Kael sat on the edge of the cargo lift, legs dangling fifty meters above the waste shaft.
Nothing below but darkness and the faint hum of machines decomposing machines.
"You're gonna fall," said Rell, leaning against the rusted frame nearby.
"Wouldn't be a bad way to go. Better than drying out in a sanitation unit."
Kael didn't answer.
His eyes were fixed on the flickering lights across the skyline the towering spires of Inner Reach glowing like bones beneath the dome.
Above that, the sky flashed with programmed constellations the false heavens of the Empire.
"You ever think," Kael said finally, "about what this place was before all this?"
Rell blinked. "Before what? Before the monks? Before the Saint Temples?"
"Before it all. Before we turned reality into math and handed our souls to the Order."
Rell snorted. "Spoken like a Zero."
Kael smirked. "Used to be, yeah."
"Still are."
Kael didn't correct him.
No point.
He leaned back, feeling the vibration of the lift platform buzz into his spine.
Not noise.
Not electricity.
Just the quiet noise of structured systems, everything engineered down to the molecular beat.
"Tell me a story, Rell."
"What, now?"
"Yeah. Something old. Something before."
Rell shook his head. "You want a bedtime myth?"
"I want context. Give me the history lesson they buried."
Rell sighed and dropped into a crouch. "Alright. Before the Order, there were the Five Rings. Whole human civilization split across five alliances. Earthbound Union, Mars Coalition, the Lanthe Syndicate, Orovine Accord, and the free floaters out past Titan who didn't belong to shit."
"I've heard of the Orovine Accord," Kael muttered. "Didn't they blow up their own moon during the Algorithm War?"
"More or less. They tried to weaponize environmental Strings. Crashed an entire orbiting biosphere into Vessan Prime. Killed three million."
"Classic."
"After that, the Order rose up quiet at first. They weren't soldiers. They were theorists. Philosophers who studied vibrational harmonics, quantum string overlaps, all that crap the old labs couldn't explain. People started calling them the Coherence Cult."
Kael smiled. "Bet that name didn't age well."
"They rewrote it. History, religion, science. All one thing now: the Code. The Sacred Strings. They said everything could be manipulated if you just... harmonized."
"And people believed them?"
"Not at first. But when their top monk collapsed a mountain by blinking at it, people stopped laughing. When a Saint unraveled the water in a man's body just to make a point? Everyone fell in line."
Kael didn't reply.
Rell looked at him sideways. "You're acting weird."
Kael shrugged. "I heard the Code last night."
"Sure you did."
"No, I'm serious. I didn't just hear it. I felt it. Like something's underneath everything we touch, and it's not god it's logic. Structure. Rules so old we forgot we were writing them."
Rell studied him. "You ever think maybe this is why they marked you Zero?"
"Because I question things?"
"No. Because you sound like you're one break away from losing your mind."
Kael laughed. "Maybe. But I'd rather go crazy chasing the truth than stay sane pretending this prison is paradise."
Rell stood up. "Careful, Veyne. This place eats people like you."
Kael looked out across the skyline again. "Not if I eat it first."
The next morning, the instructor sent Kael to the Archive.
"Probably a punishment," Rell muttered as they walked the corridors together. "Most Zeros get scrub duty or wall inspections. They're sending you to the texts. That's weird."
"I like weird."
"You are weird."
The Archive was deep under the main temple.
No windows.
No AIs.
Just rows of stacked data-cores, dusty terminals, and forgotten scriptures etched in fading code-ink.
A single monk manned the desk, blindfolded, wearing a cracked medallion.
"Kael Veyne," he rasped. "Zero. Reprobate class. You are authorized for Tier-1 maintenance only. Do not engage with restricted texts."
"Got it."
"And if the walls speak to you, do not respond."
Kael raised an eyebrow. "Seriously?"
"You'd be surprised."
He wasn't.
Hours passed in silence. Kael swept between stacks, resetting broken glyph displays, clearing corrupted fragments.
Most of the content was useless old propaganda, indoctrination chants, meditative instruction loops.
But one file caught his eye.
A shattered disc labeled Sim-Protocol: Echelon Collapse.
He slipped it into a cracked terminal.
The screen glitched.
A woman's voice whispered through static.
"We were wrong. It's not coherence that brings enlightenment. It's absence. The saints have blinded you. The Zero Path is not null. It is the rewrite..."
The screen cut off.
Kael yanked the disc out and hid it in his sleeve.
Later, he sat in the Archive's back stairwell, spinning the disc between his fingers.
"You find something you weren't supposed to?" asked a voice from the darkness.
Kael didn't jump.
He knew someone was there.
The monk from the desk stood at the bottom of the steps.
Kael held up the disc. "What is this?"
"You shouldn't have that."
"I figured."
The monk stepped closer. "You felt something, didn't you? In the quiet."
"I felt… something break open. Like the silence was faking it. Like it had layers."
The monk nodded. "Most people hear the Code as harmony. But the broken ones hear the void underneath. The discontinuity."
"You saying I'm broken?"
"I'm saying maybe broken is the only way through."
Kael squinted. "You walked the Zero Path?"
"No," the monk said. "I saw someone who did. Once. She didn't come back the same."
Kael stood. "Maybe that's the point."
The monk didn't stop him when he walked past.
Didn't report him either.
Kael didn't sleep that night.
He lay on the cot, the disc hidden under the mattress, staring up at the ceiling like it might answer him.
His mind buzzed not with fear, but with clarity.
This world the Order, the Temples, the whole damn empire it wasn't about truth.
It was about control.
Harmony.
Predictability.
But the Strings weren't perfect.
They weren't gods.
They were rules.
And rules could be rewritten.
He whispered into the dark.
"You hear me now, don't you?"
The air didn't respond.
But the wall next to him vibrated once.
A String.
One line.
Glowing faintly.
And in that faint pulse, he saw it.
A new symbol.
Not monk script.
Not anything from the Archives.
It looked like a zero.
But broken.
Open on one side.
Like it was waiting to be closed.