21 — Junction

A closed system cannot tolerate accumulation. Just as a biological organism must excrete toxins to survive, a healthy economic body must have efficient mechanisms for the disposal of non-productive elements. We must not view this expulsion as cruelty, but as a necessary hygiene. The system must be flushed to remain pure.

—Naomi Feld, The Economic Renewal Fallacy: A Theory of Replacement

The door marked Junction 44 was unlocked. Ari pushed it open. Inside he found a small, circular maintenance hub, a forgotten node deep in the pre-CGS network. It smelled of dry concrete and ozone. He collapsed against the wall.

He scanned the small room to see what he had to work with. A rusted metal shelf held a small collection of supplies, left with the casualness of someone who intended to return. He pushed himself to inspect the kit.

Ari grabbed a nutrient bar first, his hands shaking. He fumbled with the wrapper, his fingers, slick with fever-sweat. With a snarl he tore it open with his teeth. The pathogen was burning through his reserves, leaving him famished. He devoured it. It was dry and chemical-tasting, like insulating putty, but it was fuel. The rush of dense calories was a more welcome relief than any flavour.

He found a combat knife and clipped it to his belt. Fumbling past water purifications straws, tinned fish, and some first aid supplies, he came across a police-issue field charge unit with an integrated five-thousand-milliamp rapid-discharge capacitor and torch. He pocketed the charge unit.

As he opened a second nutrient bar, his mind began to click, overriding the fever’s static. He could get to Charles. He could tell him what he knew, how Francis had created the pandemic. Charles would know what to do next. The truth wouldn’t die with him. And Alene. He wished without hope that she had survived.

Steady footsteps echoed from a tunnel behind the door at the other side of the junction. Ari’s breath hitched. He fumbled for the new knife, his trembling hand barely able to close around the grip.

The door opened and a figure stepped in wearing a familiar, easy grin.

“Santo?” Ari’s thoughts seized. A false signal kicked loose by corrupted memory. “You’re… you’re dead. I saw you. I felt your hand, and—”

Santo’s grin widened. “Tough to get rid of me, mate.”

It was his voice. His actual voice, a clear analogue signal cutting through the static of his fever. The relief buckled his knees. The knife clattered from his hand. He caught the wall and a ragged sob tore out of him.

“Santo! You’re alive!” he cried.

“Got spat out by a secondary overflow grate less than a klick down.” Santo laughed and slapped Ari on his sore shoulder. “Woke up half-drowned and covered in shite. Been holed up here since. Heard you on the old radio, figured I’d wait. Knew you’d make it.”

“I can’t believe it,” Ari said. He scrubbed a trembling hand over his face, smearing tears through the grime. “I felt your hand slip. I saw you go under. I thought you were…” He swallowed against the memory. “Bloody hell. I’m glad you’re alright.”

Santo’s grin softened into a look of concern. “I’m alright, mate. Never better. But you… you look like utter shite. What the hell happened to you? You’re burning up.”

“It’s all part of it,” Ari gasped, grabbing Santo’s arm, his fingers digging into the dry fabric of his jacket. “I’ve been chasing the developers. I found them. And we have to stop her. It’s Francis. Councillor Herbert. She’s the one behind it all. She created the pathogen and injected people via vaccines four years ago. There’s a requisition that’s the proof. But we were ambushed. Alene, I don’t know what happened to her. She had the data card. It’s all gone to shit.”

Ari searched Santo’s face. “But now you’re here. We can get it out. Charles will know what to do. I’m just so happy that you’re alive. I thought I’d lost you.”

Santo just smiled. “You did, mate. A long time ago.”

“What? I… I don’t understand.” Ari sagged against the wall. Relief turned greasy in his stomach.

“Course you don’t. Still, well done.” Santo smirked and stepped forward.

The logic stalled. “Well done?”

Santo’s smile didn’t waver, but the warmth drained out of it. He took a half-step back. “You felt me die, didn’t you?” he said with mock pity. “The grief. The anger. You were never going to leave it there. You had to make it mean something. Get the proof.”

“But I don’t have it any more. Alene has it. She’s captured.”

“True. But I have you—”Santo jabbed a thumb towards a lens in the wall, “recorded as confirming the proof’s existence and its contents. It’s enough to light a fire under the right people. After all, who wouldn’t believe the grandson of The Founder?”

The door opened again and a second figure stepped in behind Santo. A colossus with a black eye patch over a ruined socket.

Jack.

The big man moved without hurry, his boots leaving prints on the dusty concrete floor. He walked around the periphery and positioned himself in the archway of the door Ari had come through.

For a long moment Ari’s brain refused what was in front of him. Santo was smiling. Jack was waiting. The world tilted, then the shape of it came clear. Junction 44 had never been a sanctuary. It was where the line ended.

“You,” Ari whispered, looking from Jack’s one good eye to Santo’s smiling face, and rage burned through him, momentarily scorching out the sickness and the fear. “It was you?”

“Always was, Narinder,” Santo spat, the name a venomous dart. “From the very first transmission. I tagged that junction to dump the cache the moment it detected your specific diagnostic tool’s signature. I knew you’d use your own kit, not the standard CGS issue.”

“And then you sent this bastard to kill me,” Ari rasped.

“Did I? Then why do you think you always managed to escape?” Santo’s smile turned vicious. “Barnes was there to keep you moving. To lean on you when you slowed. Not to kill you till you’d done the work.” He flicked a look at Barnes. “He got overeager. Didn’t matter. You still remembered the bolt-hole I planted for you. You still came. Like I said, I was waiting for you, mate.”

The offhand way he said it was the worst part. As if Ari’s injuries, Benjamin’s fall, all of it had been no more than a route test.

“Mate? Seriously? Is this what friends do?”

“Friends? You think we were friends?” Santo was angry now. “You were CGS royalty! Got the grades, got out of trouble, got the girls. Julia. And you never even saw me. I was the mess you didn’t want to fix.”

“No, that’s not true. We were friends.”

“Were we? You even remembered me at the Tannoy prank. That wasn’t me, you bloody idiot. You just wanted us to have a past that made sense. You needed me to save your arse from Charles. You used me.”

No, he’s wrong. He was right there. The memory flickered. A corrupted file, its data now unreadable. Wiring the panel. Santo standing watch. Had he stood watch? Headmaster Rowan.

The memory skipped and tore. Ari’s gaze flickered to Barnes. The killer hadn’t moved from the exit, but his one good eye was fixed on Ari, and the hand near the knife at his side kept opening and closing.

“Remember the science fair? My mag-lev model was wobbling. You walked over, tightened a coil, recalibrated the magnet, and made it run perfectly. Didn’t even bloody look at me. Just fixed it and walked off. I won the prize, and every time I looked at that trophy I knew it wasn’t mine. You stole the failure and the success in one go. Made me a passenger in my own life. Same as the sodding CGS.”

“I was trying to help. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want us to get caught. That’s what friends do for each other.”

“No, that’s what a selfish git with a hero complex does. I know you, Narinder,” Santo sneered. “Better than you’ve ever known yourself. Always the bloody hero. In the Imager. In real life. Fixit Kid, right? Well, a hero needs a motive. Barnes here supplied you with a motive. Losing your newly recovered best mate was a motive.”

The chase. The floodgate panel on the wrong side of the door. Benjamin through the access plate. His fake death.

“You staged the entire Gathering.”

“Full marks, Fixit Kid.” Santo spread his hands, delighted. “That’s the beauty of you. Show you a broken circuit and you crawl straight inside it. I pointed. You did the rest.”

The truth of this was a logic bomb, shattering his entire operating system. Santo was right. Since the first transmission he’d had no agency. He was a data packet being routed through someone else’s network design. And he had delivered his payload perfectly.

“But why? Why would you do this?”

“Because the CGS is a smug, overbearing parent that smothers all human instinct and I want to see it burn.” Santo’s face twisted, the cheerfulness gone. “And because using you, Narinder Feld, and your heartless foster mother to bring it down, that is bloody poetry.”

“So this is what Charles wants. To destroy the CGS. How could I be so stupid? I trusted him!”

“Charles?” Santo guffawed. “That weak prat? No. He’s content with his little fiefdom. He was another means to the end, same as you.”

Santo had played Charles too. “A performance,” Ari whispered.

“The best of my life.” Santo beamed. “No one pays much attention to the drunk bloke when he gets caught where he shouldn’t be.”

Barnes took a half-step forward, his flexing hand now resting on the hilt of his knife.

Santo tracked the movement, his jaw easing, eyes going flat. He jerked his chin at Barnes. “He’s all yours.”

Barnes trained his good eye on Ari. His lips peeled back in a grimace. He drew his knife. “This,” he growled, “is for my bloody eye.”

Santo turned and left through the door he had entered, whistling a soft, jaunty tune that Ari vaguely remembered from the Walker hall.

Barnes lunged. Ari, running on nothing but a primal surge of energy, scrambled back. He brought his arm up in a desperate, clumsy block, but Barnes was too fast, his strike batting Ari’s arm aside.

Barnes feinted with the knife, and as Ari flinched, Barnes drove a boot into his stomach, sending him crashing back against the wall. His head smacked against the brickwork, and his arm slammed flat against a reinforced steel maintenance panel set into the wall.

Ari’s fingers groped for the edge of it. He ripped it free from the brickwork and swung it up like a shield.

Barnes’s knife buried itself with a thunk into the metal, the tip getting wedged.

Barnes roared, yanking at the hilt, trying to pull his weapon free from the steel.

Before Barnes could wrench it free, Ari drove the panel forward, using all his weight, pinning the metal shield and the embedded knife hilt against Barnes’s chest.

But Ari wasn’t fighting. He was fixing, assembling. The steel was a conductor. The police-issue charge unit a burst power source. He dragged it from his pocket with his free hand. His fingers found the two recessed breaching contacts by instinct.

He jammed the live contacts of the charge unit against the steel, completing the circuit.

BZZZZT-CRACK.

A violent, high-amp arc erupted, illuminating the junction in a flash of blue-white light. The stench of burning hair and scorched synthetic fabric filled the small hub. Barnes’s body snapped rigid, a choked rattle in his throat as his muscles locked. Ari held the contacts in place, his own arm shaking from the strain, until the twitching stopped. Barnes collapsed.

Ari stared at the smoking panel and charge unit in his hands. Barnes lay crumpled at his feet.

Then a pneumatic puff, and a sharp sting in his neck. He twisted, his hand flying up to touch the spot. Santo stood behind him, a pneumatic injector in his hand.

“Good fight, mate,” Santo sighed. “Really. But you, Narinder, are only a technician. I’m security. I always have a contingency.”

Ari’s vision began to swim, the edges of the world dissolving into snowy static. His mind tried one last diagnostic. Compound? Dosage? Time to failure? Nothing held. The terminal went dark. His legs gave out. The last thing he saw before the blackout took him was Santo’s smile.

---

Ari’s consciousness rebooted into sensory corruption. His first panicked thought was that he was blind. He strained his eyes, forcing them further open, but there was no change. No lights, no shadows, nothing to differentiate—just all-consuming blackness. A hollow drip… drip… drip… slipped through the void, echoing in a space that felt both too large and too close. Then, a suffocating onslaught of sewage, rust, and the sour-sweet stench of decay. It was the smell of the city’s guts.

He was lying on a gritty concrete floor. His clothes were damp from the slick oily film beneath him and his own sweat. A furnace-like heat radiated from his skin, a raging metabolic fire. He raised a trembling hand, his fingers finding a sore, raised bump on his neck. He remembered the hiss of the injector.

“Santo?” The name came out as a croak.

Memory replayed in broken flashes. Santo’s easy grin. Barnes collapsing. The smell of ozone and scorched flesh. “I always have a contingency.”

He tried to push himself up, but his muscles felt like slush, his limbs leaden weights. The wall and floor were wet to the touch, the same oily film. The hollow drip. The smell. It was a waste conduit. Santo had dumped him.

A rumble joined the rhythmic drip. Low and deep in the concrete, it juddered through his teeth before he truly heard it. He knew that rumble. And that smell, the specific acrid reek of deep conduit silt. It was the sewer from the Gathering. The one where Santo had died. Santo’s poetry in its most brutal form. A twisted re-enactment, a final, vicious joke.

“Bollocks,” he breathed. The twenty-eight-minute flush cycle.

His mind flashed to Capitán Vargas, to the phantom ache of an Imager death. This was not that. The pain in his hip wasn’t haptic feedback. The stench wasn’t an olfactory simulation. There was no command to shut it off. This was a non-recoverable error, and the system was purging the file.

Adrenaline punched through the drug haze. He had no tools, no light disc, no idea what to do. He was recyclable meat in a waste chute.

He scrambled, his boots finding little purchase on the slick floor. He crawled, his hands sliding through filth. The tremors were still there, a full-body vibration that sent every movement wide of where he aimed it.

His mind, a subroutine stuck in a loop.

Alene: file not found.

Francis: access revoked.

Santo: fatal error.

Sharon: unreachable.

Network status: isolated node.

The roar was deafening now. He could feel the air in the tunnel compressing, a foul, cold wind rushing past him.

The fever was now a secondary enemy with its heat making the darkness pulse a dull, sick red behind his eyelids.

There. A pinprick of light, swimming in and out of focus. Twenty metres ahead.

He lurched to his feet, slipped, and fell to his knees, the impact sending a jolt of agony through his bruised hip. He crawled, his breath coming in ragged sobs, his heart hammering against his ribs. Water sprayed his back, cold with filth, heralding the crushing wave.

He reached the light source. It was a small reinforced glass hatch, its frame thick with rust. An old overflow access. It was high on the wall, out of reach.

He threw himself at the wall, his feet slipping in the muck. His hands clawed at the concrete and found a rusted rung. He grabbed it, his bad shoulder wrenching. Then his hand, slick with fever-sweat, spasmed. His fingers slid off the corroded iron and he slammed back down, his hip crashing against the concrete wall.

“Fucking hell!” he screamed in frustration as much as agony.

The first surge of the flood tore at his legs, cold and impossibly strong, filled with debris that hammered against his shins. He screamed again, the cry swallowed by the deluge.

He hauled himself up the ladder, the tremors now so violent he could barely hold on. The water was at his waist, trying to peel him from the wall. He reached the hatch. It was sealed by a corroded locking bar. He grabbed the lever, but his fingers, wet and spasming, slipped from the rusted metal.

His hands. His bloody hands. They had always served him until now.

The flood was at his chest, almost ripping him off the rung. With a sobbing roar, he threw his entire weight against the bar. The rusted mechanism shrieked and gave way. He pushed the hatch inward and spilled through onto a dry concrete floor, wet and shaking and broken.

He had a fraction of a second to register escape before the main flush hit. He scrambled back, grabbed the hatch’s heavy handle, and slammed it shut. A heavy thud as the seal engaged, then a concussive BOOM that rattled his bones as the wall of water struck the other side of the glass. He leaned against the hatch as if his body weight were needed to keep it closed. Through the thick, weeping port, the torrent of filth tore past, its roar muffled by the glass.

Once the flush had subsided, he sagged down the wall to the floor, caked in filth. His breathing came in ragged shudders, and then suddenly he started to laugh. It wasn’t the laughter of relief that comes from surviving a calamity, rather he had just realised that Santo’s tranquilliser, which should have kept him under for hours, had been burned off quickly by his overclocked metabolism. The pathogen that was killing him had just saved his life.

After a few moments, when the laughter had subsided, he pushed himself up and scanned the small concrete overflow junction. He ran his shaking hands along the wall, searching for a hidden panel, a loose conduit, anything. There was nothing. Just concrete and damp. The place had been picked clean years ago. A dark tunnel led out the far side. His only exit.

He was a component without a network, a packet without a destination, a signal degrading by the second.

His entire schematic, corrupted or deleted. All except one clean node. One objective that the fever and the grief couldn’t touch.

Sharon.

He’d failed to repair the circuit board. Failed to repair himself for the sake of their marriage. He pushed himself to his feet. Maybe he had enough time left for one more repair.