Vess screamed—not from pain, but from the sudden flood of her own darkness: being locked in a closet at age five, alone, for three days. Kael watched her convulse, then slowly sit up, breathing hard.
Above them, the lights of Tangle-7 flickered—and stayed on.
He looked at the girl, still trembling. Then he broke the shard in two and gave her half. sinucon checkers
Vess jumped three of his pieces in a row. Kael doubled over, reliving his daughter’s last comm-call. Tears blurred his vision. But then he saw it—a trap within a trap. Vess had left her king-piece exposed, believing he was too broken to see it.
He moved. Capture. The board flipped.
Game ten. Kael opened with a standard diagonal advance. Vess mirrored. By move six, she had sacrificed two shards deliberately—Kael felt the sting of his mother’s funeral, then the burn of being laid off from the archive. He winced but held.
By move twenty, the board was chaos. Both had Sinucons. Pieces moved backward. The corrupted AI began to whisper through the slate—distorted fragments of their own memories spoken in the other’s voice. Vess screamed—not from pain, but from the sudden
“You left her in that duct,” Vess’s shard hissed in Kael’s ear. He froze.