Chapter 657: Emotion (1)

Grey barely registered the machine still holding his wrist, his attention fixed on Benn’s body lying several meters away in the grass while Sabrina remained slumped against the side of the house.

James and Duke had fallen farther out in the yard, Lilac hadn’t moved since she landed, and every time Grey tried to convince himself that he could still see their chests rising, another pulse of pain rolled through his body hard enough to scramble the thought.

His ribs hurt when he breathed, his ankle felt like something inside it had torn apart, and the aching pressure spreading through his lower body had somehow continued growing long after Sabrina’s kick should have faded.

The rage helped Grey move, but it didn’t actually make any of the pain disappear, and the more furious he became, the worse everything seemed to get. His heartbeat hammered against his damaged ribs, his muscles clenched until every injury pulled tighter, and the agony flooding his Neural Frame climbed right alongside the fear that Benn might never stand up again.

It was almost as though whatever was hurting Grey could feel what he was feeling and was using every new emotion as another handhold to dig itself deeper.

Grey ripped his wrist free without caring how much skin tore away in the process, caught the patrol unit around the head, and pulled until its neck separated in a shriek of twisting metal.

He drove Virtueless through the open torso before the machine could begin repairing itself, then continued smashing the weapon down until the body became a ruined field of circuitry and mangled plating. Silver threads tried to stretch between the pieces several times, but Grey kept destroying them until there wasn’t enough structure left for the machine to understand what it had once been.

Another patrol unit caught Grey across the ribs, and his vision vanished beneath a burst of white so complete that for a moment he couldn’t tell whether he had fallen or was still standing.

When sight returned, Grey found himself leaning against Virtueless with blood running from his mouth, every breath shallow and painful while Benn remained in exactly the same place. That sight hurt worse than the broken ribs, and somehow the moment Grey acknowledged that, the physical pain sharpened again.

Grey forced himself forward before he could think about it, caught the next machine as it rushed him, then ripped one of its arms free while his shoulder screamed in protest.

Virtueless crushed through its torso from the side, Grey caught the machine before it could fly away, and several more strikes reduced it into a pile of metal that could no longer pull itself together. He should have felt some satisfaction when it stopped moving, yet all Grey could think about was how quiet the farm had become.

Benn had raised him.

The thought came without warning, and suddenly Grey remembered hands much rougher than his own teaching him how to work on an engine, the old man getting pissed when Grey did something stupid, then still being there every time Grey came home afterward.

He remembered Sabrina arguing with him over things neither of them actually cared about, James and Duke finding new ways to be idiots together, and Lilac somehow managing to stay mostly normal despite spending her childhood surrounded by the rest of them.

Grey had always dealt with memories like these the same way he dealt with everything else that threatened to become too heavy.

He shoved them down.

Whenever fear started growing in his chest, Grey told himself to stop being a bitch, whenever guilt started eating at him he told himself to grow a pair, and whenever life placed another impossible responsibility on his shoulders he told himself to nut up and deal with it.

The words changed, the meaning never did, and Grey had become so good at forcing himself forward that he had started believing the emotions he buried weren’t really there anymore.

Watching Benn lie in the grass made that lie impossible to maintain.

Grey’s breath caught as fear broke through first, followed so closely by guilt that he could barely tell one from the other, and the rage that came after both was strong enough to make his hands shake.

He had brought the machines here, he had forced them to evolve by fighting them, and if these people, these friends... his family were dead then some part of that belonged to him no matter how many excuses he could find afterward. Grey instinctively tried to crush the thought like he always did, but this time there was too much behind it, and something inside him finally gave way.

The pain became unbearable.

It wasn’t simply that his ribs hurt more or that the damage to his body had worsened, it felt as though every terrible thing happening around him had somehow been translated into the same agony.

The fear of losing Benn, the guilt of seeing Sabrina broken against the wall, the rage burning through him as he looked at his friends all became tangled with the physical pain until Grey couldn’t distinguish where one ended and another began. For the first time in his life, he couldn’t force any of it down fast enough to make himself functional again.

So Grey stopped trying.

He let the fear exist, let himself feel how terrified he was that Benn might be dead, and stopped pretending that guilt was something weak people indulged in when they didn’t have the balls to keep moving. He simply didn’t have the energy left to continue suppressing it.

He let the rage remain messy instead of immediately converting it into something useful, and as every emotion he’d normally bury surged through him at once, Grey suddenly felt something within his Neural Frame answer.

Not the part he knew. Something deeper.

Grey’s awareness sank through the familiar pathways of Linear, Resonant, Recursive, and Branching, moving past the portions rooted through his nerves, muscles, brain, and spine until he reached something that had no physical location at all.

Each Frame seemed to continue beyond his body into another reflection of itself, and the more Grey allowed himself to feel everything he normally suppressed, the clearer those reflections became.

It felt less like discovering something new and more like finally opening an eye that had always been closed.

Four Frames existed through Grey’s physical body, but another four impressions stretched through something beneath flesh, mirroring every pathway without occupying any place that Grey could point toward.

They were not separate Frames, just the other side of the same structures, embedded somewhere inside the strange substance that made his thoughts, emotions, identity, and existence belong to him.

His soul.