The signal was different.

  It arrived on a Tuesday—or what would have been a Tuesday if the Ring ran on Earth-time, which it largely did, because twelve billion souls carry their habits with them even into eternity, and there is something deeply human about the seven-day week that refuses to dissolve even in paradise.

  Not a lifeboat signal.

  Not a distress call.

  Not the faint, flickering frequency of something that had been broken by the universe and was looking for somewhere to rest.

  This was a Broadcast.

  And Broadcasts come with capitalization because they are designed to impose themselves on whatever receives them. This one vibrated through the Ring’s outer shell and made the Lighthouse blink twice, quickly, the way an eye blinks when something it wasn’t expecting enters its field of vision.

  The Architect translated in my mind before the words had finished forming.

  The message had no preamble. No introduction. No acknowledgment of the hierarchy of the net they were contacting.

  Demands.

  The Arbiter’s silver mask tilted toward me. His eyes, behind the polished surface, were calculating.

  “It is not a Lifeboat, Prime,” he said. “It is a Warship. And it is not broadcasting from grief—it is broadcasting from appetite.”

  I went to the observation deck and I looked.

  The warship was a brutalist nightmare of black iron and jagged spikes. It moved through the void the way a fist moves through water—not with grace, but with complete indifference to the medium. It was powered by Compression. Not the compression of physics, not the useful kind that builds stars. The other kind. The kind that takes the immeasurable complexity of a conscious soul and reduces it to fuel.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  I knew about Compression.

  I had spent ten years being compressed.

  Different geometry. Same essential insult.

  The ship was massive. Larger than the Ghost Moon. Larger, possibly, than any single thing I had built. It had consumed seven failing Nets, the Architect reported—seven realities that had reached the end of their arc without producing a Gambler, and had therefore been harvested by whatever this thing was. The energy of seven dying universes was stored in that hull, compressed into cold red light that hummed at a frequency that made the Ring’s outer shell resonate with discomfort.

  The General appeared on the hull.

  Not inside. Not in a cockpit or a throne room. On the hull—standing on the skin of his ship in the void as though the vacuum were a floor that simply hadn’t been introduced to him properly. He was jagged armor and cold red light. His form had been compressed too—whatever he had once been before he became this—and what remained was a kind of concentrated aggression, a being from whom all the unnecessary parts had been burned away until only the consuming function remained.

  His voice vibrated through my marrow.

  “You are the light that draws the moths.” It wasn’t a metaphor—it was an assessment. Cold. Economical. “We have consumed seven failing Nets. Your Golden Ring is nothing but a fat, ripe fruit waiting to be plucked.”

  A pause. A pause that felt like the countdown at the end of a fuse.

  “Give us the Beacon. Or we will turn your Garden into a Graveyard.”

  Elias was behind me. He had the stillness of a man who has heard ultimatums before and knows that reacting to the surface of them is the first step toward losing.

  The Joker was beside him, the manic energy deliberately suppressed to something that looked almost like focus.

  Sera had her void-blade out. Of course she had her void-blade out. She would have her void-blade out at a birthday party if she calculated a sufficient threat potential.

  I looked at the Iron Hegemony.

  I looked at the Gold in my veins.

  I looked at the Garden behind me—the jasmine, the stone, the weight of twelve billion people who were currently going about their existence in the Ring above, entirely unaware that something hungry was knocking on the door.

  And then I made the most Sovereign decision I was capable of.

  “Hold my glass, Elias.”