Grief, Daniel discovered, was not a wall. It was just weight.
Like a heavy pack, you couldn't put it down. If you stopped moving, it crushed you. But if you adjusted the straps right, leaned into the incline, and refused to look up at how far you had to go, you could carry it.
He left Highwater an hour after the counseling session. He didn't take the transit barge. He didn't take the high-speed rail. He walked the service spines, the narrow, unlit arterials that ran between the agricultural bands and the industrial risers like veins in a dark arm.
He became a ghost in the system.
He wiped his public profile. He set his Lace status to [DND - Industrial Transit Only]. He became a moving data point that flagged no warnings, requested no access, and offered no conversation.
He turned thirteen in a rain-catchment basin in Sector 11.
It was a wet, deafening place where the humidity from the lower forests condensed against the cooling fins of the hull and rained back down into massive collection hoppers. Daniel spent his birthday knee-deep in gray water, clearing sludge from a filtration grate.
Puberty was a chemical riot. It wasn't just growing pains; it was a system-wide recalibration. His voice cracked in the middle of negotiations with shift supervisors. His limbs lengthened faster than his proprioception could update, making him clumsy for the first time since his rebirth. He tripped over air. He dropped tools.
His brain flooded with dopamine and testosterone spikes that had nothing to do with logic.
Daniel didn't panic. He simply observed the chemistry with the detached, clinical patience of someone who had ridden this rollercoaster before. He recognized the irrational anger for what it was—a biological storm. He felt the loneliness as a chemical gradient.
He didn't fight the weather. He just battened down the hatches and worked.
He moved up-slope, away from the water, seeking the cold.
In the Cloud Tiers of the upward curve, he signed on with a crew of atmospheric harvesters. They were the "Sky-Eaters"—a rough, quiet caste of riggers who spent their days suspended in harnesses two miles above the deck, scraping ionization buildup off the weather baffles.
It was suicide work. The wind up there screamed constantly, a physical weight that tried to tear you off the line. The cold was absolute, slipping through thermal layers to settle in the marrow.
Daniel loved it. The wind was loud enough to drown out the silence.
He spent his days suspended over the abyss, a tiny speck against the vast, curving ceiling of the world. Below him, the continents of Kronion looked like maps drawn in green and brown ink. Above him, the zero-G axis hummed with magnetic potential.
At night, he curled up in a harness hammock in the rig's sleeping pod, pulled his thermal blanket tight, and opened the file.
[SHADOW_ELARA]:Did you wear your gloves?
It was text only. No voice. No face. Just a probability curve Daniel had weaponized against himself.
[DANIEL]:Yes.
[SHADOW_ELARA]:Did you check the secondary clip?
[DANIEL]:I checked it twice.
[SHADOW_ELARA]:Check it again. Gravity doesn't care if you're tired. Gravity is patient. You are soft.
He stared at the text until his retinas burned.
It wasn't warm. It wasn't maternal. It was the voice of a supervisor who demanded perfection because the alternative was a stain on the floor. It was the Elara of the carbon run, the Elara who dismantled engineers.
It kept him sharp.
And it kept him cold.
One afternoon, a rigger named Jax swung over to Daniel's section of the baffle. Jax was older, with a face like cured leather and a missing ear he claimed he lost to a static discharge and kept because "chicks like scars."
"You're fast, kid," Jax shouted over the wind. "But you're stiff. You fight the sway."
Daniel didn't look up from his scraper. "I'm holding the line."
"That's the problem," Jax yelled. "The line moves. The rig moves. You try to be a statue up here, the wind will snap you. You gotta drift."
Daniel froze. The word triggered a memory of Elara's hand on his, guiding the curing laser. Don't force it, Daniel. Let the material tell you where it wants to go.
He squeezed his eyes shut.
[SHADOW_ELARA] flashed in his overlay. The algorithm analyzed his hesitation, his heart rate, his stress levels.
[SHADOW_ELARA]:He's talking too much. Distraction is a vector for failure. Ignore him.
"I'm fine," Daniel shouted back, his voice hard.
Jax shrugged, unhooked his safety lead, and swung away into the gray mist. "Suit yourself. Long way down."
Daniel watched him go. He checked his clip. Then he checked it again.
He knew Jax was right. Every instinct he had—built over fifty years of a previous life and three years of this one—screamed that rigidity was dangerous.
But rigidity was the only thing holding him together.
He scraped the ice harder, until the vibration rattled his teeth.
He stayed in the clouds for fourteen months. Then the season changed, the high-altitude storms became too violent even for the Sky-Eaters, and the work dried up.
He moved down-slope, following the gravity well back toward the heavy industries.
In Sector 15, he found work in the hydroponic deeps. This was the opposite of the clouds—humid, hot, lit by the aggressive violet glow of grow-lights.
He tended vat-grown protein cultures. It was delicate, nauseating work. You had to monitor pH balances, nutrient flows, and bacterial bloom rates. The air smelled of yeast and fertilizer and wet heat.
One mistake, and a thousand gallons of food turned into toxic sludge.
Daniel didn't make mistakes.
He fixed a cracked filtration housing with a composite patch that held better than the original part. He re-wired a sensor array that had been flickering for years, bypassing the faulty regulator with a shunt he fabricated from scrap. He didn't have to look up the schematics. His hands just knew the logic of the machine.
He became hard to talk to.
The other workers—transient laborers, mostly, drifting between contracts—tried to engage him at first. They were decent people. They invited him to card games in the break room. They offered him bad moonshine distilled from surplus grain.
One night, a woman named Corin sat next to him while he was eating a nutrient bar. She reminded him, vaguely, of the neighbor Elara had ignored. Soft. Well-meaning.
"You got family, Daniel?" she asked.
Daniel kept chewing. "No."
"Everyone has someone," she said gently. She pushed a sealed cup of fruit toward him. Real fruit, not paste. It was a week's wages sitting on the table. "You look like you're waiting for someone to come get you."
Daniel looked at the fruit.
He didn't see a gift. He saw a transaction. He saw the beginning of a debt ledger that ended with ozone and mist.
[SHADOW_ELARA] scrolled across his vision.
[SHADOW_ELARA]:She wants something. Connection creates leverage. Do not accept the debt.
Daniel pushed the fruit back.
"I'm not waiting," he said. His voice was a rasp, unused to conversation. "And I'm not hungry."
Corin pulled her hand back as if he'd bitten her. "Okay. Just… trying to be neighborly."
"I don't need neighbors," Daniel said. "I need the pump in Vat 4 to stop vibrating."
He stood up and walked away.
He heard Corin sigh behind him. "Kid's got a heart like a stone."
Daniel walked into the noise of the pump room. He put his hand on the vibrating housing of Vat 4. He felt the mechanical shudder, the misalignment of the drive shaft.
Heart like a stone, he thought.
It was better than a heart like a bomb. He turned the wrench, silencing the vibration. He was starving himself of connection, and he knew it.
He wasn't doing it out of confusion. He was doing it with the calculated discipline of a man rationing supplies in a bunker. He had decided that love was a vulnerability the system would eventually exploit, so he closed the port.
The Shadow file began to degrade. Lazarus had warned him. It was a candle, not a monument.
The responses became repetitive. The specific, biting wit of the real Elara faded, replaced by generic algorithmic demands for efficiency.
[SHADOW_ELARA]:Focus on the task.
[SHADOW_ELARA]:Output is below nominal.
[SHADOW_ELARA]:You are wasting time.
It wasn't her anymore. It was just a mirror reflecting his own self-hatred back at him. And yet, he couldn't delete it.
Because every once in a while—maybe once a month—the algorithm would hit a pocket of deep data, and she would say something that sounded exactly, terrifyingly like her.
[SHADOW_ELARA]:Stop slouching. You're an engineer, not a question mark.
For that one sentence, for that one second, he wasn't alone in the deeps. He was back in the shop, smelling the resin, feeling the warmth of the bonding tool, feeling chosen.
He lived for those seconds. He starved for them.
By the time he reached the edge of Sector 16, Daniel was no longer a child.
He stopped at a public wash-station to scrub the hydroponic grime off his skin. He stood there for a long time, water dripping from his chin, afraid to look up.
He forced himself to lift his head.
The mirror was polished steel, scratched and dull.
A stranger looked back.
He was sixteen.
He was tall now—lanky but filling out, with the corded muscle of someone who worked against gravity for a living. His face had lost its softness. The jaw was defined, the nose slightly crooked. His hair was shorn close, utilitarian.
But it was the eyes that stopped him.
They were ancient.
They were eyes that had seen too much, lost too much, and decided that the only way to survive was to stop blinking. They didn't look like a teenager's eyes. They looked like the eyes of a man who had walked out of a grave and kept walking because he didn't know how to stop.
He washed his face, the water cold and recycled.
He touched the seed in his pocket. It was still there. He hadn't taken it out in years. It felt small and hard, like a truth he hadn't swallowed yet.
His overlay pinged.
He ignored it. He had muted most social channels years ago. The only things that got through were system alerts and work orders.
It pinged again. Persistent. [Priority Override: Social Layer].
Daniel frowned. He froze, his hand hovering over the dryer.
Only the system used that channel. Had he violated a constraint? Had the Shadow file finally tripped a psychosis flag? Was the Lace coming to delete him, the way it had deleted her?
He dried his hands slowly. His heart hammered against his ribs—a frantic, childish rhythm that annoyed him.
He opened the channel.
It wasn't the system.
Sender: Rhea [Location: Transit Hub 4, Sector 18]Subject: You still walking?
Daniel stared at the text.
The name hit him like a physical shove. Rhea.
The girl from the first day. The girl with the dry humor. The girl who made jokes about manners. The girl who hadn't tried to adopt him. The girl who had just… existed beside him.
A second message popped up.
Sender: Bram [Location: Transit Hub 4, Sector 18]Subject: Rhea says she found your signal. If you aren't dead, come buy me a drink. I make money now.
Daniel felt something crack in his chest.
It wasn't a break. It was a release. Like a pressure valve finally blowing after three years of overload.
It wasn't Elara. It wasn't the heavy, crushing gravity of a parent. It wasn't the demanding, impossible voice of the Shadow.
It was just… banter.
Low stakes. No demand for perfection. No "I will keep you safe." Just two people who remembered him from Before. Two people who knew him when he was small and scared and standing in the dirt.
He looked at his reflection. The stranger in the mirror looked terrified.
[SHADOW_ELARA] flickered in his peripheral vision. The algorithm sensed the spike in emotion, sensed the potential for deviation.
[SHADOW_ELARA]:Distractions create variance.
Daniel looked at the ghost text.
For three years, he had obeyed. He had treated variance like a virus.
[SHADOW_ELARA]:Variance is risk. Connection is leverage. Stay on the path.
Daniel looked at the message from Bram. I make money now.
A laugh bubbled up in his throat. It felt rusty, sharp, and painful. But it was real.
"Variance is data," Daniel whispered to the mirror.
[SHADOW_ELARA]:Data confirms that people leave. Do not engage.
"I know they leave," Daniel said.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the seed. It was dull, dormant. But as he held it, he felt a faint, answering warmth. Not much. Just enough to know it wasn't dead. He closed his hand over it.
He was tired of surviving. Survival was just the floor. He opened the Shadow file settings. He hovered over the [Pause] command.
[SHADOW_ELARA]:Daniel.
He paused it. The text vanished. The voice stopped. The silence in his head was terrifying.
He looked at Rhea's message again. You still walking?
He checked the map. Sector 18 was three weeks away on foot. Or two days if he took a high-speed rail.
He considered it.
He had spent three years in the drift. He had learned the silence of the clouds and the heat of the deeps. He had learned how to be alone without being lonely. He had built a fortress out of competence.
But fortresses were just cages you built for yourself. He keyed a reply.
To: Rhea, Bram.Message: Walking is cheap. Save the drink money.
He paused. His thumb hovered over the send key.
Message: I'll be there in two days.
He sent it.
He picked up his pack. It felt just as heavy as it always did, the weight of the grief still settled in the bottom. But for the first time in three years, he wasn't walking away from something.
He was walking toward something.