The hum of the drone's optics grew louder, a sound of perfect, mechanical malice. Elias didn't hesitate. He burst from the sanitation bay and into a narrow service alley, his ears straining for the slightest variance in the city's symphony. The voice on the speaker had given him a new purpose, a new path. He wasn't just running anymore; he was searching.
He looked for any signs of the hummingbird. Was it a physical symbol? A piece of graffiti? The thought felt absurd in a city where every surface was meticulously clean. The drone's hum was closer now, a predator circling its prey. He darted into a derelict residential sector, an area marked on his official maps as "re-coherence in progress." It was a sterile term for demolition.
Here, the flawless order gave way to a skeletal landscape of half-demolished buildings and mountains of twisted steel. This was the city's underbelly, the place where data was being scrubbed and history was being erased. He saw a flash of movement and ducked behind a pile of rubble. It was a patrol of Sentinels, their movements as precise and inhuman as their glowing red eyes. They moved in perfect synchronization, their sensors sweeping the area.
He held his breath, the stale air burning his lungs. The Sentinels passed, but the low hum of the drone remained. It wasn't a patrol; it was a hunter. He needed to be smarter. He needed to think like a glitch.
He activated his terminal, risking a direct connection to the Axiom's peripheral data streams. He pulled up the architectural schematics of the demolition site, cross-referencing them with maintenance schedules. He found what he was looking for: a forgotten ventilation shaft, marked for demolition in three days, its data-link temporarily offline. A perfect blind spot.
He scrambled into the shaft, pulling a loose grate over the entrance just as the drone's light swept over the spot he had just occupied. He lay there, his body trembling, as the hum faded into the distance. He was safe for now, but he was still alone.
Then he saw it. Carved into the dusty metal of the shaft's wall, a stylized image of a hummingbird. It wasn't just a doodle; it was a complex series of geometric patterns that looked like an abstract flow chart. A data signature. Elias, the former Metric Auditor, felt a thrill of recognition. It was a set of instructions, a puzzle meant to be solved by someone who understood the language of the machine. He had found the song.
He followed the trail of hummingbirds deep into the darkness of the shaft, his terminal's light the only beacon in a world without light. He had no idea where the trail would lead, or who he would find at the end. But for the first time since his sister's De-Patterning, he wasn't just running from something. He was running toward it.