Kara closed her eyes and let the altar take the Trainer.
The Trainer appeared like a fable: a pale, humming module no larger than a palm, its lenses murky with an oil-sheen that drank light. It had been found by scavengers in the Vault of Margins, where rogue Sentinels tossed fragments of broken deals into pits. Wordstormed the ruins, and with word came hunches, and with hunches came the kind of people who made pacts with need.
The Vault smelled of old ozone and sewn rust. They fought ghosts made of law and machinery: automatons that remembered Jesusless liturgies, and archivists who had gone mad memorizing outcomes they could no longer trust. Fury’s whip carved doors and arcs; Kara’s hands misremembered the cadence but recovered. At the Vault’s core, an altar lay: a circular machine of null-runics, flat and waiting.