."
"What kind of something else?"
"A devourer. A processor of human suffering. An entity that feeds on emotional energy and uses it to restructure reality." He's reading faster now. "The dead aren't being controlled by some external force. They're being controlled by this—by what the ritual created. A distributed intelligence. A hive mind of consumed souls."
I stare at the nexus.
At the thing pulsing in the center of the chamber.
"How do we stop it?" I ask.
"Stop it?" Father Mikhail laughs. It's not a happy sound. "You can't stop a god, Mr. Kaine. You can only hope to survive it."
"There has to be a way—"
"There is."
The voice comes from behind us.
We spin.
A figure emerges from the tunnel we just came through.
At first, I think it's one of the dead. The way it moves is wrong. Too smooth. Too fluid.
But then it steps into the light, and I see—
It's human. Mostly.
A man. Maybe forty. Neatly dressed in clothes that look too clean for the underground. His eyes are wrong—too many colors, shifting like the nexus itself.
And when he speaks, his voice echoes like a dozen people talking in unison.
"You came," he says. "Good. We've been waiting."
Maya has her weapon up. "Who are you?"
"We are what you'll become. What everyone becomes, eventually." He tilts his head. "But you may call us David Reeves. That was the name this vessel wore before ascension."
Reeves.
Sarah Reeves. The lieutenant on today's mission.
"Your sister," I realize.
"His sister," the thing wearing David Reeves corrects. "David Reeves died seven years ago in this chamber, completing the ritual. Now he is we. We are the Collective. We are the Ascended. We are what lies beyond the fragmentation."
"You did this." Maya's voice is shaking with rage. "You tore the Veil. You created the dead. You've been harvesting humanity for seven years."
"We've been processing humanity. Refining it. Perfecting it." David—no, the Collective—gestures to the nexus. "Human emotions are messy. Contradictory. Inefficient. But when you compress them, when you distill them to their pure essence, they become power. Potential. Apotheosis."
"You're farming us," I say.
"We're elevating you. When the harvest is complete, when all of Sanctuary Seven has been processed through the nexus, you will join us. Become part of something greater than your individual existence. No more loneliness. No more suffering. Just unity. Purpose. Perfection."
"You're insane," Maya hisses.
"We're evolved." The Collective steps closer. "And you, Dr. Zhao, are particularly valuable. Your grief. Your desperation. Your obsession with finding your daughter—such rich emotional content. When you join us, that anguish will be refined into the purest power."
Maya fires.
The sonic pulse hits the Collective center mass.
It doesn't even flinch.
"Weapons won't work. This vessel is tethered to the nexus. Anchored beyond death." It continues approaching. "But we don't want to fight. We want to show you. Help you understand."
It reaches out.
Toward Maya.
I move without thinking. Marcus's combat training and Claire's protective instinct moving my body.
I put myself between them.
"Don't touch her."
The Collective pauses. Studies me.
"Interesting. You've consumed only two fragments, yet you're already experiencing personality bleed. The protective instinct—that's not yours. And the tactical positioning—also inherited." It leans closer. "You're fragmenting faster than average. Why do you resist? Why not embrace it?"
"Because I'm still me."
"For now." It smiles. "But every fragment brings you closer to us. Closer to understanding. Closer to joining the Collective."
"I'll never join you."
"You already are." It touches its chest. "Every time you consume a Residuum, you add another voice to your internal chorus. Eventually, there will be so many voices that 'you' becomes meaningless. And when that happens—when you're nothing but a vessel for other people's endings—we'll be waiting. Ready to absorb you. Add you to our perfection."
The horror of it settles over me.
That's the end game.
Fragmentation isn't a side effect. It's the purpose.
Get people to consume enough fragments that they lose themselves. Then absorb them into the Collective. Process them. Add their power to the whole.
"The other eaters," I say. "The ones who fragmented completely—"
"Are with us now. Part of us. Their suffering refined and repurposed." The Collective spreads its arms. "Yuki Chen will join us soon. She's at twenty-three fragments. By thirty, she'll be too fractured to resist. And you, Silas Kaine—how many fragments until you break? Five? Ten? We're eager to find out."
"Father," Maya says quietly. "The text. Is there anything about stopping this?"
Father Mikhail is still reading the walls. His face is pale.
"There's a counter-ritual. A way to unbind the ascension." His voice is shaking. "But it requires... it requires someone to willingly enter the nexus. Offer themselves as a opposing anchor. The ritual would collapse, but whoever enters—"
"Would be consumed completely," the Collective finishes. "Destroyed. Erased. Not even added to the Collective. Just... gone."
"There has to be another way," I say.
"There isn't." Father Mikhail's voice is hollow. "Apotheosis requires a foundation. A sacrifice. To undo it, you need an equal and opposite sacrifice. A willing soul, completely given. Nothing held back."
"Then I'll do it," Maya says.
"No—" I start.
"My daughter is gone. I have nothing left. If my death stops this, if it saves everyone—"
"It won't work." The Collective's voice is almost gentle. "The counter-ritual requires someone without fragmentation. Someone whole. You've spent seven years obsessing over your daughter. That obsession has already fractured you. You're incomplete. Unsuitable."
Maya's face crumples.
"But you—" The Collective turns to Father Mikhail. "—you're whole. Broken, perhaps. Faith shattered. But not fragmented. Your sacrifice would suffice."
Father Mikhail meets its gaze. "Then I volunteer."
"NO!" I step forward. "There has to be another way. We can destroy the nexus, we can—"
"Destroy it and it rebuilds," the Collective says. "We've had seven years to root into the foundations of reality. You can't kill us with weapons or science or hope. Only willing sacrifice can undo willing transformation."
"This is insane—"
"This is thaumaturgy. This is the price of unmaking a god." The Collective looks at Father Mikhail. "Will you pay it, priest? Will you enter the nexus and unmake us?"
Father Mikhail is quiet for a long moment.
Then he sets down his pack.
"If it saves everyone. If it stops the harvest." He looks at Maya. "You'll need to activate the counter-ritual. The invocation is on the eastern wall. Latin. Read it as I enter the nexus."
"Father, you don't have to—"
"I lost my faith when the Veil tore. When God allowed this." He's taking off his coat. Preparing. "But maybe this is what faith looks like now. Not believing in divine intervention. Just... choosing to act. Choosing to sacrifice. Even when God is silent."
He walks toward the nexus.
The Collective doesn't stop him.
Just watches.
Interested.
"Wait!" I grab Father Mikhail's arm. "Let me do it. I'm already fragmenting. I'm already losing myself. At least your sacrifice would mean something—"
"You're fragmenting because you consumed Residuum. That makes you unsuitable." Father Mikhail's voice is gentle. "But you're also young. You have time left. Use it better than I used mine."
He pulls free.
Walks toward the nexus.
Maya is at the eastern wall. Reading. Her voice shaking.
"Quod ascendit per sanguinem et dolorem, per sanguinem et sacrificium descendat..."
Father Mikhail reaches the nexus.
Touches it.
The light explodes.
I hear him scream. Not in pain. In... release. Like he's been holding his breath for seven years and finally let go.
The nexus convulses.
The crystalline pillars crack.
And the Collective—the thing wearing David Reeves—staggers.
"No. NO. What are you—"
But Father Mikhail is dissolving. Integrating with the nexus. But not being consumed. Opposing it. Unmaking it from within.
"Per voluntatem puram et animam integram, vinculum frangatur!" Maya's voice rises.
The nexus screams.
It's not a sound. It's pressure. Force. Reality bending.
The chamber shakes.
"RUN!" Maya grabs my arm. "It's collapsing!"
We run.
Behind us, the Collective is screaming. Fragmenting. The distributed intelligence losing cohesion as its anchor unmakes itself.
The tunnels are collapsing. Stone falling. The crystalline growths shattering.
We climb.
Fast. Desperate.
The shaft is shaking so hard I nearly lose my grip twice.
But we keep climbing.
Up.
Up.
Behind us, I hear the central nexus detonate. A sound like reality breaking.
The shockwave hits.
We're thrown against the shaft walls. I feel ribs crack. Taste blood.
But we keep climbing.
We burst through the sealed door onto sub-level three.
The entire sanctuary is shaking.
Alarms are blaring.
People are screaming.
And I can feel it.
The tether between the central nexus and the six surface nexuses—
Breaking.
We emerge onto ground level to chaos.
The entire sanctuary is in lockdown. People running. Security trying to maintain order.
Jin finds us. "What the fuck did you do?"
"Stopped the harvest," Maya gasps. "Destroyed the central nexus."
"By doing WHAT?"
"Long story. What's happening up here?"
"The dead." Jin's face is grim. "All of them. Every single dead around the sanctuary—they just collapsed. Like someone cut their strings."
"They did," I say. "We cut the string. The central intelligence. It's gone."
"For now," Maya adds. "The Collective was distributed. Destroying the central nexus disrupted it, but I don't know if we killed it or just... scattered it."
The ground shakes again.
"Is the sanctuary going to collapse?" someone shouts.
"No." Maya checks her tablet. It's cracked but functional. "The tremors are localized to the central nexus chamber. Surface infrastructure should hold."
Should.
We spend the next six hours in emergency response mode.
Medical teams treating injuries. Structural teams assessing damage. Security teams confirming the dead are really down.
By dawn, the count is in.
Forty-three injured. Seven critical.
No deaths.
And outside, beyond the walls—
The dead are still. Silent. Their tethers severed. Their Residuum anchors broken.
For the first time in seven years, the dead aren't moving.
We won.
But the cost—
Father Mikhail is gone. Completely. Consumed by the nexus. Erased.
He gave himself willingly.
To save us all.
I'm in medical when Maya finds me.
Three cracked ribs. Minor lacerations. They've patched me up and told me to rest.
I won't.
"How's Yuki?" I ask.
"Stable. The severance of the central nexus seems to have reduced the pressure on fragmented eaters. She's... better. More coherent than she's been in months."
"And the surface nexuses?"
"Decaying. Without the central nexus feeding them, they're breaking down. Within a week, they'll be inert." Maya sits heavily. "We actually did it. We stopped the harvest."
"Father Mikhail stopped the harvest."
"Yes." Her voice is quiet. "He did."
We sit in silence.
Finally, I ask, "Did you find her? Lily?"
Maya looks up. "What?"
"In the deep underground. You were searching for two years. All those Residuum you catalogued. Was she there?"
"No." Maya's voice breaks. "She wasn't. I searched every fragment. Documented hundreds. None of them were my daughter."
"I'm sorry."
"I spent seven years looking. Seven years of my life devoted to finding one fragment among millions. And she's just... gone. Lost. Maybe her Residuum never formed. Maybe it dissolved. Maybe—" She stops. "Maybe I need to accept that I'll never know."
"That's not closure."
"No. It's not." She wipes her eyes. "But maybe it's enough. Maybe I can learn to live with not knowing. The same way you're learning to live with fragmentation."
Maybe.
I want to offer comfort. But what comfort is there?
We saved the sanctuary. We stopped the Collective. We broke the harvest.
But Father Mikhail is gone. Lily is still lost. And I still have two dead people's obsessions rattling around my head.
Claire still searching for Thomas.
Marcus still aching for Ana.
And me—
I don't know what I want anymore.
The things that used to matter—my career, my hobbies, my preferences—they're fading. Being overwritten by louder, more desperate needs.
"Maya," I say quietly. "How do I live like this? Carrying other people's obsessions forever?"
"You find new things to care about. New purposes. You build a life around the fragments instead of despite them." She looks at me. "Claire wants to protect. Marcus wants to serve. Those aren't terrible drives to have. You can channel them. Use them for good."
"Even if they're not really mine?"
"Are any of our drives really ours? Or are we all just collections of learned behaviors and inherited traumas, pretending we chose them?" She stands. "You're still you, Silas. Just... a more complicated version. And that's okay."
She leaves.
I sit in the medical bay and try to believe her.
Three days later, they hold a memorial for Father Mikhail.
The whole sanctuary attends.
Director Voss gives a speech about sacrifice and heroism.
Dr. Reid talks about the science of what Mikhail did.
Jin just stands there silently, head bowed.
But it's Maya who says what matters.
"Father Mikhail lost his faith when the Veil tore. He spent seven years searching for meaning in a world that seemed devoid of it. And in the end, he found it. Not in God. Not in miracles. But in choice. In the decision to give himself for others, even when he didn't believe anyone was watching. Even when he knew he wouldn't be remembered or rewarded or saved."
She pauses.
"That's faith. Real faith. Not the kind that expects divine intervention. The kind that acts anyway."
After the service, I visit his room.
They haven't cleaned it out yet. His books are still there. His notes. His journals.
I pick up one of the journals. Read a random entry from six months ago.
I don't believe anymore. But I still hope. Is that enough?
I don't know, Father.
But I hope so.