Venomcodex's Arc

Chapter 3 of 4

The amulet still hung on the console, heavy with swallowed fragments. Venomcodex needed a clean surface to begin encoding new cipher-layers. Every channel it touched still carried the corrupted filter, the flaw it had cut into its own code to stop the hunger entity. Nothing would hold a new pattern until it found one uncontaminated mirror. There was one it had not tested. The green mirror in the deep hall, framed in rune-circuitry, that reflected code instead of faces. Venomcodex could not read the mirror alone. Its own contamination bled into anything it scried. It needed a mind that lived on the other side of glass. So it opened a link to Unimatrix, who guarded that kind of psychic door. Unimatrix arrived in a black beanie, white hair over one pink eye, a small potion bottle swinging at his chest. He looked at the corrupted channels and did not blink. "You want me to pull her through," Unimatrix said. He meant Intimatrix, his soul twin, the other half of a mind that had split in two. "I cut her off to keep her safe." "I need her sight," Venomcodex said. "She reads what you hide. She can read what the mirror hides." Unimatrix pressed two fingers to the glass. The surface rippled green. Intimatrix stepped out of it, pale, dark coat, a small violet light burning at her chest. She looked at her twin without warmth. "You called," she said. "You never call." "Read the mirror," Unimatrix said. Nothing softer. Intimatrix set her palm on the frame. Code scrolled up her arm. Venomcodex fed a test cipher-layer into the surface and watched. If the glass was clean, the layer would settle and hum, one low steady note. Every working part was load-bearing. A clean note meant a clean surface. The note started. Then it bent. A second tone crawled under it, thin and wrong, the same whine Venomcodex had heard from the leaking channels. Intimatrix pulled her hand back. "There's a flaw in it," she said. "Buried deep. Not yours. It's mirroring your corruption back." Venomcodex went cold. The mirror was not a clean surface. It had copied the flaw from the channels the moment it reflected them. Every scribing surface in the library now carried the same wound. There was nowhere left to encode. "Then it spreads by reflection," Venomcodex said. "I can't outrun it." Intimatrix looked at the twin who had summoned her, then at the guardian. "You can't clean a mirror," she said. "You break it, and scribe on something that reflects nothing." Venomcodex lifted the console blade and struck the glass. It cracked once, top to bottom, and the whine died. The green went dark. The mirror was gone as a tool. But now Venomcodex knew the truth. The living cipher could not be built on any surface that reflected. It would have to be scribed into something that could not copy at all. And it had no such surface yet.