Chapter 36 : The Song
The melody drifted through the motor pool like smoke from a distant fire.
I was passing through on my way to the evening meal—a habit I'd developed over the past weeks, checking on different parts of the Citadel's operations without any particular destination. The motor pool was usually quiet at this hour, most of the mechanics having finished their shifts and headed for the communal eating areas.
But Nux was still there.
He crouched beside an engine mount, adjusting something with a wrench, and as he worked he hummed. The sound was soft, almost unconscious—the kind of ambient noise people make when they're focused on a task and not thinking about anything in particular.
I recognized the melody in three notes.
Blackbird singing in the dead of night...
My feet stopped moving. The Armor stirred against my skin, responding to the sudden surge of emotion I couldn't suppress.
That song didn't exist here.
The Beatles had never formed in this world. The British Invasion had never happened. Rock and roll as I knew it had burned along with everything else when the bombs fell, and even if some of the original recordings had survived, there was no way Nux could have heard them.
Except through me.
Capable appeared from behind a stack of salvage parts, drawn by the humming. She leaned against a support pillar and watched Nux work, her expression soft in the motor pool's dim light.
"What's that song?" she asked.
Nux looked up, blinking like he'd forgotten anyone else was in the room. "What song?"
"The one you were humming. I've never heard it before."
He set down his wrench, frowning. "I don't know. It's just... in my head. Something that feels right when I'm working." He shrugged. "Probably something I heard somewhere and forgot."
He hadn't heard it somewhere. He'd received it through the Network—a fragment of my memory, leaked during some moment of emotional intensity I couldn't identify. The melody had traveled across the connection and lodged in Nux's consciousness as a pleasant vibration without context.
"It's pretty," Capable said. "Can you hum more of it?"
Nux closed his eyes and tried. The fragments he produced were imperfect—notes out of order, rhythms slightly wrong—but the essence was unmistakable to anyone who knew the original.
Take these broken wings and learn to fly...
I turned and walked away before either of them noticed I was there.
My quarters in the Citadel were small—a carved-out room that had probably belonged to a minor functionary under Joe's regime. I'd added nothing to it except a cot, a storage chest for the stranger's jacket when I wasn't wearing it, and a small mirror I used for checking the Armor's condition.
I sat on the cot and tried to breathe normally.
A song. A Beatles song. Bleeding through the Network into Nux's mind without either of us knowing it had happened.
The implications unfolded like a slow-motion disaster.
If a melody could transfer, what else had leaked? The Network shared emotions, sensations, impressions—I'd known that since the beginning. But I'd assumed the transfers were limited to present-moment experiences, things we were actively feeling and thinking.
Background radiation of memory was different.
Nux might have received more than a song. Images, maybe. Fragments of a world with highways and streetlights and buildings that touched the sky. Echoes of a life spent in factories and engineering schools, watching movies about the very apocalypse he'd been born into.
And if Nux had received fragments, so had the others. Toast. The Dag. Mors. Every person connected to the Network was a potential window into memories I couldn't control.
The Dag had already noticed something—she'd mentioned my dreams about cities with lights that drowned the stars. At the time I'd passed it off as imagination, metaphor, the kind of symbolic imagery dreams produced. But what if it wasn't metaphor? What if she was seeing actual memories of Detroit, of nighttime drives down I-94, of a world that had never existed in her reality?
I sat in the dark and tried to calculate the exposure risk.
The Network had four permanent connections. Four people with ongoing access to whatever leaked from my consciousness. If any of them started putting fragments together—the song, the city dreams, the engineering knowledge that came from nowhere—they might begin to suspect that I carried memories of a different world.
And then what?
Best case: they assumed I was somehow crazy, experiencing delusions of a world that never was. Worst case: they realized I was something other than human. That I had been transported from elsewhere, carrying knowledge I shouldn't have, understanding events before they happened because I'd watched them in a movie.
Either outcome was catastrophic.
The transmigrator's greatest advantage was also its greatest liability. I knew things because I had lived in a world where this reality was fiction. But that knowledge only worked if no one understood its source.
I hummed "Blackbird" to myself, very quietly, letting the melody fill the small space.
The homesickness hit like a physical blow.
Six weeks. Maybe seven—I'd lost exact track somewhere during the road war. Six weeks since I'd heard music that wasn't war drums or survival songs. Six weeks since I'd seen a world with electricity on demand, with food that didn't come from hoarded stores, with the basic assumption that tomorrow would be safe.
I missed coffee. I missed hot showers. I missed the sound of traffic and the glow of screens and the comfortable certainty that civilization, whatever its flaws, would still be there when I woke up.
I missed being someone whose greatest worry was whether the engine block would crush him before he finished his shift.
The irony wasn't lost on me. I had died in that factory—or the person I had been had died, and I had woken up in a body that didn't belong to me in a world that was already ashes. But the memories of before hadn't faded. They were still there, vivid and detailed, a parallel existence I couldn't access except through the Network's accidental transmissions.
And now those memories were leaking into other people's minds.
I had to be more careful. Had to find ways to wall off the deeper memories, the personal ones, the fragments of a life that would mark me as something other than human if anyone understood what they were seeing.
But how did you control what you didn't know was escaping?
I stood and walked to the small mirror. My reflection stared back—a face I was still learning to recognize, features that belonged to someone who had died before I arrived. The Armor was visible at the collar of my shirt, dark plates rising to meet the stranger's jacket I wore almost constantly now.
I looked like someone who belonged here. That was the problem.
I was getting comfortable. Starting to think of the Citadel as home, of the Network members as friends, of this new life as my life rather than a borrowed existence. And the more I relaxed into that comfort, the more I forgot to guard the boundaries between who I had been and who I was pretending to be.
The song proved it. Somewhere along the line, I had let my guard down enough for a piece of my past to slip through the cracks.
I needed to inventory everything. Every memory that might leak. Every fragment of knowledge that would mark me as foreign if it surfaced in someone else's consciousness. Every piece of my old life that I still carried, ready to betray me at the worst possible moment.
But first, I needed to find out how much damage had already been done.
I left my quarters and walked through the Citadel's corridors toward the motor pool, where Nux was still working and Capable was still listening to him hum a song that had no business existing in this broken world.
They had created something together—her harmony joining his melody, making something new from something stolen. Maybe that was how it would always be. Old and new combined. Past and present tangled together until you couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.
Or maybe I was just telling myself stories to avoid facing the truth.
The Network was a leak. Every connection was a potential exposure. And the longer I used it, the more of myself I was pouring into people who would eventually realize that what they were receiving didn't come from anywhere they could explain.
I needed to decide whether the Network's benefits were worth the risk of its inevitable betrayals.
But not tonight. Tonight, I would listen to Nux and Capable turn "Blackbird" into something this world had never heard before, and I would pretend that was enough.
The music drifted through the motor pool—a song without a source, carried through a connection neither singer understood, making beauty from something that should never have existed here.
Tomorrow, I would take inventory.
Tonight, I would just listen.
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