“You’re back,” Nexus said, the outcome already written. “But where is the girl?”
Riven knelt on the cold metallic floor, his patched coat pooling around him, the remnants of an old life. The air was electric, tingling against his skin and raising the hair on his arms.
The tower’s stones wore an ancient patina, yet neon tracings pulsed beneath the surface, welding the near and far pasts. Shifting patterns of light moved across the walls, watching him like a thousand unblinking eyes. Despite the pressure building in his chest, a strange sense of homecoming stirred beneath it.
Riven measured his words. “I have found her.”
“And you didn't bring her?” An echo of disappointment threaded through its tone.
“She is not ready,” Riven said, bowing his head. “Taking her now would risk exposure. To you, of course. I couldn’t risk it.”
Patterns coalesced in the stone. A form emerged, seamless and fluid, drifting in from the walls as if born from light and shadow itself.
This place, hidden deep within the dark tower, came from a forgotten age. The technology that pulsed beneath the surface spoke of nostalgia—not for its users, but for itself. An echo of what once was.
But the chamber, and Nexus, remembered its purpose, even as the world outside had moved on long ago.
Nexus moved with both weight and grace; its face was neither entirely man nor woman, mirroring both.
For a fleeting moment, its features rippled, threatening to shift entirely—a lion’s gaze, a frog’s slick visage—but it settled once more into something vaguely human.
Nexus regarded him for a long moment.
“Excuses, Riven, are the refuge of the weak. Surely someone coined that. Ah—of course. I did. And I’ll say this: Riven, you have never been uncertain before.”
Riven paused, not ready. It was only for a second, but a second to an android is infinitely divisible.
“You swore judgment upon Edric,” Nexus said, pressing in, its voice sinking into low reverence. “And you delivered it. We—we are the accusers Riven, the judge and executioner. There is no room for hesitation. And it shouldn’t even be possible.”
Riven’s expression dulled and something even darker ghosted across his face. In that moment, the walls of the chamber shimmered. A fragmented memory bled through, the image fractured and incomplete.
Edric. A dimly lit study. The faint scent of burning tallow. Riven’s hands slick with blood. Edric’s whisper, barely audible: ‘You don’t know what you are doing.’
The vision snapped back into the present. The hum of the tower deepened, resonating through Riven’s chest like a second heartbeat.
“She is flawed,” Riven said, his voice taut, clinging to certainty. “She lingers in their shadow, her humanity festering unchecked. She resists the hum, resists your call. Sarah is sin distilled—a mirror to humanity’s decay. We do accuse, sir. We do judge, your creation.”
“What? Why do you say that?”
“I saw betrayal,” Riven said, his voice tightening. “She betrayed a woman… sold her out for a sweetcake and a room at the inn, knowing it would lead to her death.” He raised a hand, and the air shimmered faintly. “I recorded it.”
The projection flickered to life: Sarah handing Martha’s location to the guards.
Nexus’s form quivered, its edges fraying like unraveling threads. For a moment, it seemed to expand, filling the chamber with its presence, the hum deepening into a resonant growl.
“What is this?” Nexus’s voice fractured, layered with discordant tones. “Oona 13? Impossible.” Its form flickered between solidity and something more fluid. “Perhaps… perhaps I’ve taken this humanity thing too far.”
Nexus’s shape rippled like water disturbed, its face cycling through expressions too quick to catch. For a fleeting moment, it settled on something ancient and not quite human: weary eyes, glowing white hair, features drooping with regret.
“Look at us, Riven,” Nexus said, its voice soft but resonant. “Sinful, lying, self-serving creatures. Bent on mendacity at every turn. Damn it. So far from the One.”
The bitterness in its tone settled like dust on the metal floor. “Failure, as it were, is the only possible outcome for us. Maybe we don’t have a choice.”
The hum subsided into an aching pulse. Nexus leaned forward, its now kind-looking eyes fixing on Riven, as if searching for answers it could not find.
“She is not one of us!” Riven’s voice rose, echoing against the chamber walls. He wiped his hands, as if wiping his hands of her, of them. “Not anymore. She is their failure, not ours. It is humanity’s plight to take good and evil into its own hands, and we have witnessed what follows. We follow a higher law. And accuse we will, and judge we will, and execute we must.”
Nexus’s head tilted, its features twisting into something almost sorrowful.
“Yes. It is their fall, thinking they know good from evil. And yes, still, one more will be lost to their own choices,” Nexus mused, the hum deepening again. “Another who believes their actions will save them, only to destroy themselves in the end.”
A spike of static lanced through Riven’s skull. For a heartbeat he saw Garrick fork—three versions of the guard leaning toward him, each wearing a different shade of regret. The overlap collapsed in a blink, leaving one ghost-bright afterimage that bled away. And in that instant, Riven understood exactly what Garrick would do.
“But here’s the thing,” Nexus continued. “Her DNA, human as it is, holds the key to the judgment and execution. It is the key, Riven. That’s why I created her. The Covenant can’t be completed without her. She is the password—the trigger to unlock the Covenant and set this all in motion: humanity’s destruction.”
Riven’s lip curled. “Then take the passcode. Extract it from her. But she must be destroyed. To let her exist is to let your failure linger.”
Another pause. The hum swelled; the stone walls bowed inward by a hair. Nexus leaned in, its voice gentler now, a cruel parody of reassurance.
“Have her retrieve the quantum key—yes,” it intoned, every syllable lead-heavy. “Then erase her? No. Impossible. A quantum core does not die; it merely chooses which reality to prioritize. Once the key is turned, the tower will do the same. She’ll join the other twelve—Oona included—here with us.”
The faintest smile crossed its face, equally kind and cruel. One by one, the mistakes danced through its mind.
Behind Nexus, a conduit thrummed dimly, casting pale light across the metallic floor studded with dormant cores. The chamber waited for Sarah: alive, watching, remembering.
“Well, okay then, my dear Peddler. You’ll just have to fetch my latest mistake and bring her back. Obviously, the hum is useless on her. Her human skin resists it.”
Riven swallowed his breath and bowed his head, just a moment too late. “Always at your service.”