Chapter 2: The Underground Sermon

The Hollow at shift-change was a river of bodies. Fed let himself drift with the current, just another coverall-clad worker heading wherever workers went when the furnaces finally let them go. He'd stolen the uniform from a maintenance locker, along with a respirator that made him look properly anonymous. The neural dampener he'd bought from a twitchy dealer three levels up would keep him off the NeuroNet for about four hours.

After that, Daddy's security forces would light him up like a Christmas tree. But four hours should be enough to figure out what the hell had happened during that riot.

The workers around him moved with the exhausted shuffle of people who'd given their best hours to machines that didn't care. Nobody talked. Talking took energy, and energy was a finite resource down here. Fed tried to match their body language—shoulders slumped, head down, one foot in front of the other.

He almost pulled it off.

"You're walking wrong," a voice said beside him. Female, young, tired.

Fed glanced over. A woman about his age, her face streaked with industrial grime, fell into step beside him. Her coveralls bore the scorched patches of a furnace tender.

"Wrong how?" he asked, pitching his voice lower.

"Like you've got somewhere to be." She studied him with eyes that had seen too much. "Nobody down here walks with purpose. We just walk."

"Maybe I found religion."

That got him a laugh—short, sharp, more bark than humor. "Which kind? The Executive's official Temple of Productive Unity? Or the other thing?"

"What other thing?"

She looked around, checking for orange security badges or the telltale head-tilt of someone accessing NeuroNet surveillance feeds. Satisfied, she leaned closer.

"The Echo. The real prophet. Not the sanitized shit they feed us topside." She paused. "You're not Security, are you? You're too pretty to be Security."

"I'm too pretty to be a lot of things," Fed said. "Doesn't stop me from trying."

Another laugh, warmer this time. "Shift's over. You want to hear something that'll make you walk with purpose again?"

Every rational part of Fed's mind screamed that this was a trap. Executive Security loved using plants to ferret out dissidents. But the woman's exhaustion seemed genuine, and Fed had already come this far on stupid decisions. Might as well commit.

"Lead the way," he said.

She took him through passages he wouldn't have found with a map and a native guide. The Hollow wasn't designed for navigation—it was designed for containment. But workers had carved their own paths through the industrial maze, shortcuts and hidden ways that existed in the gaps between official notice.

They descended past the factory floors, past the worker habs, into sections that predated the current industrial configuration. Old Ring, from before the Spires rose and the world split in two. Down here, the walls were different—smoother, almost organic, like they'd been grown rather than built.

"Mayla," the woman said as they walked. "Since we're about to commit sedition together, might as well know my name."

"Fed," he replied, deciding that aliases were pointless when you were already wearing a stolen uniform in a restricted area.

"Fed? Like Federation? Your parents Company nostalgists?"

"Something like that."

They reached a door that looked like rust held together by hope. Mayla knocked—three short, two long, one short. Ancient code. The door opened onto a narrow corridor lit by bioluminescent strips that pulsed with their own slow heartbeat.

"Stay close," Mayla said. "And whatever you hear in there, try not to look too shocked. Virgin reactions make people nervous."

The corridor opened onto a space that shouldn't have existed. A natural cavern, or something like it, carved from the Ring's structure by some ancient process Fed couldn't identify. Maybe a hundred people filled the space, sitting on salvaged crates and industrial foam, their faces lit by more of those pulsing bio-strips.

At the center, on a raised platform made from welded deck plates, stood a woman.

Fed had expected someone imposing. A charismatic leader with the kind of presence that could fill a room and make people believe in better things. What he got was someone who looked like she'd rather be anywhere else.

Maria Vens was smaller than he'd imagined, mid-thirties, with the kind of face that had been pretty before the Hollow got its hooks in. She wore worker coveralls like everyone else, but hers were clean, carefully mended. Her hands moved when she talked—not theatrical gestures, but the unconscious movements of someone trying to shape ideas out of air.

"—and they tell us memory is currency," she was saying, her voice carrying despite its softness. "That our experiences, our pain, our small victories—all of it belongs to the machine. That we should be grateful to donate our selves, piece by piece, to keep the Ring turning."

The crowd murmured agreement. These weren't the glassy-eyed workers from the factory floor. These people were awake, alert, angry.

"But memory isn't currency," Maria continued. "Memory is identity. It's the story we tell ourselves about who we are, why we matter, where we've been. When they take that, they don't just steal our past. They steal our future. Because how can you imagine tomorrow when you can't remember yesterday?"

Fed found himself leaning forward. He'd heard dozens of Executive speeches, each one polished and focus-grouped and designed to inspire just enough emotion to seem authentic. This was different. Maria talked like someone working through the ideas in real-time, testing each word for truth.

"The Echo isn't just mythology," she said. "It's neuroscience. Every memory they take leaves a gap, a hole in the pattern. But consciousness abhors a vacuum. The mind tries to fill those gaps with something, anything. That's the Echo—your brain trying to remember what they made you forget. It's collective consciousness with individual voices intact, not the singular unity they're peddling."

A man near Fed whispered to his neighbor: "That's why the dreams are getting stronger."

"They can steal our memories," Maria said, "but they can't steal the shape of them. The Echo is our minds fighting back. It's proof that no matter how much they take, something remains. Something that remembers how to resist."

She paused, seeming to see the crowd for the first time. Her eyes found Fed in the back, lingered for a moment. He felt exposed, sure she'd somehow recognized him as an interloper. But she just smiled—tired, sad, but genuine.

"I'm not asking you to follow me," she said. "I'm not asking you to believe in some better tomorrow that I can deliver. I'm asking you to remember. Remember who you were before they taught you to forget. Remember that you're more than the sum of your productivity metrics. Remember that every act of memory is an act of rebellion."

The crowd started to respond—not applause, but something deeper. A humming that seemed to come from everywhere at once. Fed felt it in his chest, his bones, the space between his thoughts. The bio-strips pulsed in rhythm with it, and for a moment the whole cavern seemed to breathe as one organism.

Then the lights went hard and white, and Executive Security poured in from every entrance.

"Nobody fucking move!" The lead officer's amplified voice cut through the humming like a buzzsaw. Orange-badged figures in tactical armor spread through the room, pulse rifles charged and ready.

The crowd didn't panic. They'd been through this before. They sat still, hands visible, while Security moved among them running biometric scans. Standard sedition sweep—identify, tag, schedule for enhanced Memory Tithe.

Maria hadn't moved from her platform. She watched the Security forces with the patience of someone who'd been arrested before and would be again. The lead officer approached her, pulling off his helmet to reveal a face Fed recognized from Executive briefings.

General Thassian Rho. Hero of the Fringe Rebellions. Not someone who usually handled routine sedition sweeps.

"Maria," Rho said, and there was something in his voice that didn't match his rigid posture. "You need to stop this."

"Hello, Thass." Maria's smile was complicated. "Slumming with the rank and file?"

"Executive Council's orders. These gatherings are designated Level Three security threats." He paused. "It doesn't have to go this way."

"Doesn't it?" Maria stepped down from the platform, approaching him with the easy confidence of someone with nothing left to lose. "Tell me, when they sent you to arrest me, did they mention the new program? The one where they don't just take memories anymore?"

Rho's jaw tightened. "Don't."

"They're building something, Thass. Something that thinks like me, talks like me, but doesn't have my inconvenient habit of asking questions." She was close to him now, close enough that Fed could see the history written in the space between them. "They're going to replace me with something more... manageable."

"Secure the seditionists," Rho ordered, not looking at her. "Standard processing."

Security moved in, but the crowd's compliance was breaking down. Someone threw something—a work tool, a piece of debris. It sparked off a trooper's helmet, and suddenly the careful choreography of arrest turned into chaos.

Fed pressed himself against the wall as bodies surged around him. A Security trooper went down, swarmed by workers who'd remembered how to fight. Pulse rifle fire strobed through the cavern. Someone screamed.

Through the chaos, Fed saw Maria moving. Not running—walking with purpose through the violence like it was rain. Heading for a maintenance hatch he hadn't noticed before.

He also saw Rho tracking her movement, his weapon raised but not firing.

Decision time. Fed could stay hidden, wait for the chaos to end, hope his neural dampener held out long enough to slip away. The smart play. The survivor's play.

Instead, he moved.

A Security trooper turned as Fed approached, rifle swinging up. Fed had never thrown a punch in his life, but it turned out desperation was a decent teacher. His fist connected with the trooper's throat, sending them choking to their knees. Fed grabbed their rifle, had no idea how to use it, and threw it as hard as he could at another trooper bearing down on Maria.

She glanced back, saw him, and her eyes widened in recognition. Not of his face, but of something else. The walk, maybe. That purposeful stride that marked him as someone who didn't belong.

"This way!" she called.

Fed ran. Behind them, Rho's voice cut through the chaos: "Southwest exit! Cut them off!"

They dove through the maintenance hatch into darkness. Maria moved like she'd done this before, navigating by touch and memory through passages that seemed designed to confuse. Fed followed, his stolen boots splashing through puddles of condensation, his lungs burning from exertion and whatever toxic shit passed for air down here.

They emerged three levels up, in a mechanical space full of pipes that groaned with recycled water. Maria slammed the hatch shut, spinning the manual lock.

"That'll hold them for maybe five minutes," she said, then turned to study him. "You're not a worker."

"I was trying to be."

"You walk like someone who's never carried weight." She tilted her head. "Young executive doing poverty tourism?"

"Something like that." Fed pulled off the respirator, suddenly tired of pretending. "Fed Lang."

Her eyebrows rose. "Hadrian Lang's son. The Memory Tithe architect's boy." A laugh, bitter as industrial runoff. "Come to see how the other half lives?"

"Come to understand why they were climbing over bodies to get to you."

Maria studied him for a long moment. Somewhere in the distance, Fed could hear Security forces coordinating their search.

"You want to understand?" she finally asked. "Really understand? Not just collect data points for your next board presentation?"

"I saw them scrub a sector," Fed said. "Wipe an hour from hundreds of minds because they didn't like what those minds were thinking. So yeah, I want to understand."

She nodded slowly. "Then you'd better come with me. Your neural dampener's about to wear off, and when it does, every Security node in the Hollow will light up with your location."

"Where are we going?"

"Somewhere they can't follow. The old places, from before the Ring forgot how to remember." She started walking, that same purposeful stride that had given him away. "Fair warning—once you see what's down there, you can't unsee it. Your life up in the Spires? That ends now."

Fed thought about his apartment in the Executive district, his careful career path, his father's expectations. Then he thought about workers convulsing under neural disruption, about memories stolen and minds scrubbed clean.

"It ended the moment I took that elevator," he said.

Maria smiled—the first genuine expression he'd seen from her. "Then let's go meet the Echo."

They descended into darkness, leaving behind the last pretense that Fed Lang was just another tourist in hell. Behind them, Security forces converged on empty spaces, chasing echoes of their own.