The food tasted like rust and almonds.
Kira held a piece of it between two fingers, a flat, dark disc the size of her palm, dense as compressed clay, and sniffed it. "What is this?"
"Threadmeal," the Keeper said. The one who had led them from the grass. It had a name, apparently, something musical that the blue fragment translated as Resonance-of-Steady-Pillars, which Kira had immediately shortened to "Steady." The Keeper hadn't objected. "Cultivated from the copper substrate. It contains the mineral nutrients necessary for biological function."
"It tastes like I'm licking a knife."
"The iron content is high."
"That's not a selling point." But she ate it. Three bites, mechanical, the jaw working through the dense material with the efficient chewing of someone who had eaten worse things in worse places and understood that complaining about food was a luxury reserved for people who had options.
The shelter was a hollow in the archive's outer ring, a chamber scooped from the dark stone, roughly ten meters across, the ceiling low enough that Ren could touch it with an extended arm. The Warden had offered it the way a landlord offers a unit: no tour, no amenities list, just a gesture toward the opening and the flat statement that the space was available. The stone was warm. The amber light from outside filtered through a gap at the chamber's entrance, casting everything in the same perpetual golden tone that colored the entire realm.
Three bedrolls. The Keepers had provided them, thin mats woven from the copper grass, surprisingly comfortable, the metallic fibers creating a surface that was half-fabric and half-insulation. Ren's was against the back wall. Kira's was near the entrance. Sera's was between them. The arrangement was unconscious: Kira at the point of greatest exposure, Ren at the deepest defensive position, Sera in the protected center. The geometry of people who had learned, in different ways and different contexts, how to arrange themselves for survival.
"Eat," Ren told Sera. She was sitting on her bedroll, the threadmeal disc untouched on a flat stone beside her. Her hands were in her lap, palms up, the fingertips still carrying the faint vibration she'd picked up from the pillars.
"I can still feel them," she said. Not complaining. Reporting. The Thornwall training: observe, document, communicate. "The stored ones. Even from here. It's weaker inside the chamber, the walls dampen it. But it's there. Like standing near a crowd you can't see."
Ren's green fragment stirred. The diagnostic reflex. But the fragment was too drained for even a basic scan. It managed a flicker of awareness, registered that Sera's vital signs were within normal parameters, and went dormant again.
"The Warden said it's temporary. When we leave the Threadhall, the sensitization should fade."
"Should."
"The medical confidence interval on 'should' is about seventy percent."
Sera picked up the threadmeal. Bit into it. Her face did something complicated, the expression of a woman raised on Ashenmoor academy food confronting the mineral-rich output of an alien ecosystem for the first time.
"It's not terrible," she said carefully.
"It's terrible," Kira said from the entrance. "But it's food. Eat it and move on."
---
The record pillar was in a chamber adjacent to their shelter.
The Warden had directed Ren to it: a single column of dark stone, thinner than the repository pillars, its surface smooth and unmarked. No impressions. No faces. No bodies pressed into the stone. Instead, the surface was covered in something Ren's blue fragment recognized as data-encoding: tiny, regular patterns etched into the stone at a scale too fine for the naked eye, carrying compressed information the way magnetic tape carried sound.
"Touch the surface," the Warden had said. "Your language-pattern thread will decode the records. Do not force the connection. Allow the data to arrive at the thread's processing speed. Accelerating the transfer will cause—" A pause. "Discomfort."
The Warden had left. The chamber was empty. The amber light fell through a gap in the ceiling, catching the record pillar's surface and making the micro-etchings visible as a faint shimmer, like light on water, if the water were made of stone.
Ren placed his palm against the surface.
The blue fragment opened. Not a door. The fragment didn't have the energy for a full opening. A window. The smallest aperture the architecture would permit, enough to receive incoming data without expending reserve power. The information arrived as pressure: compressed packets of meaning, delivered in the blue fragment's translation format, unpacking themselves in Ren's consciousness the way compressed files unpacked on a computer screen.
Names. Dates. Cycle counts. Thread tallies.
The records went back forty-seven thousand cycles, as the Warden had said. Each entry was a Collector who had passed through the Threadhall, either arriving by miscalibrated void-path, as Ren had, or seeking the archive deliberately for its stored fragments.
The first entry was the most recent: a Collector designated Mira Vex, sixteen threads, passage calibrated for Nexus Prime. Transit four months ago. The entry was sparse: arrival, departure, no interaction with the archive's stored fragments. Mira had come through, the Warden had calibrated her exit, and she'd left. Clean. Professional. The transit of someone who knew exactly where she was going and didn't linger.
The second entry was older. Three hundred cycles. A Collector with ninety-one threads, a significant count. The entry was longer. This Collector had stayed in the Threadhall for forty days, studying the archive, absorbing stored fragments from the pillars. Eight fragments extracted during the stay. The Collector had departed for a Tier 2 realm and the record noted, in the Warden's administrative shorthand: *Collector failed at 142 threads. Fragments dispersed. Partial recovery to archive.*
Failed at 142.
Ren kept reading. The blue fragment processed each entry, delivering the data in bursts: names, thread counts, durations of stay, destinations, outcomes. The pattern emerged over dozens of entries, spanning thousands of cycles.
Collector at 203 threads. Failed. Fragments dispersed.
Collector at 67 threads. Failed. Fragments dispersed.
Collector at 311 threads. Failed. Identity dissolution at 280, loss of core self at 298, autonomous function ceased at 311.
Collector at 12 threads. Failed. Killed by rival Collector.
Collector at 445 threads. Failed. Absorbed by Arbiter enforcement protocol.
Failed. Failed. Failed. Failed.
The record pillar held the histories of sixty-three Collectors. Sixty-three shattered souls who had hunted their fragments across realms, who had absorbed memories and powers and trauma, who had carried the burden of becoming someone else one piece at a time. Sixty-three attempts at completion, stretching back across millennia.
None had completed.
The closest: a Collector designated only as "The Seeker." Eight hundred and forty-seven threads. The record was extensive. The Seeker had visited the Threadhall multiple times, over a span of twelve hundred cycles. Each visit documented thread count, mental stability assessment, fragment architecture integrity. The progression was staggering. From seven threads to forty in the first two hundred cycles. Then faster. A hundred threads in the next five hundred cycles. Then faster still. Two hundred threads in three hundred cycles. Then—
The rate slowed. Not by choice. The record documented increasing identity instability. Memory flood events becoming more frequent. Dissociative episodes lasting longer. The Seeker's core self eroding under the accumulated weight of hundreds of absorbed lives.
At 700 threads, the Warden had noted: *Core identity compromised. Seeker exhibits multi-personality fragmentation. Original self no longer dominant persona. Collection continues on autonomous drive, the architecture hunts fragments without conscious direction.*
At 800 threads: *Seeker is no longer a person. Seeker is a process. Collection proceeds mechanistically. No evidence of will, desire, or self-awareness beyond the imperative to collect.*
At 847 threads: *Arbiter enforcement protocol activated. Seeker's fragment architecture absorbed into Arbiter's system. Threads redistributed. Collection terminated. Seeker's core identity, if any remained, was not recoverable.*
Ren pulled his hand from the pillar. The blue fragment's window closed. The data stopped.
His hands were shaking. Not from depletion. The tremor was different. Finer. The vibration of a body processing information that the diminished emotional capacity couldn't properly feel but that the nervous system understood anyway.
Eight hundred and forty-seven out of nine hundred and ninety-nine. The closest anyone had come. And at the end, the Seeker hadn't been a person anymore. Just a machine wearing a body, collecting fragments because the architecture demanded it, the original consciousness lost somewhere around thread 700 in a flood of absorbed memories and stolen lives.
Ren had seven fragments. The identity erosion from the organism encounter had already shown him how fragile the self was, how quickly the foundational structure of who you were could be compromised. The Seeker had seven hundred and forty more fragments than Ren, and it hadn't been enough. The identity had dissolved anyway.
A second pattern in the data. The Collectors who lasted longest, who maintained their core selves the deepest into the Collection, were the ones who gained fragments slowly. Deliberately. One at a time, with recovery periods between absorptions. The ones who rushed, who consumed fragments in rapid succession, lost themselves faster. The correlation was clear across dozens of entries.
Ren's approach, forced by circumstance more than strategy, had been slow. Seven fragments in sixty chapters of his existence. One every eight or nine chapters. The slowest rate in the archive's recent history.
That was, according to the dead men's records, the reason he still knew his own name.
---
Kira came back from her exploration three hours later.
She ducked through the chamber entrance and sat on her bedroll without ceremony. Her boots were dusty, copper dust, the residue of the metallic grass, and there was a new scratch on her forearm that she wasn't mentioning.
"Where did you go?" Ren asked.
"Walking. Mapping. The archive is bigger than stoneface let on." She pulled off a boot, shook out a pebble. "The outer ring has twenty-four sections. Twenty-three are repository pillars, same as what we've seen. Dark stone, faces, stored fragments." She pulled off the other boot. "The twenty-fourth is sealed."
"Sealed how?"
"Stone wall. Floor to ceiling. No gap, no door, no passage. The Keepers have a patrol route that goes around the outer ring, and they skip section twenty-four. Walk past it without looking. I tried to get closer and Steady, the big one, blocked me. Not aggressive. Just present. Standing between me and the wall like it was part of the architecture."
"Did you see anything?"
Kira's hands paused on her boot. The question-deflection pattern, the speech habit that meant she was deciding how much to share. "Maybe."
"Kira."
"There's a crack in the seal. Top corner. Two inches wide, where the stone hasn't bonded properly to the ceiling. I climbed a pillar to get an angle."
Ren waited.
"The pillars inside are white."
The word landed wrong. Everything in the Threadhall was dark stone, the void-path material, warm and black and dense. White stone was an absence. A contradiction.
"White like limestone?"
"White like bone. Pale. Cold-looking. The opposite of everything else in this place." Kira pulled her boot back on. "And the impressions. There are impressions in the white pillars. But they're different. The dark pillars have faces, hands, bodies. The white pillars have marks. Not people shapes. More like claw marks. Like something was dragged across the surface."
Ren filed it. The information joined the archive's records in the clinical database that his diminished emotional capacity maintained: facts without feelings, observations without fear.
"Don't mention it to the Warden yet."
"Wasn't planning to." Kira stretched her legs. Her shoulder, the one she'd bruised pulling Sera from the river, rolled with a stiffness that she was covering with body language but not with sound. A small grunt, cut short. "How are the records?"
"Sixty-three Collectors in the archive's history. None completed. The closest got to eight hundred and forty-seven before losing their identity."
Kira absorbed this the way she absorbed all bad intel: with a jaw that tightened, a breath that shortened, and a response that came out practical. "So the smart money says you're not going to make it."
"The smart money says nobody's made it."
"And you're still planning to try."
"The alternative is fading out of existence."
"Right." She rolled her shoulder again. The grunt was louder this time. "Well. That's motivating."
Ren watched the way she held the arm. Guarding it, the shoulder dropped a centimeter lower than the other, the range of motion restricted. The green fragment stirred in his core. Still depleted, still fractured, but the erratic pulse had stabilized during their rest. Two seconds of power, three of nothing. The two seconds were stronger now. Recovery happening at the cellular level, the fragment's architecture rebuilding itself from the void-path's drain.
"Let me look at that."
"It's just a bruise."
"I didn't ask for a diagnosis. I asked to look at it."
Kira glanced at him. The assessment: is this person a threat, an asset, or furniture. In this case, none of the above. He was a depleted Collector offering a depleted healing ability, and the offer was less about the medicine and more about the asking.
She shifted. Turned her shoulder toward him. Pulled the collar of her shirt aside, not far, just enough to expose the bruise. It was dark. Purple-black at the center, spreading to yellow-green at the edges. The impact point from the rock shelf in the river, where she'd driven herself sideways to catch Sera and had absorbed the force with her body instead of her skill.
Ren placed his hand on the shoulder. The green fragment pulsed. Two seconds of warmth, the fractured healing energy pushing through his palm into the damaged tissue. He could feel the bruise's depth: muscle contusion, minor hematoma, capillaries ruptured in a pattern consistent with blunt force trauma. Not dangerous. Painful.
Three seconds of nothing. The fragment's gap. His hand stayed on her shoulder, doing nothing, the connection maintained through contact alone.
One second of static. The fragment's glitch, the leftover damage from its fracture, producing a buzz that traveled through the contact and made Kira's skin twitch under his palm.
"The healing is marginal," Ren said. "I can reduce the swelling, maybe accelerate the capillary repair. But the bruise will take days to resolve on its own regardless."
"So you're touching my shoulder for almost no medical reason."
"The almost is doing a lot of work in that sentence."
Kira didn't move away. The fragment pulsed again: two seconds of warmth, three of nothing, one of static. The rhythm of a broken tool doing its best. Under his palm, the bruise warmed. The tissue responded to the healing energy in the minimal, incremental way that damaged systems responded to insufficient treatment. Better than nothing, worse than what was needed.
"Soul-man."
"Yes."
"If we can't get out of here. If the Warden's conditions are something we can't meet, or the passage doesn't work, or we end up in another wrong realm." Her voice was low. Not the operational register or the anger register. Something else. The frequency she used when the question was real and the armor was temporarily set aside. "What do we do?"
The old Ren would have had an answer. Something reassuring about finding a way, about the human capacity for survival in impossible circumstances. The paramedic's bedside manner, the warm, confident tone that stabilized patients through belief as much as medicine.
The diminished Ren had the clinical version. "We adapt. We assess the environment's resources. We determine whether the Threadhall is survivable long-term. If it is, we establish a sustainable routine. If it isn't, we find another option."
"That's not an answer. That's a flowchart."
"I'm working with reduced material."
Kira's shoulder shifted under his hand. Not pulling away. Adjusting. The movement brought her closer, a centimeter, maybe two. The distance between medical treatment and something adjacent to it, measured in the space that two people occupied when they were pretending not to be scared in a realm that neither of them understood.
"You'll get it back," she said. "The feeling stuff. The parts the garden thing ate. You're already better than you were in Silverfall. The thing with Sera and the red fragment, that wasn't clinical. That was you choosing to help someone even though it hurt."
"That was the fragment choosing. Not me."
"The fragment opened the door. You walked through it." She turned her head. The assessment broke for a half-second, her eyes on his, direct, replaced by something that wasn't assessment at all. "That's still you."
The green fragment pulsed. Two seconds. His hand on her shoulder, the warmth flowing into bruised tissue, the broken healing doing its inadequate work. Three seconds of nothing, where the contact was just contact. Two people in a warm stone chamber on a world that tasted like rust, waiting for a body to recover enough to absorb a fragment from a screaming pillar.
One second of static. The buzz. The twitch.
"Thanks for the patch job," Kira said. She pulled her shoulder back. The collar settled. The distance restored itself, professional, operational, the armor returning with the efficiency of someone who'd learned to put it on fast. "Get some sleep. You look like you're running on fumes and bad decisions."
"Accurate diagnosis."
"I've been watching you long enough to know the symptoms."
She moved to the chamber's entrance. Took up her overwatch position, the rock in her hand, the gap in the wall her window, the copper-grass plain her surveillance field. The bruised shoulder rolled once. The grunt was smaller this time.
---
Sera found him an hour later.
Ren was back at the record pillar, his palm on the surface, the blue fragment processing entries from twelve thousand cycles ago. The data was sparser this far back: fewer Collectors, longer gaps between visits, the Threadhall's records thinning as history deepened. But the pattern held. Every Collector failed. Every one.
"The ones in the outer pillars," Sera said from the doorway. She didn't enter the chamber, hovered at the threshold, her hands clasped in front of her, the posture of someone requesting permission to interrupt. The academy manners. "They're not all the same."
Ren didn't lift his hand from the pillar. The blue fragment could multitask, process the records while he talked. Barely.
"Explain."
"I've been sitting with the pillars near our shelter. Touching them. The sensitization, whatever it is, it's getting finer. At first it was just pressure. A crowd behind a wall. But now I'm starting to distinguish individual presences." She stepped into the chamber. One step. Two. "They're not conscious. Not aware. But they have texture. Each one feels different. Some are smooth, completely dormant, no resistance, no trace of who they were. Others are rough. Jagged. Like they went into the stone fighting."
"Like Drekkan Moor."
"Not that extreme. Moor is a wound. An open wound in the stone. These are scars. Healed over, sealed, but you can still feel where the injury was." She sat on the chamber floor, cross-legged, her father's directness settling over her features. "One of them was a child."
Ren's hand stopped on the pillar. The blue fragment's window held, but his attention shifted.
"How do you know?"
"The texture. Small. The impression, the feel of it through the stone, it's compact. Not damaged. Not fighting. Just small. A child who died with a fragment and was stored here." She looked at her hands. The trembling fingertips. "It's been in the pillar for over a thousand cycles. Just a child, stored in stone, waiting for someone to claim a piece of their soul."
The diminished emotional capacity registered Sera's distress as data. The clinical assessment: she is processing moral horror through personal connection. The fragment sensitivity is amplifying her empathic response. Recommendation: acknowledge without dismissing.
"The system wasn't designed for mercy," Ren said. "The Arbiter fragments souls because it serves a purpose. Children, adults, soldiers, scholars. The system doesn't distinguish. It processes."
"That's not comforting."
"It's not supposed to be. It's supposed to be accurate."
Sera looked at him. Varen's eyes. The sharp assessment that her father had used to evaluate threats and that she was using to evaluate the man who carried her father's pattern.
"You used to be a paramedic," she said. "Before all this. Before the fragments. You saved people."
"I tried to save people. The success rate in emergency medicine is lower than most people assume."
"But you tried. That was the point. Not the outcomes, the trying." She nodded to herself. The gesture was self-confirming, fitting pieces together. "The records. The ones you're reading. The Collectors who failed. Did any of them try?"
"Define try."
"Did any of them treat the fragment holders as people? Not just sources of power. People."
The record pillar under his palm hummed. The blue fragment offered relevant data, a cross-reference that the translation architecture had identified in the pattern of sixty-three entries. Ren processed it.
"Three," he said. "Out of sixty-three Collectors in the archive's records, three are documented as attempting non-violent fragment acquisition. Negotiation. Exchange. Cooperative absorption." He paused. "Two of those three survived longer than the average. The third was the Seeker, the one who reached eight forty-seven."
"The one who lost their identity."
"The one who lost their identity."
"But survived longest."
"Yes."
Sera stood. The cross-legged posture unwinding with practical efficiency. "Then the approach matters. Not just the speed, the method. How you collect determines how long you last."
She left the chamber. Footsteps on dark stone, then copper grass, then the rustle of metallic blades as she returned to the outer pillars and their dormant cargo of stored souls.
Ren returned to the records. The blue fragment processed. Entry after entry. Failure after failure. The compressed history of a system designed to forge weapons from broken souls, documented by a Warden who watched them break and filed the results.
---
Sleep found him at the pillar.
He didn't plan it. The recovery process, fragment reserves rebuilding, the architecture stabilizing after the void-path drain, demanded rest, and his body took it without permission. One moment he was processing a record from twenty-three thousand cycles ago. The next, his cheek was against the stone and the blue fragment's window had closed and the amber light had shifted to something deeper. Not darker. The Threadhall didn't have darkness. Richer. The gold turning to bronze. The eternal sunset deepening without resolving.
He dreamed.
Not his dream.
The fortress was stone. Not void-stone. Real stone. Gray granite, quarried from mountains he'd never seen, built into walls three meters thick and crowned with battlements where archers stood in rows. The air smelled like smoke and copper. Not the Threadhall's copper. The copper of blood. Old blood, days-old blood, soaked into stone that had absorbed it the way the Threadhall's pillars absorbed fragments.
He was tall. Broader than his body. The hands that gripped the sword were thicker than Ren's, scarred across the knuckles, the calluses layered deep enough to be a second skin. The sword was heavy, a bastard sword, meant for two hands but wielded in one because the other hand held a shield that had been repaired so many times the original wood was invisible beneath layers of iron and leather patches.
Drekkan Moor's hands. Drekkan Moor's sword. Drekkan Moor's fortress.
The dream was a memory. Sharp. Uncompressed. The consciousness in the seventh pillar was broadcasting through the archive's stone, reaching Ren's sleeping mind through the same connection that the record pillar used to deliver data. But this was not data. This was experience.
The attackers came at dawn. Not soldiers. Something else. Beings with too many joints and skin that caught the light wrong. They moved through the fortress's outer defenses like water through gravel, and the archers' arrows passed through them without effect.
A Collector. The dream's memory supplied the word with the bitter taste of recognition. Drekkan Moor had known what a Collector was. Had been briefed. Had prepared.
The Collector was a woman. Small, dark-haired, moving through the battle with the unhurried grace of someone who knew she couldn't be killed by anything in this fortress. She wanted the fragment. Drekkan Moor's fragment, the combat pattern, the forty-seventh thread of a shattered set that had been distributed across this realm three centuries before Drekkan was born.
He fought. The dream carried the fight in compressed bursts. Sword against nothing, because the Collector didn't carry weapons; she carried fragments, seven of them at that point, and the fragments did her fighting. A red flash that Ren recognized as combat-pattern energy. A blue pulse that scrambled the defenders' coordination. A violet haze that made the walls seem wrong, the distances off, the fortress's geometry twisting.
Drekkan Moor fought for six hours. He lost forty-seven soldiers. The fortress held because it had been built by paranoid engineers who had designed it to withstand siege by things that shouldn't exist, and the Collector, frustrated, depleted, her seven fragments strained by the sustained assault, withdrew.
She died in the retreat. An archer got lucky, a bolt through the throat, angled past the fragment energy that should have deflected it. The Collector fell in the fortress's outer courtyard and her fragments erupted from her body in a burst of multicolored light that scarred the granite and left impressions in the stone.
The fragments dispersed. Six drifted away, into the air, through the walls, gone. One fell into the courtyard stone and stayed. A blue fragment. Language-pattern.
Drekkan Moor picked it up. The fortress was saved. The Collector was dead. Forty-seven soldiers who had been alive at sunrise were not alive at sunset, and the fragment in Drekkan's hand hummed with a frequency that his own fragment, the combat-pattern, recognized.
Two fragments. Drekkan Moor had held two fragments. Not one. Fragment forty-seven and the blue language-pattern he'd taken from the dead Collector.
And the blue fragment carried information.
The dream shifted. Compressed. The memory accelerating, jumping forward: days, weeks, months. Drekkan in his fortress, the blue fragment's language-pattern feeding him data the way it fed Ren data from the record pillar. The blue fragment had been part of the Collector's architecture, had processed her accumulated knowledge. Maps. Routes. Fragment locations compiled over years of hunting.
One location, pinned in Drekkan Moor's memory with the specificity of a man who understood tactical intelligence: Fragment 100. The Hive. A collective consciousness, one hundred beings sharing one fragment, bound together by the thread into a single, distributed entity. Location: Celestia. The divine realm. The fragment was anchored there, had been anchored there for millennia, because the Hive had chosen to root itself in the one realm where time moved slowly enough that they could exist as a collective without degrading.
The location was fixed. Celestia was a realm, not a planet. Its geography didn't shift, its coordinates didn't change. What was there two thousand cycles ago would be there now.
Fragment 100. The Hive. In Celestia.
The information sank into Ren's sleeping mind with the precision of a nail driven into wood.
And behind the information, pressing through the dream-connection like a face pressing against glass: Drekkan Moor's awareness. Not a message. Not words. A presence. The consciousness of a soldier who had been fighting stone for two thousand years, who had two fragments instead of one, who had tactical intelligence about the Collection that he had carried into preservation and had been screaming about ever since.
The presence pushed. The dream's edges buckled. Ren's sleeping architecture, the seven sealed doors, the depleted reserves, the diminished emotional landscape, registered the intrusion as a medical event. Foreign consciousness interfacing with host architecture. Not an attack. A handshake. Desperate, aggressive, two-thousand-years-overdue, but a handshake.
*Collector,* the presence said. Not in words. In the pressure of compressed intent, the way a drowning man's grip communicates everything the mouth cannot. *I have what you need. Let me out.*
Ren woke up with his face against the record pillar and the Compass on his palm blazing gold in the bronze light of the Threadhall's deepened dusk.
The seventh pillar, thirty meters away through stone walls, pulsed in response. Two fragments. Not one. Drekkan Moor was carrying two threads, combat-pattern and language-pattern, and he had the map to Fragment 100, and he'd been trying to tell someone for two thousand years.
From the entrance to the shelter, Kira's voice: "Your hand's glowing."
Ren looked at the Compass. The gold light reflected off the record pillar's surface, turning the micro-etchings into a field of tiny stars.
"I know where the Hive is," he said.
Kira stood in the doorway. The rock in one hand. The overwatch unbroken even by sleep. She'd been watching, had seen the glow, had come to investigate with the automatic vigilance that was less a habit and more a permanent state.
"The what?"
"Fragment 100. One hundred beings sharing one thread. In Celestia. The divine realm." He pulled his hand from the pillar. The Compass dimmed but didn't die, the connection to Drekkan Moor's signal sustaining a low-level glow that hadn't been there before. "Drekkan Moor has the location. It's two thousand years old but the coordinates are fixed."
Kira looked at the glow. At Ren's face. At the wall behind which the seventh pillar and its screaming occupant were housed.
"The man in the stone told you this."
"In a dream. His consciousness reached me through the archive's network while I was in contact with the record pillar."
"In a dream." She stepped into the chamber. The rock went to her belt pouch. Her arms crossed, the posture that preceded an assessment, the physical language of someone preparing to deliver an opinion the recipient wouldn't enjoy. "And you're sure this is his intelligence and not his bait?"
The question landed. The clinical part of Ren's brain, the part that survived the organism, the part that assessed situations without the luxury of hope, turned it over.
Bait. A trapped consciousness, desperate for release, broadcasting information that a Collector would find irresistible. Come absorb me. I have what you need. Let me out.
"I'm not sure," he said.
"Good." Kira's arms tightened. "Because the last person who trusted intelligence from a source they didn't control was Helena, and three of her operatives got captured."
The parallel was accurate. Ren sat back from the pillar. The bronze light of the deepened dusk filled the chamber. Thirty meters away, Drekkan Moor pressed his stone hands against his stone prison, his two-fragment consciousness reaching through the archive's network, and waited for the Collector who might free him or might absorb him to decide which version of the truth to believe.
