Nova Sion

3:33.

Elias woke with his hand on the pendant. Habit. His body got there before his mind did, like it needed to confirm the metal was still in place.

The heat was wrong — warmer than it should be, warmer than skin warms metal through the night. It came from inside. He pulled his hand away. Waited a second. Put it back.

He lay still.

The dream was gone, but it left something behind. He woke feeling like he’d figured something out and lost it before his eyes opened.

Eyes still closed, he asked the question.

Who am I?

He tried to picture anything. A face. An address. Anything that was actually his and not someone else’s. Same exercise as always, same hope.

Same result: nothing.

For a fraction of a second the rearview mirror came — his own face at twelve, looking back at himself, then the impact, then white. Eighteen years of nothing after that. Until he woke in a world his eyes couldn’t read, staring at an adult face in a pool of blood, the voice from the pendant in a language no system in Nova Sion recognized — but one he understood anyway:

Welcome back, master. It’s 2060.

The pendant warmed another degree in his palm. Then cooled, slowly.

He opened his eyes.

The crack in the ceiling — upper left, curving near the wall like a river seen from above — was there. Always was. He fixed his gaze on the split at its center, let his mind go quiet, and stayed like that until the gap in the concrete seemed to look back. About ten minutes. Then the internal snap, and he came back.

He got up.

He gave thanks before anything else. For the chance to be useful. It was the only thought that held when the rest didn’t.

Workout. Cold shower. Food. Dark clothes.

He went to the window.

Nova Sion was lit in the sky.

Even after ten months, the first sight still caught him. The city looked less built than suspended. Someone had decided it belonged there, and the engineering came after. White towers on aerial platforms, connected by glass bridges. Vertical gardens down the facades. Artificial rivers in transparent channels. Drones adjusting, removing, delivering everything before anyone noticed it was missing.

Nothing creaked or leaked.

The Central Tower cut through the low clouds. There was no honest word for it — building was too small, monument not enough, cathedral came close, but cathedrals asked for faith. The Tower didn’t ask for faith. It delivered energy. And so everyone believed.

A panel lit up on a government building across the way. White letters:

PEACE IS A SYSTEM.

It held for a few seconds. Disappeared.

Elias pressed his hand to the glass. The surface read his temperature and brightened the view. The window sharpened the city and removed his face from the glass.

Below, where the platforms sank into the industrial haze, the lower levels almost disappeared. The city didn’t hide them. It didn’t need to. It just let the light arrive weaker.

Nova Sion wasn’t a simple lie. It had saved real people, fed entire cities, ended wars. The worst part was that the numbers still made sense. There was another part of him that didn’t trust it — the part that walked into a dead person’s mind and knew, from the wrong silence between two memories, that someone had already been there.

He recognized that silence. It was like finding a gap where a memory should be.

He pulled his hand from the glass and went to the meditation room.

The room was empty. Just a rug. Elias sat cross-legged in the dark and waited for the silence to settle.

Today she came.

The hand first — always the hand. Reaching toward him, calling him closer, bathed in red light from a moon that didn’t exist on any map of Nova Sion. Too young for whatever his body had been carrying about her. The warmth arrived before it made sense.

He leaned forward before deciding to.

He tried to see the face. His mind shut before he got there.

His fingers closed on nothing. The image left. The warmth went with it.

He sat looking at his own open hand in the dark.

The pendant warmed more than the room accounted for. Elias didn’t hear the answer. He already knew:

This person must have been very important to you, master. Every time, the same warmth.

His body believed in her. His mind had nothing to back it up.

When he came back to himself, he was at the window again, palm against the cold glass. He didn’t remember getting up.

His wrist vibrated.

Seven short, two long, pause, three short.

Mira.

He answered.

“Voss.” Her voice already had the wrong tone. “We have a body. Sepulcro, level two, camera-blind sector.”

He waited.

“Bone fragment cross. Same placement as a year ago.”

He said nothing.

“Clean. No signs of struggle. The body was arranged.”

The apartment went quiet.

“Silas,” he said.

“Yes.”

There was something about the first ritual he’d never told anyone. When the government technicians found him kneeling among the symbols, beside the body, the victim’s neural field was still active. And inside that field — inside the memory of a woman he had never met — there was a fragment that wasn’t hers.

It was his. From the accident. The sound of breaking glass.

Inside a dead stranger.

The technicians called it field contamination. Elias never believed it. Someone had put it there.

He stopped thinking before the question finished forming.

“The victim. How old.”

A pause.

“Nineteen.”

The pendant warmed in the same spot it had during the meditation. For half a second, the hand came back under that red light. He pushed it away.

The air came back before he noticed it had left.

He asked before the memory could settle.

“Where’s the body.”

“Level two. Camera-blind sector.” A shorter pause. “No standard consultant goes down there. You know what I’m asking.”

“I’m on my way.”

“Voss.” Something shifted in her voice. Barely. “Be careful what you access down there. With Silas’s signature involved, the field may be contaminated.”

“I know how to work.”

Silence.

“I know you do,” she said, quieter. “If the field pulls you back — let go. Don’t fight it. Let go.”

He ended the call before the silence became something else.

The Sepulcro was fifteen minutes on foot. Elias knew the way — twelve months had taught him the shortcuts the official maps left out and the corridors where the cameras had blind spots. The pendant guided in silence. When he asked, the answer was already there.

At the bridge, he only realized he was staring into the drop when he was already centimeters from the edge. The void between Nova Sion and what lay below — too deep to see the bottom. The ceiling crack came back to him. Then the hand in the dark.

The internal snap came.

The elevator was too small for the distance. When the doors opened, the air arrived before his eyes did.

Metal on the tongue. Damp. Mildew. Rust. The smell of somewhere light had never reached.

Fog covered the entire dome. In the center of the Sepulcro, enormous screens showed Nova Sion with a clarity that only existed down here — for people with no way back up. People walked past without looking. They’d learned not to.

In one corner, a government supply crate. Someone had crossed out the number on the side — RATIONS 20,000 — and written above it in charcoal: 50,000.

Elias kept walking.

The streets had just enough light to find your footing. The corners stayed dirty. A body against a wall, posture of someone who stopped waiting. Another near a ventilation grate, face down, still.

That was what hunger looked like.

Then he saw the child.

Same corridor as always. Back against the damp wall, maybe nine years old, eyes open but the light wasn’t there. He knew her — saw her every day, usually running through the alleyways with a smile that had no business being in a place like this.

She wasn’t running today.

He crouched. Touched her wrist with two fingers. Weak pulse, present. Alive, no strength to speak.

He took a nutrition bar from his pocket — the sealed kind, not the counterfeit ones circulating underground with half the promised calories — pressed it soft between his fingers and placed it against her lips. She swallowed with what she had left. The light came back into her eyes, slowly.

When she recognized Elias, the distrust came with it. She hesitated anyway.

She was about to thank him.

Her gaze dropped to the pendant.

Her expression changed. The thank-you died before it reached her mouth. Before Elias could blink, she was gone between the alleyways without a word.

He stood there a moment.

Across the corridor, leaning against a ventilation column, stood a man in his seventies. Large hands, thick fingers, skin worn down from work he was too old to still be doing. He gave a slow nod, as if Elias had confirmed something for him.

Elias had seen that look before. Whenever he asked, nobody said anything.

He nodded back. Kept walking toward level two.

The service elevator descended to the camera-blind sector. Elias stepped in. The panel blinked as it registered the pendant. Automatic. Always automatic.

The screen read: USER NOT IDENTIFIED.

It blinked again.

VOSS, ELIAS — GOVERNMENT AUXILIARY — ACTIVE.

The elevator descended. Elias watched the panel where his name had been missing for two seconds.

For two seconds, Nova Sion didn’t know who he was.

The system never forgot anyone.