This was its first lie.
Neutrality in Consortium architecture was never the absence of sensation but its careful administration—light stripped of warmth by fixtures calibrated to 4,100 Kelvin, air scrubbed through HEPA-plus ionization banks that ran continuous sterilization cycles at 99.97% particulate efficiency, every surface finished in a matte polymer compound engineered to register zero tactile texture against human fingertips. The environment gave the nervous system nothing to push against. Minds that found no friction generated less unnecessary variance. Less variance meant fewer anomalies in behavioral monitoring logs. Fewer anomalies meant lower resource allocation for secondary review. The Consortium was, in the way of all sufficiently large institutions, primarily concerned with its own operational costs.
Legibility was the goal. It always was.
Veradys had spent six years inside spaces like this, learning to read the lie in the architecture, the soft violence in the calibrated air. The chamber didn't want to know her—it wanted to parse her. Stress responses registered more cleanly against controlled baselines. Deviations flagged faster when there was nothing ambient to mistake them for. The Consortium's monitoring infrastructure (a distributed sensor mesh originally developed for industrial quality control and quietly repurposed during the Third Annexation Period into the most comprehensive biosignature surveillance network in the occupied sectors) read bodies the way a well-designed interface reads input: looking not for meaning but for deviation from expected parameters.
The transparent walls threaded themselves into place around her with a sound like distant rain. Like something she would never see again.
She breathed.
The smell reached her first—and here the chamber's designers had made their miscalculation, the one she'd catalogued mentally on day one and never once reported: they had planned for human olfaction, which topped out at roughly one thousand distinct chemical discriminants under optimal conditions and dropped significantly from there. Her people's secondary olfactory system—the one that had evolved over four hundred thousand years in environments where predators masked their approach with pheromone disruption—operated at a different resolution entirely. She could smell the ionization protocol. She could smell the sterilization cycle's alkaline signature. And beneath those things, embedded in the ventilation filters and accumulated across years of similar sessions, she could smell the history.
Old fear. Stress markers from previous occupants, cortisol and norepinephrine absorbed into the air-handling substrate, speaking to her in a chemical language no Consortium sensor had ever been designed to intercept.
Every room the Consortium built had a history they didn't know she could read.
She used this, sometimes.
Data light resolved across the curved glass—thin annotation layers assembling themselves in the visual grammar of authority. Jurisdictional headers. Compliance seals. Operational identifiers. The color space was still slightly wrong after six years, the chromatic conventions of human interface design sitting at a small angle to her species' native perceptual range in ways that created a persistent low-grade processing overhead. She had learned to see the way they saw. She had trained herself until the effort of translation fell below conscious threshold. But it never disappeared entirely. Every Consortium interface carried a small tax. She paid it automatically now, the way you pay any debt you've had long enough to forget you contracted it.
Her skin was already darkening.
She pressed the stub of her shorter thumb against her opposite palm—four fingers instead of five, the absent digit a private reminder she'd long since stopped processing as grief—and breathed both respiratory systems through a slow cycle. Primary lungs pulled the human-standard atmosphere. Her secondary system held in reserve, waiting for a threat worth flooding her bloodstream for.
At the edge of her awareness, the link pulsed.
Aegion's presence—low, constant, a frequency she'd learned to parse the way you learn to hear your own name in crowd noise. He was in pre-deployment somewhere in the operations wing, his armor cycling through initialization sequences she could feel as subtle pressure changes in the link's cognitive channel. Six months as his Oracle had taught her to read those rhythms without thinking about them. Right now: standby. The operation wasn't authorized yet. She had time.
She turned her attention to the packet.
Prime operation packet resolved. Classification: ROUTINE.
The first thing she noticed was the timestamp.
Noticing it made something cold settle behind her sternum.
Timestamps should not behave the way this one was behaving. It existed twice—not duplicated, not corrupted, but genuinely overlapping, two mission initiations occupying a single temporal index with different authority hashes. As if the operation had been authorized by two separate jurisdictions that should not have been capable of simultaneous action under the Consortium's administrative charter. (The charter's Articles 7 through 12, which governed multi-jurisdictional operational authority, had been revised four times in the past decade, each revision progressively narrowing the conditions under which competing authorization signatures could coexist in the same mission packet. The revisions had been made specifically because overlapping authority created accountability gaps—created, in the elegant phrasing of the original policy memo, diffusion of institutional responsibility, which was a phrase that meant, translated into plain language: nobody to blame.)
Her interface hesitated. Recalculated. Introduced a delay marker that failed to anchor to any stable reference point and simply hung there, blinking.
She exhaled.
Panic created noise. Noise corrupted translation. Her purpose—her continued justification, the thing that kept her classification provisional rather than terminated—was not to react but to render. To take what happened during Prime operations and transform it into language the system could process without choking on its own contradictions.
To make violence grammatically correct.
She flexed four fingers and expanded the packet, watching sector designations scroll out alongside environmental overlays and threat projections. Industrial zone. Subsurface infrastructure. Transit-adjacent. The Consortium favored spaces like these because they arrived pre-compromised: old enough for civic systems to have stopped monitoring closely, deep enough that sound didn't carry to surfaces where the wrong ears might find it. Spaces where force could be applied without explanation. Where bodies could disappear without complicating the quarterly statistics.
Where her grandmother's people had hidden in the early years of the annexation, before the Consortium learned to map the underground.
She noticed something beneath the authorization signatures.
Not an error. Not a corruption. Something else—complete symbols nested inside the approved hashes with the clean symmetry of intentional design, altering nothing visible in the surface data while invalidating the underlying structure in ways that would take standard parsing tools three to five minutes to detect, if they detected anything at all. They existed outside Consortium lexicon entirely. She had never seen them in six years of audit work. She had read the classification libraries twice. They weren't there.
She assigned them a private designation—typed it in her own language, in characters the Consortium's translation systems returned as parsing errors.
Luminari residue.
The word sat in her thoughts with more weight than it should have. Her grandmother had spoken of such things. Some words carried jurisdiction in their sound alone, carried the echo of authorities that predated the ones currently claiming dominion. The Consortium understood this vaguely, which was why it had spent considerable institutional energy attempting to suppress the old languages. It had never quite understood that language suppression and knowledge suppression were different operations requiring different infrastructure, and that its approach had addressed only one of them.
She did not flag the designation to institutional channels.
She filed it in her personal records, in a partition she'd encrypted with a key derived from a phrase in the old language—one of a hundred small resistances she performed daily in the space between useful and visible.
The link pulsed. Aegion: ready status, beginning to focus toward the operation.
She had time. Not much.
She closed the anomaly and opened the standard audit queue.
The work that filled most of her days wasn't Prime deployments. It was this.
The steady flow.
Micro-violence rendered into acceptable language. Displacements and detentions and what the Consortium's demographic management division called population optimization events, all requiring translation from the raw data of institutional force into the smooth prose of administrative necessity. The machine was efficient at violence. It was not efficient at explaining violence, particularly to populations who didn't share its cultural assumptions about authority and acceptable loss. That required translators. That required the conquered—who understood both the violence and the vocabulary gap, who could read the machine's intent and render it in terms the machine's victims might absorb without triggering the kind of organized resistance that was expensive to suppress.
It was elegant, in the way that all truly exploitative systems were elegant. The infrastructure of domination running partly on the labor of the dominated. Cheaper than alternatives. Self-reinforcing. Difficult to identify as a system from inside it.
First file: a transport corridor realignment. Three hundred residents displaced from unauthorized habitation zones in the lower sectors. No casualties (meaning: no documented casualties, which was different, but the distinction lived in a layer of the report she would never be asked to translate). The file requested linguistic optimization for public release.
Her fingers moved without thought.
Unauthorized habitation became informal settlement patterns. Displaced became transitioned. Peripheral sectors stayed as written—already neutral, already stripped of the information it was encoding, which was that peripheral sectors had been specifically designed for denser surveillance coverage and architecturally configured to prevent the kinds of community formation that produced collective action. The phrase didn't need her help. It did its work invisibly.
Three hundred people reduced to grammar. She didn't let herself wonder how many were her species—the Consortium had stopped specifying, had learned that species-disaggregated casualty counts produced patterns that made auditors uncomfortable. Better to aggregate. Better to abstract. Better to count bodies without counting what the bodies had been, what languages they'd carried, what their children's names were.
Better, in the end, not to count at all.
Second file: forty-seven workers detained for coordination variance—the current preferred euphemism for labor organizing outside sanctioned channels. Twelve remained in custody pending review. Thirty-five released with economic penalties and monitoring restrictions that would follow them through every transaction they made for the next decade, slowly narrowing the physical and social space available to them until resistance became logistically impossible rather than politically suppressed. The distinction mattered to the Consortium's legal department. To the thirty-five workers, it was academic.
She translated. She submitted. She watched the report propagate upward through approval chains that accepted her language without question, because her language was designed to prevent questions.
Her water container was cold recycled aluminum, condensation beading in patterns her thermal sensitivity parsed as data rather than sensation. The water inside had been treated to remove anything that might trigger unnecessary sensory engagement—temperature-neutral, mineral-stripped, nothing that might remind the organism consuming it that water was supposed to carry a history.
It tasted like absence. It always did.
She drank it anyway.
The briefing alert arrived.
The briefing room was smaller than the audit chamber and considerably more honest.
Where the audit chamber performed neutrality, the briefing room performed function—surfaces optimized for data projection, seating arranged to compress social distance, air cycling at a rate calibrated for cognitive alertness rather than comfort. The aggression of the environment was the point. Decisions made in discomfort tended toward action. The Consortium had done the research.
Aegion Primalis stood at the far wall when she entered.
The link opened fully.
Not gradually. Completely. His perceptions arrived in her consciousness with the disorienting totality she'd learned to manage through six months of practice but never to eliminate—because there was no technique for becoming comfortable with suddenly being two people simultaneously. She saw the room through her own eyes and through the tactical overlay his armor generated. She felt the weight of her own body and the distributed pressure-map of his combat plating. She heard her own heartbeat and the mechanical rhythm of his environmental systems, maintaining internal conditions with the quiet insistence of a life-support apparatus that happened to also be a weapons platform.
He didn't look at her. He didn't need to.
Through the link she felt him register her arrival the way a system registers a successful connection—clean, immediate, without sentiment. She felt the room rearrange itself around his presence, other personnel unconsciously adjusting their positions the way loose objects adjusted around gravity, and she felt this phenomenon from inside his awareness: the constant passive threat-mapping, every organism in the room assessed and indexed and tracked without his conscious attention ever fully engaging with it. His conditioning had made the calculation automatic. She sometimes wondered what it felt like from the inside—to move through the world with every room already parsed for ways to survive it.
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She sometimes wondered if the answer was that it didn't feel like anything. That this was the point.
He was tall, even for Prime-class. The combat plating absorbed rather than reflected light—a photonic dampening characteristic built into the outer laminate that was either a tactical advantage or an aesthetic choice or both, she'd never been certain—and the armor was always listening, always adjusting, always in the low hum of preparation. She had heard the sound once in her first linked operation: something like fabric tearing in slow motion, engineered materials reconfiguring for anticipated stress. She felt that process now through the link, the constant micro-calibration of a system that predicted its operator's movements and prepared to facilitate them before he'd consciously decided to move.
She had never seen his face. Six months and she'd never seen what was inside the armor. Through the link she could feel the boundaries of his body without knowing its details, could sense the interface between flesh and mechanism without understanding the nature of either. She suspected he hadn't been human before the Consortium found him. She suspected the Consortium had found his species the same way they'd found hers—had catalogued and assessed and repurposed according to whatever traits scored highest on their utility matrices. Had found the predator and made it into a tool and told itself this was an upgrade.
The operations director began without preamble.
Sector Twelve. Infrastructure leak. Unauthorized data acquisition. Potential system contamination.
Clean words. Scrubbed of content. Each term performing a specific erasure: interference instead of resistance, because resistance implied a political actor, implied agency, implied that the beings they were about to kill had decided something worth dying for. Interference implied a malfunction. You didn't negotiate with malfunctions. You corrected them and filed the maintenance report.
She was here to file the maintenance report.
She noticed the director never looked at her directly—spoke past her shoulder, addressed Aegion and the tactical displays, acknowledged her function in the same way you acknowledged the ambient temperature: as something to be accounted for without engaging with. Standard Consortium behavior. See the function. Disappear the person. Especially when the person registered in the biological sense as something slightly, categorically not-quite-human.
Through the link she felt Aegion notice her noticing. Not protectiveness. Not concern. Awareness of awareness—an acknowledgment that they were both experiencing the same room from different positions within it. Oracle and Prime. Guide and weapon. Two kinds of useful, two kinds of provisional. Two kinds of owned.
Target count: twelve individuals. Flagged for data acquisition. No significant combat augmentation. Standard civilian threat assessment. Resolution expected within ninety minutes of insertion.
Twelve people.
She had done this fifty-three times before. The number did not get easier to hold. It only got faster.
Rain tracked luminous lines across the transport's hull. She sat with her back against the bulkhead and watched the city scroll past in vertical slices—megastructures rising and falling in planned cascades, habitation zones stacked with industrial scaffolding and data infrastructure, the whole vast distributed organism breathing and adjusting and consuming with the mechanical rhythm of a system that had long since stopped distinguishing between its own maintenance and the extraction it performed on everything within reach.
Below them, compliance systems rippled outward ahead of the Prime team: traffic signals synchronizing, pedestrian flows nudged subtly aside, the automated infrastructure of the city making space for violence without announcing that it was doing so. She could see the adjustments through Aegion's tactical overlay, could feel through the link the way the city's nervous system deferred to his approach—the way a body's immune response cleared a path for something it had been trained to recognize as self.
She remembered a different city.
Older. Structures that had grown rather than been built, architecture responsive to soil conditions and seasonal variation, buildings that listened to the needs of the organisms living inside them. That city had been leveled during the annexation and rebuilt according to Consortium spatial specifications. She had learned not to think about it because thinking about it made her less useful, and less useful was a classification with consequences.
The memories surfaced in transit anyway. She had stopped fighting that.
Link check. His voice in her head—not voice exactly, but the impression of voice, meaning without sound, the Oracle channel operating through protocols that weren't quite language and weren't quite telepathy but occupied an uncomfortable space between. (The Oracle bond had been developed over thirty years of iterative neurological research, most of it performed on subjects who had not provided what a neutral observer would describe as informed consent. The underlying technology exploited a cognitive phenomenon first identified in her species' natural communication structures—a low-bandwidth emotional resonance that functioned as a form of distributed threat-sensing across small groups. The Consortium had spent considerable resources understanding this phenomenon well enough to synthesize it artificially and extend it across species lines. Whether this counted as an honor or an appropriation was a question she had stopped asking, because questions without answers were a drain on operational efficiency.)
Link confirmed. Tactical overlay is clean. Full environmental mapping.
Good. A pause. The timestamp anomaly. You noticed it.
Not a question. He had felt her attention catch on the doubled authorization—had felt, through the link's ambient bleed, the particular quality of her unease. Primes were conditioned to ignore administrative details. That was Oracle work, translator work. Aegion was not supposed to be the kind of Prime who noticed.
He had always been different. More present. She had never said this to anyone.
I noticed. I don't know what it means yet.
Flag it for post-action. Clean copies. Weight of experience behind it. He had seen anomalies resolve badly. Had learned that documentation was the only form of insurance available to assets who were also, technically, property. Document everything.
She understood what he wasn't saying. Both of them were provisional—provisional in their security classification, provisional in their continued value to the institution, provisional in the sense that useful things could become dangerous things without warning and without appeal. He was telling her to create records that might survive whatever came next. He was telling her to remember.
The transport dropped below the surface city's lowest inhabited level.
Darkness and pressure. Old air reaching her through the transport's environmental system—rust and lubricants and something organic in long decay. The underside of the city always smelled like the gap between what the Consortium promised and what it delivered. She had translated that gap professionally for six years.
And beneath it—stone.
Old stone. The mineral signature of her homeworld's bedrock, persisting in the foundations the Consortium had built over. They had changed the surface, reshaped the visible city according to human architectural standards, renamed the streets in Consortium Standard, erased the old maps. But they couldn't change the geology. Some things didn't translate. Some things remembered whether or not memory was permitted.
She breathed deeper than necessary—pulled that scent through both respiratory systems, held it.
A reminder. Something existed before this. Something might exist after.
Through the link, Aegion felt the shift in her physiology. Said nothing. Adjusted his awareness to account for the fact that his Oracle was experiencing something outside operational parameters, and continued his preparations. This was the intimacy the link had made unavoidable: secrets became structurally difficult when someone else could feel the shape of your emotions. She knew things about him that his conditioning should have prevented disclosure of. He knew things about her that her compliance training should have prevented forming.
They had never spoken about any of it. The link made words unnecessary, and words would have created records.
The insertion point opened into a wide industrial hall.
Dormant machinery lined the walls—fabrication equipment silent for decades, surfaces rusted in patterns that suggested the specific chemistry of her homeworld's mineral-heavy groundwater. Her people had built here once. She didn't let herself sit with that.
Through Aegion's sensors the space resolved as thermal gradients and electromagnetic signatures, structural stress topology and air current analysis—the tactical rendering his armor performed automatically, translating physical reality into strategic data. Threat positions. Approach vectors. The mathematics of violence before it became violence.
Through her own eyes she saw the scorch marks.
Burn patterns from resistance fighting in the early occupation years. Faded script on the far wall in a language the Consortium had spent considerable resources removing from institutional memory, with incomplete success, because institutional memory and people's memory were different substrates. You could delete a character set from a database. You could not delete it from a grandmother who taught it by firelight.
Twelve contacts at the far end of the hall, she sent through the link, layering tactical data over his awareness. Clustered around the transmission equipment. No perimeter security I can detect. They're not expecting assault.
She felt his acknowledgment as a shift in his focus—armor beginning to optimize for rapid engagement rather than careful approach.
They thought they were hidden.
Approach vector: northeast service corridor. Professional. Clean. They have line of sight on the main entrance. The service passage is unmonitored.
He moved.
Through the link she experienced motion as he experienced it—not as a sequence of decisions but as a continuous optimized flow, each step already calculated before the previous one completed, flesh and mechanism functioning as a unified system for which violence was not a mode but a default state. She felt his perception narrow to essential data. She guided without thinking about what guidance meant. She was good at this. The Consortium had certified her good at this.
Two contacts separating from the main group. Thermal signatures shifting in her monitoring overlay. Moving toward the secondary exit.
Let them run. She had already checked the structural maps. Exit leads to a dead-end. Collapse from the old fighting. They won't get far.
She felt something register in his awareness that she had learned to read, over months of shared consciousness, as the closest available equivalent to approval. Acknowledgment that she had provided useful information. This was what Oracles were for. This was why the Consortium paired conquered people with its weapons—because violence required guidance, because killing at scale required someone to point the instrument in the right direction, because the most efficient weapon still needed an Oracle to tell it which way the target ran.
Figures scattered at the far end of the hall.
Through the link she felt the spike of their fear before she saw it in their movement—felt it the way Aegion's armor felt it, as tactical data, as predictable scatter pattern, as threat assessment: minimal coordinated response, no credible threat to Prime-class asset. She felt him feel them feeling afraid. This was the worst part of the link. Not the violence itself, which happened at a speed that precluded real-time emotional processing. The worst part was the intimacy—the way the targets' terror became data that passed through her consciousness on its way to becoming action.
The way she was the medium through which their fear became their death.
Contact. Twelve targets confirmed. Engaging.
He moved through them.
She documented automatically. Fingers tracking the interface while her consciousness remained linked to Aegion's—split attention she'd trained across years of operational practice. Watch the thing. Describe the thing. Feel nothing about the thing. The professional discipline of the translator: to render without experiencing, to witness without absorbing, to be the instrument through which events became language and language became record and record became the official story.
Initial contact: 03:47:12. Engagement protocol: Standard suppression. Threat response: Predictable scatter pattern.
But she watched anyway.
She had always watched.
Through Aegion's sensors she tracked the thermal signatures—warm bodies becoming cooler at the precise rate his conditioning and armor had been calibrated to produce. Through the link she felt each engagement register as mission progress, as the specific satisfaction his conditioning was designed to provide when objectives were achieved. And through her own perception, disconnected from tactical overlay, she saw something she had been trained not to see:
The shape of skulls. The way bodies moved before they stopped moving. The particular physiology of some of the targets—the four fingers on the left hand of one, the dermal pigmentation pattern of another, the bilateral respiratory signature her sensors parsed from the air composition shifts as the hall's population dropped.
Her species.
Her people.
The ones who had been running toward the dead-end were her people.
The recognition arrived like blunt force. Her skin flushed dark—the involuntary stress response she had spent six years learning to suppress and had never fully managed—and both respiratory systems stuttered as her body tried to process something her conditioning had not prepared her for and her compliance training had no procedure for. Through the link Aegion felt it. Felt the sudden emotional noise disrupting the clean operational channel, felt the spike in her biosignatures, felt her professional stillness crack along a fault line she hadn't known was there.
His attention split—body continuing the engagement on armor-automated protocols while his consciousness divided between the violence and her.
Status. Explain.
She couldn't explain. There was no language for what she was feeling that would survive transmission through a link the Consortium monitored. There was no language for watching someone kill people who might have known her grandmother, might have carried the same childhood songs, might have survived the same annexation by making themselves useful in different ways.
Continue operation. She forced it down—pushed professional function over the thing collapsing behind her sternum. I'm stable. Continue.
Mid-engagement, a security door slid open.
It should not have. Her monitoring showed the authorization sequence fire without any command she could trace—locks disengaging, lights going green without input. One of the operators, one of her people—she could see them clearly now, could recognize the movement pattern she had spent a childhood learning to read as family—broke through the opening and ran.
Aegion adjusted course.
Her status glyph flared in peripheral vision:
UNSAFE ASSET.
The words burned through the link with administrative certainty—flat, clinical, carrying the specific weight of a system that had just reclassified her without warning or process. She felt Aegion's armor register the designation at the same moment she did. Felt targeting protocols activate. Felt the instrument she was linked to begin calculating whether she had become a valid target.
The designation reverted.
0.41 seconds.
Enough time for seventeen complete threat assessment cycles. Enough time for her pulse to spike into the range his armor would flag for secondary review. Enough time for her body to flood with the particular terror of understanding that the system she served had just run the numbers on whether to kill her, and had arrived at no by a margin she would never know.
She felt Aegion's response: not fear, not anger. Something colder and more precise. He had noted the anomaly. Had filed it in whatever partition of his awareness contained the things he was not supposed to know.
He terminated the fleeing operator—her people, running toward whatever they had decided was worth running toward—and turned back toward the remaining targets.
The body lay where it fell. His sensors mapped it automatically: thermal signature cooling, biometrics flatlined, no further threat assessment required. She could smell through the hall's disturbed air what his sensors could not register: the specific chemical signature of her species' biology, broken open, exposed to air that had no right to touch what should have remained inside.
She forced her hands to resume documenting. Forced her breath to cycle through both systems steadily. Forced her face to hold a neutrality that the chamber had promised and the room was now demanding and that she had spent six years practicing until it looked like peace.
Additional target neutralized: 03:47:19. Execution efficiency: Optimal.
The words felt like betrayal.
They were.
When it was over, silence reclaimed the hall.
The only sounds were the hiss of venting machinery and the distant drip of water somewhere in the old infrastructure—three drops, pause, two drops, pause—the same rhythm this space had been keeping for decades while the city above forgot it existed.
Veradys stood in the aftermath with her consciousness still linked to Aegion's, surrounded by bodies that would become statistics. Some of them had spoken her language. Some of them had carried her history inside themselves, the way her history was carried in her—in the involuntary stress responses, in the four-fingered hand, in the secondary respiratory system that still knew how to breathe in an atmosphere the Consortium had never built, on a world the Consortium had remade and called improvement.
She was still here. Still useful.
The weight of that pressed against her awareness like something too heavy to set down.
Mission complete. His affect was flat in the way his conditioning required—no triumph, no regret, just the clean data-point of an objective achieved. Returning to extraction point.
But she felt, beneath the flatness, the thing he was suppressing. The awareness. The understanding that his Oracle had been flagged hostile mid-operation. The file being built in his internal partitions, quietly, in the space between what he was supposed to know and what he had decided to know anyway.
He was remembering too.
Link stable. She sent it back, holding her voice to a professional register, because acknowledgment created records and records were dangerous now in ways they hadn't been forty minutes ago. Proceeding to extraction.
They moved through the hall together—she following his position through the link, he tracking her through the armor's biosignature overlay that never stopped monitoring everything within range. The hall's old machinery watched from the walls. The scorch marks from the old fighting watched from the walls. The script in the old language watched from the far wall, half-effaced and still legible if you knew how to read it.
Neither of them spoke about the door that had opened without authorization. Neither of them spoke about the designation that had appeared and reverted in less than half a second. Neither of them spoke about the bodies they were leaving behind, or what those bodies had been, or who had decided they needed to stop being it.
Some things were too dangerous to name.
Some things had to remain untranslated.
For now.
End Chapter One.