The Grid was blank.

It was like swimming in an empty, white world. All that was left of the places he used to know - virtual realms and learning systems and all the streams - were the skeletons. The basic infrastructure.

Everywhere he looked, there was no noise. No rooms filled with chatter, no blaring advertisements. Every page, every forum, every virtual space, blank. Whoever had been here before him had erased all the guides, too.

Who would have done this?

The Emperor?

That didn’t make sense. Poire didn’t think he would have made it through the Keepers.

But as far as he could tell, the infrastructure worked. The Keepers had kept this place alive. Functioning.

He had set the Grid to repeat his message, over and over. Broadcasting it out across the stars.

Maybe there’s nothing. Maybe there’s no one out there to hear it.

The grid was on. It was working, and any receiver out there - out in the stars - should have gotten his message by now.

Some part of him had hoped the grid would light up with responses. That he would find them all, waiting for him. As if he was only a lost child, stranded on some distant planet.

It had been a vain hope. They’re gone. You know this. But knowing and believing were two very different things, and Poire was not ready to believe that he was alone. Not yet.

While he waited, Poire tried to work his way through the infrastructure of the grid. The Keeper had to guide him. Poire’s cohort wasn’t trained in flow manipulation, nor anything but the most basic programming. Even if he had, the grid had been built on ancient specifications, and the rules had long since moved on. To him, it was all symbols and words, all meaningless to him. So many options, and none of them seemed to do anything.

So, he called upon the Keeper. The frustrating part was how easy it was, with the Keeper’s help. Getting into the backend was easy. Crawling through the administrative logs was no challenge. Finding the server backups was as simple as asking, and even the compounds were open to his queries.

But it was all empty.

Only the Keepers themselves and the basic functions of the grid had anything left. It was a house with blank walls and a hundred empty rooms.

After hours of searching, Poire disconnected from the grid, and opened his eyes on the real world around him. The four moons had long since transited away, but all the panels of the Heart were still awash with that brilliant, white light. Poire had to squint to see, and when he held up his hand, he could almost see the veins through his skin. The walls of mist around the Heart were too bright to see.

He curled up against the metal dome of a terminal, feeling the cold metal stick to the sweat of his shirt. The liquid armor wrapped and reached out to touch the terminal, inspecting it. When it was satisfied, it went back to sliding slowly over Poire’s torso.

Laykis squatted next to him, her body levering down so easily on her machine joints. She had her hands on her knees, and her face, smooth except for that one great scar, was staring gently down on Poire.

“Perhaps the Emperor might be of assistance,” she said. “Perhaps he’ll know a way to look.”

“You really think we can trust him?”

“Not at all. You looked distressed.”

“So that’s it?” Poire said, still staring at the sky. His limbs were too heavy to move, and even opening his mouth was a struggle. “We came all this way, just to turn back?”

“This was a success, Poire. The grid works. It’s here, and you made it work. This is a time to be grateful.”

“There’s nothing here. We came all this way to find an empty machine. I left him behind, Laykis. I left Eolh. I left Kirine. And those soldiers. They were killed for this?”

“Frustration will not yield results.” The calm clicking of her voice only incensed his anger.

The sudden urge to shout escaped his lips before he could think about it.

“Of course you can say that! You’re a construct, Laykis. You’re not programmed to get frustrated.”

Shouting, attacking her was supposed to make him feel better. Only, it didn’t. He looked up into Laykis’s eyes. They flashed once, with some kind of emotion. Because she wasn’t a machine. She was… something else.

‘I didn’t mean it,” Poire said. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“No,” she said. “You don’t. But lucky for you, Divine One, I am programmed to forgive.”

He furrowed his brow at her. Not sure how to answer that.

Her eyes were glowing warmly, still boring into his own. “It is called a joke, Divine One. You are meant to laugh.”

She had no mouth on that scarred, metal face, but the light of her eyes narrowed into an approximation of a smile.

Poire smiled back.

“You have come far, Divine One. But in the great scheme, you have moved only an inch. You must do better if you wish to bring us all salvation.”

He sighed heavily. “Everywhere I go. It’s more setbacks. More jungles to cross. More problems to solve.”

“That is life.”

“Does it always have to be this hard? I don’t know what I’m doing. Maybe I should go ask the Emperor for help. He knew this place was here. Maybe he had a plan for the grid.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Laykis said.

“You were the one who suggested it!”

“I could see that you were stuck in a narrow path. You were not thinking beyond the moment of failure. I was only trying to help.”

“Yeah, well,” Poire said, feeling his anger melt into something else.

“Thanks, Laykis,” he said, after a long moment of thinking. “I’m glad you’re here with me.”

“As long as I live, I would be nowhere else. To serve you, Savior, is the greatest blessing I could ask.”

Poire gave her a mock-sour expression. “You’re really not a machine, are you?”

“Define ‘machine’ please.”

Poire shook his head, and smiled. Another joke.

But he couldn’t laugh. Not now, not here. He had come to the end of the road. The race was run. And there was no one waiting for him at the end.

“I thought when I got here,” Poire started to say, “It would somehow solve all my problems. I don’t know what I expected.”

“You thought you would find someone here.”

“Yes,” he croaked. His throat was tight, making it hard to speak. “Or that I’d find something at least. A sign, a light in all this darkness, telling me where they’d gone. What happened to them? I’m such an idiot.”

He reached up to touch her hand, to feel something.

“It’s empty, Laykis. The whole universe out there, it’s all empty.”

But Laykis wasn’t looking at him anymore. Her head was turned to the terminal.

“Is it?”

Poire followed her gaze to a single, blinking light.

A message?

No. This was more than that. This was a line, waiting to be pulled.

Poire stood up. His palms prickled with sweat, and under his arms too. The humidity stuck his clothes to his bare skin. Only the armor kept him cool, as it tightened around his stomach. Clenching at him for support.

He swallowed hard, and wiped his palms on his shirt.

“Go on,” Laykis said. Her eyes were wide, too. Maybe wider than his. “See what it is.”

He could hear the excitement in the clicks of her voice. He could feel it, in his own heartbeat.

Could it be?

Poire opened the line with an impulse.

The other end crackled with silence. No, that wasn’t silence. Someone was breathing.

A voice poured out from the terminal. Just loud enough to carry across the metal expanse of the bowl, speckled with dew and still glowing with light.

“Can you hear me?” the voice said. A woman’s voice.

“I’m here!” Poire said. “Can you hear me?”

“Are you human?” The voice asked in guarded tones. Once, that would have been a strange question. But now, it was the only thing that mattered.

Poire nodded vigorously, even though the voice couldn’t see him. “I am. Are you?”

“Yes. Who are you?”

“My name is Poire. I’m from Kaya, but that was a long time ago. It’s different now. Everything is different now. You’re the first human being I’ve talked to since I woke up. Well, almost the first.”

“Almost?”

“I met someone who calls himself the Emperor. The Everlord of the Cyran Empire. Do you know him?”

There was a silent pause on the other end.

“Can’t say that I do,” she said.

“Oh. What’s your name?”

“Listen. Poire, is it? Before we do anything else, is the Grid working on your end?”

“I think so. I’m at the heart of the Old Grid, but it’s empty. There’s nothing inside it. Do you know what’s going on?.”

“The Heart? You know, maybe you shouldn’t tell strangers where you are.”

“What?” Poire said, furrowing his brow. He looked over at Laykis, whose face was blank. “Why not?”

“Forget it. So you went inside the Grid? What did you see?”

“I told you, it’s empty. The rooms are all there, the paths and the space. But it’s all empty.”

“Hm,” the voice said. “Are you an admin?”

“Yes!”

“Okay, have you checked the arc’s connection?”

“The… what?”

“The receivers. Scrape underneath and look at the receivers. I just want to know if its outputting, or if the line bank is empty, or what.”

“Okay,” Poire said, eager to help. Then, he thought about it. “I don’t know what any of that means.”

“I thought you said you were an admin?” she asked.

“I am.”

“How can you be an admin if you don’t even know how to access the grid’s receiver?”

“I’m the only one left. The Keepers said I’m the first they’ve seen in thousands of years. So, I asked them to default it to me.”

“Huh.”

Silence. Then, the voice said, “Okay, Poire? I’m going to try to walk you through this, step by step. Are you ready?”

***

Did you kill them all for nothing?

If Khadam had known the Grid was still running - even the Old Grid - then she wouldn’t need an extraction engine. Then she wouldn’t need to pull her own light.

Which mean, all those nomads had died for nothing.

Well, Khadam said, it’s not working yet.

Khadam put everything on hold while she focused on this. All the Hedrons, stopped in their tracks. Even Finder seemed pleased with her decision. He was just as excited as she was to hear another voice - another human voice.

If this worked, she might even throw out the original plan. If they could get the Grid working, she could shortcut herself across the stars.

As for the plan…

If this Poire person had come from a settlement, she might be able to borrow and scavenge pieces of old, human architecture. That would preclude her from having to build from the ground up.

Khadam spent half an hour troubleshooting the Grid through Poire. As she did, she had to keep adjusting her mental image of him.

A child. A newborn. Still in his teens. He must’ve been born right before Seedfall. And thrown in a cold chamber ever since. Right? But why would someone have put a child into a cold chamber so soon.

Not important right now. First, she wanted to maximize the Grid. So what if it didn’t have any information? She had all the information she needed. Khadam just needed the Grid to amp up its functions.

It was old architecture, and many of the systems were painfully outdated. The Old Grid had been old long before Khadam was born. It had fallen into disuse when the newer way stations were created, and then the repeaters made it absolutely obsolete. Not to mention what happened after Seedfall.

The boy on the other side wasn’t an idiot. And though navigation was difficult, because Khadam couldn’t even see the options, she found it easy enough to coach him through the convoluted pathways - many of which routed them to dead ends, or back to the top level.

Slowly, Khadam was starting to get a clear impression of what happened to the Old Grid.

It had been wiped. Someone had gone out of their way to locate the decrepit, old network that nobody used anymore, and purged it while Khadam had been in stasis.

Why? She could only guess. And Poire was more clueless than her.

Khadam had Poire ask the guide that tended to the Grid’s maintenance. It had been warped and evolved (corrupted was too strong of a word) by the unpredictable entropy of time, and now the guide - it kept calling itself “We, the Keepers” - was a kind of living presence that guarded and upheld the Old Grid, for thousands of years. And it knew nothing either, only that it wanted to serve the Old Grid. To keep it operational.

That was worrisome and hopeful at the same time. It meant that Khadam might be able to expand the Grid’s functions. Maybe she could still use it to locate more artifacts left behind.

“Good. Now, can you see the extractors?” She asked Poire.

“There’s four of them. There used to be twelve, but the others are dark now.”

“Well, four is enough,” she said. “How much light do they have?”

And when Poire answered, Khadam’s eyes went wide.

She said nothing for a long moment. Imagining the possibilities.

“Is that good?” The voice on the other end asked.

“That’s incredible,” Khadam said. “That’s absurd. Are you sure that’s right?”

“Unless the sensors are broken.”

“No. It just means it’s working. That’s very good, Poire. We might even be able to open a gate. We’re ready to start.”

That would make everything so much easier. A near instant result. Then, she’d be able to fix all of this herself, in person.

Of course, there was still the question of the kid. Who was she talking to, anyway?

Khadam was several hundred years old, but even among Rodeiro’s upstart clan, she was always the young one.

This Poire… There was something out of place about him. Something, she couldn’t put her finger on.

“Okay,” a voice broke through Khadam’s clasp. It poured directly into her mind, via her implants. “Okay, I think I’ve got it working.”

“Read it to me.”

“It says ‘Resetting sphere.’ That’s the entangled path, right?”

“Yeah, that’s good. That will take a few minutes. Or maybe longer, I don’t know. It’s old. If this doesn’t work, we might have to try resetting the whole Grid. But I’d like to avoid that if possible.”

“Why?” He asked. His question was so innocent. So naive.

“Because if we turn the Grid off,” Khadam bit her lip. “There’s no guarantee it’ll come back on.”

“Oh.”

It was agonizing to even consider the possibility. To know that all she needed was right there. Was almost working at a reasonable capacity. To think that any slight error - compounded over centuries - could erupt at any moment.

“Look, don’t worry about it just yet. Whatever we have to do, it’s worth it. All the other Grids are down, I don’t know why.”

“The other Grids? There’s more than one?”

She scrunched her mouth in a kind of confusion. Of course, there were other grids. Everyone should know that.

Each city, each settlement, even each clan had their own way station. How else would they stay independent, safe from the Swarm?

“Where are you from, Poire? You said Kaya. What’s it like there?”

“It’s green. It’s hot. We lived underground, mostly, except for the shield dome that protected the reserve. But Kaya is all different now. Before I… Before I woke up, they were just animals that we experimented on.”

“You’re a biologist?”

“No,” he said. He almost sounded disappointed. And more than a little sad. “I wasn’t old enough to choose. To start training. I was… My caretaker was still… I wasn’t old enough.”

Again, Khadam scrunched her face in confusion.

Khadam was born in a cold smith settlement, on the outskirts of the outskirts. Only a few hundred people, but most of them were experts in their fields. And she had been trained as one of them, from day one. Broken toys and drones and other half-finished machines were integral to her upbringing. She was fixing things before she could even speak. And this was before she even met Rodeiro, a true master.

Biologists, architects, everyone she’d ever met were much the same. They had each been taught from the start to love and explore the worlds they inhabited. Training always began at birth.

“Khadam?”

“Yes?”

“Have you seen any other humans?”

Khadam almost answered no, but she bit it back. She had seen others, since she’d woken up. There was Joira, and the black haired one. Did that count?

And there were the others, still frozen in the Gate Walker’s coldchambers. Herald-touched bodies. Rife with the dream disease. She shuddered at the thought. It was hard not to imagine the power going out, and that awful degeneration spreading across the ship. And beyond.

I should move one of the gates, just in case, Khadam thought. Get the Hedrons to carry it to the other side of the planet.

“No,” Khadam finally answered. “No one alive, anyway. What about you?”

“No,” the voice was slight. “Just aliens. And the Emperor, but I don’t think he’s human. At least, not anymore.”

“A guide?”

“I don’t think so. His body is human. And he acts like one. But I can’t see it in him.”

Well, that’s concerning, Khadam thought. And dangerous. And what did he mean by “I can’t see it in him?”

Khadam couldn’t help it. Her mind went immediately to the figure in her dreams. The Herald, with those footsteps that cracked the earth. If this Emperor was the Herald…

If the Herald was already this far ahead of her…

She would have to be careful. There would be no room for error.

Khadam swallowed. Only now did she realize how thirsty she was. Slowly, she formed the question. “Is this Emperor with you now, Poire?”

“No. I’m alone. It’s just me and Laykis. She’s an an-droid. The Emperor is on another planet. I don’t think the Keepers of the Old Grid would let him through.”

Khadam leaned back against the hull of the Gate Walker. Relieved. If it was just this kid, she’d be fine. She’d get the gate working, and walk through, and figure out the rest from there. Just be patient.

“How much longer, Poire?”

“Right now it’s on the step called ‘Xide Integration.’ Whatever that is.”

“Let me know if it starts spitting errors at you. And don’t touch it.”

“Khadam. Do you know what happened to them?”

“To who?”

“To us.”

Khadam furrowed her brow again. Staring at the naked hull of the Gate Walker. All that plain, gray metal, stretching up towards the rounded ceiling.

“You don’t know?”

How could he not know? About the pact? The lightning wars that wiped out so many of their cities and threatened the clans at every turn?

About Seedfall.

And the visions that started it all. How could he not know?

“Your people never told you?”

“They didn’t tell us a lot of things. None of my cohort was allowed to talk about this.”

“Talk about what?”

The voice on the other side went silent. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter. Softer.

“I have visions. They’re like dreams, only they happen when I’m awake. When I’m near too many people. Or now, in the mist. That’s when it’s at its worst.”

“Then you do know.”

“So it’s real?” The boy’s voice was tinged with worry. “Then why wouldn’t they tell us?”

Of course, they’re real, Khadam thought. Why else did we do this? Why else am I here, if not to hunt down and destroy the Herald?

That was the whole point. That was the only reason she had agreed to cryostasis, when all of humanity was falling to pieces.

It would’ve been easier to stay. To fight - and die - with the rest of them. But Rodeiro made her go. This war is lost, Khadam. You must go to another place in time, to wait for the world to be so utterly broken that there is no one left to hunt you.

You must go alone, and save us.

Khadam came here to build. To prepare herself for the only murder she would ever commit.

But she wouldn’t tell Poire that. In fact, she was more than a little surprised he didn’t know anything about the vision.

“Poire, where are you from again?”

She just wanted time to think. He had called the planet Kaya. The name sounded familiar to her. Maybe it was just another one of those biologists’ worlds. They did love to propagate, and find new places to build their useless experiments.

“Kaya,” he said. “I’m from the Central Conclave. Do you know it?”

It was like a fuse had been lit in her head. And she was frozen on the moment, where the spark was almost at the end of the wick. Ready to ignite.

Rodeiro had spoken of the conclaves.

Everyone had spoken of the conclaves. The projects, rumored to be hidden among the stars.

There were biologists, and then there were radical biologists.

Many people didn’t think the latter existed. Still, other, more militant groups dedicated their lives to routing them out. To destroying them, and their conclaves. Heretics, who went against the strictest wishes of all humanity.

They worked on projects that should never be. They worked with the light, far outside the scope of acceptability. The universe is ending, they said. That was their excuse. And it was true. Everyone could see that. Everyone had the visions. Everyone had the dreams.

But the radical biologists went beyond the brink.

Rodeiro always spoke of the radicals with venom in his voice. This is not the way. This is exactly the wrong way. They’re going to bring the change to our doorstep, and then we will have no chance at all. We will lose, before we’ve even begun.

He wasn’t the only one who thought that way.

Poire’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “Khadam! I see it! It’s finished. I’m going to try something-”

The line was severed. It was like a string of light in her mind had suddenly snapped. A pocket of her thoughts, gone dark.

Khadam felt a great, yawning emptiness there. She held her breath. Trying to stem the tide of panic that threatened to wash over her.

Be patient.

But what if it doesn’t work? What if he broke it and you’re stranded out here all alone again? What if-

Be. Patient.

A new signal blinked in her mind. A beautiful, one-note song. A new connection, waiting for her to open it.

She opened it.

The image appeared in the air before her, floating. A child, his skin so dark, it was almost blue. Tight, black curls of hair growing a little too wild, like he hadn’t cut it in months. And his face was innocent, with his eyes opened wide, and his tongue sticking out in concentration as he tried to interface with the Grid. Tried to understand if he was doing it right. How long had it been since she’d seen a child?

“Hello?” he said. “Can you hear me?”

Poire didn’t know she could see him.

“Khadam, is it working?”

But Khadam could not bring herself to speak. To breathe.

The icy claws of horror dragged down her spine, and wrapped around her heart.

It’s him.

But he’s so young. How can it be him?

Yet every part of her was screaming the truth.

The Herald.

The one from all our dreams.

Khadam severed the connection. Shut off her clasp. And grabbed at her chest, gasping for air. Sucking it down, alone in the dark.

Why did he have to be so young?