Part 2: Broken Choir
The silence beyond the architects' corpses was not empty.
It sang.
Low at first, barely perceptible beneath the drone of emergency sirens and the hiss of ruptured coolant lines. A hum, buried deep in the bones of Requiem, not mechanical, not organic, but something inbetween.
As Kairo stepped deeper into the Requiem core—down a winding staircase of broken glass, flickering data screens, and smeared handprints—it grew louder.
A song.
High and reedy. Monotone. No melody. No harmony. Just breath, expelled in rhythm. It wasn't a chant. It was something else. Older. Like a nervous system trying to scream without a brain.
Whispers swirled with the tune, threading the air like black veins.
"Let us out..."
"No more fire..."
"Please..."
"I remember the red..."
The descent opened into a cavernous chamber. A rotunda, carved into bedrock, thick with old dust and synthetic ash. The air buzzed with residual energy, the scent of scorched circuits and rotting antiseptic.
Cages lined the walls, stacked six high, four feet deep. Reinforced glass fogged with condensation, blood, and fingerprints. Each cell glowed faint blue from interior pulses, bio stabilizers long past their calibration windows.
What they held barely resembled people.
These were the footnotes of Paragon's ambition.
Discarded blueprints. Glitches in the system. Broken drafts.
Some rocked back and forth. Some clawed silently at the glass, fingernails long gone, raw bone tapping in repetition.
Others just stared.
Eyes hollow. Eyes glowing. Eyes missing entirely.
Their mouths moved in unison. No variation. No soul. Just muscle memory. Repeating a single, sustained note. It shook Kairo to his spine.
It wasn't language. It was a sound of pain so sustained, so fundamental, it had transcended meaning.
Sera stirred against his back. Her voice was hoarse. A crack of air through torn vocal cords.
"They're still alive... you have to let them out... Kai, please."
He turned his head slightly. His neck creaked a bit like a rusted hinge.
"They were like me?"
She nodded. Barely.
"Worse."
He stepped toward the first cage. A malformed figure twitched inside. Its skin was transparent, muscles visible beneath. Every breath was a seizure. Every movement, an error. Its eyes were oversized, unblinking, its mouth wide open in a permanent silent scream.
The panel outside its cell blinked, damaged but active. Kairo ran a claw across the display. The surface crackled, reacting to his mutated biosignature.
PURGE.
It headbutted the glass once, twice, then again and again, harder each time, until a pink smear formed on the glass.
Kairo moved on.
The next cell held a man—or what remained of one. His spine had fused to the back wall. His torso swelled unnaturally with fluid. Tubes fed into his lungs, into his eyes, out of his ears. He gargled a sound that may once have been a language. Screamed through bubbles.
Another cage.
A woman. Thin as wire. Her skull partially transparent. Brain pulsating beneath a dome of cracked polymer. Dozens of wires stitched through her skin. Every nerve pulsed independently, her limbs twitching like broken marionettes.
She did not beg. She did not scream.
Her eyes looking dead and forgotten.
She mouthed three words:
"Kill us now."
Kairo stood in the rotunda's center. Surrounded by the echoes of himself.
The failures they never let die. The symphony of the broken.
Dozens of eyes watched him. Not out of hatred. Not even pain. They were waiting. Not for salvation. Not for hope. For an end.
One by one, the monitors lit up:
FAILED ASSET.
REJECTED STRAIN.
TERMINATED SUBJECT.
NEURAL COLLAPSE.
CORRUPTED FILE.
SENSORY LOOP FAILURE.
UNSTABLE.
UNSTABLE.
UNSTABLE.
Each label burned deeper than the last. Each one was a grave.
Each one could have been him.
Kairo exhaled. The air steamed against the frozen metal floor. His breath sounded like the hiss of death itself.
He whispered:
"You deserved better."
And pressed PURGE.
The floor shuddered. A slow hiss built beneath his feet. Gas seeped into each cage—fine, white, odorless. Final.
The note fractured.
One creature began to laugh—a broken, childlike giggle. Another rammed its head into the wall until the glass cracked and bled. A third began to wail, long and sharp, the sound of pure terror being given a voice.
Most simply stopped.
The lights dimmed. The chamber quieted.
The air was still.
But it wasn't peace.
It was mourning.
He turned to leave.
And then—a sound.
Not mechanical. Not human.
Wet.
Rhythmic.
Breathing.
One final cage stood at the corridor's end.
He had missed it.
Deliberately hidden. Reinforced. Thicker than the others. No panel. No diagnostics. Just a ring bolted into the wall, painted with rust and blood.
He approached slowly, each step heavier than the last.
Inside: a girl.
Older than Sera. But not grown.
Not... whole.
Her back was to him. White hair matted in thick ropes. Her arms trembled like antennae. The floor beneath her was littered with marks, scratched phrases.
Names.
Equations.
Clawings into steel.
Sera stirred against him, her voice a ghost:
"That was Nine... she was... almost you."
Kairo approached the glass.
The girl turned.
Her eyes were solid black. Her face smooth and strange. Her teeth, far too many.
But her voice was calm.
Soft.
"Hello, brother."
Kairo did not move.
His reflection in the reinforced glass shimmered—bloody, inhuman, grotesque. But what stared back through the glass was worse. The girl known as Nine tilted her head slowly, watching him with clinical fascination, as if trying to decide what part of him was real. Or still salvageable.
The scratched phrases around her were not random.
They were equations, neural lattice configurations. Combat data. Kill probabilities. Algorithms from a mind too young to understand them, but forced to contain them.
The claw marks in the steel weren't just scars of rage.
They formed a pattern. A language.
Kairo reached out and touched the cage wall. The reinforced glass felt cold, colder than the air around them. Nine mirrored him, her palm pressing against the opposite side.
Her skin was cracked, not with injury, but like cooling glass. She blinked once, slowly—and whispered again.
"You made the right choice. You ended their song."
He stared.
"What are you?"
Nine smiled, and it was not a kind thing. Not even human. But it was familiar. Like staring into a mirror warped by fire.
"I'm what comes next."
The chamber lights flickered.
Nine's eyes glinted in the dim.
"They put all their broken ideas into me... all but one. You."