There were three rules to surviving the Fade.
Don't trust your senses. Don't stay longer than you planned. And never, under any circumstances, look at something that shouldn't exist.
Kael Ashwick broke the third rule on a Tuesday.
He was crouched on the second floor of a pre-Waning office building — or what remained of one. The walls had lost the concept of opacity sometime in the last decade, turning them into sheets of translucent glass that hummed faintly when the wind pushed through. The ceiling still believed it was solid, which was fortunate, because the sky above the Fade today was raining upward.
Inverted rain. Droplets rising from the shattered streets below, accelerating toward a bruised violet sky that pulsed like a living thing. Beautiful, in the way a knife was beautiful — elegant, purposeful, and capable of killing you if you stared too long.
Kael didn't stare. He'd stopped finding the Fade beautiful three years ago.
"Come on," he muttered, prying at the rusted panel of what had once been an electrical junction box. His fingers were wrapped in treated cloth — standard Fade Runner gear, woven with Axiom-threaded fibers that kept the Fade from nibbling at your skin. The cheap kind. The kind that worked for about six hours before the threads started unraveling.
He'd been in the Fade for five hours and forty minutes.
The panel groaned and popped free, revealing a nest of corroded wiring and, nestled in the back like a sleeping jewel, a fragment of crystalline material no larger than his thumbnail. It pulsed with a faint, warm light — amber, steady, real. An Axiom Fragment. Small, but clean.
Kael exhaled slowly. That was two weeks of food. Maybe three if he haggled well and Maren was in a good mood, which she never was, but a man could dream.
He reached in carefully, fingers closing around the fragment. The warmth spread through his hand, up his wrist — that familiar sensation of touching something that was fundamentally, stubbornly real in a place where reality had given up. It was like holding a coal from a fire in a blizzard. Grounding. Almost painful in its solidity.
He slipped it into the lead-lined pouch on his belt and allowed himself exactly two seconds of satisfaction.
Then he noticed the rust.
It was on the junction box's inner panel — a streak of corrosion that had been hidden behind the fragment. Ordinary rust. Iron oxide. The kind of thing you'd see on any piece of pre-Waning metalwork that had spent decades exposed to the elements.
Except the color was wrong.
Not different. Not faded. Not altered by the Fade's tendency to warp perception. Wrong. It was a shade of orange that Kael had never seen before. Not in the Fade, not in Threshold, not anywhere in nineteen years of existence. It sat on the visible spectrum like a word misspelled in a language he was fluent in — close enough to pass a casual glance, alien enough to make his brain itch.
He should have walked away. Rule three existed for a reason. Things that shouldn't exist in the Fade were the Fade's way of fishing. You notice something impossible, you lean in to examine it, and then gravity forgets which direction you're supposed to fall, or your lungs decide they'd rather breathe time instead of air, and the next salvage team finds your boots standing upright in a hallway with nothing inside them.
Kael knew this. He had found those boots. More than once.
And yet.
He leaned closer.
The rust didn't shimmer or shift under his gaze. It didn't try to crawl away or whisper to him or rearrange itself into a face. It just sat there, being the wrong color, with the quiet confidence of something that had always been that way and saw no reason to change.
Kael pulled a small glass vial from his kit — the kind used for collecting Fade-anomaly samples, sealed with Axiom-treated wax — and scraped a flake of the rust into it. He held the vial up to the translucent wall, letting the Fade's bruised light filter through.
The wrong orange glowed.
Not with energy. Not with power. It glowed the way a word glows when you suddenly understand its meaning — a shift in comprehension rather than luminance. Looking at it, Kael felt something he couldn't name. A sensation like standing at the edge of a cliff and realizing the cliff was deeper than he thought. Not fear, exactly. Recognition.
As if some part of him, buried deep beneath years of survival instinct and carefully cultivated indifference, had been waiting to see this exact color.
"Okay," he said to the empty room. "That's enough of that."
He pocketed the vial, checked his wraps — five hours, fifty-one minutes, threads starting to fray at the fingertips — and made for the stairwell.
The trip back through the Fade was routine, which in Fade terms meant only three things tried to kill him.
First: a section of street where sound had been replaced by temperature. Every footstep sent a wave of cold radiating outward, and the distant groan of shifting buildings registered as a burning heat on his skin. He navigated it by memory, keeping his breathing shallow.
Second: a Faded dog. Or what had been a dog. It still had the shape — four legs, a tail, a muzzle — but it had lost the concept of proportion. Its legs were different lengths, its body telescoped in and out of itself like a broken accordion, and its eyes were perfectly, horribly human. It watched Kael pass with an expression of bewildered grief, as if it remembered being something else and mourned the difference.
He gave it a wide berth. Faded animals were unpredictable. Some were harmless. Some had lost the concept of pain and would attack without self-preservation. Some had lost the concept of distance and could be beside you between one blink and the next.
This one just watched. Mourning.
Third: the border shimmer. The point where the Fade thinned and the Lucid Zone's influence began to assert itself. Crossing the border always felt like waking from a dream you couldn't quite remember — a sudden sharpening of the world, colors snapping back to their proper positions, gravity committing to a single direction with renewed conviction. It should have been a relief.
It never was. Because every time he crossed back, Kael noticed that the border had moved. Just a little. Just a few meters further in than the last time.
The Fringe was shrinking.
Threshold's outermost district was called the Fringe for a reason. It was the ragged edge of civilization, the place where the Lucid Zone's reality was thinnest and cheapest and most prone to hiccups. Walls occasionally forgot they were load-bearing. Clocks ran backward for minutes at a time. Children born in the Fringe sometimes had trouble with concepts that inner-district residents took for granted, like object permanence or the idea that fire was supposed to be hot.
It was, by any reasonable standard, a terrible place to live.
Kael loved it.
Not because it was comfortable — it wasn't. Not because it was safe — it absolutely was not. He loved it because the Fringe didn't pretend to be something it wasn't. The inner districts, with their towering Axiom-reinforced architecture and their clean streets and their politicians who smiled like they'd practiced in front of mirrors, were built on a lie. The lie that everything was fine. That the Waning was manageable. That the Axioms would hold forever.
The Fringe knew better. The Fringe lived with the truth every day — that reality was dying, one piece at a time, and no amount of political speeches or Axiom-funded infrastructure could change that.
For a professional liar, Kael had an unusual appreciation for honesty in architecture.
He made his way through the Fringe's winding streets as evening settled in, the sky above shifting from its usual sickly amber to a deeper, more honest darkness. The Axiom that anchored this section of the Lucid Zone — a crystalline spire visible from every point in the district, rising from the center of the old market square like a splinter of frozen lightning — pulsed with its steady, reassuring rhythm. One pulse every four seconds. The heartbeat of reality.
Kael had been counting that heartbeat since he was seven years old. The night his mother walked into the Fade and didn't come back, he'd sat on the roof of their cramped apartment and watched the Axiom pulse until dawn, counting each flash like a prayer.
Four seconds. Four seconds. Four seconds.
It had never missed.
He sold the Axiom Fragment to a fence named Torvel who operated out of the back of a noodle shop that had never, to Kael's knowledge, actually served noodles. The negotiation was brief: Torvel offered insultingly low, Kael threatened to take his business to a competitor that didn't exist, and they settled on a price that left both of them mildly dissatisfied, which was the hallmark of a fair deal in the Fringe.
"You look like shit," Torvel observed, counting out thin metal chips into Kael's palm.
"Thank you. I've been working on it."
"I'm serious. You've got that look. The one runners get before they stop coming back."
Kael pocketed the chips. "I've had that look for five years. I think it's just my face now."
Torvel grunted. He was a heavyset man with the cautious eyes of someone who'd survived the Fringe by never being the most interesting person in any room. "Suit yourself. But the Fade's been active lately. More Runners going out than coming back. You hear about Lissa?"
Kael's hand paused on the doorframe. "No."
"Found her boots yesterday. Left stairwell of the Carven building, third Fade block east. Standing straight up. Nothing inside."
A silence. Kael had trained Lissa. She was careful. She was smart. She was twenty-two years old.
"Boots tell you anything?" he asked.
"Yeah. They told me she's dead." Torvel's voice was flat. Not cruel — just Fringe. In the Fringe, you mourned quickly or you didn't mourn at all. There wasn't time for anything in between.
Kael nodded once and left.
He almost didn't see it.
Later, replaying the moment in his mind — and he would replay it many times, in many dark hours — he would wonder what would have happened if he'd gone straight home. If he hadn't stopped at the overlook on the way back. If he'd been looking anywhere else.
But he did stop. And he was looking up.
The overlook was a crumbling balcony on the seventh floor of an abandoned residential tower, offering an unobstructed view of the Axiom spire. Kael came here sometimes when sleep wouldn't come — which was most nights — to count the pulse and let the rhythm quiet his mind.
He settled against the railing, pulled out the glass vial with the rust sample, and held it up against the spire's glow, idly wondering if Threshold's Tenet-holders at the university might pay for an anomalous Fade sample. Probably not. They didn't like being reminded that the Fade produced things they couldn't explain.
Four seconds. The Axiom pulsed.
Four seconds. Another pulse.
Four seconds.
Four seconds.
Four —
The spire flickered.
Not pulsed. Flickered. A stutter in the rhythm, so brief that if Kael had blinked, he would have missed it entirely. A fraction of a second where the crystalline structure's light didn't dim gradually and reignite — it simply wasn't there. As if someone had snipped a single frame from a film reel and spliced the remaining footage back together.
Kael straightened. His hand tightened around the vial.
Below him, the Fringe continued its evening routine. A woman hung laundry on a line. Two children kicked a ball against a wall. A drunk man argued with a lamppost about politics. No one looked up. No one had seen it.
But Kael had.
And in that flicker — in that impossible, tiny gap in the Axiom's eternal rhythm — he had seen something that made the wrong-colored rust, the Faded dog, and Lissa's empty boots all seem trivial by comparison.
He had seen a pattern.
Not randomness. Not the slow, natural degradation that every Axiom was supposed to undergo over centuries. A pattern. Deliberate. Structured. Like watching someone pick the threads from a tapestry — not tearing it apart, but carefully, methodically pulling it loose. Thread by thread. Truth by truth.
As if the Axiom wasn't failing.
As if it was being dismantled.
Kael sat on that balcony for a long time, the wrong-colored rust glowing faintly in his palm, the Axiom's heartbeat counting four seconds, four seconds, four seconds above him — steady again, as if the flicker had never happened.
But it had.
And for the first time in years, Kael Ashwick felt something more dangerous than fear.
He felt curious.