Chapter 102: Flashback: No Blue in the Spectrum

The shelf didn’t fall. It settled with a slow, grinding groan of stressed iron against the radiator pile.

Cassius stayed on one knee in the grease and quarters, the dead iPod cold against his palm, forcing the frantic pulse in his throat to slow down.

If this is the real world...

Pay forty bucks at the gate, get back in the Jeep, drive home. Simple. Boring. Safe.

If I’m still in that unhinged vampire world...

The Lord tore his throat out, and waking up knee-deep in a trash vault means the nightmare just changed outfits.

Either way, sitting here frozen meant dying twice.

He closed his eyes for a sharp, quiet breath. Calm. Use the head.

He picked up a jagged sliver of aluminum from a peeled radiator fin.

Without hesitation, he dragged the sharp edge hard across the palm of his left hand.

Shk-t.

A thin white line split his skin for half a second. Then, blood welled up.

Not iron-red. Not warm crimson.

Again the thick, iridescent, and bruised-purple, smelling faintly of ozone and old battery acid, it pooled in the center of his calloused hand and beaded over his lifeline.

He stared at it, jaw tight.

"Thought so," he rasped.

He dropped the foil shard and turned to the heap. The tunnel smelled of rotting leather and rusted iron.

Books rotted in damp heaps beside broken electronics, their screens dead, their batteries flat.

If the Bastard’s hounds catch my real frequency down here...

His thumbnail dug into a smashed tablet frame, prying free a tiny, microscopic earpiece. Tch-click.

Copper hair-wire snapped loose against his skin.

...they’ll know the execution missed. A ghost with an active pulse is worth a bounty.

He grabbed a heavy quarter from the oil-slicked spill, wedging the zinc disc flat over the magnet.

Need a reed. Something rigid to pitch the vibration lower... His frantic mind shouted.

He ripped a blank margin from a water-stained page of Introduction to Hydrology, shoving it into his mouth.

Suck-wet.

The paper pulp turned pasty against his tongue, bitter with old mold and copper taste.

He wrapped the chewed rag tight around the metal seam, sealing it air-tight.

Bite down. Hold the frequency, he thought.

He clamped the paper bite-block hard between his back molars.

He forced a low, controlled breath past his teeth.

The quarter vibrated a harsh, metallic hum against his tongue, and the damp vault threw back a voice that didn’t belong to him... thick, grinding, and hollow like an iron bell struck underwater:

"...One. Two. Testing the dead wire."

He rolled the sound in his mouth, adjusting the bite pressure until the rasp smoothed into a cold, unrecognizable industrial drone.

"Good enough to fool a hound."

Not Cassius or a worthy dead opponent of the King.

A gravel-cracked stranger vibrating off the wet concrete walls, sounding three sizes too large for his own chest.

The adrenaline evaporated all at once.

He scrambled backward down the scrap slope... shhhk-clatter of aluminum siding and greasy fan belts sliding under his bare heels--- hitting the flat concrete floor with a dull, heavy thud.

His knees buckled.

He let himself sprawl flat on his back, bare shoulders hitting the cold grit.

He spat the makeshift reed onto his chest with a wet thwip, letting his eyelids slam shut.

One second. Heavy, dead weight.

His chest didn’t rise; it just stayed hollow, buzzing with exhaustion.

Then his eyes snapped wide open. The gray ceiling stared back, streaked with yellow bug-glow.

The wire-mesh tunnel at the Nairobi safari... Dad’s voice echoing in the Jeep...

Before it the jungle one...

He stared at his own palm, purple blood drying black in the center lines.

When I was ten, I spent three hours tracking a rhino beetle in the forest trips near the watery areas...

And my first reincarnation was ...THE JUNGLE WHERE FUKURO HAD WATER DRUM.

A cold, electric shock spiked behind his ribs, sharper than any wound.

The safari tunnel... this bunker... the insects...

His breath hitched.

My death didn’t scatter me. My memory built the map.

He stared into the dark.

"...My reincarnation is in my control?"

The silence in the vault went dead cold.

Not a drip. Not a buzz.

Even the lightbees overhead stopped twitching, hovering frozen in place like pinpricks of grease on black water.

Leave footprints, leave a trail. Reset the crime scene.

He moved with brisk, cold economy.

He kicked the scattered zinc quarters back into the oil-slick depression, sweeping the loose aluminum slivers and spare metal debris back under the radiator base with the side of his foot... shhk-skuff, clink.

He grabbed the heavy, water-logged paperback of Hydrology, pressing the torn margin flat against the spine and shoving the volume back into the cordwood stack where it fit tight.

Then he turned to the main entrance barrier.

The sheared wrought-iron door lay tipped inside.

He hauled it upright with a grinding, metal-on-concrete screee-ch, jamming the bottom anchor pins back into their rotted floor sleeves and locking the rusted hasp together with a dry clack-crunch.

He smeared a handful of fresh cellar dust over the bright scrape marks on the floor, blotting out the shine.

If I leave this scrap here, they track the parts.

If I carry it loose, it drops.

He snatched the damp, mud-stiffened t-shirt off the floor.

He pulled it over his head, sliding his arms through the sleeves.

Then, working his fingers inside the collar fabric, he dropped the coin-and-magnet reed into the inner hem, rolling the cotton tight around the micro-driver and tying a hard, double-overhand knot right against his collarbone.

The heavy knot bumped cold against his sternum, a secret weight hidden under rough gray cotton.

He didn’t hesitate.

He reached down, grabbing a jagged, rust-pitted length of sheared steel rebar from the base of the radiator stack.

Shhh-krr across the concrete.

He flipped the metal over. The broken end was sharp as a cold chisel.

Without looking at the ceiling, without waiting for the floor to hum again, he dragged the jagged edge deep across the inner crook of his left wrist.

Tch-rip.

Skin parted. Veins popped.

Thick, bruised-purple blood surged out in a warm, pulsing jet... drip, gush, soak- darkening the dirty concrete into an oil-slick mirror.

He didn’t compress the cut.

He held his arm wide, letting every drop drain from the meat of his arm, his vision graying at the corners as his pulse slowed to a heavy, sluggish thud.

His lips moved against the cold air, a dry, cracked chant repeating like a stuck groove:

"Lordess Florianthum... Ezailum Florianthum... my friend Ezaily..."

He wasn’t bleeding out to die.

He was bleeding the old map empty to draw a new one straight to her.

Gravity turned to wet lead.

The concrete floor rushed up, or maybe his spine just dissolved.

Cold... getting heavy... wrist stopped stinging, he thought.

His arm flopped limp into the purple pool, splashing a dull, slow palt.

His voice dragged through his teeth, dragging like a spinning tape deck losing juice:

"Lo... rdess... Flo... ri... an... thum..."

If the frequency drops before the heart stops... back to the void... back to forty bucks at the gate...

His tongue swelled thick against the collar knot.

"E... zail... um..."

A breath rattled in his chest... dry, broken, sounding like a dry leaf scraping over gravel.

"...Ezaily."

Above him, the thousands of suspended lightbees went dead.

Not one by one.

Zzzt-pop.

Total, simultaneous black.

In the pitch-black vault, a fine mist of ultraviolet and silver dust erupted from the wet puddle under his arm.

Whum-shhh.

It didn’t drift. It spun.

A cyclone of micro-glitter, bruised violet and raw, hammered silver... whipped upward into a tight, screaming vortex around his collapsing frame, lifting the grit off the floor.

Memory isn’t a museum. It’s an anchor.

The silver needles bit into his skin, cold as ice water.

A blinding, violent purple flash swallowed the vault, the concrete, the scrap pile, and the dark... washing the entire screen solid, blinding white-violet.

No floor. No lungs.

Just a trembling, transparent stencil of bone-light and window-glass drifting through a high-contrast furnace of unmapped hues.

Ribbons of bruised-orange and violent, oily crimson smeared across the pitch-black void, radiating a dry, skin-peeling heat that left behind no ash.

The same sickening, metallic gap stared back from the center of the spectrum. Not a single shred of blue.

A dense, whining cyclone of purple and silver glitter locked orbit around his hollow silhouette, the microscopic metal shards biting cold against phantom nerves.

Lordess Florianthum... (Cassius spoke with his soul in his thoughts)

The thought tore through his skull without a tongue, vibrating the invisible frequency still knotted to his phantom collarbone.

We drag this whole rotten kingdom down and break through the glass together.

Back to the happy chaos, back to the lively helping creatures, to our world...

The heavy, oil-thick colors sheared sideways, funneling into a screaming, violent violet pinhole.

Ezailum...

The air here didn’t breathe; it grated against his transparent ribs like dry emery cloth.

Every pulse of the ultraviolet vortex stripped another layer of memory away, leaving only the raw, hard coordinates of the living world.