The metronome doesn’t speed up for fear.

In Annex Two, Cassia clings to the clock and the table—refusing the seductive whisper that begs her to be “heroic” at the worst possible moment. But while she holds the ship’s course with stubborn discipline, Inquisitor Varra’s voice cuts in with a new rot: the cathedral hymn is breaking where it shouldn’t, and Savine-9’s Mechanicus reliquary key is missing.

They find it where people kneel.

A hidden cabinet in a side chapel. Fresh tool marks. Father Severian smiling like a host who enjoys watching guests bleed. The key is real. The hiding place is deliberate. And the priest’s contempt is the kind that doesn’t need a weapon to wound.

But the theft is only the bait.

Back in the vox junction—where incense fades into ozone—an unlogged cable waits behind a sealed panel, dust-free and shameless. A new line. A quiet relay. A lie threaded through the ship itself, looping their own authority into the cathedral’s crooked song. Even the city’s “push” has fingers up here.

Now the hunt shifts from suspicion to proof.

Varra wants receipts on a screen, not sermons. Savine wants a trace. Havel wants everyone alive. Milo—shaking and pale—hears the wrongness like metal in the teeth. And Elias, collared and watched, has to aim his words like a blade while the ship tries to own his silence.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

The hymn below keeps changing key.
The lie keeps moving.
And Annex Two has one job:

Hold steady. Name it. Cut it. On record.

Reformed Theologian GPT: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-XXwzX1gnv-reformed-theologian

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