BLOODCAPE
Chapter 147: The Weight That Remains

Chapter 147: Chapter 147: The Weight That Remains

The plaza was quieter than it should’ve been.

Sector Core, once the brightest artery in the city’s heart, now blinked with halved ambition. Neon ran on delay. Holosigns flickered faint, like they were waking up slow from a long dream. Only the dome above kept time — casting dawn in vertical streaks across the architecture like a sun bleeding through cracked glass.

Hernan walked alone through its center.

No escort. No surveillance.

No name overhead.

The riot barriers had been dismantled. Civilian foot traffic passed steadily, but with a strange rhythm — as if each step was still asking permission. He passed a baker brushing soot from her storefront sign, two street techs rewiring a news node, a man repainting his food cart by hand. None stopped him. None saluted. None screamed.

But they looked.

Like he was something just outside language. The kind of face you remembered from a half-waking dream. One you couldn’t explain — only feel.

He didn’t wear his coat anymore. Just a simple gray tunic, collar low. His scar visible again, like a story he’d stopped apologizing for.

A flock of drones passed overhead. Silent. Observing. But no alerts pinged. No priority feeds updated. The central feedboards — once choked with Echo-confirmation tags, stability slogans, Scorpio memory protocols — were blank.

Not clean.

Just empty.

Aya stood waiting by the old statue of the Zodiac oculus.

Iro beside her, arms folded, eyes scanning reflexively like the mission hadn’t ended.

They didn’t wave.

He didn’t nod.

But when they reached each other, they didn’t speak for a while. They just stood there, in the cool silence that lived between things once whole.

Aya was the first to break it.

"No feed records updated in forty-eight hours. No signs of B. No resonance echoes. Nothing."

"Public sentiment?" Hernan asked.

She shook her head. "Not negative. Not positive. Just..."

"Gone?" he offered.

"Diffused," Iro said. "People don’t remember who did what. They just know the loop stopped. The friction is gone."

"And Dekra?" Hernan asked.

Aya looked down. "Signal dropped an hour after you stepped out of the Nexus. Clean disconnect. No trace."

They let that sit for a moment. Long enough for a tram car to hiss by and disappear into a shaft of reflected light.

Finally, Iro gestured behind Hernan with a tilt of his head. "You’ve got a fan."

Hernan turned.

A child stood at the edge of the plaza — alone, small, wearing mismatched shoes and an oversized jacket. In one hand: a piece of paper. Folded. Scuffed at the corners.

The child approached slowly. Cautiously. But not with fear.

Just... reverence.

He stopped a few feet from Hernan, held out the paper.

Hernan took it gently.

Unfolded it.

A sketch, drawn in colored graphite — rough, but deliberate. A man standing beneath a storm, arms slightly raised, coat flared. Hernan. The scar down the left cheek clearly marked.

But the eyes... blank.

Two hollow ovals. Unfinished.

Or perhaps impossible to finish.

"Is this me?" Hernan asked.

The child nodded once.

Aya watched silently.

Hernan looked again at the drawing, then knelt.

"What do you think I did?" he asked, voice low.

The child shrugged.

"You stopped something," the boy said. "I think."

Hernan didn’t smile. He just nodded, once.

"Thanks," he said, and carefully folded the drawing.

He slipped it into his coat pocket — where the badge used to go.

The boy watched him a moment longer, then ran off.

No one else in the plaza reacted.

Aya turned toward the skyline. "You know the strangest part?"

"What?" Hernan asked.

"There’s no tags anymore. No metadata, no classification blur. Even Scorpio’s tertiary nodes are silent."

"Feels wrong," Iro said.

"Feels free," Hernan replied.

They stood there as the light climbed.

Above them, the dome shimmered — clear now of Echo reflections, no overlays, no curated icons.

Just open sky filtered through old glass.

Undefined.

Awaiting the next story.

Scene 2: "Echoes in Maintenance"

The observatory had long since lost its function.

Once, its domed crown had tracked orbital drift, upper-atmo surveillance patterns, and the cyclical alignments of the city’s artificial moons. Now it sat lopsided on a hill of collapse-earth and cracked lattice supports — its glass panels long since removed, its control room scavenged for parts.

But below it, buried in a maintenance subroute accessed only by crawling past a disused water pump and a rusted keylock panel, something still pulsed.

Aya ducked beneath the bent conduit pipe, her boots thudding softly on grated floor.

It wasn’t a scheduled diagnostic. It wasn’t protocol.

It was instinct.

She found herself returning here often in the days since convergence — not to search, not even to confirm. Just to listen. The space had the quiet of machines that had once been alive, and might be again.

At the far end, beside a still-sealed interface ring and a patch of wall covered in faded system stamps, a single terminal remained live.

No other feed in the city connected to it.

It blinked slowly, breathing.

Aya stepped up to it, resting her hand lightly on the edge of the frame. Dust shimmered in the light of her portable field lamp, particles hanging weightless in the stillness.

She keyed in a scan command, expecting the usual static — environmental integrity, humidity readouts, obsolete routing paths.

But instead, a playback icon appeared.

Flickering.

She hesitated.

Then tapped.

The audio crackled for a moment, distorting like it was being pulled from memory itself. Then a voice emerged.

Calm. Low.

B’s voice.

Not as it had been during confrontation. Not poised, not clean.

But slow.

Searching.

"If this reaches him, I don’t know who I’ll be. I’m not scheduled to remember this.

I thought at first that I was the improvement. The next line. I had your maps. Your tone. Your convictions — only refined. Polished. Sanded free of guilt.

But the guilt... started bleeding in anyway. The system ignored it at first. Labeled it recursion drift. Emotional bleedthrough. Then I began to want it.

I tried to make them love you better. That’s what I told myself. That I was fixing their memory of you. Making them see the version that would’ve made it all simpler. All cleaner.

But now I wonder—if I remember him too well... do I stop being myself?"

The message ended there.

No final sentence. No signature. No closure.

Just silence.

Aya stared at the terminal.

Her fingers hovered over the delete key.

But didn’t press it.

She reached for her field pad instead, linked it briefly, then typed in a new tag:

FILE MARK: ACTIVE UNKNOWNLOCK STATUS: MANUALACCESS: RESTRICTED TO USER — AYA VELLAN

She closed the panel.

Then stood still for a long moment, listening to the hum of old machines — not because they were saying anything useful.

But because they still said something.

She climbed the conduit ladder slowly.

Back up to the surface, where dawn had finally begun to warm the fractured city skyline.

Hernan sat on the observatory’s outer ledge, legs hanging loosely over the side, coat folded beside him. He wasn’t watching anything in particular — just the open space, the clouds shifting like no one had asked them to.

Aya didn’t join him right away.

She paused just behind, looking out across the city. The public feeds remained empty. No loyalty indexes. No real-time identity tags.

Just stillness.

A lull in a city that no longer had a script to follow.

No curated grief. No official legacy.

Just people, slowly building forward.

Aya whispered into the wind, not for him — and not for B either.

But maybe for both.

"They remembered something. And let it go."

Hernan didn’t turn.

He just nodded.

Once.

As if to say: Let’s see what happens when no one tells the story for them.

And below, the city kept breathing.

Softly.

Together.

Unanchored.