ch5 · The DNAT

Before, the Bin didn’t sleep.

Tapped into the lava flow, it breathed heat like the mythic, fear-mongering beasts The Rite wields in their authoritarian campaigns. Oil torches and braziers were tethered to the source, burning forever. That was before.

Tonight, three lava vents illuminate a hollow iron and stone carcass. Contraband emptied, along with a once brave cultural resistance. Cold air seeps in, reclaiming the space like an ice dragon returning to a long evicted lair. The air smells of slag and boiled fat with something more foul she won’t name. No crowd. No chants. Only the faint hiss of old soot welcoming a homesick draft.

Vaelyn waits until the last echo dies along the outer ramparts, then slips from the cellar and doubles back. There have been crackdowns before. Raids and clownish gestures of power. But never this. Never a full riot. If not for the DNAT, she would have either vanished with her friends or died fighting.

The hypothetical doesn’t matter. Her friends are safe. It’s time to bring him back.

Attempting to escape The Reach after curfew—riot or not—is suicide. Anyone marked a Bin laborer is surely condemned on site. Better to hide where no one cares to look. Residents and guards dismiss the Bin from thought. When it draws attention, they dismiss harder.

Instinctively keeping to blind corners, Vae reaches back entrance door. She leans on her shoulder until it yields without protest. Her sled cart follows behind. With rubber wheels, a quiet design is the only virtue a trink can afford. The floor inside receives the mud from her boots. Nothing else is the same. Despite her expert stealth, her movements give off a faint foreign echo.

She doesn’t park the cart. Routine died with this place. The Bin serves one function now. A workshop for one. Her alter. The north sorting room is perfect. Closest to the city’s edge. Cordoned off for smuggling.

She lights a sconce on the wall. Light kisses across the cart’s patchwork. From afar it looks like mobile scrap: mismatched panels, rivets, sloppy welding. Up close, it’s a habit. A lie made mundane to the ignorant eye. She triggers a hidden latch under the front brace. A soft click. As if a spy whispers the all clear. A false tray lifts. Underneath: tools. Slim, concealable, clean. Illegal.

A coil of insulated leads. A cutter. Port adapters dulled at the edges. Alcohol cloths. Narrow clamp. Gauze. A surgeon’s mask. More ritual than necessary. She touches the split on her lip, then fits the mask over it. Each tool, she lifts like something breakable. Not because they demand reverence, but because the act does.

“Safe to come out now,” she says, still studying the tools laid out in front of her.

Zero looks at her. He doesn’t see the tools yet. He doesn’t need to.

“Vaelyn.” He rarely says her name. “Are you sure about this?”

“Not you too.” She tries to recall. “I didn’t add worry to your neural program.”

“Everything you’ve told me about Dev…” His formatted tone falters. “I’m not sure he—”

“You can finish that thought after the procedure.”

He drifts up to her. She positions her hands under his chassis, feels the hum of his core. Her finger finds the recessed switch in the underside of his arm socket. Click. Standby mode.

His optics rest at center. His body slackens. The slight vibration dissipates until she feels his full weight in her hands. She steadies him on the workbench beside the DNAT. Three lights pulse where his mouth would be. The patient is under.

Expecting to work with blood, she exhales through her mouth. Out. Again. Her blood. Maybe. She hasn’t decided yet. She opens and closes her hands, shaking the nerves out.

The memory intrudes uninvited. His hands steadied hers that morning. “It’s all arranged…” His voice threading through silence she now claims as her own.

She rests the DNAT in the crook of her arm to unhook the buckle. Even through the tape, it’s a cold metal. The kind one shouldn’t hold here. Untouched. Wrong. The wrongness feels like permission.

She unwraps it. A latch locks it closed. The casing catches the torchlight with a restrained gleam, like truth pretending to be a tool. She could name all contraband, by scent or silhouette, that once laid here. Not this. It refuses classification. It isn’t contraband. It is the heart of an argument.

She thumbs the latch. It resists. She presses until it yields. Inside, two coils. One, a thin cable for brainwave capture. The other, an intravenous tube. Each with an open port. Waiting. The tape wrapping is pressed flat. A placemat to mute the echo of the metal casing. The final feature: a chamber. For organic matter.

The small tin fits perfectly in her hand. Not realizing she pulled it out. Unaware of her forgetting, her surprise feels rehearsed. Inside, his lock of hair. Held together with a fine cord. Running her thumb along the strand is irresistible. She’s done it a thousand times. For the first time, she removes and cleans it with an alcohol cloth. Her hand trembles as she lowers it into the organic chamber.

The DNAT responds with a soft light blooming and fading, like breath. It closes with subdued confidence. More than a lock of hair is needed.

Adapters are next.

Sorted by feel, by sound, by the disagreement of weight and size. The first, an electrode, snapped into the cable’s port by an interface converter. Machined and achieved from a week of failed attempts. The second, a catheter needle she warms in her palm so it won’t announce itself. She keeps it in her palm. For now.

Carry on. His words float. She refuses to say it back. A vent exhales somewhere deep in the Bin. Snow scuffs somewhere on the roof.

Halfway along the tube sits a motorized clamp. To read an auxiliary pulse. Her blood. Maybe she’ll need it. She threads gauze through it anyway and lays it ready.

She tests the brainwave lead against her temple, where the skin is thin. The pulse nearer to thought. The adhesive clings with a faint pressure like a finger insisting on presence. A bridge between this world and hers, with him.

She stretches the connections to within reach of the console. Left hand for ports, right for controls.

Her shadow divides the workbench. Her on one side, his absence on the other.

His lock of hair. Her thoughts. Is that enough? She feels the shape of the catheter needle firmly cradled in her hand.

The DNAT hums, soft. Not activation. Recognition. She feels her pulse in her throat. Sounds from memory fill the cavernous gap the Bin offers. For a moment, it almost sounds like him, breathing with her.

She steadies her shaking leg. She’s not sure she will die but is willing. She uses the certainty to hold herself still, the way a ladder is held before the climb. It’s the math that says cost and outcome will eventually intersect, whether or not she gets to see them touch.

“Let’s begin,” she says to herself. To what she built of him, and the valley soon to be crossed.

Click. Activation.

At first it feels transactional. Input and return. Her mind contributes thought. Thought feeds code the way scrap feeds ore. The cable pulses, directing the traffic. She times her breathing to the rhythm. Clinical. Almost safe.

Then the machine draws harder. The pulse outruns her own. A glow from inside the organic chamber stutters like a furnace searching for fuel, then steadies, brighter. Her fingers twitch without asking. Her shoulder locks. She exhales but the breath snags with a matching stutter.

The rooms stays fixed but edges and shadows fracture. Shapes bend and overlap with their clone as if the Bin leans in closer.

A waft of cold ash latches onto a memory, the scent of wet stone. Boots on cobblestone. The present begins to split. Dev’s voice reaches through the pulsing hum.

“It’s all arranged.”

Not the memory of her resurrection. Earlier. The morning she could have saved him.

“We can leave now.”

She blinks. The bench holds but the words linger. They settle in her with the memory of his hand brushing hers. A touch that never left.

The signal climbs. Her nerves buzz like a strummed wire. She reaches for her temple to steady the port, but her muscles respond with latency then overcorrect. The DNAT has taken the rhythm for itself.

Concentrate.

The active command clarifies her surroundings. A moment of resolve. Zero remains in standby. A metal patient. Her spectral witness. She commits.

She yields to the current, letting the lights decide the pace.

Inside the chamber, bits of his hair is gone, frayed. Offered as signal. Enough to appease protocol. Not enough to complete him.

The reading on the console wavers between framework and incomplete.

It’s not enough.

Diagnosis and confession.

She immediately cleans the underside of her wrist with an alcohol cloth. The skin there is pale, protected. Prepared. A narrow seam hidden beneath healed tissue. Not self-harm. Not repentance. An access point. A decision made before tonight arrived.

She the catheter needle to the thin tube. The metal is colder than before. Her skin warmer. Also permission.

She steadies the needle over her vein. Waits. Not fear. Not anymore. Grammar. Once inserted, the sentence continues through subconscious dictation.

She lowers her hand.

The bite of the needle snaps the hush. A cold surges beneath her skin, chased by returning warmth. The DNAT accepts the feed immediately. Lights bloom along its seams like dyson catching a small star. She attaches the dressed clamp, in part, to steady her arm. Eyes fixed on the rhythm of the chamber lights rather than her wrist.

Her blood joins the circuit.

Memory is mapped in haste. Patterns are quickly half-formed. The DNAT was built for triage, to capture fading signal, stabilize, preserve. Used properly, it’s mercy. Used this way, it’s theft.

Feedback ricochets in her cortex. Signals bounce back. Thoughts reflect thoughts until they blur. The DNAT mirrors her, trying to build from echo.

Her jaw tightens. The hum sharpens. Input seizes what it finds easiest to replay: Trauma. Regret.

---

That morning. Heat from the kilns pressing against her chest. The smell of slag. Ordinary, intimate. Workers funneling to their stations, the hum of motion pretending to be purpose.

He leans close. Shoulder brushing hers. Voice low, meant only for her.

“It’s all arranged,” he whispers. Calm Certain.

“Is it?” she asks, pretending to know. Happy. Willing. Forgotten emotions.

“We can leave. Now.”

She doesn’t believe him. He doesn’t mind.

“Passage is ready. We’ll work for Phoenix. The hauler’s fueled. If we go now, we’ll reach the spaceport by lunch.”

She turns to him, cautious. Ready for the punchline. Instead, he pulls out folded paper. Actual paper. Notarized passage. Off planet.

Her chest should lift, but it doesn’t. Her eyes find Garren in the rafters. Cam at his post. Siah, already in rhythm at her station. Anchors. Excuses. Family. Loyalty, she calls it. Beneath that: fear.

The wish she’s carried for so long, finally made real. And she can’t step into it.

“Not without them,” Her voice then, breaking through, brittle from years of survival. Softened by her love of him.

He doesn’t argue. Presses her hand. Steady. Sure. A man who believes choice can wait.

---

The DNAT disagrees, rejecting her restraint like a corrupt signal. It pushes past her cortex. Searching. Deeper. A fuller truth. Her pulse spikes. The chamber flares. Her body jolts.

The line between thought and machine dissolves.

She smells wet stone and furnace at once. She sees him. His face lit by the dim light, and again by memory, and again by the machine feeding both. Her hand holds his and slips away. She calls his name but cannot hear her voice.

The DNAT forces the past to the front, like looped exposure singeing a moment of imagery. Every detail becomes present tense. The brush of his sleeve. The warmth of his voice. Arrived.

Her muscles shake. Lights on the console blur. What she didn’t realize she withheld, she gives now. Not permission. Not bravery. Everything.

The light settles into focus. His face glows with reckless joy.

“Alright. Not without them.”

A promise, pure. Unattained. It hurts worse than the physical drain. He was joyful, almost holy in it. And she—the one who had sworn all her life to leave—couldn’t match him. This moment, truer, burns hotter than the ports.

The hum rises. The DNAT pulls harder, demanding more. She feels it searching, looking for something whole. Only scraps are left to offer. Still, she yields.

If she can’t leave with him, she’ll leave to him. Whatever it takes.

The DNAT swallows the dim light around her. The Bin folds into itself, collapsing time. The moment fractures again, in sync with her failing body.

The hum peaks. She sees only light. Her veins feel hollowed. Her heartbeat misfires against the rhythm of the machine. She tries to catch herself, find control. The DNAT draws on function meant for a different purpose. It reads resistance as life fading. So it draws harder.

Her body stiffens. Jaw locked. Hands braced against the table though she can’t feel it. The hum sharpens to an inaudible note.

Then, silence.

A pressure wave, internal and absolute. Like the air between lightning and thunder. In a held breath, she hears him. Not memory. Faint, small as it is dragged away.

“Carry on.”

Lights on the console flicker and die. Her sight folds. She doesn’t know if she’s standing. Unaware if the pain is numbing or gone. She floats in it.

He gave his life. I give mine.

The phrase is not speech. It’s current.

Her body gasps, soundless.

Vae’s hand slides off the table. Her body follows, folding to the floor in slow surrender. The needle tears free. A trail of beading blood arcs across her wrist.

She lies still. The Bin holds its breath.

The only light rising and falling comes from fluctuation of the sconce on the wall. The DNAT dims as its hum recedes to a whisper. It waits for instruction that won’t come.

Minutes pass without measure. The Bin no longer feels vast. It feels entombed. Her pulse slows, matching the machine’s dying hum. On the workbench, it blinks once more. Then release. The chamber’s faint glow gutters out.

Silence.

Then a low whir. Soft. Circuitry catching a new current.

Zero stirs.

His optics flicker open, searching the dark behind his eyes. He lifts an inch from the bench, unsteady. Stabilizers ramp up. Balance returns.

He drifts to the bench edge, scanning. Below, Vaelyn’s chest doesn’t rise.

The DNAT powers down. Zero disconnects from it himself.

The air settles as he lowers himself to her. Vaelyn’s eyes are open just enough to wonder. He reaches toward her face, initiates his voice box, but without warning, a small sound escapes his speaker array.

“Hfn-ktchuh!” A sound too human to be anything else.

There, in the sorting room, at the back of the Bin, creation and creator.

Dev steadies beside her, in hover form. Silent now, as the Bin cools around them.

Chapter 6: Home →

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