The ringing in Leo's ears was a physical thing, a high-pitched cathedral built inside his skull from the remains of the feedback scream.
The world returned in pieces.
The smell of ozone and burned plastic. The groans of the Lealists on the floor, their movements clumsy, their glowing HUDs now flickering messes of scrambled code.
The red lenses of the gas mask, watching him, waiting.
The Apostate didn't look at the struggling men.
He turned with a rustle of his long coat and knelt by the remains of the Fixer. His movements were economical, precise.
From the jumble of rags and coolant lines, his gloved fingers plucked a small, rectangular chip. It was stained with rainbow sludge and one corner was blackened.
He held it up to the dim light filtering through the holes in the ceiling.
"A builder of hums," he said, his synthesized voice lower now, almost conversational.
He turned the chip over.
"A rare thing. The System does not tolerate creativity it cannot optimize. Only efficiency."
He tucked the chip into a pouch on his belt.
"You are also an anomaly. But you are a central fault. That makes you useful. Or a nuclear-grade target."
One of the Lealists, the one who'd spoken earlier, pushed himself up onto his elbows. His visor was cracked. He blinked, his eyes unfocused, trying to make his interface obey.
He saw the Apostate's back, a dark shape against the gloom.
The Apostate didn't turn. He seemed to sense the movement.
In one fluid motion, he rose, pivoted, and took two silent steps. From a sleeve, a small, cylindrical device like a thick stylus slid into his hand.
He pressed it against the side of the Lealist's neck, just below the helmet's rim.
A quiet, surgical click.
The Lealist's eyes rolled back. He slumped, a puppet with strings cut. The frantic flicker of his interface winked out, leaving his face pale and blank in the unnatural quiet.
Not dead. Switched off.
"They will trace this disturbance," the Apostate said, standing over the unconscious man.
He glanced at the other Lealist, who was fumbling for his fallen weapon. A second, almost weary step, another click.
The second man joined the first in silent, sprawled oblivion.
"More will come. With worse tools. Tools that don't just disconnect. Tools that scour."
He turned back to Leo. He didn't offer a hand. He simply stood there, a silhouette of matte black and red glass, his head tilted.
The offer hung in the air, unspoken but screaming.
It wasn't a hand of help. It was the outline of a contract.
Go with him, and trade a public, System-sanctioned hunt for an obscure alliance with ghosts who lived in the cracks.
Stay, and become prey so predictable the Lealists would have a form for it.
Leo's mouth was dry. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic animal in a cage of bone.
The analytical part of his mind tried to run the numbers. Unknown variable (Apostate) versus known threat (Lealists, hunters, the ping).
The unknown was terrifying. The known was fatal.
His vision pulsed. A soft, inevitable chime sounded only for him.
[Next Location Ping in: 00:04:17.]
Four minutes and seventeen seconds.
Then the red dot would bloom. It wouldn't just be Lealists. It would be every desperate soul with an interface in a kilometer radius, all converging on this shattered shop.
The Apostate's mask emitted a sound—a low, staticky exhale that might have been a laugh.
"Ah, yes. The heartbeat of your personal hell."
He pointed a single, gloved finger upward, through one of the null-craters in the ceiling, toward the sickly, artificial twilight.
"In two hundred and fifty-seven seconds, every hunter, pragmatist, and fanatic within a thousand meters will know you are here. With me."
The red lenses seemed to brighten.
"They do not discriminate in their hunger. The bounty does not specify solo capture."
He let that settle.
The image formed in Leo's mind: a wave of bodies, armed with crude weapons and System-bought advantages, crashing through the windows, trampling the Lealists, tearing the place apart to claim the prize.
The Apostate would be collateral damage, or a secondary target. Order and chaos, both converging to erase him.
The Apostate took a single step backward, toward the deeper darkness of the lab doorway.
It was an invitation. A test.
"So," the metallic voice filtered through the mask.
"You can wait for the clock to zero. Become the center of a storm. Or you can step out of the timepiece altogether."
He didn't say follow me. He didn't promise safety.
He offered a path away from the ticking.
Leo looked at the two unconscious Lealists. He looked at the silent, broken form of the Fixer.
He felt the faint, persistent translucence in his own hands, the 67% synchronization a slow death sentence.
The System's countdown was a drumbeat in his veins.
He had no stats. No strength. Only a curse that let him see the world's fractures, and a head full of empty spaces where happy memories used to be.
The Apostate lived in those fractures.
With a breath that felt like lifting a weight he'd carried his whole life, Leo moved.
Not a run, not a leap of faith. A shuffle. A defeated, pragmatic step away from the light of the street, toward the man in the gas mask.
It felt less like choosing a side and more like admitting the arena was rigged, and stepping out of the ring.
The Apostate gave a single, slight nod. He turned and disappeared into the black rectangle of the lab door.
Leo followed, the chemical stench growing stronger, wrapping around him like a burial shroud.
Behind him, the world of light and law and relentless pings continued without him.
Ahead, there was only dark, and the whisper of a matte-black coat, and the scent of ozone.
The Apostate moved through the cluttered back room—a graveyard of janitorial supplies and corroded chemical drums—with the ease of a man walking through his own living room.
He didn't use a light.
He stopped before a large, heavy metal shelf unit piled with boxes of detergent that had solidified into chalky bricks.
With a grunt of effort, he pushed the entire shelf sideways.
It screeched on the concrete floor, revealing not a wall, but a ragged hole in the brickwork. It looked like it had been smashed open, then partially covered up.
A draft, cold and smelling of damp earth and stale electricity, flowed from it.
"A shortcut," the Apostate said.
"The city has many. Old maintenance tunnels, sewer overflows, places the System's cartography is… fuzzy. They don't like fuzzy."
He ducked through the hole. Leo hesitated for only a second.
The countdown in his vision read 00:03:41.
He crouched and followed.
On the other side was a narrow, pitch-black tunnel. The air was thick and cold.
The Apostate was already several paces ahead, a deeper shadow in the absolute dark.
Then, a small, green LED light winked on from a device on his belt, casting just enough illumination to see the rough, curved walls of what looked like a utility conduit.
"Keep up," the voice came back, muffled by the mask and the tunnel.
"The ping will still transmit from here, but the signal will be degraded. It will give them an area, not a point. It will confuse them. For a while."
Leo stumbled after him, his weak legs protesting, his shoes slipping on the slimy floor.
He was now completely blind to the world above.
The only constants were the bobbing green dot of light ahead, the oppressive dark, and the numbers in his vision, ticking down.
00:02:15.
"Who are you?" Leo asked, the question bursting out of him, raw and too loud in the confined space.
The Apostate didn't break stride.
"A question for a question. A fair trade. But not yet. First, we must see if you live long enough for the answer to matter."
00:01:30.
They took a left fork, the tunnel dipping downward. The sound of dripping water grew louder. Leo's breath fogged in the green light.
00:00:45.
The Apostate stopped suddenly. He held up a closed fist. Leo froze.
The man listened, his masked head cocked. From far, far behind them, echoing down the tunnel, came a new sound.
Not pursuit. A muffled, booming crump, followed by the distant screech of tearing metal.
"They're clearing the shop. Making sure," the Apostate murmured. "Efficient."
00:00:10.
The numbers in Leo's vision flashed red.
00:00:03… 00:00:02… 00:00:01…
Passive Location Ping Transmitted.
There was no fanfare. No physical sensation. But Leo knew.
Somewhere above, in the clean, ruined streets, on a thousand interfaces and HUDs, his icon had just pulsed into existence. A red star on their maps.
But down here, in the fuzzy dark, what would it show? A blur? A smear?
The Apostate's masked face turned toward him. The red lenses were unreadable.
"And so it beats," he said.
"Now the hounds have a scent, but the trail leads into a maze they fear to enter. You have bought minutes, Zero. Only minutes. What you do with them is the next question."
He turned and continued walking, deeper into the bowels of the dead city.
The green LED light bobbed ahead, a will-o'-the-wisp leading him away from the hunters, away from the light, and into the heart of the silence between the System's lines.