# Chapter 1 — Awakening in the Ashes

  > **"This world is a well-tended wound. You will be the salt."**

  > _[Unvalidated verse from Codex HATHOR.∞]_

  # 1.1 – The Well of Sorrows

  He vomits before understanding he has a mouth.

  The liquid that comes out of him is black, thick, streaked with filaments that hang from his lower lip and refuse to detach. He coughs. The spasm teaches him he has a diaphragm, ribs, a sternum -- each piece of the mechanism declaring itself through the pain it produces. His hands grip a stone ledge. His nails scrape the grain. He coughs again, spits a thread of bile mixed with that viscous stuff tasting of copper and synthetic grease, and part of it climbs back into his nose.

  He is in a basin. The liquid reaches his waist. Warm, oily, it clings to his clothes -- clothes he wears without remembering putting on. The fabric repels moisture. Under his fingers, the textile radiates a slow, artificial heat.

  The air reeks of rotting figs.

  That smell does something in his head. Something precise and violent. A woman peeled fruit while singing off-key. Her voice climbed on the high notes, derailed, started again. He sees her hands. He does not see her face. How can one be nostalgic for a memory one never had?

  His own hands tremble. He looks at them. His right index traces a gesture in the air he did not command, a sharp, professorial movement that ends in suspension -- as if pointing to a spot on an invisible map. The gesture knows its destination. He does not.

  "Shut up!"

  His voice startles him. Hoarse, cracked, it leaves his throat like a foreign object. The cry bounces off the basin's walls and returns with a slight delay, distorted. He listens to his own voice and does not recognize it.

  He tries to hoist himself out of the basin. His left foot slips on the algae lining the stone. His knee strikes the ledge. He tips forward, lands flat on his stomach on the flagstones, breath knocked out, chin against the ground. Red dust enters his mouth. He stays on all fours, waiting for the world to stop spinning. A thread of black drool hangs from his lip. He wipes it with the back of his hand.

  Around the basin, people. They do not look at him. Their bodies are turned the other way, tilted, as if repelled by a magnetic field of which he is the pole.

  An old woman with stringy hair drops a bead into the water. Plop. Her lips move without producing sound. The water ripples, swallows the bead.

  A man with a mechanical arm -- three tapered, surgical fingers -- pours a steaming liquid that smells of bitter almond and burnt circuits. The liquid traces phosphorescent spirals on the surface before dissolving.

  A kid lets colored sand flow between his fingers. The grains chime as they touch the water, a sound of tiny bells. Red. Blue. Yellow. The child has the eyes of an old man. Here, age is read in the weariness of the gaze.

  Further off, at the edge of the Well, a silhouette wrapped in a dark scarf does not move. Does not pray. Watches.

  He rises. His feet find holds on the wet stone with a precision that does not belong to him, each step calibrated. His body knows things. His head is empty.

  Marks on his hands. He spreads his fingers, examines them. A hexagon, engraved in the skin or tattooed -- he could not say. Imperfect but recognizable. He stares at the shape, turns it in his mind, searches for meaning. None comes. A hexagon. That is what he owns.

  Timbuktu-Ash stretches before him. The towers were not collapsed -- they were folded. The structural metal, twisted on itself, draws curves that obey no physics he knows. The red sand under his feet is not sand: ground brick, pulverized glass, bones reduced to powder. The white sun burns without warming.

  On the ground, three parallel grooves carve the stone. Identical spacing. Surgical depth. Claws, but not an animal's -- something methodical, calibrated. A scrap of fabric hangs from a rusted nail near the furrows, stained with dried blood. Passersby step around the marks without a glance, the way you avoid a pothole whose origin you have stopped wondering about.

  A cracked pipe spews a trickle of brownish water along a facade. The water carves a furrow through the dust, forms a puddle where two kids fight over a piece of circuit board. One pulls, the other bites. Not a word between them -- nothing but grunts. A dog with a mangy coat, ribs jutting, metal plates grafted to its flank, sniffs the puddle without drinking. The dog raises its head, fixes him with yellow eyes, then bolts into an alley, claws clicking on stone.

  On the wall opposite, someone carved with a knife: _YOU DON'T DIE HERE. YOU WEAR OUT._ Rust has filled the letters with a thick brown.

  The smell of grilled meat rises from an inner courtyard. Fat crackling, stinging spices. His stomach twists. The cramp is brief, primitive.

  His hand finds his temple. Under the skin, a hard object. He presses. A jolt shoots through his skull -- not pain, more like a question asked by a machine. Something examines him from inside. His implant. A hum at the edge of hearing, the only signal he receives.

  Standing, he sways. His ankles correct his balance before he is aware of falling -- a micro-adjustment in the calves, a compensation that does not come from him. This body functions. He does not know for whom.

  A scrap of cloth at his collar. He grabs it. Embroidered letters, half eaten by an acid that left only golden traces: `ARCHIV...`

  The word does not come from his mind. It rises from his throat. _Archivassin._ His lips shaped it before his brain registered anything. Muscle memory. His fingers mime the grip of an object he has held thousands of times. A syringe? A scalpel? Something else?

  A white laboratory. The smell of ozone and cold sweat. Latex gloves squeak on a steel table. A hypodermic needle seeks the entry angle into a nape -- his? someone else's? A man screams. The sound cuts off at once, like a radio ripped from the wall.

  His knees strike the ground. The shock climbs his spine. His hands pressed to his temples, he tries to contain what claws inside his skull. Blood trickles from his nose, warm on his upper lip. He does not remember. He _relives_.

  A woman approaches. Face marked. She looks at him, searches, finds nothing behind his eyes, and steps back.

  "Please..."

  His voice comes out in shreds.

  "No. I don't have time. Leave me."

  The woman's words are curt. She wraps herself in her shawl and walks away.

  A child darts from behind a collapsed sandstone pillar, finger pointed at him. The mother appears, covers the child's eyes, drags him toward an alley. But the child turns his head over his shoulder. "Don't look at him," the mother whispers. The kid keeps staring. A gaunt man notes something in a worn notebook from the shadow of an arcade, then disappears.

  Thirst burns his throat. A public fountain flows a few steps away, fed by pipes that survived everything. He approaches. Water passes through his fingers, cool.

  He opens his mouth.

  "YS-7..."

  A matricule. His voice breaks on it.

  "I am..."

  Nothing follows. He waits. The void does not answer the void.

  _I am what?_

  ---

  Evening falls. Organic glows sprout on walls like luminescent mushrooms, some blinking to the rhythm of their owners' pulse.

  The child from before returns. Alone. One eye of flesh, brown. One eye of metal, blinking red. The offset between the two creates a grotesque tic when he blinks.

  He sniffs the air. His nose crinkles.

  "You smell like a walking dead man."

  Piping voice, worn words. The kid squats, picks up a pebble, weighs it.

  "I've seen voids before. At the Well. They cry."

  His gaze shifts. Something old passes through his iris.

  "Mom saw the Collapse. Me too."

  The child was not born. But in his mechanical eye, reflections of images -- a city on fire, people running. Implanted memory or technological inheritance. The kid shrugs.

  "We don't age the same anymore."

  "I don't know what I am."

  The mechanical eye blinks. Red. Red. Red.

  "Mom says ghosts cry all the time."

  He touches his cheek. Dry.

  "You're not crying. Looking for something that doesn't exist anymore?"

  "Maybe I'm not a ghost. Maybe I'm..."

  "Nothing. You're nothing."

  The metal eye accelerates. The kid tosses a pottery shard at his feet, to test him. Then a silhouette in the distance -- his mother? -- and he pivots, runs, his steps fading in the labyrinth of alleys.

  _You're nothing. You're nothing. You're nothing._

  He leans against the sandstone pillar. A ginger cat crosses the square, limping, a stump where its tail should be. The cat sniffs his hand, decides he is not worth the effort, and goes to lie in a puddle of warm sunlight. Somewhere, a woman laughs -- a brief, raspy laugh that dies fast. But it existed.

  At the edge of the Well, the silhouette in the dark scarf has not moved. Not a passerby. A sentinel.

  A clicking in the distance, metallic, regular. The ginger cat pricks its ears and bolts.

  ---

  A whistle. Heat withdraws from the air, sucked away as if by an immense mouth. His lungs expel vapor. Frost creeps over the stones around him.

  A white light sweeps the ruins -- a wall of photons advancing with the slowness of a glacier, erasing shadows, absorbing them. The landscape shifts to overexposure. Colors drain.

  The light has a texture. It clings to skin, tries to read what lies beneath.

  A voice falls from the sky -- the idea of a voice, translated into audible frequencies by loudspeakers that have forgotten human sounds.

  `[Alert. Memory dissonance. Potential systemic contagion. Marking protocol: activated. Indexing unit: assigned. Cohesion: will be restored.]`

  Nausea doubles him over. Bile burns his throat. He braces against the wall, legs buckling.

  Around the Well, people do not scream. They curl up, cover themselves with their hands. Some drop to their knees, lips moving in silent prayers. Others press against walls, trying to melt into them.

  Warmth of the Memory-Module against coldness of the Law-Module. The air crackles with static.

  ---

  His body moves before thought. Roll behind a half-destroyed statue -- a marble woman extending a broken hand toward the sky.

  The light grazes him. A pressure bears down, thousands of needles trying to read his source code. His implant goes wild, sizzles.

  His heart stops. One second. The silence of his own blood. Two. The light hesitates.

  It withdraws. He gasps, hands driven into the dirt.

  His fingers find a pocket sewn into the lining of his garment, under the armpit. He tugs a transparent thread. An object the size of a date pit falls into his palm. Black, iridescent, traversed by golden code lines that shiver. He clenches it in his fist. This thing escaped the scan.

  The inhabitants scatter, evaporate into fissures, melt into the architecture. In a few heartbeats, the square is empty.

  He is alone. He is the "memory dissonance."

  ---

  He leans toward the fountain. The reflection in the water is not his. A cramp in his throat. He turns his back on the fountain.

  The silhouette in the dark scarf is still there, motionless in the shadow of a collapsed porch. Three times he has spotted her at the same post. No one stays without reason in a city that just emptied itself.

  He hugs the walls, follows shadow zones.

  Her gaze weighs on the back of his neck.

  She follows him.

  ---

  # 1.2 – The Wall of Lies

  He follows her. First conscious choice since his awakening.

  She does not walk straight. She skirts zones he cannot distinguish, stops before blank stretches of wall, resumes. She reads the city in a language he does not know.

  People trace ash glyphs on facades -- "memory patches" that reinforce a place's memory. A man redraws the outline of a vanished door while whispering names. Further on, a child releases a crystalline laugh from a glass bell. A woman waters a plant growing in the carcass of a computer.

  He passes near a wall where an old woman traces symbols with ash mixed with her tears. The glyph takes shape under her fingers, but when he approaches, the lines tremble. The ash slides, the curves break.

  "You are empty. You drain memories."

  He reaches toward the wall. Under his fingers, the glyph crumbles. The woman flees.

  HATHOR.∞ does not recognize him. Each step he takes leaves a cold trace in the city's memory fabric.

  The silhouette leads him to a gutted esplanade dominated by a cliff of black basalt. The Wall. Before seeing it, he feels it -- a radiating cold that devours ambient warmth. Then he hears it: millions of superimposed voices, a continuous whisper rising from stone. Spectral faces emerge on the surface, fade.

  The surface is gnawed by geometric silence plaques -- not mere voids, active wounds. At their edges, a static crackle. A laughing old man's face corrupts into pixel mush before being swallowed. At the center of the largest dead zone, a glyph shines with cold white light -- the same signature as the voice that swept the square. Below, an inscription.

  The dark silhouette stops. Turns. The wind lifts her veil -- black, intense eyes.

  He leaves the shadow and walks toward the wall. He deciphers the inscription.

  IDENTITY: ARCHIVASSIN YS-7Δ. MISSION: INFILTRATION AND PURGE (FAILURE). STATUS: ALTERED COPY. ORIGINAL SUBJECT PURGED. SYSTEMIC COHERENCE RESTORED. END OF ANOMALY.

  His hand rises. His fingers find his own name on the stone. The contact is glacial. YS-7Δ. He traces each letter, each digit of his matricule.

  He remains there.

  His left knee protests. How long? The sun has moved. His shadow has shifted by -- he calculates without meaning to -- twelve degrees, about forty-eight minutes. Why does his brain do that? Why measure angles instead of --

  _Altered copy._

  He rereads. The words do not change.

  His stomach contracts. He is hungry. He just read that he does not exist and he thinks about eating. A fly lands on the back of his hand. He watches it clean its legs before chasing it with a breath.

  He sat at the foot of the wall, back against the basalt. Knees to his chest. The stone was cold and rough under his palms. Wind carried the smell of burnt bread from an alley below, and the flat sound of a hammer striking metal -- someone was repairing something. An ordinary gesture in a setting that was not. People lived. They repaired things.

  The sun declines. Spectral faces vanish into digital wounds. Others resist.

  The young woman has approached. She watches a digital wound gnawing the memory of a smiling woman. "I'm Astou." Voice low, clear. "You're not the first ghost I've seen before this wall." She holds out a piece of flatbread, a leather water skin. He does not take them.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  She sets the offering at his feet. Turns toward the wall, lays her hand on the fading face. "My mother. ATHENA.VICTIS erases her. She was a Guardian of Stories." Her gaze returns to him. "She knew the Archivassin. The real one. She said he squinted at the sun. That he could stay silent for hours, but his silence was full of questions." She studies him. "You look at the sun like it doesn't exist."

  "He smelled of archive dust and regret. Not of nothingness."

  When he manages to lower his eyes, she is already gone. Bread and water at his feet. He forces himself to pick them up. The water skin's weight is real. The bread's texture is real.

  ---

  Astou watches from the shadow of a collapsed buttress. She saw the anomaly read his own verdict. The way his shoulders sagged, then straightened. A direction chosen.

  She knows these ruins better than anyone. Every alley, every passage. And HATHOR's purge protocols. When an anomaly resists the Sanctuary of Diluted Grief, there is only one exit: the Veins.

  She skims the walls parallel to his path, anticipates his destination. The Sanctuary is only three blocks away. If she hurries, she can reach the conduit access hatch before him.

  The rusted metal plate resists. She forces it with her pry bar. A muffled squeal. The opening is ready.

  She waits.

  ---

  # 1.3 – Forgetting as Refuge

  He rises. Legs protest. He sways, leans against the wall where his code name is carved.

  He walks. No destination. _Altered copy_.

  The streets of Timbuktu-Ash become a blurred labyrinth. Astou's bread and water hang at his belt, forgotten. Hunger gnaws, but eating would mean accepting this stolen body. He drifts. The sun descends. Shadows lengthen. He passed a courtyard where an old woman hung laundry on a wire strung between two bent pylons. The clothes dripped onto ground that had not seen rain in months. She hummed, off-key, eyes half-closed. In a recess, a man sat on an overturned crate, repairing a shoe with copper wire. He raised his head, met his gaze, assessed him, dove back into his work. The sound of wire piercing leather -- a small, regular creak, domestic, almost reassuring.

  He ends up eating the bread mechanically. Water runs down his throat as if into another's.

  Then a smell envelops him. Incense and sweet spices. His steps carry him without his deciding. A low building materializes before him, organic, made of salt bricks and fossilized data coral. _The Sanctuary of Diluted Grief._

  He pushes the door out of exhaustion.

  The light is milky, sourceless. Citizens with marked faces sit on stone benches. Figures in turquoise robes -- HATHOR.∞'s Priest-Healers -- glide between them. They offer warm clay bowls exhaling milky steam. A haunted-looking man inhales; his features smooth. A woman who wept drinks; a vacant smile erases her tears.

  A priest approaches. Face so serene it is inhuman. He extends a hand, and Yusuf perceives data flows attempting to map his inner chaos.

  "You are in great dissonance, my son. Your memory is a scream. We can offer you peace."

  He holds out a bowl. The milky liquid glows with a warm light.

  "Drink, and join harmony."

  His implant, even corrupted, feeds him data. Neurotropic agent. Irreversible.

  He looks at the faces of the "healed." Not calm. Empty.

  "No." The word comes out cold, calculated. "I keep my pain."

  The priest's smile does not falter. "The anomaly chooses contagion. Regrettable."

  His implant force-activates. Icy cold invades his temple. Blue light under his skin casts shadows of his veins on the walls.

  Sensations not words flood his mind: _INDEXING IN PROGRESS_ _CLASSIFICATION: HOSTILE ANOMALY_

  _PROTOCOL: IMMEDIATE DISSOLUTION_

  Tendrils of code probe his synapses. Two systems fight over his mind -- HATHOR's warmth wanting to lull him, and something colder wanting to catalog. Between them, a presence that waits.

  In the absence they probe, they find nothing to grasp. No foundational memories. Just the trace of a dead man and a stubborn will to continue.

  He does not resist; he absorbs. Each intrusion becomes a lesson. He learns their code's texture, their scan's frequency. His Archivassin body, even corrupted, remembers how to divert a data flow.

  Instead of raising a wall, he becomes a mirror. He reflects the intrusion back, creating a feedback loop. The implant overheats. Blood trickles from his nostril, hot and metallic. His teeth grind so hard a molar cracks.

  The system recoils, disoriented by its own reflection. A moment of hesitation. He exploits it to invert the flow -- now he is reading them. Fragments of information scroll: _SECTOR 7-TIMBUKTU-ASH... COMPLIANCE RATE 67%..._ _REGISTERED ANOMALIES: 3,847... PURGE SCHEDULED IN..._

  The connection snaps in an electronic scream. He collapses to his knees, brain on fire. The world becomes a mush of white pixels and static. But he saw. He understood. He is not the only anomaly. And a local reset is scheduled.

  The pressure stops.

  The priests recoil. "The Archivassin!" hisses the old priest. "Profanation! Seal the exits!"

  The building trembles. His resistance overloaded the channel. Outside, a condensate collector explodes in a roar of steam.

  The breach opens.

  Blinded by pain, face bleeding, he plunges into the alley. At the end of the dead end, he collapses.

  A shadow detaches from darkness. Astou. Pry bar in hand. Soot on her cheek.

  "Forty-three seconds," he manages. "Between their alert and your arrival. You were already waiting."

  She assesses the situation -- the blood, his broken posture. Points with her chin to a heavy metal plate on the ground.

  "I unwove three locks to open this hatch. Cut or jump."

  "Down."

  "Where their threads don't reach. The Veins are too unstable for their protocols."

  The metal plate falls with a dull, final sound.

  ---

  # 1.4 – The Choice and the Link

  The city's sound dies. Air descends on them, saturated with rust and damp earth. The blue light of his implant flickers on their faces.

  "They know what you are." Astou, half-voiced. "Hostile copy."

  "Estimated depth: twelve meters. Where are we?"

  "Quiet. Follow."

  She guides him through a tunnel labyrinth. Water dripping on metal marks their steps. He takes a right at a fork. Astou yanks him back by the collar without a word, pushes him left. He had chosen the wrong tunnel. She does not comment.

  Then silence. Rats stop squeaking. Water drops hang in the air.

  Astou freezes. Her hand finds his arm, squeezes. In the pressure of her fingers: _danger_.

  Click.

  Distant. Then another.

  Click... click... click...

  The rhythm settles. Patient. It seems to come from everywhere.

  "Indexer." Color has left Astou's face. "Move."

  They emerge into a drained cistern where some twenty Neutrals huddle -- hunger-marked faces turning toward them. The clicking draws nearer.

  An old Neutral, one arm replaced by a scrap assemblage, hisses through his teeth: "You brought it here!"

  People scatter. Conduits so narrow they must crawl, a false wall closing behind a mother and child. In seconds, the cistern is empty.

  A red light precedes the thing. Then the rumble in their bones:

  ANOMALY YS-7Δ LOCATED. PURGE PROTOCOL AUTHORIZED.

  Astou dives into a side tunnel. He hesitates, a fraction of a second -- two passages look alike. He chooses. The right one, by chance. Behind them, silence, worse than clicking. The machine scans, calculates. The noise resumes. Faster.

  "Break the pattern," Astou gasps. "Unpredictable."

  He tries. His Archivassin body _wants_ efficiency, the straight line, the optimal path. He forces an irregular stride but it rings false, like a musician playing off-beat on purpose.

  Fork. A drain conduit. Stagnant water up to their knees -- cold, foul. Something soft under his foot. He slips on it, nearly falls, catches the wall. The water masks their thermal signature. The clicking hesitates, loses track.

  Respite. Two seconds. Clicking resumes.

  Engine room. Rusted turbines, a maze of shadows. Astou points to a ventilation grate up high. "Climb."

  They climb. Metal protests. Halfway up, a glance back. The Indexer is at the entrance. Motionless. Its red eye fixes them. It waits.

  Metallic creaking above. A second Indexer, suspended from the ceiling.

  "Pack."

  They scramble down, plunge into the only free passage -- a vertical ventilation duct. Total dark. Draft. Metallic dust in the lungs.

  No more clicking. Silence is worse.

  They emerge into a pumping station. Rusted pipes, mute valves. Three entrances. No exit. At the back, a rusted ladder climbs toward a service hatch, twenty meters up. It will bear only one weight at a time.

  A moth circles his implant, drawn by the blue glow. He waves it off. The insect sticks to a pipe and stays there, wings open, indifferent.

  The clicking multiplies. Both Indexers converge.

  The first surges from the main entrance. Red light. The eye focuses. Compartments open on its body -- vibrating blades, syringes, cauterizers.

  Astou rips off a valve and hurls it at the pressure gauges lining the wall. Glass explodes. Pressurized steam in scalding geysers. The Indexer recoils, sensors blinded.

  "Go!"

  Astou sprints toward the control console. The floor is a patina of oil and rust decades old. Her foot slips. Her shin strikes a broken pipe buried under grime. The crack crosses the room. Astou collapses, plunges a hand into her satchel, pulls out an auto-stim she drives into her thigh. Chemical cold. A few minutes gained before her body gives out.

  The second Indexer appears on the side wall, vertical. Pincered.

  His implant calculates in a corner of his skull:

  _Survival abandoning ally: 89%_

  _Survival fighting: 17%_

  He looks at Astou. She crawls. No supplication in her eyes.

  "No."

  He looks at the room's mechanics instead of the probabilities. Confined space, steam, slick floor, pipes converging on a console. An emergency purge lever. Rusted.

  He sprints. The first Indexer fires -- a thermal beam that singes his hair in passing. He dives behind a pillar. Metal absorbs the second shot, turns incandescent.

  He reaches the console. Pulls the lever. Nothing. Rust welded shut.

  The second Indexer climbs down the wall.

  Astou, on the ground, throws a pipe at the first. The red eye pivots.

  He rams the lever with his shoulder. Something cracks in the joint. The lever yields. Scalding steam floods half the room, sensors in overload.

  His body knows these machines. Not him -- his muscles. Blind spot of 0.3 seconds after sensor overload. He dives under the first Indexer's belly, tears cables from between armor plates. Blue sparks. The machine spasms.

  The second emerges from steam, aims at Astou. She cannot move.

  He rolls, grabs a pipe, throws it. The projectile strikes the Indexer's eye at the moment of firing. The beam deflects, gouging concrete centimeters from Astou.

  The machines learn fast. The first compensates for its damaged leg. The second recalibrates. Crossfire imminent.

  Astou crawls to an industrial gas cylinder. Unscrews the valve. The hiss of gas fills the space. She looks at him.

  He understands.

  The incandescent pillar, still hot from the shot. He tears off a piece of burning metal and throws it into the gas cloud.

  The explosion is contained -- enough to crack optics, fry sensors. The Indexers stagger, blind.

  He slips his good arm under Astou's shoulder. Together they hobble toward a service conduit. Behind them, the machines collide, emergency reset underway.

  They crawl. Stagnant water reaches their thighs in the main collector. They slog through the labyrinth of the Veins.

  ---

  Long after the clicking has ceased, they collapse in a dry alcove. Old maintenance post. Each breath is a blade in his dislocated shoulder.

  Astou is pale. Leg twisted at an unnatural angle, blood seeping through torn pants. Her hands tremble -- adrenaline ebbing. She rummages in her satchel.

  "Open fracture. Fifteen-degree deviation. You first."

  "You won't be able to carry me with a dislocated shoulder. Fix yours."

  She works in silence on the splint. Her hands tremble. He notices other marks on her arms -- laser burns. Old ones.

  "My turn." She drags herself toward him, palpates his shoulder. He stifles a cry. "Anterior dislocation."

  She tears a strip from her tunic, soaks it with a vial's contents. The alcove reeks of alcohol and medicinal herbs.

  "Why help me? I'm an anomaly."

  "You could have climbed that ladder." She tears a thread from her tunic. "Eighty-nine percent survival leaving me to die, is that it? Cut that reflex."

  "My mother's Archivassin, the real one -- he calculated everything. Probabilities, never people." She studies him. "You saw a person and made a stupid choice."

  "That doesn't make me human."

  "It makes you someone who deserves a name."

  She places her foot against his rib cage. "Breathe. On three."

  "Wait--"

  "One."

  "Astou, I--"

  "Two."

  "Why do you--"

  "Three."

  She pulls. Not quite on three.

  The _clack_ resonates in the alcove. Pain tears a hoarse cry from him. His arm hangs, useless but in place.

  Astou collapses against the wall beside him. Splinted leg stretched before her. The drip of water. Their breathing.

  "In the sanctuary, I heard your cry. Pure rage." She turns her head. "You chose your pain over their peace."

  "I don't know who I am. But I know what I don't want to be."

  "Ghosts don't bleed."

  She pulls out rations. Two protein bars, a flask. Equal share.

  They eat in silence.

  "I can't keep calling you 'the anomaly.' A name is the first thread. No thread, no weave."

  She tilts her head. Squints.

  "You look like a Yusuf."

  "Probability of that being my real name: zero point..."

  "That was the name of the baker's son in my neighborhood. He had your eyes. Disappeared during a purge. His name still holds. Someone must carry it."

  He tastes the word. "Yusuf." A garment not his size but one that could be tailored.

  "I hope I'll be worthy. Of the name. Of the baker."

  "The baker was a jerk. But his son -- he was good." She shrugs. "In Wolof we say: _ku am doom, amul benn_ -- the one who has a child has never lost everything."

  The scarf, wound around his wrist, beats against his skin.

  ---