10. Friends and Comrades

The smog coiled thick over the abandoned textile factory where Claire had relocated the Brigade's headquarters. She'd chosen it for the skeletal looms—useful for hanging maps—and the stench of dye vats that masked rebel sweat. What she hadn't accounted for were the whispers.

The looms stood like skeletal sentinels, their rusted shuttles still threaded with fabric scraps that fluttered like surrender flags. Claire's maps curled at the edges where dye vat fumes rose in jaundiced tendrils, the acidic stench eating through parchment and resolve alike. The shadowmoths left frost in their wake—tiny fractal patterns blooming on ration crates, their crystalline edges slicing fingertips. When the doll appeared, its button eyes had been replaced with Talin-stones stolen from ISB helmets. They pulsed faintly, mimicking a heartbeat.

They started a week prior: patrols reporting shadowmoths circling their heads in perfect triangles, ration barrels inexplicably refilling with black-market honey, a child's doll appearing on her cot with a note—You forgot your birthday. Her 34th had been three days earlier, celebrated silently with stolen chocolate.

She was recalibrating a radio crystal when the air snapped.

"You always hated surprises."

Claire spun, knife drawn. The voice came from everywhere—the rusted gears above, the puddles underfoot, the static in her teeth. A silhouette flickered in the corner, smoke given fleeting shape.

"Fred, or should I call you Agent Deva."

"Devon, Devon Vael." The correction cracked like a whip. The shadow sharpened—a man's outline, edges bleeding static, one eye a pinprick of void-black. "The Agent's dead. The Chef's dead. I'm what's left."

Claire lowered the knife, not sheathing it. "Cryptic and pretentious. The smog rot your brain?"

The silhouette rippled, amused. "Rot's a process. You'd know, still hauling the Scholar's chains."

Her hand flew to her collarbone, where the Urban Guerilla sigil pulsed. "What do you want?"

"To unmake what they made us." The shadow gestured. A map of the city materialized in the smog, rebel outposts glowing red. "Your cells here, here, and here are compromised. The Inquisitors tap your comms via the Scholar's relays."

"Bullshit. Our codes—"

"Are variations of the Monarch's census algorithms. The Scholars gave you those 'unbreakable' ciphers." The shadow coalesced into something almost human, kneeling to trace a phantom finger over the map. "You're losing because you're still playing their game, Claire."

She kicked a dye vat. The shadow dissolved, reforming behind her.

"Prove it."

"Check your sentries. East alley."

East Alley – 03:17 AM

The rookie didn't scream when the shadowmoths swarmed him. The alley reeked of copper and spoiled milk. Frost spread from the recruit's thrashing form, crackling across puddles of dye runoff until the walls glittered like a Seraphim's reliquary. Claire's breath hung frozen midair as the moths poured into his ears, their wings humming hymns in a language that prickled her molars. When his giggles began, they echoed with layered voices—the rookie's reedy tenor overlaid with Devon's static rasp and a third, unfamiliar lilt that tasted of census office ink.

"Loyalty sigil," Devon's voice hummed from the moths. "Scholar's handiwork. He's been reporting to a Red Scholar handler since you recruited him."

Claire stomped a moth. It burst into static that stank of burnt sugar. "Why tell me?"

"Because you're next."

Claire didn't sleep. By dawn, she'd cross-referenced every recruit's file. The rookie's contact was a Scholar operative she'd trusted for years. She burned the evidence, watching the sigil on her collarbone dim with every page turned.

The flames spat embers that danced like rebel codes—danger-all clear-ambush. She'd learned to read fire before letters. At twelve, she'd burned her first ISB warrant in a trash can, mesmerized by how the Monarch's seal curled into ash. Now, watching her own sigil blacken, she wondered if loyalty was just another kind of fuel. The Scholar's voice haunted the smoke: "You'll lead them." Lead them where? Into another meat grinder stamped with different slogans?

Devon materialized as a distortion in the morning light, his presence warping the room like heat haze. "Ready to listen?"

"What's your endgame?"

"To break every chain. Starting with yours."

He flickered closer. The Urban Guerilla sigil burned.

The Baptism

He led her to a derelict chapel even the Brigade hadn't mapped. Veyra waited inside, her Inquisitor armor traded for a rebel's trench coat, eyes hollowed by the same void-dark as Devon's.

"Welcome to the Unseen," she said, voice layered with echoes.

Claire froze. "You're supposed to be dead. Murdoch's reports—"

"—said I died raiding a purifier plant?" Veyra grinned. "I didn't. We are still functioning as an Inquisitor cell, at the border towns."

Devon's form solidified briefly—a man-shaped rift in reality, static crackling where his heart should be. "The Scholars and Inquisition share a playbook. Sigils. Classes. Lies. Let me show you the truth."

He pressed a translucent hand to Claire's sigil.

The Urban Guerilla emblem fought back. Golden filaments lashed from her collarbone, embedding in the chapel walls like puppet strings. Veyra's stolen Scholar-robes caught one strand, yanking her into a marionette's jerking bow. "It's alive?!" Claire choked. "Alive?" Devon's static-laugh vibrated the rotting pews. "No. Just well-trained." With a surgeon's precision, he severed each thread. They writhed on the floor like decapitated vipers before dissolving into census reports and casualty lists.

The chapel's shattered stained glass became a kaleidoscope of condemnation—every shard reflecting a different betrayal. Her bones vibrated with the Monarch's laugh, a sound like steam valves rupturing. When the sigil tore free, it didn't bleed. It unspooled, tendrils of golden light dissolving into equations that stank of Scholar incense and Inquisitor interrogation rooms. Veyra watched hungrily, her void-eyes recording every twitch. Claire realized with dawning horror that the ex-Inquisitor's coat was stitched from Red Scholar robes.

PAIN.

Memories detonated:

- The Scholar branding her, his census badge glinting under rebel rags.

- A Inquisitor across the city receiving the same sigil, screaming as it seared his flesh.

- The Monarch's laugh echoing through both ceremonies.

When it ended, Claire was on her knees, vomit steaming in the smog-light.

"The System's a loop," Devon intoned, his voice resonant with the Void's harmonics. "Rebel or Imperial, you're fodder for their war machine. Let me free you."

Claire clutched her unmarked collarbone. The sigil was gone. "What… am I now?"

"Whatever you choose."

Name : Claire Lindberg

Age : 28

Art : Unbound(initiate)

Dawn

Devon watched her from the chapel rafters, his form barely a shudder in the dust motes. Below, Claire paced, testing her newfound void-sight—a ability to detect loyalty sigils glowing like tumors on every Brigade member.

"She'll resist," Veyra murmured, materializing beside him as a wisp of smoke.

"She'll adapt."

"And the others? The knife-wielder? The sniper?"

Devon's gaze drifted northwest, where Natalie's latest kill—a corrupt ration commissioner—made headlines. Holy Drones already circled her safehouse.

"One at a time."

Static bled from Devon's form, warping the chapel's dust into fractal patterns—a map of the city with glowing nodes at key locations. Natalie's safehouse. Gonov's sniper nest. The smog refinery where Lapen's sister coughed behind airlocks. "They'll need guides," Veyra murmured, her voice spliced with radio chatter. "Someone who knows the old pathways." Devon's silence was answer enough. Claire's void-sight would make her the perfect shepherd….

A moth landed on Natalie's whetstone as she polished her glaive. It unfolded into a note in Claire's handwriting:

Need you. –C

Natalie froze as the moth's wings unfolded, her reflection fracturing in the glaive's polished edge. The "C" bled static, dissolving into a string of numbers—coordinates matching the scars on her ribs from a Seraphim's whip. Old habits made her tongue the hollow molar where she'd once hidden cyanide. New instincts had her spit a curse in High Talin, the holy language burning her throat. The note burst into cold flames, searing a single truth into her palm that only void-touched eyes could read:

FREEDOM

The scar on her ribs ignited—a relic from the Seraphim who'd carved HOPE IS HERESY into her flesh and a smiling mouth with six angel wings. Natalie's glaive clattered as she ripped her shirt open. The coordinates now burned where the scar had been, her skin knitting into a void-map only Claire could decipher. Somewhere, a Holy Drone's camera whirred. She smiled, sweet as a rigged grenade. Let them come.