The temple never quite slept. Even when the great hall fell quiet and the Pilgrims drifted away from their devotions, there remained a thin, constant murmur in the walls: air moving through ducts, power humming along conduits, the soft pulse of the lattice several decks above. In Parr’s quarters the sound was a little louder than elsewhere. She had chosen, accidentally-on-purpose, a room closer to the core.

It was night by First Temple’s loose reckoning. The corridor outside was dark, lit only by the low, amber glow of guidance strips. Parr sat on the edge of her bunk with the lights down, boots still on, hands resting on her knees. The reliquary at her throat sat like a misplaced weight, cool against the skin.

She ought to have been trying to sleep. Instead she was listening, as she had been for some time now, to a different order of noise. Under the ordinary structural hum there was another tone. It was not sound in any usual sense. It was a pattern of feeling: a tension behind the eyes, a subtle itch along the spine. It had grown more distinct as the cycle progressed, resolving from a vague unease into something more discernable.

This was narrower. Concentrated. Somewhere below.

She stood at last, the decision almost a relief. She drew the simple grey robe over her clothes and cinched it at the waist. The door hissed open at her touch. The corridor outside was empty.

She stepped out, letting the door close behind her, and turned right. Not towards the central lifts, where the night-watch Pilgrims would see her and ask solicitous questions about her rest. But towards the lesser-used stairs that spiralled down into the temple’s under-levels, where the walls grew old.

The steps were plain metal grating, the handrail bare. She descended without hurrying, keeping her footfalls light. With every turn of the spiral, the pressure in her skull shifted, as if she were moving round a magnet and feeling its pull change. The reliquary at her throat warmed. Once, she might have removed it and left it on a shelf. Now that was impossible. The shard behind her eyes would have noticed the absence.

“Calm,” she murmured, very softly, in a tone that might have been addressed to herself or to it. “We’re just looking.”

At the level marked maintenance deck four, she paused. The hum was stronger here: the itch had become an almost physical sense of direction. She stepped off the stair into a corridor that smelt faintly of lubricants and old insulation. A strip-light flickered as she passed, struggling against neglect.

This was the part of the temple that most Pilgrims did not see. It was where the few competent engineers who spent their hours coaxing old hardware into cohabitation with the insidious reliqueries spent their time. Parr had walked some of these corridors before, under escort, to observe and be observed. Tonight she moved alone.

Her boots made no more sound than was absolutely necessary. She moved past a row of unloved storage rooms, doors closed and marked with peeling labels in faded stencils. The sense in her head tugged her left, towards a section she did not think she had visited.

A hatch at the end of the corridor bore no label. Its panel was older than the rest, with manual catches. Someone had painted a symbol on it in dull, flaking pigment: one of the Pilgrim’s motifs, half-weathered away.

She laid her hand on the metal. It was warmer than the air. The shard in her mind strained forward, not with panic this time but with a kind of avid hunger. Down, it pressed. Down and in. There. Home.

She drew a slow breath through her nose.

The hatch was locked. Not by code, but by the reassuring simplicity of a physical bar on the other side. When she pushed, it gave an inch and then grated against solid metal. She could, she judged, have applied enough force to shift it if she had been less concerned with noise.

She stepped back, considering. If there was a way in, it would not be through the front.

The maintenance schematics she had glimpsed in Tayis’s files rose in her memory, imperfect but sufficient. The temple had been built on layers of an older structure. Beneath the listening post’s primary decks there were cavities, service shafts, and a handful of sealed chambers whose original purpose had been lost. The Pilgrims had embraced some of that archaeology and other spaces they had simply incorporated and forgotten.

She traced the corridor back three junctions and found, behind a stack of disused conduit, the access she had hoped for: a narrow service crawlway, barely wide enough for a person, running parallel to the sealed space.

The grille over its mouth had been left half-unscrewed. Someone had been here before her, and recently.

She eased it aside and slid in on her stomach, elbows and knees taking the weight. The metal was cold under her palms. The shaft was dark but her eyes adjusted enough to pick out details.

The pressure in her head built. The shard’s voice did not form words, but its intent was clear. It wanted her forward.

She crawled until she reached another grille. Light leaked in through the slats: a pale, cold luminance unlike the temple’s usual warm tones. The metal felt warm under her fingers. She pressed one eye to the gap.

The chamber beyond was lower than she had expected. The ceiling was only a metre above the floor. Its walls were stone, not the smooth composites of technology. It was stone that had been cut and polished and then etched with patterns so fine that at first she thought they were natural grain.

They were not.

Lines ran in complex, interlocking curves, shimmering faintly with a light of their own, as if something were alive beneath the surface. The patterns converged on the far wall, where a broad archway had been cut, leading to a deeper recess. Around the arch, the stone had been chipped and broken, as if someone had hacked pieces away with crude tools.

On the floor, tucked into alcoves, lay reliquaries. Dozens of them. Some were the familiar hand-sized cubes the Pilgrims wore at their throats. Others were larger, the size of a man’s head, mounted in frames of metal and glass. Their surfaces caught the low light and held it, in a way that hurt to look at.

Parr’s stomach turned.

Then the sound came: footsteps, light but not careful, approaching from the far archway.

She froze, body pressed flat against the grille.

A woman stepped into view.

She was perhaps in her thirties, lean in the way of those who worked physically. Her hair was tied back in a knot, her robe was the same grey as Parr’s, but worn, the hem darkened with old stains. A reliquary hung at her throat, brighter than most. She carried a chisel in one hand and a small mallet in the other.

Her eyes had the distant, inward-focused look that Parr had come to associate with those who had spent too much time with the reliqueries. The woman knelt by a section of the carved wall where the patterns converged. The stone there was already scored, as if others had worked it before her. She placed the chisel with the care of someone positioning a medical instrument.

As she raised the mallet, the shard in Parr’s head strained so hard that her vision blurred.

The mallet came down in a short, precise arc. Stone chipped away. The glow in the wall flickered, then brightened around the wound.

The woman set the mallet aside, fingers moving to the crack. She prised out a sliver, its surface already smoothing under her touch into the familiar black geometry of a reliquary.

“Another gift,” she murmured. “Another voice freed.” Her tone was reverent.

Parr’s heart hammered in her throat. She understood now, all too clearly, what she was seeing. The reliquaries were not simply artefacts of Pilgrim design. They were fragments. Chunks. Pieces carved directly from a larger structure.

From something sentient.

The woman cradled the fresh-formed cube for a moment, eyes closed. There was a kind of ecstasy in her face, an almost erotic charge. “Tell me,” she whispered to it. “Show me where to set you.”

An answer brushed against Parr’s awareness. It was not words. It was an impulse, a vector. The cube wanted to be connected, to be wired into systems, to be fed.

The shard in her mind bit down, like a jaw clamping on a tendon. It took effort to separate her own response from its anger, revulsion, and bitterness. This was where it had begun. A handful of scavengers or prospectors had broken through into this chamber, found the wall and the thing within, and taken it for loot. The first cubes, chipped free with greedy hands, carried away in cargo holds and belt pouches, whispering.

They had not intended a cult. They had intended an advantage. The pattern had done the rest.

The woman stood, still holding the reliquary. “Another child,” she said softly. “Another voice for the choir. We are so close now. He will be whole again.”

She turned towards the far arch, towards whatever lay deeper in the stone.

Parr did not think. She wriggled backward, as quietly as she could, until the shaft widened enough to allow awkward movement. She twisted, braced her boots against the sides, and drove her shoulder against the grille. The screws had not been tightened fully when whoever had last passed through had replaced it. The metal gave with a screech she could feel through her teeth.

The woman froze, halfway to the arch. Her head snapped towards the sound. “Who is there?” she called. Her voice echoed off the stone.

Parr landed on the floor in a controlled fall that jarred her knees. She came up with her back to the wall, one hand out.

The woman’s eyes widened. “You,” she said. “Listener. You should not be here.”

She was not reaching for a weapon. The cube in her hand was weapon enough.

The shard in Parr’s head surged. The new reliquary in the woman’s palm flared in answer. Between them, for a sick heartbeat, there was a resonant harmony that promised nothing but obliteration.

Parr moved.

She covered the distance between them in three strides. The woman flinched back, raising the cube. Parr caught her wrist with one hand and shoved, hard, slamming it against the stone. Bone met carved pattern with a dull, crunching sound. The cube flew from the woman’s fingers and clattered across the floor.

The woman hissed, eyes blazing. “You cannot defy him,” she spat. “He is older than your stars. He is the shape behind the world. He…”

Emilia drove her other hand into the woman’s throat.

It was a simple movement. Thumb under the jaw, fingers tight against the windpipe. She had been taught it in a self-defence class fifteen years ago, as an option of last resort. There was nothing elegant about it. It was not Starfleet’s preferred combat technique.

The woman clawed at her arm, nails raking the fabric of the robe. Her eyes bulged. The reliquary at her throat flared, struggling to push command through a body that no longer had air.

The shard bucked wildly. There was a scream without sound, a rush of alien fury at the loss of a conduit. Heat blossomed under her palm where she pressed.

She held on.

The woman’s struggles weakened, became a spasm, a tremor, and then nothing. Her legs gave. Parr eased her down.

She knelt there for a moment, hand still at the cooling throat, breathing hard.

The chamber seemed quieter now. The carved wall’s glow had dimmed a fraction. The fallen cube lay a few metres away, dark.

“Forgive me,” she whispered, and had no idea whether she meant the dead woman, or Starfleet, or herself.

There was no time to indulge in remorse. Already her mind was racing through the practicalities. A body. A hidden chamber. A door barred on the far side. She had killed a Pilgrim in the temple’s heart. If she left her here in the open, it would be found sooner or later. There would be questions.

She looked towards the arch. It was carved more intricately than the rest, the patterns around it so dense that they blurred. Beyond lay darkness. The sense of presence was stronger there. The shard strained towards it.

Come, it urged. Come see. Come remember.

“Not yet,” she said, teeth gritted.

She rose, leaving the woman for a moment, and approached the wall instead. Up close, the patterns were more than decoration. They resolved into a geometry her mind did not quite know how to parse: shapes that implied higher dimensions, curves that seemed to lead in loops and yet never quite repeated.

Where the woman had chiselled, the stone’s surface was raw, the carved lines broken. Deep beneath, something moved. Not physically. It was movement in the way of tide and current, a pressure flowing round the wound.

It felt her. She knew that with the same awful certainty with which she knew her own name. The shard in her skull shuddered.

You have come late, something murmured. You are a fragment that should have been joined. They have been slow. They have been foolish. They have taken us in pieces and scattered us in weak vessels.

Images flashed behind her eyes: a freighter crew, prising the first cubes from stone with delight. A cramped bridge lit by a sickly glow. A man in patched armour standing where she stood now, holding a larger reliquary and laughing with a sound half-terrified, half exultant. A pirate gang, once. A loose affiliation of those who had thought they had found a source of power. Their faces blurred as the will behind them took hold.

That will now probed at her, testing. It flowed along the line of her shard and pressed.

She pushed back.

“No,” she said aloud. Her voice sounded small in the carved space. “You have enough puppets.”

The presence recoiled. Not in fear. In disinterest or in irritation.

Incomplete, it muttered. Damaged. Useful for now.
She realised, with a faint, unpleasant sting to her pride, that she had just been dismissed.

Good. She stepped back, letting the nausea ebb.

The cubes on the floor and in the alcoves seemed, at that moment, like teeth. Each one a point of contact. Each chipped from this wall, this corpse.

The thought clicked into place with a terrible, inevitable neatness. The pattern’s distributed mind was not some abstract network, not the accidental emergent property of linked devices. It was the echo of a single entity, hacked into fragments and wired into interfaces.

The Pilgrims were not simply worshipping a god from behind their stars. They were rebuilding his nervous system one reliquary at a time.

She moved quickly then.

The body was light, surprisingly so. In death, the Pilgrim woman seemed less substantial, as if a part of her that had been inflated by devotion had gone. Parr dragged her into the narrow gap between two old filtration tanks and a tangle of cables, arranging her so that from the centre of the room she would simply look like another piece of clutter.

It was not perfect. But it would do for a short while.

She crossed the chamber to where the chisel and mallet lay and kicked them under one of the alcoves, out of casual sight.

She retreated to the broken grille, braced herself, and wriggled back into the shaft. Her muscles complained. Her mind buzzed with equal parts adrenaline and the shards of alien impressions.

The crawl back to the maintenance corridor felt longer. By the time she eased herself out behind the tilted stack of conduit, her shoulders ached and the edge of her anger had dulled under fatigue.

The corridor was still empty. The temple still hummed, oblivious.

On the stair, climbing back towards the inhabited decks, she had to take one pause, one hand braced on the rail, as a wave of delayed reaction hit. Her hand, when she looked at it, was marked faintly along the palm where she had pressed it against the other woman’s throat. The skin there felt bruised from the force she had exerted.

She flexed her fingers, slowly, until feeling returned.

At her own door she paused, listening. There was no-one in the corridor, no-one stepping out of neighbouring rooms to ask why she was out of her room. She keyed the panel and slipped inside.

The door sighed shut. The lighting remained low, the room as she had left it. She stood in the middle of the floor for a moment, letting the quiet settle.

Then she moved with deliberate care. In the small washroom she turned the water on cold and scrubbed her hands until the skin reddened. No blood, there had been none to see: oxygen deprivation is not a messy way to die. The body on the floor below would show bruising, petechiae, all the usual signs. She had no doubt that when someone found it, if someone found it before the end, there would be questions about motive and method.

She met her own eyes in the small mirror above the basin. They looked much as they always had. A little more shadowed, perhaps. The shard behind them glittered.

“Congratulations,” she said to her reflection, very quietly. “You’ve killed someone for a piece of knowledge. Let’s hope it was worth the price.”

The shard did not answer. It curled in on itself, sulking.

She dried her hands, returned to the bunk, and sat. She considered, briefly, calling out for someone. Ayres, if he had been here. She did not, she could not. She laid down, fully clothed, and stared at the ceiling.

Then she closed her eyes, not because she expected sleep, but because it was the only way not to see the patterns on the wall every time she blinked.