Episode 13: The Backlash
889 Words
The training started because Lyric couldn't sleep.
He'd tried. The flat Graves Industries had found him was clean to the point of sterility, three floors above a bakery that pumped yeast fumes through the vents at four AM. He'd lain there staring at the ceiling, Soraya Alim's face hovering at the edges of his vision, the mirror's cold hum still ringing in his bones. He needed to go deeper. Faster. Before the next person died because he wasn't fast enough.
At three in the morning he threw back the covers.
At four he was in the archive.
The replica room in the morning smelled like metal and the particular dry warmth of a space with good climate control. Lyric stood in the center of it and thought about what he could and couldn't do.
He could touch an object and read its surface history — who had handled it, when, with what emotional charge. He could feel the echo of an original in a copy. He could sense a bound soul's register without contact, at close range.
What he couldn't do: get deep. Get past the surface layer into the actual stored memory. He'd tried with the dice and the backlash had hit him like a door slamming on his skull — not pain exactly, more like every sense going offline simultaneously.
He needed to be able to go deeper without going dark.
He started with the smallest replica. A ceramic bead. Seventh century, probably, regional, unremarkable. He held it in his bare palm and went in slowly — not reaching, just opening.
He got three layers deep before the pressure hit.
He kept going.
He lasted eleven minutes before the backlash.
It arrived as sound first — a high, sustained frequency, not in the room but inside his skull. Then his vision whited out for a moment, not completely but enough that the room went grey and indistinct at the edges. He sat down on the floor, which he hadn't decided to do. His body had made that decision unilaterally.
He was sitting there, back against the shelving, breathing through it, when the door opened.
Caspian came in, took one look at him, and crouched down to his level with the smooth economy of someone who had done this for other people before and didn't need to announce it.
"How long?" he said.
"Eleven minutes. I got to the third memory layer." Lyric's voice was steady. He was glad about that. "The ceiling is the transition between the second and third layer. There's a pressure point — like a threshold the residue doesn't want to let me through."
"You're pushing too hard."
"I'm pushing hard enough to find the edge." Lyric looked at him. "I need to know where the edge is before I can move it."
Caspian studied him for a moment.
Then he sat down on the floor beside him, back against the shelving, which was not a thing Lyric had expected.
The suit jacket did not seem designed for sitting on archive floors.
Lyric looked at him.
"What are you doing?" Lyric said.
"Waiting for your vision to come back fully," Caspian said. "Your left pupil is still slightly dilated. It means the neurological pressure hasn't resolved."
"You know what a dilated pupil means."
"I've watched people push ability ceilings before." He said it simply, without drama. "It takes approximately four minutes for full resolution after a second-layer backlash. I'll sit here until it's done."
Lyric opened his mouth.
"Don't say you're fine," Caspian said. "You're sitting on the floor."
"I sat down on purpose."
"Your body sat down. You weren't consulted."
A silence.
"You shouted in Old Meridian," Lyric said.
Caspian paused. "When?"
"When I went down from the first backlash. In the vault, day three. I heard you through the white noise." He looked at the ceiling. "I don't speak Old Meridian. What did you say?"
A very long pause.
"I said —" Caspian stopped. "It was an expletive. It doesn't translate cleanly."
"Try."
"The closest Modern Meridian equivalent is something like 'don't you dare.'" He said it very levelly. "It's not typically used as an expletive. It's typically used as—" Another pause. "An instruction."
Lyric turned his head to look at him.
Caspian was looking at the ceiling.
"Four minutes," Lyric said.
"Three and a half," Caspian said. "You can sit still for three and a half minutes."
Lyric sat still.
The archive was very quiet.
After a moment, without looking away from the ceiling, Caspian said: "You'll get through the third layer. The pressure threshold responds to familiarity, not force. Come back to the same object every day. Let it recognize you."
"Like courting it," Lyric said.
"Yes."
Lyric thought about Evelyn's words, weeks ago that felt like longer: Some objects need to be courted. Approached gradually.
"You knew that would work," he said. "For me specifically."
A pause. "I thought it might."
"Because of what I am to the objects."
Silence.
"Three and a half minutes," Caspian said, quietly, "and then I'll tell you something."
Lyric looked at him. At the clean line of his jaw. The wire-rimmed glasses. The very careful way he was holding still on a cold archive floor in a suit that cost more than Lyric's monthly rent.
"Okay," Lyric said.
He waited.
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