Darkness presses against my eyelids, unbroken and suffocating. I try to move, but my limbs are lead weights in a void. I know exactly where I am. I know why I cannot move. I am a splinter of the Source, cast into a vessel of bone and heat. A voice echoes through the black-Pauline's laugh, fragile as crushed glass. "We'll always be friends," she'd promised. I should have told her the truth then and there. I should have told her that "forever" is a very different thing where I come from. Now that promise feels like a knife twisting in my chest, a human emotion I wasn't designed to carry.
When I tore through the membrane of that sac, the first thing I saw was her. Even through the translucent, pulsing film of my arrival, I could feel her. Her heat, her fear, the frantic rhythm of a heart that didn't understand the stars were falling. She was a silhouette against a landscape of broken steel, where towering machines lay silent and rusted hinges froze mid-creak. No humans. Just her. Thank the gods-exposed as I am, I'd rather slip through history alone, but the Source had tethered me to this specific coordinate. To her.
***
I remember the descent. I remember the Birth-Scream. When I open my eyes, I am naked in a landscape of broken steel. Towering machines lie silent, their rusted hinges frozen mid-creak. No humans. Thank the gods-exposed as I am, I'd rather slip through history alone.
The ground is slick with brown goo, sticky as old blood-the industrial bile of our arrival. Each step is a gamble; I stumble over loose bricks and half-buried tools. My knee bruises against cold concrete and I mutter: How careless of them. I am talking about my own kind. They are messy architects. Then, like a shard of normal life, a small shop: its faded wooden door ajar, mannequins posed in welcoming silence. Inside, clothes lie folded on dusty shelves, waiting. Someone-or something-expected me. I pull on a grubby blue dress that smells of machine oil and regret. I dress myself in their skin, their cloth, their lies.
***
A few days bleed past after I drape myself in scavenged cloth. I wander without direction, my feet tracing broken pavement, watching the world die in real-time. I stumble on a family holed up in an old van. They usher me inside with gentle eyes and no questions asked. I watch them, memorizing the way their pulses jump in their necks. I know what is following me.
Night comes folded in on itself, and the Purposeful Ones arrive like living steel nightmares. Their claws tear through metal and flesh; the van's walls shudder with the family's last screams. I sit in the corner and watch. I do not scream. I do not pray. They leave me there, unscathed, between ruined seats and spilled life. They recognize the frequency humming in my marrow.
***
I flee until my legs give out, stumbling through the jagged metal maze that has replaced the main road. The asphalt is choked with the skeletal remains of cars and the sharp, twisted geometry of fallen girders. That's when she appears-Pauline, a silhouette against the rusted wreckage. She looks as frayed as the world around her, clutching a bag, her eyes wide with a mix of suspicion and pity. My throat clenches; I play the part. I let my voice fail, swallowed by the "hollow" she expects to see in a survivor.
Whenever she asks who I am, I let the silence stretch. I have a billion names in the Concordance, but none that her tongue could shape. She tilts her head and offers a name-Blue. It feels soft, like a cage I am willing to step into. I vow to follow her, not because I need a friend, but because I need to see how the story ends. I let her guide me through the maze, her hand warm against mine, ignoring the static pop that reminds me I don't belong in this skin.
By the Port, the world was a fortress of twisted metal. Above us, the Antenna throbbed with the frequencies I missed so dearly. I pressed Pauline into the shadow of a rusted container. "Let's just watch," I murmured, my voice already beginning to lose its human vibrance.
Every morning, I moved between the crane's girders fifty meters up. I wasn't being an acrobat; I was trying to get closer to the broadcast. Pauline stayed low, her voice tight: "Stop treating this as a thrill." She thought I was playing. She didn't realize I was listening.
On the final morning, the sky was a bruise of violet. Pauline climbed ahead of me. She was leaving. She was breaking the loop. My chest tightened-the human heart in this body was fighting the logic of the Source. I stepped closer, the secret of my origin trembling between us. I rose to reach for her. My dress snagged. I fell. I didn't scream as I tumbled toward the basin; I just watched her face get smaller and smaller.
I awoke in absolute darkness. No sound but my own ragged breath. Pauline's laughter flickered through my mind-she was my friend, and I had led her directly into the mouth of the hive.
Then, from the black, the Concordance spoke. A billion voices, loud and clear in my mind, no longer muffled by the atmosphere:
"Welcome Home"