He stood in the ruins with the dead boy at his back and felt, very suddenly, very small.
The storm clouds were still there, pressing low over the broken city, thick and unmoving, as if someone had stretched a sheet of dark wool over the sky and pinned it in place. The air had the weight of impending rain without the relief of actual water.
'Plant the seed.'
The words wouldn't leave.
He had heard plenty of nonsense over the years — cult lines, Demon-worship slogans, half-understood scraps of System theology, but this felt different.
This hadn't been screamed by a fanatic in a crowd. It had been said quietly by a boy whose hands shook and whose face was being eaten from one side inward.
Why had he answered at all.
He replayed the exchange in his head: the brief silence and the flatness cracking on we would be free, the way the eye had moved when he mentioned Kenji.
