The resonance quarantine chamber was a sphere of silent, gray static. Within it, Marcus floated in a lotus position, a faint, golden smile still etched on his face. Through the observation port, Kaito watched as thin filaments of gray energy—like the tendrils of a jellyfish—slowly probed at the shimmering, contaminating Gold Fire that had taken root in his friend's core. Each touch elicited a tiny, blissful sigh from Marcus.
"He thinks he's been made CEO of a Fortune 500," Leo said, his voice a low growl. He stood beside Kaito, his massive arms crossed. "Keeps talking about his corner office and his stock options. It's the same damn thing he wanted when we were alive. The fire just… gave him the brochure."
Anya was on the other side, her medical scanner humming as she analyzed the data stream from the chamber. "The corruption is tenacious. It's not attacking his memory; it's fulfilled a narrative. It's made itself the happy ending. Extracting it is like convincing someone to leave paradise."
Kaito said nothing. His new sight—the **Director's Eye**, as he'd privately named it—was still a raw nerve. Even here, in the sterile medical wing of the SNIP complex, he could see the infrastructure. The quarantine sphere wasn't a miracle of thanato-science; it was a sophisticated resonant filter, a sieve for unwanted emotions. The gray tendrils were simple cleaning algorithms. It was all machinery. Beautiful, terrifying machinery.
A soft chime announced an incoming directive. Not paper, but a vibration in the air before them that resolved into glowing text.
**DIRECTIVE: RESOURCE RECLAMATION.**
**Target:** Memory-Quarter 22, Sub-Sector: "The Commute."
**Asset:** Fragmented Echo-Cluster, Type: "Communal Male Bonding / Sacrificial Ritual."
**Status:** Recently destabilized. At risk of absorption by hostile elements.
**Team:** Santos (Anchor), Rourke (Logistics), Valdez (Medical).
**Objective:** Secure cluster before dispersion or theft.
**Note:** High probability of freelance "Duster" or "Junker" activity. Lethal force authorized.
"Rourke?" Leo scowled. "The salvage jockey? Since when do we work with freelancers?"
"Since we're down a man, and Finch needs a job done," Kaito said, the words tasting bitter. Marcus was a qualified failure. They were being sent into a potential combat zone with a contractor to prove they were still useful tools. The mention of "Junkers" was new—a slang term, likely for deniers who scavenged and stole raw emotional resonance, like the gem-thieves from his dream.
***
The "Commute" was a depressing masterpiece. It was an endless, rattling subway train car that existed in a perpetual, grimy twilight. The air smelled of stale coffee, cold metal, and despair. The Backgrounders here were men in rumpled suits or workwear, their faces pressed against the windows or buried in phantom newspapers, radiating a uniform frequency of quiet dread and exhausted obligation. It was a memory of purgatory, repeated millions of times a day across a nation, condensed into one looping car.
Rourke materialized beside them already inside the train. He looked more solid than the Backgrounders, but grimmer than last time, a fresh scorch mark on his duster. "Santos. Valdez," he nodded. "Heard about your boy. Nasty business, Gold. It leaves a shine."
"What are we here for, Rourke?" Kaito asked, keeping his voice low. The train car seemed to stretch forever in both directions.
"Bunch of poor sods," Rourke muttered, gesturing with his chin towards a group of about fifteen male Backgrounders clustered in the center of the car. They were different. Their fear wasn't generic. It was sharp, specific, and *shared*. "Memory of a real event. Bankers, lawyers, a few cops. Train got stuck in a tunnel for eight hours back in the 90s. Power outage. No light, no air. Thought they were gonna die. Started a prayer circle that turned into… something else."
As they watched, the memory began to play. The lights in the car flickered and died, plunging them into a darkness that felt thick and cold. A voice, tremulous with authority, rang out. "Alright, everyone! Stay calm! We need to… to preserve warmth. Preserve sanity. Form a circle. Hold hands."
The selected Backgrounders shuffled together. Kaito's Director's Eye activated, a painless shift now that he'd stopped fighting it. He saw the resonant strings. As the men grasped each other's hands in the dark, their individual threads of fear—pale blue and jittery—didn't just mingle. They began to *braid*. A ritual was forming, not of magic, but of desperate, collective psychology.
"Now, repeat after me," the leader's voice intoned from the dark. "I release my claim to the self. I bind my fate to the whole. My portion is the portion of all."
The chant began, low and fervent. With each repetition, Kaito Saw it. The braided cord of their shared fear grew thicker, stronger, but it also began to *divide*. Like a cell undergoing mitosis, the shared resonance split, and a section of it pulsed and attached itself to one of the men. Then again. And again.
"They're not sharing strength," Anya whispered, her medic's perception catching the echo. "They're *parceling out responsibility for survival*. Each man is taking a piece of the collective dread so no one has to bear it all."
The ritual reached its peak. The leader's voice cried out, "The vessel is full! To your stations! Hold your piece!"
In the resonant vision Kaito shared with his team, a stunning visual played out. The spectral image of the entire train car *shattered* along invisible lines. Each man was mentally assigned a section—a door, a window, a length of seats. His portion of the braided fear-cord wrapped around that section like a binding chain. The communal terror had been successfully fragmented and anchored. It was a horrifyingly elegant act of psychic triage.
The memory-loop ended. The lights in the car flickered back on to the gloomy twilight. The clustered Backgrounders now stood slightly apart, each one subtly tethered to their portion of the train, their fear managed, contained, but eternally present.
"The cluster is that braided cord," Rourke said. "A stable, complex emotional artifact. Rare. Valuable. Finch's pet researchers probably want to study collective coping mechanisms. Junkers would just tear it apart and sell the strands as 'communal courage' or some such nonsense to lonely Deniers."
"So we just… harvest it?" Leo asked, discomfort in his voice.
Before Rourke could answer, the train car shuddered. Not a memory shudder. A real, resonant quake. The lights didn't flicker; they *changed*, bleaching to a cold, surgical white.
From both ends of the infinite car, figures stepped through the doors. They weren't Backgrounders. They were Deniers, but unlike any Kaito had seen. They wore mismatched, scavenged armor—pieces of police riot gear, football padding, firefighter coats—all fused together. Their faces were obscured by grimy welding goggles or crude masks. They carried weapons that weren't guns, but jagged, resonant tools: a hooked rod that crackled with blue energy (a grief-siphon), a circular saw whose teeth were spinning fragments of angry song.
**Junkers.**
One, taller than the rest, with a train conductor's cap perched on his helmet, stepped forward. His voice was a distorted rasp through a vox-filter. "The Binding Cord. Stand aside. This is claimed by the **Foundry**."
Rourke spat on the floor. "Bull. It's in a SNIP-designated quarter. You're out of your depth, scrap-rat."
"SNIP curates," the Junker Conductor rasped. "The Foundry *forges*. We have more use for its parts." He raised a hand, and his crew surged forward.
Chaos erupted. The Junkers moved with brutal efficiency. One fired the grief-siphon at a Backgrounder, not to destroy him, but to violently sever the thin tether connecting him to his "portion" of the train. The Backgrounder didn't dissolve; he simply went blank, his managed fear released and instantly scooped into a canister on the Junker's back.
They were harvesting the ritual's components.
"Stop them!" Kaito yelled. He couldn't unleash a full Sanity Howl without shattering the fragile Backgrounders. Instead, he focused his Director's Eye. He looked at the braided cord itself, the core artifact. He saw the Junkers' tools not as weapons, but as crude programs—**algorithms for severance and capture**.
A Junker lunged at Leo with the sonic saw. Leo met him with a fist wrapped in reinforced resonance, the impact sounding like a gong. Anya was a blur, using her medical injectors to fire concentrated doses of "calm" (a paralytic in this context) at Junker joints. Rourke fought with a salvaged wrench that glowed with negation energy, breaking tools and bones with equal gusto.
Kaito ducked a swipe from a hook, his Sight tracking the arc. It was designed to snag and tear resonant threads. He had an idea. A dangerous one. He focused on the central, braided cord of the Binding Ritual. He didn't try to protect it. He *pulled*.
With a mental scream of effort, he used his Sight not to see, but to **interact**. He grabbed the resonant "plot" of the ritual itself and *yanked it forward in its loop*.
The train car plunged back into darkness.
The Junkers froze, disoriented. The leader's voice boomed again in the black. "I release my claim to the self! I bind my fate to the whole!"
The ritual was restarting. The selected Backgrounders, responding to the deeper memory, began to shuffle together, reaching for hands.
"What is this?" the Junker Conductor snarled.
"The memory's defending itself!" Rourke shouted. "Disrupt the chant!"
But it was too late. The braiding process began. The powerful, communal fear-energy, now reactivated, wasn't passive. As the Junkers stood in the circle, their own sharp, acquisitive resonance—a spiky, orange greed—got caught in the braid. The ritual, a program for binding fear, started trying to bind *them*, to assign them a "portion" and shackle their aggression.
The Junkers howled, not in pain, but in violation. Their carefully maintained individual identities were being forced into a collective. One began seizing violently as the ritual tried to make him responsible for a section of floor, his scavenger's psyche rejecting the burden of static guardianship.
Taking advantage of the chaos, Kaito turned his Sight inward, to the core of the ritual's power. Not to the braid, but to the *moment of division*, where the shared fear was apportioned. He saw the logic: **To survive the overwhelming, you must make it manageable. You must break the whole into dedicated pieces.**
A Junker broke free from the ritual's pull and charged Kaito, hook raised. Kaito didn't dodge. He reached out with his hand and his will, focusing on the Junker's raging, spikey resonance. He didn't attack it. He performed the ritual's function *on it*.
He mentally *divided* the Junker's aggressive resonance. He isolated a single thread of "territorial anger" and, with a wrenching twist of perception, *assigned* it to the Junker's own weapon. He bound that specific emotion to the physical hook.
The effect was instant. The crackling energy on the hook flared, then solidified into a brittle, crystalline shell around it. The weapon became impossibly heavy in the Junker's hand, yanking him to the floor. It was no longer a tool; it was an **anchor**, weighed down by the literal, solidified burden of its own malice.
Kaito stumbled back, a fierce headache spiking behind his eyes. He'd done it. A new application. Not a Howl to deny, nor just Sight to see. It was a **Bind**. A way to impose narrative order—however cruel—onto chaotic emotion.
Seeing their leader neutralized, the remaining Junkers retreated, dragging their disoriented comrades. They vanished through the train doors, which sealed shut behind them.
The ritual loop ended again. The lights returned. The braided cord of the Binding Ritual pulsed, weaker now, slightly frayed from the conflict, but intact.
Rourke stared at Kaito, a new, calculating respect in his eyes. "Well. That's a new trick. The Foundry won't like that."
"The Foundry?" Anya asked, checking Leo for injuries.
"Junker collective. They think the SNIP is wasteful. They strip-mine memory-quarters for resonant parts to build… things. Weapons. Idols. New kinds of afterlives. Nasty business." He looked at the stabilized cluster. "My part's done. I'll secure the artifact for transport. You lot should report."
***
Back in the complex, Finch was waiting, not in the debriefing room, but in a smaller, more private analysis chamber. The data-stream from the mission played on a screen.
"Improvisation with a core memory-protocol," Finch said, his back to them as he watched Kaito use the Bind. "Risky. But effective." He turned. "You are developing a toolkit, Kaito. A Howl to disrupt. A Sight to perceive structure. Now a Bind to impose temporary order. This is the path of an Anchor. You are learning to manipulate the narrative substrate itself."
He approached, his demeanor that of a proud engineer. "The 'Foundry' is a nuisance. Scavengers. But their existence proves a point: the resources here are real. Power is there for the taking, for those with the will to shape it." He looked at Kaito meaningfully. "Your friend Marcus will recover. But he is vulnerable. The world beyond these walls is not curated. It is contested. To protect what is yours, you must become more than a janitor for the SNIP. You must become a **shaper**."
Finch handed him a small, sealed case. Inside, on a bed of gray foam, lay three rough, green crystals. They pulsed with a faint, familiar energy—the same resonance as the Binding Ritual, but refined, concentrated.
"Emerald Splinters," Finch said. "Stabilized fragments of 'communal resolve.' A bonus. Use them. Practice your new Bind. Not on enemies. On yourself. On your own resonance. A shaper must first master his own material."
Later, in his construct, Kaito held one of the green crystals. He focused his Director's Eye upon it. He saw it not as a gem, but as a dense knot of disciplined fear. He could, as in the dream, try to grind it down, to refine it into a purer form. A tool. A shield.
He thought of Marcus's golden smile. Of the Junkers' scavenger greed. Of the desperate eye in the portrait. Of Thorne's secret chip burning in his pocket.
Everyone wanted to use the remnants of the dead. The SNIP curated them. The Gold Fire consumed them. The Foundry scavenged them.
Kaito closed his fist around the emerald splinter. A cold, green light seeped between his fingers. He wasn't sure what he wanted to be. A janitor, a shaper, or something else. But he was starting to understand the material he had to work with. It was all around him. It was the very fabric of his prison. And it was the only weapon he had.