The journey to the east was a tedious march through a landscape where industrial zones transformed into a wind-swept wasteland. The days were shortening, a sign that autumn was slowly welcoming winter. Towns here were rare, and they preferred to avoid even those unless they needed to steal water or food.
The border crossing of the Eastern March was a monstrous complex of steel and concrete, occupied by soldiers and automated towers. Searchlights sliced through the night at regular intervals. "See those towers?" Ash whispered as they crouched in a ditch a few hundred meters from the main gate. "They have sensors for Ambara there. As soon as someone with an infection or... some anomaly passes through that beam, it starts screaming like a wounded animal. And then those big things on the roof start shooting."
Pollux pulled his coat closer to his body. He felt the cold metal of his tags beneath it. To him, those towers were not just light and concrete. He perceived them as a high-frequency buzzing that vibrated in his bones. He felt the invisible webs that those devices wove in the air.
"Those lights... they aren't just looking for infection," Pollux said, concentrating on the regular rhythm of the buzzing. "They are looking for rhythm. Every person has their own pulse, their own interior. And those machines at the gate are set to catch everything that doesn't fit that rhythm."
"So they'll catch us as soon as we take a step," Ash remarked, checking her charges. "Because you stink of Skeldar and I stink of trouble."
"Maybe not," Pollux closed his eyes. "I can feel when those towers 'inhale'. Between those waves of buzzing, there is a moment of silence. It lasts only a few seconds before those devices reset. If we walk in that silence... maybe they won't see us."
Ash looked at him with a mixture of doubt and interest. "You want to dance between sensors? Pollux, if you're off by a second, they'll turn us into a sieve."
"I won't be wrong. Those little lights tell me when they are sleeping," Pollux replied. In reality, it wasn't just a guess. He was unconsciously "pushing" into the system. He felt that if he concentrated enough on that one specific spot in his head, the buzzing in front of him would weaken for a moment. As if he were tiring the machines for a while with his presence.
They moved forward. It was a bizarre theater. Ash, accustomed to running and explosions, had to adapt to Pollux's pace. He walked slowly, his head slightly tilted to the side, as if listening to music that no one else heard. Every few meters he stopped, hand outstretched before him, palm turned toward the gate. "Now," he whispered.
They ran through the first cone of light exactly at the moment the searchlight got stuck for a second. Ash noticed it—it wasn't a coincidence. That searchlight had a fluid movement, but at the moment they stood under it, it jerked as if someone had jammed a thumb into a gear.
"What are you doing?" Ash hissed when they reached the shadow of the main wall. "Those machines somehow don't want to work when you're nearby."
"They're old," Pollux lied, while a trickle of sweat ran down his forehead. He felt immense pressure in his temples. "They're jamming. They just need a little... persuasion."
They were directly under the gate's main terminal. Pollux placed his hand on the cold metal panel. He felt a vast amount of data in it, flowing toward the south. And in that flow, he again caught that logo—Aethel Biotech. But beneath it, hidden in deep layers, was something else. Something that made his heart race.
AETHEL BIOTECH. LOGIN REQUIRED.
Those letters pained his mind. The tags on his chest seemed to grow heavy at that moment. Pollux pulled his hand back sharply. "Pollux? What is it?" Ash noticed how he turned pale.
"Nothing... just... there's too much noise there," he made an excuse while trying to calm his breathing. "The gate will open in ten seconds. They're letting a supply convoy in. We have to hitch a ride on the chassis of the last vehicle."
Ash looked at him with a long, searching gaze. "Fine, Investment. If we get out of here, you'll have to explain to me exactly how you 'persuade' those machines. Because this isn't just good hearing anymore."
"Just stay close to me, Ash," Pollux replied and prepared to jump. "And try not to blow anything up until we're at least a kilometer past the border. Those sensors are... sensitive."
As the convoy passed through the gate, Pollux felt Aethel's systems "look" his way for a moment. He pushed that feeling deep inside himself, hiding behind Ash's nitrate scent and her chaotic energy. For this moment, he was safe. He was just a shadow beside a madwoman, heading into the world that created him—and that wanted him back.
The wasteland beyond Karimor, lined by the rocky cliffs of Skeldar to the north, was a no-man's-land. No lights, no terminals to scream, only an endless horizon and the wind carrying dust. It was exactly that moment when silence stops being an enemy and becomes a space where thoughts echo louder than footsteps in the snow.
They had been walking for hours. They had jumped off the convoy at a safe distance, and it had disappeared into the darkness like a mechanical snake. Pollux felt the tension from the border slowly fading from his head. That massive, impersonal pressure of Aethel's systems was gone, replaced only by the rhythm of their steps.
Ash walked beside him. In the darkness, she appeared smaller, more human. Her submachine gun was slung over her shoulder like an old stick. Pollux felt her—her heat, her breath, and the quiet, metallic pulse of her gear.
"Did you all stay silent this much in Skeldar too?" Ash spoke up. Her voice wasn't sharp, rather just curious, dissolving in the cold.
"Mostly, yes," Pollux nodded. "In the mountains, silence means the mountains are listening to you. Here... here silence is just waiting for a sound."
"Philosophizing," she remarked, but there was no mockery in it. "But you're right about something. When it's silent for too long, you start hearing things you didn't want to. Your own head. That's dangerous in our trade."
Pollux looked at her. "It's different for you. You make that noise outside on purpose. It's a way to silence everything else, isn't it?"
Ash stopped for a moment and looked at him. No light reflected in her eyes, only the emptiness of the night. "You're sharp, Investment. Maybe too sharp. Sometimes it's just better when the world is so loud for a moment that everything else vanishes. The past, the future, even those stupid questions you're asking me."
They walked on. They were just two wanderers lending each other a bit of certainty in the middle of nowhere. "Why didn't you actually run away?" Ash asked after a while. "At that border... you could have just gone through alone. With your talent, you'd get lost in any city. Why drag yourself along with someone who could blow you up at any time?"
Pollux smiled gently. "Because you're the only thing in this world that doesn't hum in my head like a broken motor. You are... pure chaos, Ash. And chaos cannot be predicted. My brain rests with you because it doesn't know what you'll do a second from now. It's... liberating."
Ash remained silent. She hadn't expected this. Mercenaries stayed with her out of fear or money. No one stayed with her for the "silence."
"You're a nutcase," she finally said, that familiar sarcasm returning to her voice. "But at least you're a useful nutcase. When we get to Tarnov, I'll buy you a proper coat. Yours looks like it was chewed by those rats in the warehouse."
"Will you buy it with my credits that you stole from that machine?" Pollux noted.
"Of course. I am your financial advisor, after all," she chuckled and placed a hand on his shoulder for a moment.
"And why are we actually going there?" he asked in a serious voice.
"It's a total backwater, but it's also a crossroads; you can go anywhere from there. South to the corporations or big cities, further east to older cultures, or you can go back north to Skeldar. Although this eastern one is probably a bit different from the one you're used to," Ash replied curtly.
They covered the last few kilometers in complete silence. The hum of the border zone finally died down, replaced by the empty, freezing night of the southern plains. Pollux walked mechanically. Every step resonated in his skull like a hammer blow against an anvil. That pressure he felt at the gate—that conscious pushing against corporate sensors—had left a taste of metal and fever in him.
They stopped at an old concrete pillar that might have once held some wiring. Now it just stuck out of the ground like a tombstone. "We're out," Ash exhaled and slung the submachine gun off her shoulder. "Karimor can only bark at us through the fence now. Good job, Investment. For a Skeldarian, you quite..."
She stopped mid-sentence.
Pollux stood leaning against a boulder, eyes fixed somewhere in the void. In the moonlight, his face looked as if carved from ice—pale, almost translucent. He wasn't breathing rapidly, but his body trembled slightly, as if the residual current from those terminals he had "put to sleep" moments ago was still flowing through him.
Ash stepped a pace closer to him. Her sarcasm vanished for a moment in the cold air. She reached out and lifted his chin with a finger. "Hey," she addressed him softly. "Look at me."
Pollux slowly focused. The world around him was still spinning slightly. He felt cold, but inside his head, it felt as if his brain were on fire.
"Aha," Ash said, and there was a strange, almost detached respect in her voice. "Something is leaking from your nose."
Pollux automatically wiped under his nose with the back of his hand. A dark, thick smudge remained on his pale skin. Blood. It wasn't red blood from a broken nose after a punch. It was dark, almost black, and smelled of iron.
"That's your price, isn't it?" Ash continued, still watching him with those red eyes of hers. "Nothing down here is for free, Pollux. That trick of yours with the 'little lights'..."
Pollux looked at his hand, then at the distant lights of the first industrial city on the horizon. He felt his strength returning, but that metallic aftertaste in his mouth remained.
"In Skeldar..." he began in a hoarse voice, "...it didn't hurt there. There was nothing to push against."
"In Skeldar you were in frozen cotton wool, sweetie," Ash let go of his chin and slung her weapon back onto her shoulder. This time, however, she didn't let him walk behind. "Here, the world is made of iron. And iron doesn't ask. Iron takes. Get used to it. Or learn to bleed quietly."
Pollux wiped the rest of the blood onto the sleeve of his coat. He looked at Ash, who was already walking ahead, her figure disappearing into the orange haze of the approaching morning. He stepped out after her. His legs were heavy, but for the first time in a long while, his mind was clear. The first lesson had ended. He had survived.