The Folly did not enter Unspace.
It was swallowed.
There was no tunnel. No streaking stars. No elegant folding of spacetime like in old cinematic fantasies. One moment there were fractured constellations and Kaelis's dissolving silhouette against the viewport - the next, the stars blinked out as though someone had erased the concept of distance.
Silence didn't fall.
Silence thickened.
Outside the reinforced viewing pane, reality resembled marrow. Pale fibrous currents stretched in every direction, threaded with shards of geometry that might once have been galaxies. Some rotated slowly like broken vertebrae. Others pulsed faintly, leaking muted color that never quite decided what spectrum it belonged to.
Unspace was not empty.
It was what remained after meaning had been extracted.
Inkwell's remaining tentacles worked the console in sharp, efficient bursts. The amputated limb had not regrown. The stump was sealed in black resin, but it twitched occasionally - not in pain, but in memory. Reflex. A body part that hadn't accepted it was gone.
"Transit stable," he muttered.
The words vibrated strangely, as if the air had to negotiate permission to carry them.
Jidd stood at the center of the navigation chamber.
He had not moved since the jump.
His right hand - the one the clone had pressed the bone-key into - now looked almost normal. Almost. Beneath the skin, something faintly luminous shifted when he flexed his fingers. Not light. Not exactly. It was closer to structural awareness. Veins that did not carry blood, but orientation.
He could feel direction.
Not left or right.
But toward.
Toward what, he did not know.
He pressed his palm against the inner hull.
The metal rippled.
Inkwell froze.
"Do not," the octopus said carefully, "experiment with the ship."
"I didn't."
His voice carried a faint harmonic undertone. As though two versions of the same word had been spoken slightly out of phase.
The hull pulsed once beneath his hand.
And somewhere far beyond the Folly, something answered.
---
The Bone Key was not embedded in him.
It was indexing him.
That realization arrived without language. He did not think it. He simply understood it. His bones felt catalogued. His nerves mapped. His memories tagged with invisible sigils that flickered at the edge of perception.
The chamber flickered with him.
For a fraction of a second he saw -
A different Folly. Burning. Inkwell split in half. A skyline made of ribcages. A woman holding a radio, listening.
Then it was gone.
He staggered.
Inkwell rotated fully toward him now.
"What did you unlock?"
"I didn't unlock anything."
A pause.
"That," Inkwell said flatly, "is precisely the problem."
---
Unspace did not obey inertia.
The Folly drifted, but drift implied direction. Instead, the ship seemed to be negotiated forward by unseen forces that tolerated its presence for now.
The engines hummed.
Then the hum thinned.
Inkwell adjusted dials. Power levels were steady. Stabilizers functioning. Coffee reservoir dangerously low.
Yet the sound of the engines began to fade - not in volume, but in existence.
Jidd felt it before he heard it. Or rather, before he didn't hear it.
The vibration beneath his feet - gone.
The faint background resonance all machines carry - gone.
Inkwell tapped the console. No error. No fluctuation.
But the ship was becoming quiet in a way that was not mechanical.
It was subtractive.
Jidd swallowed.
The swallow made no noise.
He tried to speak.
His lips moved.
Nothing emerged.
Inkwell's tentacles snapped upward. He opened his beak to bark an order -
Silence.
Not absence of sound.
Absence of permission.
Outside the viewport, the marrow-currents slowed. Then parted. They did not ripple or explode. They simply made room.
Something was approaching.
At first Jidd thought the shapes were distortions in Unspace itself—elongated smears of darker pale against lighter pale. Then one passed in front of a drifting geometric corpse. It did not block the view. It erased the contrast.
Tall. Thin. Too vertical.
Their forms were not black. Black implied color. These were subtraction columns. They did not glide. They arrived.
Inkwell's eyes contracted to pinpoints. He moved frantically across the console - alarms should have blared.
Nothing.
He struck the panel.
The impact made no sound.
The silence was spreading through the ship like frost.
Jidd felt it climbing his spine.
The shapes touched the hull. Not physically. The hull simply stopped having sound where they intersected it.
A seam opened without tearing.
They entered.
Three of them.
Inside the navigation chamber.
They had no faces. Where a face might be, there was a slight indentation in probability. A concavity where recognition should live.
Jidd could not hear his own heartbeat.
But he could feel it trying.
The nearest column shifted toward Inkwell. One tentacle lashed out on instinct. It passed through the entity. The tentacle continued moving. But the splash of impact never happened. The air did not ripple. The action had been denied consequence.
The entity raised what might have been an appendage. It touched the console.
The final residual hum of the ship vanished.
Complete stillness.
The Folly floated in conceptual vacuum.
Jidd's thoughts felt louder now - not audible, but textured. As if his mind were the only remaining source of vibration.
The entity turned toward him.
And for the first time since entering Unspace, he understood something clearly.
They were not here for the ship.
They were here for the resonance.
For him.
The Bone Key pulsed beneath his skin.
A tone. Too low to be heard. Too deep to be ignored.
The entity drifted closer. It extended its subtraction-limb toward Jidd's chest. Where his name resided. Ω-7. Īddūl. Human. Fragment. Door. His identity was layered.
And loud.
The limb touched him.
And something tore.
Not flesh. Not bone.
A syllable.
He felt a piece of his name peel away.
Memory flickered. He forgot, briefly, the smell of rain. He knew rain existed. He knew he had smelled it. But the experience of it - the cold weight, the petrichor, the way it made skin feel alive, that was simply gone. Replaced by the fact of its absence.
Panic surged.
He tried to shout.
Nothing.
The entity leaned closer.
Another touch.
This time, a memory dissolved. The clone pressing the key into his wound. The pain remained. But the face blurred. He could no longer picture it clearly. Just a shape. A suggestion of features.
No.
No.
He would not be edited.
He closed his eyes.
If sound was forbidden externally-
Then he would generate it internally.
He reached for something messy. Something human. Something the subtraction columns could not understand because they had never possessed it.
Anger.
It came easily.
At Kaelis. At the cage. At being told to sleep. At being treated as inventory. At having his rain taken.
The anger burned.
And the Bone Key responded.
Not with light.
With rhythm.
A thud.
Inside his chest.
He felt it more than heard it.
Thud.
Another.
The entities recoiled slightly.
The rhythm strengthened.
It was not a heart. It was a decision.
I exist.
Thud.
I refuse.
Thud.
The silence around him fractured. Hairline cracks spread through the air like shattered glass in reverse. The entities stretched taller, thinner. Trying to absorb it.
The rhythm intensified.
Not chaotic. Steady. Intentional.
The ship vibrated faintly.
Sound did not return.
But presence did.
The Bone Key flared under his skin.
The cracks burst outward.
Not with noise.
With restoration.
The engine hum snapped back into existence like a delayed echo. Inkwell gasped mid-motion. The console lights flickered violently. The entities staggered. Where they touched the air, sound reasserted itself aggressively - metal groaned, circuitry whined, distant currents howled.
The subtraction columns distorted.
For the first time, they seemed unstable.
Jidd opened his eyes.
The rhythm continued.
He stepped forward.
Not away.
Toward them.
The nearest entity attempted another contact. Its limb reached his forehead.
The Bone Key shifted.
Unlocked.
Not space.
Probability.
For a fraction of an infinite second, Jidd saw multiple outcomes branching. In some, the entity erased him. In others, he devoured it. In one, Inkwell died. In another, Kaelis watched and smiled.
He chose.
Not consciously. But firmly.
The branch where he remained.
The entity's limb shattered. Not physically. Conceptually. It fragmented into slivers of absent matter and dissolved.
The other two recoiled.
Unspace convulsed.
The marrow-currents twisted violently.
The Folly lurched.
Inkwell screamed something untranslatable and slammed a tentacle onto the jump lever. Emergency breach. No coordinates. No negotiation.
The ship tore sideways through Unspace.
The entities elongated, reaching -
Too late.
The marrow imploded.
Light returned.
Stars reappeared.
Gravity asserted dominance.
And the Folly fell.
---
Atmosphere screamed around the hull.
Alarms wailed.
This time, sound was very real.
Inkwell wrestled the controls, his remaining tentacles moving in desperate sequence. "Unplanned re-entry! Unmapped dimension! Structural integrity at - catastrophic!"
Through the viewport, the planet rushed upward.
Not blue. Not green.
Bone.
A colossal skeletal structure curved across the horizon - a ribcage so vast it pierced cloud layers. Between the ribs, a city glowed in fractured neon. Buildings clung to ivory arches. Bridges spanned vertebrae. Rain fell in thin silver lines.
The Folly spiraled toward it.
Impact was inevitable.
Inkwell rerouted power. Stabilizers flared. The ship slammed through cloud cover, scraping along one massive rib before crashing into a cluster of metallic spires embedded in the titan's sternum.
The world jolted.
Metal screamed.
Systems died.
Silence returned briefly - but natural this time. The kind that follows violence, not the kind that precedes erasure.
The Folly lay embedded in bone.
Smoke drifted.
Rain hissed against overheated plating.
Jidd stood slowly. His legs shook. His heartbeat - still there. Steady. The Bone Key pulsed beneath his skin, but softer now. Satisfied. Or sleeping.
Inkwell dangled upside down from his harness, one remaining tentacle gripping the console. The stump of his lost limb had split during the crash. Dark ichor seeped onto the deck.
"We," the octopus said faintly, "have arrived somewhere inconvenient."
He tried to laugh. It came out wet.
Outside, the city pulsed with life. Sirens in the distance. Voices. Movement along the rib structures. Lights flickered in windows carved into bone.
Jidd moved to the viewport.
The rain was real. He could hear it now - a soft, persistent hiss against the hull. He pressed his palm to the cold glass.
He remembered rain.
The columns hadn't taken that.
Not yet.
Inkwell groaned, slowly righting himself. "We need to -" He stopped. His large eyes fixed on something beyond the viewport.
Jidd followed his gaze.
Across the skeletal avenue, beneath a flickering neon sign shaped like a broken halo, stood a girl.
She was young. Sixteen, maybe. Seventeen. Rain soaked her hair flat against her face. She wore a worn jacket several sizes too large, sleeves rolled up to reveal thin wrists. In one hand, she held a small radio receiver - old technology, analog, the kind with a telescoping antenna she'd extended to its full length.
She held it against her ear.
Listening.
Her eyes were not on the ship. They were on him.
Jidd felt the Bone Key stir.
The girl lowered the radio slowly. Her lips moved.
He couldn't hear her through the hull, through the rain, through the distance.
But he heard her anyway.
"You're late."
Not ominous. Not mysterious.
Tired.
She sounded like someone who'd been waiting a long time and had stopped expecting anything else.
Inkwell floated up beside him, following his gaze. When he saw the girl, his entire body went still.
"Do you know her?" Jidd asked.
"No." A pause. "But I know what she's holding."
"The radio?"
"That's not a radio." Inkwell's voice was barely a whisper. "That's a resonance caster. Pre-cataclysm tech. They were used to - " He stopped. His eyes widened. "Kid. If she's holding that, and she's listening to us - "
"She's not listening to us."
Jidd knew this with sudden, absolute certainty.
She was listening to him. To the Bone Key. To the rhythm he'd generated in Unspace.
She'd heard it.
From here.
The girl lowered the radio to her side. She took a step forward, then stopped. Rain ran down her face like tears, but her expression was dry. Watchful.
Waiting.
Behind her, in the cavernous darkness of the titan's exposed chest cavity, something shifted.
Jidd felt it through the bone of the planet itself - a deep, resonant movement, slow as continental drift, heavy as gravity.
The girl glanced back. Just for a moment. When she turned forward again, her lips moved once more.
Three words.
"It knows you."
The Bone Key flared.
And deep within the hollow heart of the skeletal world, something that had been sleeping for a very long time began to wake.
Inkwell grabbed Jidd's arm with his remaining tentacle. His grip was surprisingly strong.
"We need to move. Now."
Jidd didn't argue.
The girl was already walking toward the ship, picking her way across the bone bridge, radio clutched against her chest like a talisman.
Behind her, the darkness deepened.
And somewhere in the marrow of that impossible place, a sound emerged.
Low. Rhythmic.
Almost like a heartbeat.
Almost like an answer.