Chapter 6: The Choice to Leave
The Harken perimeter had grown overnight.
Idris stood on the Ridgeline’s western lip, the dawn light catching the new marker stakes driven into the hardpan in a precise arc — fifty meters out from the sinkhole, then another fifty beyond that. Yellow tape connected them, the kind that wouldn’t survive Gehenna’s wind for more than a week but didn’t need to. The tape said temporary. The three scanning arrays positioned at equidistant points around the depression said permanent.
A second transport had landed on the pad at Perdition sometime before dawn. He’d heard it from the homestead — the low-frequency whine of Strand-drive engines cycling down, a sound that traveled too well through Gehenna’s thin, dry air. Bigger than the surveyor’s shuttle. Cargo-class, at minimum.
Through [Strand Sight], the sinkhole was a wound in the landscape. The Prismatic vein at its floor blazed in shifting spectra — amber to violet to something beyond blue that had no name he knew — and the dead soil around it absorbed none of that light. The contrast made the rest of Gehenna look like what it was: a corpse. The scanning arrays pulsed with pale Refined-grade energy, feeding data back to a relay booster the survey team had mounted on a portable mast. The booster’s signal was a tight, structured beam aimed at the sky — visible to his perception as a needle of compressed light punching through the atmosphere toward whatever Meridian relay satellite covered this sector.
They were transmitting constantly now. Not single reports. A live data feed.
He turned from the ridge and walked back along the ravine path. The nascent Rig was where he’d left it, sheltered beneath the lip of cracked basalt and the tarp he’d weighted down with stones. It had grown again overnight — the left-side lattice was complete now, shoulder through hip, an intricate weave of Prismatic circuits that caught the first light and scattered it in tiny fractured rainbows across the rock wall. The right arm had filled in from the skeletal scaffolding, still thinner than the left, but the hand — five fingers of shifting-spectrum Strand — flexed when he approached. He hadn’t touched it.
The motion was small. Worse for being small. Not a servo twitch, not random settling. The fingers opened in sequence, one after another, as if something buried in the new lattice were counting. Calcified logic pathways lit under the translucent growth. The Loom spark at the thing’s center gave a hard pulse that landed in Idris’s mouth as the taste of hot copper. Then the hand closed again, slow and deliberate, around empty air.
The Loom spark at the thing’s center pulsed steadily, brighter than a week ago. Almost bright enough to read.
“Not yet,” he said. To himself or the Rig — he wasn’t sure there was a distinction anymore.
Jen Aldric was waiting outside the Harken office when Idris reached Perdition. Not behind her desk. Outside, in the thin morning air, arms crossed over her standard-issue jacket, looking like she hadn’t slept.
“Cray.” She glanced left, right. The Hub’s central square was mostly empty — too early for the farmers who still worked, too hopeless for those who didn’t. “I’m not supposed to tell you this.”
Idris waited.
“They’ve reclassified the decommission.” She spoke fast, the corporate language coming out in a rush she couldn’t quite strip of its jargon. “It’s not a relocation order anymore. It’s a resource acquisition filing. The timeline’s been accelerated — sixty days, not ninety.”
The number settled into him like a stone into still water. Sixty days. Two months. He’d been counting on three.
“The second transport,” he said.
“Asset security specialists.” She almost whispered it. “Four of them. They’re here to secure the survey site, but the filing — the filing covers the entire colony footprint, Cray. Subsurface mineral rights. Everything under the soil for six kilometers around the sinkhole.” She swallowed. “That includes your homestead. That includes Maren’s. That includes — everything.”
“When did the order come?”
“Midnight. Flagged priority. It was signed three days ago, but they held it until the survey team’s initial data reached—” She stopped herself. Looked at the ground. “I shouldn’t be telling you any of this.”
“You already did.”
She met his eyes. Something in her expression — not courage, exactly, but a kind of desperate decency that knew its own futility. “I process the paperwork, Cray. I don’t make the decisions. But I can count. The original decommission was filed four months ago. The Veil storm was three weeks ago. The accelerated timeline was signed before the survey team even landed.” She paused, letting the math speak. “Someone knew what they’d find.”
Idris looked past her, toward the landing pad. The second transport squatted there like a fat insect, ramp down, cargo containers being offloaded by a work-Rig in Harken livery.
“Thank you, Jen.”
She nodded once, jerkily, and went back inside.
The colony fractured along a line Idris could have predicted with his eyes closed.
By noon, two camps had formed in the Hub’s common area. On one side: the optimists. Nells, who ran what passed for Perdition’s supply store, was telling anyone who’d listen that Prismatic Strand meant investment. “They’ll reopen the extraction works. They’ll need labor. Skilled labor. We stay, we work, we pay down our debts on the new contracts—”
“New contracts with the same people who bled this soil dry in the first place.” Maren’s voice cut through the noise like a blade through gauze. She stood against the back wall, arms folded, face set in the expression Idris had learned long ago meant she’d stopped listening to anyone who wasn’t making sense. “They’re not investing. They’re acquiring. Read the notice, Nells. Resource acquisition. That means they take what’s under the ground and we get put on a transport to wherever they need backs to break next.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I’ve lived here forty years. I know exactly that.”
Idris stood near the doorway and watched. The faces of people he’d known his entire life — Pell, who’d farmed the eastern plots since before Idris was born. Tarr, who maintained the reclaimer system and charged too much and apologized every time. Dara, who taught the colony’s children in a room that doubled as storage and smelled of mineral dust and old screens. They were arguing about a future none of them would control, splitting into factions over a resource that had been beneath their feet the whole time, too deep to reach, while the people who would actually decide their fate were already here with scanning arrays and security clearances and a timeline that had been set before the storm.
He left without speaking.
The ravine was quiet. Gehenna’s wind had dropped, and the air sat heavy and still — the kind of stillness that preceded weather on worlds with enough atmosphere to have it. Here it just meant the planet was holding its breath.
The nascent Rig waited.
Idris knelt beside it and placed his hands on the left-side lattice — the completed section, where the Prismatic circuits ran in those impossible Fibonacci spirals Venn had recognized and couldn’t explain. The surface was warm. Not ambient warmth, not reflected body heat. Generated. The Rig’s own energy, produced from Strand it was pulling from the vein’s ambient field without his help.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s see if you’re ready.”
The bonding process with the Mutt had taken six days. He’d been fourteen, and the old Rig had accepted him the way an aging animal accepts a new handler — slowly, with grudging tolerance, each connection forming like scar tissue. He’d learned its rhythms over weeks. Its stutters and resistances had become as familiar as his own body’s limits. By the end, the bond was deep — not intimate, but solid. Comfortable. The way you know a tool you’ve used ten thousand times.
This was nothing like that.
The moment his palms pressed flat against the lattice, the Prismatic circuits flared. Not gradually — instantly, a cascade of light running from the contact point through every spiral, every branch, every half-formed connection in the Rig’s growing frame. The Loom spark at the center blazed from its steady pulse to a sustained burn, and the light it threw was wrong — shifting through spectra too fast for his eyes to track, colors he’d seen in the vein and colors he hadn’t, colors that seemed to exist between the ones he could name.
Then the Rig reached back.
Not metaphorically. The lattice under his hands moved — circuits extending, splitting, threading outward like roots seeking water. They found his skin and kept going. Warmth became heat. Heat became a sharp, bright pain that started at his palms and raced up his forearms, following the pathways his own Strand integration had carved through his body over three levels of growth. The Rig’s circuits were mapping him — finding every thread of Strand the System had laced through his bones and muscles and nerves, and reaching for them like a hand reaching for its reflection.
The first thing it gave him was not language. It was a dump of sensation so dense it hit like a blow: mineral cold, buried pressure, the wet electrical smell of opened circuitry, the phantom weight of six limbs he didn’t own folded in cramped dark. Data broke across his vision in green shards and vanished before he could read more than fragments.
[PILOT TRACE...CALCIFICATION ROUTE...HEARTBEAT/NOT-HEARTBEAT...MATCH]
A pulse of binary ran through the bond and thudded against his sternum like something trying out the rhythm of a living chest. He tasted ozone. Heard, somewhere below hearing, the slow grind of structures knitting themselves together in the dark. The Rig wasn’t greeting him. It was excavating him, measuring him against a pattern older than either of them.
His vision whited out.
The bonding lasted a day and a night.
Later, Idris would remember it in fragments — the way you remember fever dreams, or the moments before and after a fall. Images without sequence: the vein beneath the sinkhole seen from above, from inside, as if he were the Strand rather than the person touching it. The Rig’s Loom, no longer a spark but a column of structured light, data cascading through it in patterns he could almost read — not language, not numbers, but something older, something the System’s notifications were a translation of. His father’s face, which he hadn’t been able to picture clearly in months, suddenly precise and present, lit by light from below, mouth forming words Idris couldn’t hear.
And other things. A map of branching channels that looked like nerves until they calcified into architecture. A smell like hot fruit gone sweet with rot. A pressure at the base of his skull every time the Loom spat another burst of unreadable telemetry into him. Every few minutes the bond kicked loose a new phantom sensation — grit under metal teeth, coolant chill in a chamber he had never seen, a weight hanging from the right arm as if a tool had once belonged there and had been torn free. Not memory exactly. Not his, certainly. But not random either.
And pain. Not the integration ache of a level-up, where the Strand laced through existing structures and reinforced them. This was construction — the Rig building its half of the bond from scratch, growing connections that wouldn’t just link pilot to machine but make the boundary between them negotiable. Every nerve ending in his hands and arms screamed with the specificity of new wiring being soldered into a live circuit.
He surfaced once, in the dark, to find himself lying against the Rig’s frame with his hands still pressed to the lattice. Above him, Gehenna’s sky was clear — no Veil shimmer tonight, just unfamiliar stars and the faint glow of the Prismatic circuits casting shifting light across the ravine walls. His Strand Reserve was nearly empty, the System’s tracking a distant pressure at the back of his skull reading somewhere below 20, and the depletion felt physical — a hollowness in his chest, as though someone had removed a lung and replaced it with cold air.
The Rig hummed against his back. Not a mechanical sound. Something closer to breathing run through a cracked speaker, wet and electrical and too regular to be an accident.
He closed his eyes and let the bond pull him back under.
Dawn again. Different from the one before.
Idris opened his eyes and the world had a new layer. Not the Strand-sight overlay he’d lived with since the Veil storm — that was there, the perpetual luminous texture of a reality he could no longer unsee. This was beneath it, or beside it. A channel of awareness that ran from the base of his skull down through his shoulders and arms and into the thing cradling him, and through that thing into the ground, and through the ground into the faint ambient Strand of Gehenna’s depleted substrate.
The Rig had him. He had the Rig. The distinction had gotten thin overnight.
He sat up. His body protested — twenty-four hours without food, water, or movement, curled against a framework of Prismatic Strand in a ravine on a dying world. His mouth tasted of copper and ozone. His hands, when he turned them palm-up, showed faint traces of the Fibonacci pattern imprinted on the skin — not wounds, not burns, but something grown into the surface layer, luminous threads that pulsed with his heartbeat and faded as he watched.
The Rig stood with him.
Not because he commanded it. Because a pressure moved through the bond a fraction of a second before his muscles did, and the machine took that pressure as enough. The frame unfolded from its resting configuration — a process that should have been mechanical, servo-driven, hydraulic, the way every Frame-0 on Gehenna moved — and instead was fluid. Organic. The lattice expanded around him, the right arm still thinner than the left, the lower section incomplete below the hips, but the upper frame locked into place with a precision the Mutt had never achieved. The Loom — no longer a spark, now a steady flame of structured light mounted where a cockpit display would eventually grow — flickered to life and projected data directly into Idris’s field of vision.
System integration. Clean, sharp, immediate.
╔══════════════════════════════════════╗ ║ [RIG BOND ESTABLISHED] ║ ║ ║ ║ Frame: 0 (Prismatic origin) ║ ║ Core Integrity: 78% ║ ║ Strand Circuit Grade: Prismatic ║ ║ ║ ║ Loom Status: ACTIVE ║ ║ Sensory Link: ACTIVE ║ ║ Growth Potential: [UNCLASSIFIED] ║ ╚══════════════════════════════════════╝
The notification burned in his vision for three seconds, green text on darkness. His body wanted to flinch — that old reflex, the System’s voice as intrusion — but the Rig absorbed the reaction, translated it into a micro-adjustment of the left shoulder servo, and the flinch became a smooth roll of the joint instead. As if the Rig had caught him stumbling and set him upright before he registered the fall.
[UNCLASSIFIED]. Growth Potential: the System didn’t know what this Rig would become. That made two of them.
And then, before the bond notification had fully faded:
╔══════════════════════════════════════╗ ║ [LEVEL UP] ║ ║ Level: 3 → 4 ║ ║ ║ ║ Stat Points: 4 ║ ║ Auto: Resonance 18 → 19 ║ ║ Acuity 14 → 15 ║ ║ Discretionary: 2 points ║ ╚══════════════════════════════════════╝
The auto-distribution hit first. Resonance expanded like a breath held too long and finally released — a warmth in his chest that radiated outward, deepening the channel between him and the Rig, brightening the Strand-sight overlay until the ravine walls glowed with the faint gray tracery of depleted substrate and the Prismatic circuits on his Rig blazed like captured lightning. Acuity followed — a sharpening, edges gaining definition, the individual grains of mineral dust on the rock face suddenly countable if he chose to count them.
The two discretionary points hovered in his awareness. Patient. Waiting.
He thought about the Harken security team on the landing pad. Four specialists, Jen had said. People trained for acquisition — which meant people trained to take what wasn’t given. He thought about the supply transport that would leave Perdition in two days for the Nearshore transit hub, and the Veil-space transit beyond it, and the city called Threshold where his father’s letter pointed.
He needed to move. He needed to endure.
He placed one point in Kinetics — and the nerve-speed recalibration hit like a current through his legs, a twitching, restless energy that wanted motion — and one in Tenacity, and the consolidation that followed was the opposite: a wall going up behind his eyes, a settling, as though someone had poured foundation into the spaces where doubt lived.
The Rig absorbed each change through the bond. Its circuits pulsed — once for Kinetics, a quick bright flash, and once for Tenacity, slower, deeper. Learning him. Adapting.
Idris flexed the Rig’s hands. The left responded with smooth, immediate precision. The right — thinner, newer — lagged a fraction of a second and trembled at full extension. Not perfect. Growing.
He looked down at Perdition from the Ridgeline. The colony was small from up here. A cluster of buildings around a seasonal marsh on a world the corporations had sucked dry and were now coming back to crack open for the marrow. The people down there were arguing about whether the bone-cracking was a blessing.
He climbed down toward the settlement. He had conversations to finish and a letter to collect.
Maren was waiting at her homestead. She stood in the doorway with her arms crossed, watching him approach in the Rig, and her expression didn’t change — not surprise, not fear, not wonder. She looked at the Prismatic frame the way she looked at weather: as a thing that was happening regardless of her opinion.
“So it bonded.”
“Last night.” His voice sounded different through the Rig’s minimal audio — not amplified, not distorted, but carried with a resonance the open air stole. Like speaking inside a room that fit him exactly.
“Looks half-finished.”
“It is.”
She studied him. The same assessing gaze she’d turned on him a hundred times since Marek died — the look that was checking whether he was still holding together, still functional, still worth the effort of caring about. Whatever she saw satisfied her. She went inside without a word and came back with something in her hand.
A folded packet. Paper — real paper, not screen-printed or Loom-projected — sealed with a strip of adhesive that had yellowed with age. Marek’s handwriting on the outside, three words: For Idris. Ready.
“He left this with me before his last survey trip.” Maren held it out and didn’t let go when Idris reached for it. Her grip was stronger than it should have been — Cultivator strength, Level 7, sixty-two years of Gehenna in her hands. “He told me to give it to you when you were ready. I never thought you’d be ready.” She released the packet. “Maybe you’re not. But you’re out of time.”
Idris held the letter. The paper was warm from her hand, or from the residual Strand traces he could see threaded through its fibers — his father’s touch, years old, still faintly present.
“I’m leaving,” he said. “Tomorrow. The supply transport.”
“I know.”
“Not on the relocation. On my own terms. Before the security team—”
“I know, Idris.” She cut him off without raising her voice. Maren never raised her voice. Volume was wasted energy on a world where everything cost too much already. “You think I can’t read the shape of a thing? You’ve been packing since the survey team landed. Probably before.”
She was right. He’d been packing since Marek died. He just hadn’t known what he was packing for.
“Don’t come back,” Maren said. The words landed without softness, but he heard what was underneath them — not rejection. Instruction. “Don’t come back until you’re strong enough to mean something. Until you know what your father found. Until whatever’s in that letter makes sense.” She paused. The wind picked up, carrying the sweet-rot smell of failed crops from the southern plots. “And when you do come back, come back angry. Gehenna deserves angry.”
She gripped his arm — the real arm, not the Rig’s frame, reaching through the open exoskeleton to find skin. Her fingers were calloused and warm and they squeezed once, hard enough to leave marks.
Then she let go and went inside and closed the door. Through the thin walls, Idris heard nothing. Maren didn’t cry. Maren didn’t do anything she couldn’t afford.
He read the letter in his homestead, sitting at the table where his father’s journal still waited. The Rig stood folded against the wall by the door — too large for the small room, hunched and waiting with the patience of something that didn’t know how to be impatient yet.
The adhesive strip cracked when he peeled it. The paper inside was thin, covered on both sides in Marek’s careful handwriting — the deliberate version, the one reserved for things that mattered.
Idris —
If you’re reading this, the Strand found you or you found it. The vein is real. It’s Prismatic. It’s not the only one. There are others, and people died to keep them secret.
Don’t go to Harken. Go to Threshold. Find the Keepers. Ask about the Resonance.
And Idris — trust what you see. Not what they tell you.
— M.
The letter was short. Marek had never wasted words on paper any more than his son wasted them in speech. But beneath the text, visible now through [Strand Sight] in a way it wouldn’t have been a month ago, there was more. Faint Strand traces laced through the paper — not random impressions from handling but deliberate, structured, the same directional markers Idris had found embedded in the journal’s ghost text layer. Arrows, or something like arrows. Pointing.
He held the letter next to the journal and let his perception slide between them. The Strand signatures matched. Not identical — the journal’s traces were older, more complex, accumulated over years of Marek’s touch. The letter’s were simpler. A single layer, laid down once, with purpose.
Both pointed the same direction. Out. Away from Gehenna. Toward the Veil channels that connected the Nearshore worlds, and through them, toward something his father had found and followed and died for.
Idris folded the letter back into its packet and slid it inside the journal’s cover. Two documents now. A puzzle and a compass. Neither complete without the other.
Outside, the light was failing. Gehenna’s long dusk turned the sky the color of old rust and the Veil shimmer pulsed at the horizon — faint, distant, patient. The supply transport would leave at dawn. Twelve marks for cargo-class passage. More than half his remaining money for a seat in a hold that smelled of Strand-lubricant and recycled air.
He looked around the homestead. The heating plate with its forty-second lag. The reclaimer that hummed off-key. The wall his mother had grown from Strand, her fingerprints still pressed into the growth-seams, visible now in luminous whorls that had been there his entire life, unseen until the System opened his eyes. The hook his father had driven with a Strand-threaded nail because the stone was too hard for steel.
He didn’t take any of it. The journal. The letter. His survival kit and pack. A small sealed container of Raw Strand — fourteen units, roughly 14₼ worth, enough to trade for food if his money ran out. His harvesting tools, the good ones, the pair Marek had shaped himself.
The homestead would stand empty after tomorrow. Another abandoned structure on a dying world, joining the Alden place and the Vas place and all the others whose doors had stopped opening years ago. The wind would find the gaps in the wall seal. The heating plate would cool for the last time. The dust would settle.
Idris closed the door behind him and didn’t look back.
The landing pad was busy at false dawn — that liminal hour when Gehenna’s sky was the color of a bruise and the air was coldest and the colony’s handful of functioning exterior lights cast sharp circles on the hardpan. The Meridian supply hauler sat on the pad with its cargo ramp down, its hull scarred and dull, a workhorse machine without personality or pretension. MLS-4407 was stenciled on the tail in faded paint. Meridian Logistics Services. The name of the company that owned the spaces between worlds.
Idris approached in his Rig, folded to its most compact configuration — barely an exoskeleton, the upper lattice hugging his torso and arms, the Loom’s glow dimmed to a faint pulse behind his sternum. At Frame-0, he could pass for someone wearing heavy work gear. Almost. The Prismatic circuits betrayed him if anyone looked closely enough, their shifting light seeping through the gaps in the frame like something alive trying not to be noticed.
No one looked closely.
Venn was at the Yards, visible through the open bay doors, doing something to a Rig that would never fly again. He saw Idris pass and straightened. Crossed the distance in that stiff-legged walk of a man who’d spent too many years hunched over machines.
“That Rig of yours is going to be something.” He said it the way he said everything — like a diagnostic report, devoid of sentiment. “If you don’t kill it first. Find a real Artificer when you reach the hub. Someone with actual equipment, not—” He gestured at his workshop. Salvage and string. “Not this.”
“Thank you, Venn.”
“Don’t thank me. I didn’t do anything except not report what I saw.” A pause. His eyes tracked the Rig’s circuits — professional attention, the kind that couldn’t be switched off. “The spirals are tighter since last week. It’s optimizing. Growing more efficient.” He shook his head. “Whatever you fed it, whatever that vein is — I’ve never seen growth curves like this. Not in thirty years.” He looked like he wanted to say more. Didn’t. Turned back toward the Yards and the dead machine waiting for his hands.
Cole Dray was standing by the path that led from the residential ring to the landing pad. Idris almost missed him — Cole had a gift for looking like part of the landscape, a man so diminished by loss that he barely registered as solid. But he was standing, not sitting. And his eyes were focused.
“Your dad asked me to keep an eye on you.” Cole’s voice was flat, the words coming out like they’d been rehearsed a hundred times and stripped of everything except their structure. “I did a piss-poor job.”
Idris stopped. He didn’t know what to say to Cole Dray, and hadn’t since the night Cole sat in front of his homestead and told him what he’d seen on the Ridgeline — Marek talking to the ground, the ground answering, the light, the smile, the death three days later. Cole had been carrying that weight for three years. It had crushed him into the shape of a man who’d given up.
“He talked to the ground,” Cole said. “It talked back. And then they killed him for it.” His gaze drifted to the sinkhole, invisible from here but present in the way gravity was present — a pull felt rather than seen. “Go find out what it said.”
Idris nodded. It was the most Cole had spoken in months, and there was nothing he could add to it that wouldn’t diminish what it cost.
He walked to the transport. Paid 12₼ for cargo-class passage — the crewman who processed his fare didn’t look at his face, just the marks, counted them twice, and jerked a thumb toward the hold. Eleven marks left. Against forty-five thousand in debt. The math was absurd. The math had always been absurd.
The hold was half-empty, lit by strips of chemical luminescence that cast everything in flat, shadowless yellow. Three other passengers: a woman with a Laborer’s build and the blank expression of someone who’d stopped expecting anything, a pair of young men who looked like brothers and spoke in a dialect Idris didn’t recognize. None of them looked at him. Another migrant from another dying colony. Not interesting. Not worth the energy of curiosity.
Idris found a space against the starboard bulkhead, settled the Rig into its folded position around him, and let the frame take his weight. Through the bond, he felt the machine’s awareness of the ship around them — the hum of the Strand-drive warming up, the vibration of the cargo ramp retracting, the subtle shift in air pressure as the hold sealed.
The transport lifted at dawn. Through the narrow viewport above his section of the hold, Idris watched Gehenna fall away — the hardpan flattening into geometric patterns of cracked soil, the seasonal marsh catching the first light like a dull mirror, Perdition shrinking to a cluster of dark shapes around it. The Ridgeline was a scar on the landscape, and the sinkhole a shadow within it, and the Prismatic vein — even from altitude, even through the viewport’s dirty glass — blazed.
Then the transport banked toward the Veil channel’s entry point, and Gehenna slid out of the viewport’s frame, and the sky changed color, and there was nothing to look at except the future.