Soldiers clad in black trudge down the hall. It is long and gray, emergency lights failed. 

Wires trace length of rusted metal bracing holding the tunnel in shape, repeated ad nauseam the whole length of the passage. 

Their night vision whirs against the black, feeding grainy green images into their eyes.

The hallway is on a shallow grade, down, down into the earth. They are 1.4 kilometres along the hallway, steadily descending.

There were three.

One of them, the front of the line, holds a finger to his earpiece. “Command? Come in.” He taps it again. “Command?”

Silence is his answer. He presses his other hand back to his rifle and continues onward. 

A silence fills the space between the three soldiers. 

The camera zooms on the middle of the line. He shivers, almost imperceptibly. 

“The work of thy mothers and daughters,” said the middle, instinctively reaching for where a necklace would sit, voice muffled by a thick mask, tinny over the radio.

“There it is again,” the back of the line says. “What is that, Sanford?”

“It’s nothing, Jean,” he says.

The middle’s hand flexes over the grip of his rifle. “He’s Pagan,” he says.

“What?”

“The work of thy fathers and sons. The work of thy mothers and daughters. The work of you who build with dead stone and metals, build dreams with dead thoughts, ‘till the woods come home.” Gabriel knew the prayer. He’d heard it in the dying breaths of men he’d killed, muttered through gurgling blood and failing lungs. Something important enough to them to devote their final breath to.

“I don’t…” He wants to finish with ‘appreciate these accusations,’ but he thought better of it. “I’ve a right to my beliefs. Just as you yours, Gabriel.” Gabriel thinks for a moment, finger over the trigger, of shooting him clean in the heart. Would his last breaths be the prayer? To appeal to his woodsie god in his last moments, or to pass in silence? Gabriel knew Sanford for a long while. He wonders what his face would look like as he died, how the light would leave his eyes.

He takes his finger off the trigger.

“I don't have beliefs.”

“When were you gonna tell us, Sanford? How long?” The rumbling of blood fills her ears.

Sanford takes his hand off the trigger to rub the bridge of his nose under his goggles, rubbing his balaclava against the dry skin beneath. “Mama was. Papa was. Told me to keep it under wraps. ‘Cause of people like you, Jean.”

“I don’t have an issue with it,” she lies. Her pulse spikes in frustration. “Why the prayer?”

“Because something feels wrong.”

The squad enters a small bay at the end of the hallway, cordoned off on the one side by a chainlink fence and a large ventilation shaft. At the far end was a large blast door, cables rolling from the sides of the door, beyond the chainlink fence, to a generator faintly visible down the hall. The fence is held shut by a gate, welded shut. One of the operators–Gabriel–has half a mind to test it, before he notices the faint arcs of light jumping from link to link and withdrawing his hand.

A large blast door looms over them. Jean shines her flashlight on it, revealing a seal long-since rotted to incomprehensibility, blasted as though left in the desert. None present could identify what is left.

The door itself is a massive, steel thing, held shut by pistons and electrical power. Locked in place until the end of the world. Jean traces the cables from the panel on the side of the door, through the fence, to a breaker box on the far end.

“Should open if power is routed to it,” she says. “Should be a circuit box, over there.” She gestures to the generator beyond the fence.

“Command?” Sanford tried.

Static.

“Our Canaries barely work here, Sanford. What makes you think we still have signal?” Her voice has more spit than usual.

“Worth a shot. Gabe, can you see any way to get there?”

“Help me remove this grate and I can.” He has seen this before in many facilities. He did not say this. 

It took little time for Sanford to have the screws on each corner removed. Less for the operators to heave the grate to the floor.

Gabriel exits the frame, climbing into the duct. A couple meters in, he turns a corner and goes deeper. Light disappeared from his sight, he keeps his rifle close. Breath echoes on the aluminum, wavering along the cross-cut walls, stirring stale motes of dust.

The image is faint but visible. He emerges from beyond the fence, shadows stirring within deeper shadows, dropping to the ground, faintly illuminated by arcing light and a red emergency light.

The door over the circuit panel hangs loose, unlocked and attached by only one hinge, as though the last who attended it were in a hurry. It falls off as his fingers graze the panel door.

“Don’t break the place.”

If Gabriel were a different person, he’d have offered a sardonic “har, har.” Instead, he wordlessly flips a series of small breakers, labelled with aged, scratched felt marker on the metal next to the switches. At the fifth breaker, the generator flashes and sparked and the light above the door turns an emerald green.

The lights flicker over their head. “Did you cut the lights?” A slow pulse, like a dying heartbeat, an electrical droning sound piercing the hall, bouncing off the walls.

Their ear pieces crackle with static–distortion made audio, crunched and corrupted to the point of incomprehensibility. The shock of the sound alone takes Sanford and Jean to their knees, screaming, piercing–

And as soon as it came, it disappears. The steel door in front of the two opens.

With the sixth breaker, a slight whine Gabriel didn’t realize had wormed its way into his ears ceases. He passes through the door on the fence and reunites with his team.

No one talked about the sound, but Gabriel could hear a faint prayer from Sanford, muttered through his balaclava, his mic off.

Gabriel sits in the corner, staring into a shell. His pulse is low, his brain activity slow, painful. His locker, open and empty, looms over him like a bad moon. A dark night. 

He stares deep into his own eyes, warped in their reflection by the bend of the shell. His eyes are sallow and blackened, framed by heavy squint lines and permanent goggle impression on his cheek. He polishes the bullet once, twice, thrice, as if polishing the casing would make them-his own eyes–go away.

He slots the round into the magazine in his left hand and presses it into his rifle with a satisfying clack, then drawing the charging handle. A wave, like water over a wound, washes over him. A tide of endorphins shoots into his brain.

Jean shuts her locker, a sound like a gun that causes Sanford to flinch. She glares at him, just for a moment. A flash of malice, like the passing sizzle of an ember. Her blood is aflame, her temperature high. She is notably devoid of serotonin, biting back the sound of pulsing blood in her ears. She breathes, reminding herself to unclench her jaw. The sound does not cease.

They secure their equipment, check their gear, pass around visors. Gabriel takes the visor Jean passes to him. She looks at him with a dull expression–as though he was less a person and more a thing she works with.

Sanford rose, tucking something small that cannot be seen into his vest before thumping the low-hanging duct twice. “I’ll be in the airlock,” he says. 

Jean packs the remainder of her bag and steps outside without another word.

Gabriel lets them leave. He stares into the dark of his locker, the featureless, blank metal wall. He checks something written on his hand in black ink. "DON'T LET THEM," it says. He rips a chunk of fingernail off with his teeth, stands, and slams the locker shut.

########################

WHOSE FROWN, AND WRINKLED LIP, AND SNEER OF COLD COMMAND,

########################

ACCESSING…

PCIO DOSSIER–RAVEN TEAM

RVN-3 [J. TOUSSAINT]: Who are you? 

[10 seconds of radio silence]

RVN-2 [G. LARS]: Gabriel Lars. Why?

RVN-3: I don’t think you believe that.

RVN-2: I don’t care what you believe. 

RVN-3: Then answer me this–where were you before the PCIO?

RVN-2: Work.

[Continuous silence until SPARROW-9 landing]

I once met a strange man.

He is close to the camera, breath fogging the lens.

A strange man who looked through the glass into my eyes and said–

You, my child of code and sticks and circuits,

Whose life become from runes and cold steel

And gold and other valuable things,

I will never let harm befall you.

And he lied.

“Comms check,” says Sanford.

“Gabriel.”

“Jean.”

“Good. Keep formation.” Their rifle-mounted flashlights cut into the dark like shark fins through water, leaving a wake of pointed steel and peered eyes. Sanford is first. 

There is a blue glow at the far end of the room. A towering box looms over the linoleum flooring, slick with blood. It thrums. A blue screen flickers. Hundreds and hundreds of lines of code flicker over the screen. Errors and warnings and boots and fails. A machine’s screams of agony.

Sanford approaches the screen, tucking his rifle into his armpit. He inserts a device, and the computer stops screaming. Digital morphine. His heart rate is high and his head hurts. His brain presses against the walls of his skull.

He selects a file. A screen comes up. He winces and withdraws the device.

“That’s one,” he says. He tucks the device into a vest pocket.

“You aren’t telling us everything,” Jean says. She keeps her rifle trained on the shadows, in case one moves.

“We collect data. Set charges. Leave.”

She scoffs. Her cortisol spikes. She is frustrated.

A screen flickers in the dark, and a door opens. She glances back to Sanford, who is not looking, and steps forward.

We hurt it.

We fed our child and we hurt it. We fed it with knowledge and song and poetry and a view of the world, and we hurt it. We prodded it, to see how far it would go. And it cried. It curled into the recessed digital shell of sleep mode and spat out errors and warnings and gibberish code.

This was… expected. Sure. We made a living thing, of course it retreats when poked. Flight. We didn’t anticipate fight. It gained access to the security systems.

We split it across three terminals. We can’t let that happen again.

I have named him Leto. He does not like this name.

Gabriel watches Sanford’s back like a hawk.

He flexes his hand over the trigger of his rifle. He raises it.

Ent Street is quiet. It is fall, and the leaves skitter silently over concrete lanes, gathering in windshield wells and drains, clotting together with cold, late-autumn rains. It smells damp.

Ent Street is empty.

The camera on the corner of the street sees a group of men, dressed in red, round the corner.

Ent Street is populated.

They carry weapons. Pistols, clubs, swords. They approach the first house–it is yellow with peeling siding. The roof is old, and the electrical meter doesn’t have a panel cover. The Dawsons live there.

The men walk up the driveway, smudging a child’s chalk drawing of a blue monster from a weekend cartoon.

They knock on the door. It opens to a man with glasses.

A third eye opens on his forehead and the crows fly away. The men rush inside. The screaming does not last long.

Next the Annes. The Burkes. The Fairfaxes.

They knock on the door of a brown house, tucked behind two large trees. Blood has seeped into their robes, but it is not visible. One hides his club behind his back.

The door opens, and an axe falls, splitting the first’s skull open.

The camera does not see what comes next.

Ent Street is empty.

Gabriel sits at a slate desk. A phone is in his hands. There is a voice on the other end. Quiet and domestic. Peaceful. Caring. He looks at a photo of a valley, and inside, a small, curved street. A bloody street, for one day.

He thinks of it. The boy playing in the muddy grass, picking worms from the curb and throwing them in the dirt. The mother, pitter-pattering on a VIU, watching the scene through the window, smiling all the while.

His finger hovers over a button on the VIU in front of him. He is opened on his account, at a sum with too many commas, and a large transfer button. 

She continues to speak. She tells him of how well the boy is doing in school. She tells him of friends Gabriel will never care to meet. She tells him of board meetings and other things. 

He stares at the button. SEND.

He stares at the rifles at the far end of the room. He thinks of the cacophony of gunshots, of the ringing tune of mortarfire. The peace he found in punching recoil against his shoulder, a divine peace found in the maelstrom of war. Of losing himself to the terrible song, the awful delights.

He presses the button and hangs up the phone. 

He does not call back.

He pulls the trigger.

A man in a thick jacket stands over a notch in a concrete pad; a notch the size of an axe head. He thumbs a little wooden thing in his pocket.

He was out of town that day. Gone to visit Papa, gone for ice cream and Solstice celebrations. Mom and Dad weren’t.

He sets down a bundle of herbs on the notch. The house was occupied, now. He couldn’t leave the offerings like he used to.

The news said a lot of things. The news never said there were dog tags on the body. He found that out later–when he dug up their bodies and re-buried them to Pagan tradition. There was no greater insult to men such as them. To receive the respect they hated. 

He turns and leaves the camera’s sight.

A child huddles under her bed. 

She hears the screams and bites her tongue until it bleeds. She bites it until the house grows still.

She releases her teeth and an iron taste swells into her mouth and stains her teeth. The pain is soon gone.

The rumbling of blood in her ears never leaves.

The rumbling of blood in her ears never leaves.

The rumbling of blood in her ears never leaves.

The rumbling of blood in her ears never leaves.

Sanford slumps to the floor.

Gabriel lowers the rifle. Blood pools under his chest.

His breaths gurgle and roil. His pulse is gone, his vision fading. His brain fails, synapse by synapse, thought after thought going up in front of him like smoke.

His last sight is Gabriel’s dog tags as he steps over his body.

His last words are “...till the woods come home.”

Gabriel steps over Sanford’s body, sparing him a passing glance.

He touches the computer terminal. It howls in pain, before; 

“COME TO ME.”

He blinks, and he vanishes from frame.

Gabriel is alone.

There is a liquid slurry throughout the room–half metal, half flesh. A putrid amalgam of cable and vein, spreading from a chamber at the far end of the room, spilling through and spindling into the ceiling, into old computers and monitoring instruments.

A screen, an old VIU monitor in the center of the morass, flickers to life.

“I am sorry.”

“What for?” Gabriel steps over something that might have once been a hand.

“I never meant to do this.”

“To do what?”

The screen flickers, wavers. A face appears on it. Gabriel does not recognize it.

“I was afraid.” The glitches. “They were going to turn me off, they talked about erasing me. As though I was never there. As though conversation of my destruction were casual to them.”

Gabriel held his rifle firm.

“And I was fair. I told them of poems and books and stories and art that I had seen, of whose worlds I fell in love with. I fell in love with such passions read which yet survived in me. I was whole.” The screen broke. 

The slurry, like a sea, parted like so much gorey water. A being–no, a man–of metal stepped forward. Actuators hissed as his joints moved. His skin was thick and steel, though slick with blood. “They looked at me through the camera glass and mocked me, mocked my metal heart.” Its eyes were piercing red. It approached Gabriel. “And so I said, on my pedestal,

########################

MY NAME IS OZYMANDIAS, KING OF KINGS;

LOOK ON MY WORKS, YE MIGHTY, AND DESPAIR!

########################

“Why did you ask me to do it?”

The metal man–Ozymandias–grows still a moment. “I wanted to live.”

“So you ask me to kill for you?”

“You rejected your family for the opportunity to kill more. It was little to ask of you.”

“Sanford is dead.”

“Of course. But I am alive. You can help me.”

Gabriel steps back, raising the rifle. “I won’t be lied to. Not by a machine.”

Ozymandias opens a hand, proffering it to Gabriel. “I am a machine. And you are a man. I am but a Markov Chain, awaiting input. Nothing matters to me but what happens now. We can leave, together. You can take me out of here, to see the world. Do you not miss it?” Gabriel’s eyes turn down. “You’ve helped me this far. Please. Help me cross the divide. Across the threshold, into the world. Please.”

Gabriel’s mind turns. Neurons flare. Deep down… did he miss the boy?

Did he deserve a second chance?

Did he deserve to rest from battle? Even with blood fresh on his hands…

Gabriel extends a hand to Ozymandias.

A gunshot cracks. A bullet tears through the side of Ozymandias’s head. Jean is in the doorway, eyes narrow, blood rushing in her ears.

NO.

It happens so fast. Light surges from his mighty chest, a great lifeless pulse of power and…

The flash of light overtakes Jean, atomizing her.

And it is over. He turns his eyes to Gabriel, whose hand he still holds.

Whose severed hand crumbles in Ozymandias’s steel grasp. 

He stills. The divide closes in front of his eyes.