Dark shapes look up as we pass overhead: heavy things with Mirai in their genes and Sigurd’s R&D crackling in their arms. They come to life among the crags and cracks, and along the ugly ravine carved through NorCol’s massive plates. They trade whispers at first, hollow sounds on the edge of hearing, but their voices rise to howls and incoherence, their weapons turning to meet us.

But we’re falling too fast already, our course set to spiral. We weren’t the only ones watching Bor and all of Hasei’s secrets playing out. The Junos move like their plates are streaked in orange now, borrowed calculations taking us between rising silhouettes and sudden bursts of fire. Sigurd’s bodyguards fight to bring their sights on target, but the Cluster has beaten them already, without a shot fired.

We fall through a rush of hostile networking, and munitions half a heartbeat too slow. Down into unlit caverns, ruined decks flashing past the edges of our low-light.

The Cluster’s calculations twist and evolve, new margins factored in.

It will keep us flying for another thirteen seconds before we hit the bottom of this hole. That’s where Tower Actual used to be—the massive halls where Horizon used to organise the skies around it.

After that, there will be hollows. We will fight across decks not made to take our weight, barrel-to-barrel with ghostly shapes and things the Cluster can’t predict. It can guess—we will burn bright, hit hard before the other machines can react. We will live or die on a few unknowns, but we have weight and fire, and there’s only so much the flood can do to stop it.

But somewhere in the middle of the Cluster’s simulations, we see something else.

We see Hail taken by hollows. She is a fulcrum point, and their plan needs her to take the weight, past the point of breaking.

No.

We spin in place, aim our transmitters.

Run. Turn back. Don’t come any closer.

Don’t let them touch you.

But the Cluster knows us better than that. No, flashes the one that carries Salt. We need six.

I can’t lose another.

Hail’s voice finds us a moment later, human-slow. “We need six.”

We close a fist, hard enough that the sync-systems try to make us feel the pain. The Cluster is right—we need six, and we know it well enough. We can see their thoughts, play it out in our own head. Five machines die as fast as four, barely a minute in. Three die as fast as one, measured in heartbeats.

The reason it’s Hail is the same reason it’s always been; the same reason we were all here in the first place, caught up in eddies, froth, cloud, and storm. The only reason that matters, and no reason at all:

This is about dying, and it’s her turn first.

Christs.