“We saw it again,” I say, with an eye on Salt, “just before the incident in block 2-8.”

“The first confirmed NorCol hollows,” says Andrade, just so everyone’s keeping track.

We push another image out, this time from Salt’s machine. His senses were always sharper, and he caught a better look to begin with. We can see more of it now: the oversized wings and sinuous hull.

“What is it?” asks King.

Andrade adds one last picture, this time completely clear and dead on target.

“At first,” I say, “we thought it was a surveyor’s machine. Some kind of observation platform.”

A mirror-black hull opens up across our eyes, completely out of scale for anything you’d call a shell.

“It made sense at the time. We’d landed on contested ground.”

Four arms, each with a double-jointed shoulder. Four wings, mounted at odd angles to its spine.

“The second contact was unconfirmed at the time, but Andrade found an outstation who’d caught it on their scopes.”

Huge plates interlock, shifting over one another like scales.

“They confirmed that it was present for the first full-scale attack on Horizon.”

Its skin is covered in all the livery of Sigurd-Lem. Odd glyphs mark its body, scrolling down its chest and wrapping around its arms. It has no unit numbers, no ID.

I aim a finger at Andrade. “These images were captured by a Werewolf crew just after the Demiurge hit.”

All of the anatomy is off. The shoulders have extra joints and the knees fold backwards, the spine able to bend further than any human could hope to match.

A jockey can only pilot something that looks about the same as they do. The companies have tried unconventional designs before: weird things built around twisting bodies and variable geometry, but shells fly like phantom limbs. If they’re the wrong shape, your mammal-brain won’t know what to do with them.

This thing wasn’t built for a human jockey.

Six eyes peer out from its massive, oblong head, arranged in a circle. Four are dull, but two sparkle in the light. Two glassy eyes, two prison cells breached. They run out past the edges of their sockets, turning to clear veins in the steel. They’re arranged like eyes, but some part of me knows better. They’re something closer to hearts.

The second heart that holds your soul when you die.

“The hollows didn’t come from nowhere. The flood has a source. It was sealed away once before, but Sigurd broke some of it out.”

“You think this thing has to be present for the hollows to function?” asks Mer Sah.

“The froth clouds anything you try to send through it: signals, thoughts, whatever. It has to be close—there’s no other option. There has to be some way for the observer to send commands.”

“So there is some way to isolate it.”