The Node is larger than he was able to model from inside it. Someone without the context would call it real: there is nothing in the view to suggest it ends. The boundary, when you reach it, is known as being ocean, generated on demand or already rendered to distances without practical ceiling. Candidates have tried to cross it expecting something on the other side. All were ejected. None of them saw what lay beyond, if anything.
The geography carries on regardless. Forest immediately below. Old growth, the canopy so dense it reads from here as a single surface, broken only by the silver threads of streams winding through it. The green of it does not process correctly. He has been in amber and black long enough that his eyes no longer know what to do with saturated green, and they fail at it repeatedly, and he lets them fail.
Past the forest: plain. Rolling land, cut through by a river that catches the sky in one long silver line from somewhere east of the hills to somewhere past the western edge of his sight. Wide enough at this distance to feel permanent. Something that has been there longer than the mine behind him.
Past the plain: more forest, more hills. And further still, at the limit of what he can resolve, a cliff face catching late light along its length, the silhouette of what sits atop it unmistakable in the way certain shapes are always unmistakable: height, walls, something built to overlook. He looks at it for a moment. The shape is almost right for a castle.
He turns from it.
Closer (close enough to reach before dark, if the slope is what it looks like from here) a scatter of structures breaks the treeline. Not a city. Too small, too quiet. A village, or the category of thing that earns that name by being practical: water, shelter, a fire already lit. Smoke from one chimney unraveling into the wind above the roofline. Paths between the buildings. The kind of settlement that has been there long enough to stop explaining itself.
And higher than the village, on a hill that rises from the valley floor with enough authority to be visible from anywhere in the Node: a cathedral. Old stone, darker than the hillside, towers intact, roofline unbroken. Not a fortification. Something quieter than that, and somehow more imposing for it.
He needs water. He needs to know what is below and what is past it and how far. He needs to be somewhere that is not a mine and has people in it who know things he doesn't.
He starts down the slope. His hands stop shaking somewhere in the first ten meters. He only notices they were shaking when they stopped to do so.
The descent is not clean. Below the exit gap the slope is loose shale for thirty meters, and he crosses it with care that costs time, weight transferred forward and down with deliberate attention on each step. His right foot makes a short note of every landing. He makes all the landings anyway.
Below the shale: a path. Not a constructed route. A line worn into the slope by the same descent repeated often enough that it became the obvious choice. He follows it without deciding to.
He opens the HUD.
(...)
STRANDS: 52 / 128
LIFESTRANDS: 84
GRADE: 1
INTEGRITY: 50 / 96
FLUX: 64 / 64
(...)
ANCHORS: -
(...)
He closes it. The missing Anchor is not new information.
A hundred and fifty meters below the mine face, he hears water.
The path drops toward a shelf of rock where a stream crosses it, thin and fast, cutting through a groove worn into the stone over years that have nothing to do with him. He crouches beside it. Cups his hands. Drinks until he stops being desperate about it, then sits back on his heels and breathes.
He is still there when he hears someone coming up.
The newcomer is moving steadily, weight forward, pacing the slope the way you do when you have done the descent before and know where the loose sections are. A big pack on his back. Over the upper body: partial plate, dark metal, fitted to move rather than impose. A breastplate and pauldrons, functional. No helm. The base suit visible underneath, the same close-fitting panel material as Lio's. A sword at the left hip, carried loose in a belt-ring rather than a scabbard.
The figure looks up from the path.
Brown skin, black hair pushed back by the wind. Mid-twenties. The jaw of someone who has had occasion to set it and did, more than once, and came to a working arrangement with that. The assessment is immediate and mutual: his eyes do the same inventory Lio's do, in the same order and at the same pace. Jumpsuit. Rings. Bare feet. Bound foot. No weapon.
Neither of them moves.
"Why are you carrying all of that?" Lio asks.
The other Candidate looks at him. The question has landed somewhere he didn't expect. "Because I need them?"
"You can't anchor them?"
A short pause. Something being recalculated. "I... I guess I could."
He hadn't considered it. The weight is habit: gear worn and carried because that is what you do with gear. Lio watches the recalculation run and says nothing.
"Mateus," he says, eventually. Not extended as an offer. Just stated. "Vanguard."
"Lio."
He doesn't say the rest of it. The rings say it for him.
They move to the edge of the path, out of the direct wind.
"Looks like you need boots," Mateus says, not expecting a response.
He produces a flask without ceremony and offers it across. Lio passes it back untouched: the stream already handled that. Food comes next. Dried, dense, broken and offered without ceremony: one piece larger than the other. Lio takes the larger piece because it is offered and because the mathematics of the split are not worth arguing.
"I've been at the settlement below the treeline for two days," Mateus says. "There are some Residents. Water's clean. They have a Ledger and a Locus."
"How far?"
"Hour and a half from here."
The foot will manage that or it won't, and finding out sooner is better than later.
"Any Anomalies on the way?" Lio asks.
"Nothing that initiates," Mateus says. "Residents in that valley know how to pick their ground. Low density, inoffensive population." A pause. "People don't usually get hurt around here."
He looks at Lio, as if evaluating his condition.
"There's a collapsed mine about halfway down the slope. Entrance is buried. Word is it got infested, so they sealed the access rather than clear it."
Lio says nothing.
Not completely sealed.
"When was your Reading?"
"Four days ago." Mateus looks at the valley. "Yours?"
"A few hours ago."
He takes that in without comment. Lio looks at the slope above them.
This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.
"In the mine."
He lays it out: the encounters with the Anomalies, learning how they moved and what they read. The shaft and the chain resonance windows. The Edge. Mateus listens without interrupting. One question, when Lio finishes. "The one at the Edge. Did it respond the same way?"
"I don't know," Lio says. "I didn't test it."
That's enough.
"I did my Candidacy in London," Lio says. "But I'm from France." He watches Mateus's face. "You know what it is."
"What?"
"The Aperture in Paris."
Mateus nods once. Nothing more required.
"I'm from S?o Paulo," Mateus finally says.
The wind has shifted, coming down the face now rather than across it. The smoke from the valley chimney continues in the same direction.
"I want to have another Reading," Lio says. Not a preamble. The relevant fact.
Mateus doesn't react the way most people would to hearing something they already suspected confirmed. He accepts it as information. "Keystones."
"Keystones."
"I've asked around." He turns the flask over in his hands. "Keystones show up in Ordeals sometimes. Not what people go in for. But some Candidates come out with one."
"I know it's not certain."
Mateus is quiet for a moment. "One per Candidacy," he says. "And the Reading isn't guaranteed to produce something different. The system reads the pattern and lands where it lands." He turns the flask over once more. "My uncle told me about a Vanguard. Used his Keystone at Grade 16, after his Second Ordeal. Came back Vanguard. He's still Vanguard." A pause. "I never understood what he was trying to get away from."
Lio already knew this. The information is not new. The weight of it is.
The cliff face on the far side of the valley is catching more light now. He wonders, briefly, if anyone has reached it yet, and what Grade that would require.
"I'll reach Grade 8," Lio says. "Then I'll see what the Ordeal gives me."
Mateus nods. He does not argue it.
"I need to join a Squad."
Mateus looks at him. "We can be a Squad."
No hesitation. Lio hadn't expected that.
"You'd team up with an Ally."
"What's wrong with Ally?" He doesn't look at the rings when he says it. "I won't say no to someone willing to fight beside me."
A pause.
"That's not..." Lio stops. "It can be that. But that's not why I'm asking."
"Why then?"
"Mesh. My first Protocol. It won't unlock without a Squad formation."
"Ah." Something shifts in Mateus's expression. A small recalibration. "So that's it."
"Is that a problem?"
"No."
He doesn't say anything else. The flask goes still in his hands, and Lio understands what he walked into.
"I don't know what Mesh does yet," Lio says. "I need to activate it to find out. But it's support architecture: it runs through whoever I'm linked with." A pause. "I'm not asking for a free ride. I want to know what I can give you before I ask you to trust it."
Mateus is quiet for a moment. Then he puts the flask away.
The light has moved in the valley. The afternoon is getting on.
Mateus stands and dusts the front of his breastplate with one hand, a gesture so habitual it doesn't look like something he chose to do. "Down today."
"I need boots," Lio says, because this is also true.
"Settlement has the Ledger." The same words as before, now logistics rather than information.
He gets to his feet. His right foot makes its note. He takes the first step, and the foot decides to manage.
They start down the path toward the treeline.
His rings pulse. He opens the HUD.
(...)
PROTOCOLS: Mesh
(...)
SQUAD [1/4]:
Elian Moreau Ally G1
Mateus Lucas Pereira Souza Vanguard G2
How?
He stops walking. Mateus is three steps ahead before he notices. "What?"
"Mesh," he says. "My first Protocol just unlocked. And..."
One on four?
Mateus turns back.
"Isn't that what it was supposed to do?" he asks.
He looks at the rings. He looks at the path downhill. He appears to assess whether this changes anything material about the next twenty-four hours.
"Does it do anything yet?" he asks.
"I don't know what it does."
Mateus turns back toward the valley. "Tell me when you figure it out."
Lio follows him down the path. The afternoon light catches the rings on his fingers and gives it back at the wrong angle, iridescent, unbothered. Mesh sits in the Protocols field like a door he still has to open.
He could check Mesh now. Allocate those four I/O points sitting unassigned since he got hist first Grade. But the foot is singing in a register he can't ignore anymore, and Mateus is right about the distance, and there's something else too: he doesn't want to make choices about new systems while he's counting seconds between steps.
Later. When he can focus.
They are into the trees when he asks.
"How did you do that?"
The canopy is dense enough here to cut the wind. The path is worn into root-threaded ground by a long habit of descent. Mateus keeps walking.
"Everyone can Squad with an Ally," he says. "You didn't know?"
He didn't. Ally documentation is thin: ATF briefs, ejection interviews, scattered forum fragments from people who never ran the Vocation themselves. Most of it contradicts itself. What just happened on the slope wasn't in any version.
"My uncle was a Wayfinder," Mateus says. "Grade forty-one when he got ejected. He fought alongside an Ally for most of it." He steps over a root without looking down. "What he told me doesn't match what people say."
"Doesn't match how?"
"Ally breaks the rules." Mateus says it like a weather fact. "You're an extra slot. The Squad has one member, me, and then you."
Lio doesn't answer immediately. He's thinking about the HUD entry still sitting in the corner of his vision: 1/4.
"One slot occupied on four, but we are two," Lio says.
"Exactly."
Is it a glitch?
He reconsiders before the thought finishes.
No. Too clean for a glitch. It's deliberate.
They walk in silence for several minutes, branches brushing their shoulders, damp earth underfoot. Then the name catches up with him.
"Wait," Lio says. "Pereira. Is your uncle Gabriel Pereira?"
Mateus nods.
The Gabriel Pereira. Not the first Candidate above Grade forty, but the first to do it in under ten years. Every ATF used him in their motivational decks until the footage rights expired.
"He fought alongside an Ally for most of it."
"Then there might be an Ally above Grade forty still active," Lio says.
"No idea."
They keep descending.
The settlement appears in layers.
First the smoke line through the trees. Then the roofs. Then the road itself, compacted dirt and old gravel, running between low stone houses with timber upper levels and deep eaves that push rain off the doorways. No walls around it. No gate. The people here built for weather and traffic, not sieges.
Residents move through the square without urgency. A woman carries a basket toward one of the stone houses. Two men unload crates near a storage shed. No one looks at Lio or Mateus directly, but the space around them adjusts. Paths shift. Conversations pause, then resume.
Lio's foot starts complaining as soon as the slope flattens. The thin wrap he made in the mine held long enough to get him down; now every step lands on heat.
Mateus says, reading his gait. "If you have Strands, the Ledger is that way. If you don't, I have some."
"I appreciate it but I would have to stick too close to you."
Everything you buy from a Ledger is anchored. If anchored to Mateus, it would shatter if Lio moved out his range with it. That's how he lost his Rusty Pickaxe.
The Ledger is a stone obelisk rising from the settlement square, chest-height to the pyramidion. The shaft is plain, unmarked. Only the four triangular faces of the pyramidion are carved with symbols: one interface per face.
Lio places his palm on the side with two circles overlapping, the one he knows as the interface for buying and selling.
A menu rises in his vision, projected the same way the HUD is. It indicates VERDANT #14 - LUKIA'S LEDGER, with a list of available items and their prices in Strands.
He browses the available items. One item catches his attention for a single reason: it's a Catalyst.
SINGLE INSIGHT CATALYST
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
On activation, obtain the knowledge of a targeted Anomaly.
CHARGE: 1 / 1
Defeat the targeted Anomaly to regain a charge.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
"Knowing is seeing. Seeing is knowing you didn't know."
"Knowledge"? Vague enough to be either useless or essential. No way to tell without using it.
It costs 3072 Strands to purchase. He has 52 Strands.
Okay, boots...
He filters the category to footwear. The list updates.
(...)
REINFORCED WRAPS: 16 STRANDS
TRAIL SANDALS: 24 STRANDS
FIELD GREAVES: 48 STRANDS
CLIMBING SPIKES: 96 STRANDS
(...)
He doesn't know what to do. The wraps or the sandals could offer minor protection. Open air would let the injury breathe. But he doesn't intend to keep the injury. Either would be enough. And that's exactly the problem. He has to check for alternatives. The Vault might have something better.
Mateus leans against the obelisk shaft, waiting without comment.
Lio lifts his palm from the pyramidion face. The projection fades.
"I think I should check my Vault." Lio concludes.
"Nothing interesting in here?"
"Nothing I can afford."
"Give me a minute then."
Mateus sets his pack down, shrugs out of the straps, and places his palm where Lio's had been. He reaches into the pack and begins pulling items out one by one. Salvage mostly. And, one by one, they shatter under his eyes.
"Where did you get all that?" Lio asks.
"Abandoned outpost around the mountain." Mateus pulls another item: a candlestick. It disappears like the rest. "Storage rooms mostly. Low threat. Enough Anomalies nearby to push Grade two."
"Locus is uphill," Mateus says after he has finished emptying his bad.
"You're coming?"
"Yes, I'll settle in the Vault for the night."
They leave the post and climb.
At the fork, past the square, the settlement noise drops behind them.
The left road is wider, better maintained, climbing toward the cathedral ridge. The right road is narrow, grass cutting through the center, old stones surfacing at intervals where rain took the dirt.
The Locus is forty meters further: an octagonal stone disc flush with the ground, barely raised above the surrounding earth. It is wide enough to allows two full Squads to stand on it. Weathered. Unmarked.
Mateus stands beside him at the edge of the disc.
"Let's meet here at dawn."
"Alright."
"Get some sleep, Ally. You look like you're about to collapse."
Lio gives him a dry nod then steps on the Locus and enter his Vault. The Key is the key. It activates automatically. The transition hits like the Aperture did: his body pulled apart thread by thread, every synapse misfiring in chaotic succession. Gravity inverts, then inverts again. Then reality snaps back into place.