The mountain felt louder the next morning.

  Matas woke to the band at the base of his skull already tight, like it had been bracing without him all night. The hum under Samhal had picked up a finer, higher thread—like a crack you could hear before you saw it.

  He pushed himself upright on the narrow barracks pallet and waited to see if his morning would give a chance to wake up.

  Nothing failed, immediately. His hands just shook when he dragged them over his face. His left eye ached where the slit pupil tugged on whatever nerves it had been spliced into. The right ghosted a wash of thin gold over the rafters, mapping load lines he already knew were bad.

  No new text. No chime. Just the same sour halo lodged in the corner of his vision, pulsing its four?count like a metronome that had forgotten how to do anything but keep time.

  Good. Or not good? The design choices on this system didn’t make sense to him, and in that moment, it really clicked. If the current system has been under suppression, does that mean he still hadn’t seen the true system texts that were coming from the other side?

  Outside, the barracks sounded wrong. Fewer boots but more packing. Voices too focused for a normal morning. He dressed on autopilot—shirt, worn trousers, leather chest piece, boots , and the belt whose leather had long since learned the shape of his hips, with his omen blade hanging on the end—and stepped into a corridor that had turned into a vein for evacuation.

  Rope?hands trotted past with coils on their shoulders. Two younger hunters wrestled a chest between them, arguing in the bare, flinty tones of people pretending they weren’t scared. Somewhere up?slope, a child cried, sharp and short, then stopped like someone had clapped a hand over the sound.

  “Scout.”

  Matas turned.

  Tharel stood at the junction where the barracks passage fed the upper terraces. The older man’s posture had shifted since yesterday; his shoulders were weighed down by every set of eyes that locked onto him as they passed, but it read more like someone braced under known weight than someone being pushed at random. The box was in his hands.

  Even cold, its presence had a taste. The air around it felt scraped thin. Light caught on the mysterious material of its surface and went nowhere.

  “Council wants new numbers,” Tharel said. “Before I set timing.”

  “On the writ?” Matas asked, because his mouth still got ahead of better judgment.

  “On everything,” Tharel said. “Routes. Heart’s tolerance. And this.”

  His fingers tightened on the box a fraction, then eased.

  “You can say no,” Tharel added, almost as an afterthought. “Serh will say I should let you.”

  The band at the base of Matas’s skull pulsed once, like it agreed with her in advance.

  He looked past Tharel toward the terraces. The outer platforms boiled with motion—bundles, goats, people arguing about who owned what when none of it was going to belong to any of them much longer. A rope?line marked off the cracked east storage wall; builders walked it, hands on stone, chalk at belts, already measuring how long it would hold.

  They would do this with or without him.

  “No,” he said. “You’re stuck with me.”

  Tharel’s mouth twitched. “Thought so,” he said. “Keth’s waiting on the way down. They have more to say.”

  “Of course they do,” Matas muttered. “Why wouldn’t the auditor want another look at their favorite collapsing project?”

  If Tharel heard, he didn’t react. He turned toward the lower corridors, the not?stone box tucked against his chest as if it were both relic and live coal.

  Matas fell in behind him. The halo in the corner of his sight brightened half a shade in acknowledgment of direction.

  Work, then.

  That, at least, he knew how to do.

  ~

  The corridor under the terraces had fresh scars. Hairline cracks feathered out from corners that had been clean yesterday. Dust lay in delicate fans at the bases of support pillars, like the mountain had taken up shedding.

  “That’s new,” Matas said.

  “Add it to the ledger,” Tharel said.

  Some part of Matas already had. There was a section of his mind now that never stopped tracking: this crack, that flaking seam, this tremor’s timing. Heart. Writ. Keth. The system might be running its own private spreadsheet somewhere he couldn’t see, but his skull felt like the local copy.

  At the last bend before the old Chief’s door, the air thinned in a way that had nothing to do with depth.

  Keth waited in the corridor, just past the point where daylight from the upper slits gave up. They didn’t lean or pace. They simply stood, hands folded behind their back, head tilted toward the stone like they were listening to it hum.

  It hummed back.

  “How many of you are there?” Matas asked before he could stop himself.

  Keth’s lips moved in something that might have been amusement, but didn’t quite make it.

  “Enough,” they said. “For the data you’re generating though I am sufficient.”

  They nodded to Tharel in crisp acknowledgment, then shifted their attention to Matas with the unblinking focus of someone inspecting a hairline fracture.

  “We have a problem,” Keth said. “Beyond the one you can already hear.”

  Matas tapped his temple. “You’ll have to be more specific. There’s competition for the top of that list.”

  “The Heart’s suppression field is failing,” Keth said. “You know that. The primary entity is closer to surface awareness than your elders prefer to say aloud. You know that as well.”

  “New and exciting part, then,” Matas said.

  “The ledger doesn’t like plateaus,” Keth said.

  The sentence landed with the flat weight of a board dropped on a workbench.

  Matas frowned. “Plateaus.”

  “Stasis,” Keth said. “Subjects who remain at the same level while suppression drops tend to degrade quickly. Neurological collapse. Structural failures routed through their nervous systems. Occasionally wider…events. Untidy patterns.”

  “Untidy,” Matas repeated. “You mean people die and we don’t finish evacuation, or what are we talking about here?”

  “I mean nodes fail unpredictably,” Keth said. “People die in all scenarios. The question is where and when.”

  The halo in the corner of Matas’s vision flared in time with Keth’s words, a brief, sour brightness that left a smear of afterimage. No text. Just pressure.

  “You’re saying I need to keep leveling,” Matas said. “Now.”

  “I am saying stagnation under rising load correlates strongly with catastrophic outcomes,” Keth said. “You are a primary instrument in this node. If you do not continue to adapt as the load increases, you will crack.”

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  “Adapt,” Matas said. “Nice, clean word for losing more pieces of myself.”

  Keth inclined their head, as if conceding the phrasing without disputing the point.

  “The Heart’s earlier compression event—your jump to fifteen—was not fully resolved,” they said. “Some adjustments were deferred.”

  “Can't we tone down the cryptic nature?” Matas said, “Jesus Christ.., do you have something still waiting to land?”

  “As in pending,” Keth said. “The ledger recorded additional changes but did not apply them locally. Resolution requires further advancement under pressure.” A short pause, “It shocks me how obliviously you use the word nature. Shall I ask you to stop being a fool?”

  Matas worked through the skull?band ache. “Alright, I earned that one. If I pick up another level the old-fashioned way—poke something to death or expand my skills—whatever it didn’t finish doing to me last time shows up to catch up.”

  “Additional strain will be applied,” Keth said. “Yes. The system does not regard it as debt. It is an incomplete state returning to completion.”

  The band at his skull squeezed like someone had set a jack to it and given it half a turn.

  “So if I stay stuck at fifteen while all this is letting go,” he said slowly, “I crack wrong and maybe take other people with me. If I push for sixteen, the system finishes everything it started when the Heart rang me like a bell, and I…crack differently.”

  “Those are two observed patterns,” Keth said. “There are outliers. Some instruments survive.”

  “For a given value of survival,” Matas said. “You know this is all still very cryptic. I'm not pushing because I assume youre already saying what you can, but damn dude.”

  Keth didn’t respond.

  Tharel cleared his throat. Even that small sound carried weight.

  “We needed to know,” he said. “Now we know.”

  He looked at Keth. “Anything else before we go?”

  Keth considered, gaze turning inward for a beat, like they were paging through invisible lists.

  “External routes remain open,” they said. “Three valleys prepared to receive evacuees. An exit vector exists for your integration subject as well. Load constraints are narrow. We will discuss it after your inspection.”

  Matas fixed them with a look. “Translation: there’s maybe a way out for me if I’m willing to move my problems onto someone else’s ledger.”

  “Everyone moves their problems,” Keth said. “The difference is whether you acknowledge it.”

  The mountain hummed underfoot. A faint tremor rippled through the corridor—a shiver rather than a shake. Dust whispered down from the ceiling and salted Tharel’s hair.

  “Time is compressing,” Keth said. “You should go down.”

  Matas’s eyes burned. His teeth ached. The halo in the corner of his sight skated between a sickly red and a muted gold.

  “Stagnation is death,” he said. “Level or crack.”

  “Those are the trends,” Keth said.

  “Great,” Matas said. “Let’s go stare at the fuse again, then.”

  “Ill meet you there.” Keth popped out of existence in a familiar pop of nothingness.

  ~

  Keth waited where the council hall’s main terrace swept out into a view over the valley. They’d taken up a position at the railing, looking down the throat of the mountain as if they could see the three chalked routes engraved on its skin.

  “Efficient,” they said when Matas joined them. “For a settlement that resisted every earlier chance to move.”

  “Praise from you feels like a note that says ‘nice form’ on the way I fell off a roof,” Matas said.

  “The angle matters,” Keth said. “For data.”

  Matas leaned his forearms on the stone rail. The drop beyond it wasn’t sheer, but it was enough.

  “You mentioned an exit vector,” he said. “I'd like to hear it straight. No poetry. My skull’s not equipped for it. Just pretend you’re dealing with a child.”

  Keth’s gaze stayed on the slopes.

  “When the writ is enacted,” they said, “the suppression field will fail in a controlled pattern. That event, combined with the primary entity’s response, will open a narrow routing window in the network. During that window, certain loads can be displaced.”

  “Loads like me,” Matas said.

  “You are one candidate,” Keth said. “You, and perhaps a handful of others physically adjacent, could be moved away from this node along that path. Toward a domain closer to your origin structure.”

  “Alea,” Matas said softly. The name felt like a tooth his tongue kept finding and not quite believing was gone.

  “Possibly,” Keth said. “Time differentials complicate precision. But closer than here.”

  “And the cost,” Matas said.

  “Load conservation,” Keth said. “Removing you from this node removes both your local strain and your capacity to shape how it fails. That load will settle elsewhere. Another node. Another set of people.”

  Matas stared at the valley.

  “Staying at fifteen when suppression goes means I crack and make things worse,” he said. “Leaving without leveling means I probably tear on the way out and destabilize wherever I land. Leaving after leveling means I walk away stronger and shove the stress somewhere that never asked for it.”

  “Those are likely outcomes,” Keth said. “The ledger will balance regardless.”

  He huffed a laugh that wasn’t one.

  “So my choices are: stagnate and fail here; run and fail somewhere else; or level, hurt like hell, and stay put while everything tallies through me.”

  “You become an anchor,” Keth said. “This node’s later behavior would be logged through you. It's expeditions. It's interactions with the primary entity. Its eventual failure, or stabilization, if such a thing is possible.”

  “Anchor,” Matas said. “Serh’s word.”

  “It is accurate,” Keth said. “For once, local terminology maps well.”

  His fingers curled against the stone. The rail under his hands had its own microcracks, dust trapped in corners worn by years of boots and weather. He counted without meaning to. Tiny failures, all of them waiting for someone to lean wrong.

  “What happens if I leave without picking up that level first?” he asked.

  “Your nervous system is unlikely to tolerate the transition,” Keth said. “The network would record what it could and extract useful data from the outcome. Some subjects survive, partially. Most do not.” They hesitated before adding, “ I repeat, this is the only way I know of getting you back. Remember that you owe these people nothing. This binding will follow you, but the system operates… differently outside the suppression.”

  “Comforting, I assure you, but let's just finish this, alright?” Matas said. “And if I stay here at fifteen through suppression collapse?”

  “Analogous,” Keth said. “Your integration would tear under shifting load. The entity’s attention might end you, or repurpose you. Neither pattern is elegant.”

  “And if I stay and push for the level?” he asked.

  Keth finally looked at him.

  “Then the pending adjustments will resolve,” they said. “You will experience significant strain. You may die. If you do not, you will be better able to navigate what comes next. And more entangled. This node’s future will be bound to you more tightly.”

  “Less chance to walk away later,” Matas said.

  “Integration rarely reverses,” Keth said.

  The band at his skull pulsed. The halo flickered, as if agreeing.

  “Everyone is using everyone,” Keth had told him in the watch post. The line came back now, uninvited.

  “Samhal’s using me,” Matas said. “The network’s using me. Whatever’s under the Heart is using all of us. You’re using me. Even the version of Alea in my head is using me.”

  “Yes,” Keth said.

  He waited for them to dress it up. They didn’t.

  “The system doesn’t care whether you are noble,” Keth said. “It cares how the numbers move when you do. You are not choosing between good and bad. You are choosing which beams you stand under when they break.”

  Matas let out a breath that felt like it had been trapped since Illinois.

  “I was happier when my worst decision was taking a cash job from a guy whose ladder had more rust than rungs,” he said.

  “Were you.” Keth asked. It wasn’t really a question. “This is not my first Integration, and far from everyone would have a fraction of your self-instilled debt to these people.”

  Matas didn’t answer for a long while.

  Below, the valley waited. Chalk lines on stone up here would turn into narrow paths down there, then into new walls somewhere further on. No version of this ended with him back on a McHenry roof next week, cursing at shingles.

  The question wasn’t “How do I escape.” It hadn’t been for a while.

  It was “What happens if I leave.”

  And now, layered over it, “What happens if I stay.”

  The band at his skull squeezed again. Not punishment. Reminder.

  Stagnation kills you.

  “Yeah, I don’t know about all that, but I think the average person would like to pay back someone who helped them in a time of need.” Flashing a cheeky smile, he added, “That’s how you get bad jobs to call you back.”

  He pushed off the rail.

  “Tell Tharel,” he said, “that when he speaks the writ, I’ll be here. Not on some valley path. Not halfway along your tidy routing window.”

  “You are committing,” Keth said. No approval. No censure. Just record.

  “Yeah,” Matas said. “I’m tired of walking away from roofs while they’re still standing and pretending I did something to help fix them.”

  Keth nodded once. “Then you will need that new level,” they said. “Soon.”

  “I figured,” Matas said. “Tell the system to schedule it for a situation where my life is not in mortal danger, and I can hopefully take a nap after?”

  “That is not how it operates,” Keth said.

  “Worth a shot,” Matas said, offering a wide smile.

  He turned from the valley. The terraces spread before him, suddenly smaller than they had ever felt. A village in the shadow of something too big to fit in anyone’s head. People he had patched walls for, eaten with, argued with.

  Serh stood at the far end of the terrace, watching routes being argued over in chalk and rope. Merrik hovered a few paces away, talking logistics with a rope?hand. Juela’s silhouette moved in and out of the kitchen doorway, steady as ever.

  He walked toward them.

  The halo in his sight brightened with each step, as if the system, too, were leaning in.

  “Changed your mind?” Serh asked when he reached her.

  “No,” Matas said. “I finally picked one.”

  “And?” she said.

  “I’m not taking Keth’s off-ramp,” he said. “If there’s going to be an anchor on this slope, it might as well be the idiot who’s been reading its bad lines since day one.”

  Something in her shoulders eased and tightened at the same time.

  “Good,” she said. “Bad.”

  “Story of my life,” Matas said.

  Merrik let out a breath that sounded like someone had wrung all the humor out of a laugh.

  “Then we stay,” he said. “At least until…?”

  “Until the beam comes down,” Matas said. “Then we see what’s left to stand under.”

  The mountain hummed. Deeper now. Closer.

  Somewhere, far below, crystal strained.

  Above, on the terraces, people argued about pack lists and who would lead which group down which path. Children chased each other around bundles, their laughter brittle but still there. The air smelled of dust and stew and fear.

  The next pulse from the mailbox wasn’t the usual sour smear at the edge of his sight.

  It hit clean and hard, a four?count that came back bright, molten gold instead of muted.

  The band at the base of his skull tightened in answer, just enough to warn him that what came next wouldn’t be gentle.

  Of course, he thought. It waited until I picked a side.

  On the following beat, the little flag in the corner of his vision burned steady gold, brighter than it had any right to be.