Ashe moved through tunnels that seemed to go on endlessly ahead of her, scattered light falling across the passageways as she followed Cral through the ruins. Every once in a while, she noticed markings along the walls. Unlike the ruins themselves, they didn't feel as ancient. They looked newer, left behind by people from a world that felt more familiar to her. More careless. Most were symbols Ashe couldn't translate into anything meaningful, but one of them was written in plain words.
Black zone ahead.
Ashe read it, then looked at the space in front of them. The tunnel seemed to continue for another thirty meters before changing direction again.
"What is the black zone?" she asked into the comms.
"You're probably getting close to the net," the one who had spoken earlier about the Outer Ring said, and then a short burst of static followed. "Yes. You're approximately three hundred spans from it. You'll need to reroute before you reach it. There's a secondary path that's been cleared through a ruined stadium. Cral knows it, and from what I can see, you're already headed toward it."
They soon arrived at a passage between two collapsed structures with debris scattered everywhere around them. The moment they reached it, Cral stopped. It extended its left arm across Ashe's path, preventing her from moving any farther.
Ahead, at a distance Ashe estimated to be around two hundred meters or perhaps slightly more, the passage opened into what looked like an old junction. And there, for the first time, she saw what they called the net. The image of the drift she had encountered before was still vivid in her mind, but this was not that. Here, there were dozens of them spread across the open space in a formation with no obvious logic to it. She understood then why people called it that. Each drift moved slowly and independently of the others, yet together they formed something that resembled a torn web shifting in the wind.
"I can see them," she said and her voice was quiet, still trying to understand how these things could once have been human beings at all.
"Fascinating, isn't it?" Moira said through the comms, anticipating Ashe's thoughts. Or perhaps empathizing with them. "We still trace human signatures when we scan them and yet they couldn't be farther from that."
"They're quite something," Connor said but with a flatter tone than Moira's. "You must move away from there now. If they see you, it's over." A sharp burst of interference cut through the line before he could continue, and then the signal dropped entirely.
"Connor?" Ashe tried. "Moira."
But nothing came back. The comms seemed to be live, she could hear the faint sound behind it, but no voice came through at all.
Cral lowered its arm and turned, moving toward the gap between the two nearest structures and Ashe followed close behind. The route led them through the interior of what had once been a series of connected halls with any debris cleared away. As Ashe glanced from side to side, she caught glimpses of objects still resting on surfaces inside adjoining rooms. The urge to stop and look was difficult to ignore, but she also understood it wasn't safe to linger there. The only thing she could really do was redirect her attention elsewhere.
"How long have you known Moira?" she asked.
But Cral said nothing. It continued forward at the same steady pace, its steps making almost no sound against the debris.
"Do you know what happened to this place?" she insisted. "To any of this?"
Nothing. She scoffed a little bit, amused by her own attempts. "I could say almost anything to you right now and you wouldn't react at all, would you?"
Still nothing. Cral turned a corner and Ashe followed it into a longer corridor, where the ceiling remained intact on one side and was completely gone on the other, leaving half the passage exposed to a pale strip of sky above.
She was still thinking of what to say next when Cral suddenly stopped and turned toward her. Its red lenses contracted, then expanded again as they fixed directly on her, and for a brief moment they stood and looked at one another.
Suddenly, Connor's voice came back through the comms, fractured and inconsistent, cutting in and out across heavy interference.
"Ashe… if you can hear this… you are underneath a hot zone… you need to…"
The signal collapsed again before he had the chance to finish the line at all.
Cral took two steps toward her, and something about its movement made Ashe step back almost instinctively. It then lifted its hand and pressed two fingers to a specific point on the disc's edge that Ashe hadn't known existed, and the communicator came away cleanly, as though it had never been bonded at all.
"What are you doing?…" She reached for it but the motion was too late.
Losing that communicator meant she was left entirely alone with this automaton she couldn't understand and dozens of drifts out there, beyond the tunnels, any one of them capable of killing her within minutes or worse, turning her into something like them.
Then Cral opened its mouth. The motion resembled the way a human would move when screaming, except no sound came out at all. Or at least none that Ashe could hear. It lasted perhaps five seconds before it stopped altogether. Cral closed its mouth and returned to stillness, but that wasn't the end of it.
Something moved in the walls soon afterward. Or rather, through them. Ashe heard debris moving somewhere nearby as whatever it was drew closer, pushing material aside until the drift finally came through. It slipped through a narrow gap in the wall to her left, an opening barely wide for a person to look through. And yet, the thing passed through it without resistance, its mass compressing and expanding again once it reached the other side. Its mass gathered around a central core that glowed in a cold and intermittent blue-white light, while its outer layers were both solid and then turning to something liquid seconds later. It had no clear outline or anything that resembled eyes or a face, and yet Ashe felt that it was looking directly at her.
She moved back until her shoulders bumped into the wall behind her. Her eyes stayed on it.
Had Cral just... summoned this thing? Was this Cral's purpose from the beginning? Had Moira sent her out here to die? Did the Dripper even exist at all? Then why all the theatrics? Why not just kill her back in Railen, when she had been completely within their control? Or… was this Cral's doing? Was it more independent than Moira realized? The questions came fast, striking the back of her mind again and again without resolution as she kept her attention fixed on the thing in front of her.
Still, she was determined not to run this time. If this was where it ended, it would end with her putting up a fight, using everything her body would allow her to do to resist this fate.
Cral stood off to the side, its lenses fixed on the drift without any visible reaction to its presence. There was no defensive posture, no visible sign of retreat. It simply watched the scene unfold.