Ringcut

Exit moved in silence through the black zone. The road beneath his boots was fractured and blistered from a century of stress fractures, chemical erosion, and neglect. Every surface held the residue of failure. Surveillance nodes blinked faintly in the walls above him. Pale red eyes stared from cracked housing. They still tracked motion and still read heat. Power to the district had been cut hours ago. The Network never really died. It idled, quiet and watchful. It waited for patterns to reestablish.

The buildings around him weren’t just abandoned. They had been emptied with intent. You could feel it in the air. Everything resisted your breath. These were places where people had lived. Then they were reclassified. Now they stood hollowed, reduced to signal receivers and concrete carcasses.

He walked with control. He had memorized every step. His knees flexed with the incline of the slanted concrete. His gloved fingers brushed a crumbling column as he passed. He made contact only to stabilize his weight. The Network logged every tremor in the city. Even when they couldn’t see you, they knew how you moved.

Ahead, in the shadow of a ruptured tram station, Cambri sat folded on the ground. His knees were drawn to his chest. His head rocked with mechanical precision, side to side, at a tempo too fast for comfort. His hands tapped against his legs, and every finger followed its own internal beat. Cambri always heard more than he said. He didn't need instruction. He had already begun decoding the panel beside him.

Newt crouched a few meters away with one arm braced against the rusted rail of the station platform. His eyes were sharp and moving. He didn’t blink. He held two fingers in the air to signal no movement. He had already swept the surrounding rooftops to insure there were no drones, heat beacons, or visible pulse signatures.

They had a window. It would close quickly.

Exit dropped into a crouch beside Cambri. The boy’s fingers never stopped moving. The panel was decades old. It had been updated, reskinned, and altered by thousands of firmware edits. Cambri understood it like a language.

“Is the sequence still clean?” Exit asked.

Cambri didn't look away. His lips barely moved.

“Nine seconds. Not twelve. Everyone thinks twelve. They repeat it. But it’s nine. Always nine.”

Exit nodded once. He reached to the edge of the panel and peeled back a weather-flattened strip of metal that concealed the manual override port. The smell of the panel hit immediately. Burnt wiring mixed with oxidized copper and cheap adhesive. He tapped the port twice. A string of sparks jumped from the input node and then vanished. The light inside the panel blinked red and then dulled to amber.

Newt stood slowly and moved closer, daring not speak until he was within whisper range.

“We have less than three minutes until the Network syncs. After that we’re open.”

Exit kept his focus on Cambri. He trusted the boy’s mind more than the grid’s timing.

“Cambri, if anything shifts, you let me know.”

Cambri nodded sharply. “I’ll see it before it shifts.”

Exit reached inside his coat and drew out the device. It was no larger than a memory card and looked unfinished. The corners were scorched; the sides partially melted. Its casing had been built from salvaged scraps. Its software had never been validated by any official code authority leaving it with no registration hash or biosignature.

It was a crime to carry it, and a deeper one to understand how to use it.

He pressed it into the panel’s interior slot. The wall made a low noise. It almost sounded like breathing. Then the panel unlocked.

The three of them entered.

Inside, the air was dead and dry. This had once been an administrative node for Ancestry Foundation records. Now it was a carcass. The lights were long dead. Cambri’s portable infrared lamp lit the space in shallow, trembling arcs. The ground was bare concrete, pitted and uneven. Laminate remnants lay shattered across the floor.

A poster drooped on the far wall. Its edges were curled and stiff. The center was faded, but some of the words were still visible. Unity through legacy.

Below it, the carved emblem of the Ancestry Foundation glared from the wall. A tree set aflame with its branches ringed in laurel. Someone had tried to burn it off, but the attempt had failed. The symbol still held.

Exit took a slow breath. Even now, standing inside one of their forgotten buildings, he could feel the grid humming beneath his feet.

This had been the center of the world once.

The Ancestry Foundation had not begun as a ruling body. It had started with lobbying, advisory panels, and soft power over judicial standards. Then came corporate consolidation and faith legislation. Full absorption of civic infrastructure followed. Schools, hospitals, and transport systems—all of it folded into a single body politic. The Foundation called it integration. Everyone else called it inevitability.

At birth, every male infant was Ringed. The procedure took place within minutes of delivery. No parental consent was required. The device was embedded in the foreskin and connected to the nervous system. It measured blood and hormone fluctuations. It also measured language patterns and proximity exposure. It updated constantly, even during sleep.

The state called it sacramental. The children did not get to disagree.

Women were exempt from Ringing. The Foundation considered them unpredictable data sources. Their role was reproductive, domestic, and supportive. They were evaluated by fertility index and behavioral alignment. Most never reached score parity with their male counterparts. Deviance lowered one’s status. Sexual, spiritual, or emotional deviation. A woman married to a dishonored man was reassigned. If her productivity rating was too low, she was not reassigned. She simply vanished.

Exit had grown up inside the Network. His father, Reit, had served as a technician in the early days of the surveillance grid. He had never believed in it, but he worked quietly. Reit had helped migrants cross borders in secret. He had transferred deleted scores back into the database so they could apply for food. He had forged clearance IDs.

The first time he was caught, his score dropped below functional. The family’s apartment was reclassified. Exit lost access to higher education. Ciphin, his partner, received a reassignment warning.

The second time Reit was caught, it was over a Ringless and his son. He helped them forge a location mask. This time the Foundation responded with full erasure.

Exit's mother, Marrol was reassigned within the hour.

Reit’s Ring was removed at home. Exit had been made to watch.

Ciphin was reassigned three days later. The Network informed Exit with a flashing alert on his bedframe. She had already been relocated. They would not tell him where.

No one told Exit to leave the apartment. They just stopped recognizing his authorization. The locks no longer opened. The food ports stopped responding.

He waited for three days. No one came.

He left the building and did not look back.

Now he stood in a dead node with two others who had been erased in different ways. Newt’s body had violated their definitions. Cambri’s mind had exceeded their limits.

Exit turned to face them.

“We’ll build it here.”

Newt nodded. He was already unpacking.

Cambri dropped into a crouch. His eyes scanned the floor.

“There’s power below the slab. Probably for refrigeration. We can siphon.”

Exit opened the cloth wrap that held the device’s innards. The frame was a mess. The emitters had been taken from an old pulse beacon. The signal amp was pre-grid, almost twenty years old. The housing was little more than a box welded from scrap.

The Splitter was not elegant. But it did not need to be.

It only needed to fracture the grid.

If they could sever the central sync loop for even four hours, the Network would lose its hold on nearly everything south of the third zone. The scanners would blink out. The checkpoints would go quiet. The Ring feeds would freeze.

People could run.

Not everyone. But some.

Newt moved carefully across the floor. He laid out the tools: solder, uplink splicer, a portable bypass node. Cambri traced circuit lines across the floor with his fingertips. Exit examined the emitter’s pulse frequency.

Cambri spoke again while still tracing.

“We need thirty minutes of uninterrupted feed to charge the capacitor. The sync hits every nine minutes and seventeen seconds. You’ll have about three to swap in the override once the pulse stabilizes. If you’re off by half a second, the surge will trace the Ring.”

Exit looked up. “I know.”

Newt stood behind him. “Are you going to cut it out?”

Exit nodded.

“When?”

“When it’s done.”

Newt hesitated. “You know you’ll still bleed.”

“I’m counting on it.”

They worked in shifts for seventeen hours.

The building had no ventilation system that still functioned. They took turns cracking the emergency seal on the outer door to let the heat bleed out. Cambri didn’t stop moving. He paced the perimeter of the room, humming under his breath, scanning the data on the internal node they’d reactivated from the panel. The glow lit his face in a steady rhythm and turned his features into a flickering strobe of bone and shadow.

Exit sat cross-legged on the floor. He soldered leads into the power intake for the emitter. He had built machines before, but never one designed to break the world open.

Newt had set up a perimeter of motion detectors outside the building. The technology was old and analog, scavenged from ruins far beyond the third zone. It still worked. It clicked quietly in his ear every time a rat or bird moved near the outer wall. There weren't any human patterns yet. He kept checking anyway.

The Splitter began to take form. It looked like a weapon. Really it was a hole punch. A ghost maker. A disruption node rigged from heat sinks, burst coils, and a cracked capacitor from a medical bay generator. It would surge the Network’s sync channel into feedback. The system would fold in on itself for a limited window. After that, everything would begin restoring.

Not fast enough to stop them. Not fast enough to stop everyone.

Exit calibrated the resonance lens with the steady patience of someone who had stopped believing in mercy but still believed in precision. The lens was cracked. The housing flexed when the charge built. That would be a problem. There was no replacement. They would adjust the timing instead.

“We have a window of four hours,” Exit said. “After that, we’re back in the system.”

Newt glanced toward Cambri. “How wide is the collapse?”

Cambri didn’t speak for a moment. He was tracing something in the dust with his fingers. Rings within rings. A spoked wheel turning inward.

“South grid. Outer zone. Second tier. Maybe lower districts if the feedback folds right. Hospitals will lock. Food units will purge the queues. Transit nodes will jam. But the checkpoints will blink. They’ll blink long enough.”

Newt’s mouth tightened. He nodded. “People will know. They’ll feel it.”

Exit closed the panel and stood. He turned toward the emergency light Cambri had anchored to the far wall. He began unfastening his coat.

Newt moved closer but didn’t touch him. “You’re doing it now?”

“There’s no point running if they can track me through the static.”

Exit laid the coat across the table and unbuttoned his shirt, folding it cleanly, like a habit. He unfastened his belt and rolled it tight before he sat back down on the floor and pulled a sealed scalpel pack from the med kit.

Cambri had stopped humming. He turned away.

Newt crouched beside Exit. “You need help?”

Exit shook his head. “If I slip, don’t touch me.”

He opened the pack. The scalpel gleamed under the lamp’s light. He examined the edge with one finger. Then he set it down and adjusted the mirror. The skin beneath the Ring had formed a callus over the years. It was hard and sensitive. The device glowed faintly. A blue trace under the surface. It was shaped like a sliver of bone.

The state called it divine.

Exit called it his leash.

He took the scalpel.

The cut was clean.

Blood flooded the space between his legs but he stayed silent. The pain pulsed through him, white-hot and absolute. It was a familiar language. It was the language of subtraction. Every piece of him that bled was a piece no longer counted by the Network.

He removed the Ring. It came away with a click. It still hummed faintly. Wet and unblinking. His foreskin came away, too, and for a moment he wasn't sure he wouldn't pass out. 

Newt took it gently and placed it in a box wrapped in insulation foam. “You’ll scar.”

Exit closed his eyes. “That’s the point.”

They burned the Ring in a canister lined with signal scramblers. It sparked and shrieked. Exit remained on the floor until the bleeding slowed. He used gauze from the kit and bound the wound himself. When he stood again, he was lighter. Not healed. Not free. But reduced.

Stripped of worth, the Network would no longer measure him.

Now, he could move.

They tested the Splitter that night. The building groaned when it powered. The lights surged once and then died. The pulse rippled through the perimeter. Cambri watched it hit the wall; saw it reflect back and fold.

“That’s it,” he said. “That’s the moment.”

Exit nodded. “Tomorrow night.”

Newt glanced toward the city’s center. The towers still glowed through the cracked walls. Their signals blinked like a heartbeat.

“Once we trigger it,” Newt said, “we have four hours.”

“Three and a half,” Cambri corrected. “You’ll want to account for bleed and echo recovery. Full reset in four. But grid sensors might pulse back in less.”

Exit looked out into the dark. “We move at the sync shift. Cambri hits the loop. I trigger the override. Newt, you launch the null beacon. We guide them out.”

“They won’t all make it,” Newt said.

“No,” Exit said. “But some will.”

They did not speak again that night.

When the time came, the building shivered.

The Splitter had been buried inside the wall cavity. The emitter was aimed directly into the junction pipe feeding into the south grid. Cambri crouched at the base. His fingers were poised over the launch node. His pupils were wide. Sweat streamed down his temple. The hum of the system was rising in his skull.

Exit stood at the relay. He held the override in one hand. His other hand rested on the edge of the console. His pulse was steady. His legs ached, but he didn't shift his weight.

Newt was on the roof. The beacon was ready. The null burst would call out on pre-Foundation radio frequencies. They were no longer in use. Still buried in the minds of those who remembered.

Cambri muttered, “Now.”

Exit pressed the trigger.

The Splitter released.

The lights died.

Not flickered. Not dimmed. Died.

Across the southern grid, towers went dark. Sync relays dropped out. Ring data feeds fell to zero. Score tallies failed to update. Status checks blanked.

Food units stopped sorting. Medical bays locked. Birthing centers froze mid-procedure.

Transit lines shut down. Doors unlocked. Checkpoints stalled.

Everywhere, a hum of dislocation passed through the city. Not noise. Not silence. A kind of stillness that made people turn their heads.

Exit stepped back from the console. Cambri was shaking. Newt’s voice crackled over the signal link.

“They’re moving. I see them.”

From every quarter of the outer districts, people began to run.

They came with infants wrapped in curtain fabric. They came with tagged ID cards taped to their chests. They came barefoot. Some had bags. Some had nothing.

Mothers with daughters. Grandparents pushing half-broken carts. Children clinging to hands that weren’t their parents.

People who had been hiding. People who had been deleted. People whose Rings had been removed. They had lived in closets and tunnels and ghost apartments for years.

The signal called them. They ran.

Exit opened the south door.

Smoke from burning nodes rose into the sky. Alerts blinked silently in the air above the checkpoints. No one was watching.

They began their escape.

They moved through the burial zones where old cities had once stood. There were fields of ash where servers had melted down. There were forests overtaken by silence. The road they followed wasn't real. It was a line Cambri saw in his head. It was the gap between sync towers. The hole where the signal couldn't reach.

Exit helped the children climb over fences. Newt carried two siblings with matching scars on their necks. Cambri led them between the ruins. He did dare speak. Rather, he pointed, and they followed.

Hours passed. The sky began to lighten.

Behind them, the lights would return. The Network would reboot. The grid would hum again. Someone would trace the surge and follow it back.

But they would be gone.

They found the trees just past the seventh relay tower. They climbed through broken fencing and crossed a dry riverbed. Cambri dropped to the ground and buried his face in the moss. He began to breathe again.

Newt collapsed against the trunk of a fallen oak. His eyes were wet, but he said nothing.

Exit walked to the edge of the clearing. He looked up.

There were no signals in the sky. No blinking lights, overlays or echo pings. No scores.

Just sky.

Behind him, Newt was laying stones around a small ring of fire. Cambri was unpacking the bundle of food they had brought. They would sleep in the open tonight with no roof and no sensors.

Exit sat down in the dirt.

His body still hurt. The scar where the Ring had been itched. The blood had dried but the mark remained.

He touched the scar and felt nothing.

Not pain. Not pride. Just presence. Just the feeling of being unmeasured.

They built a simple shelter. It felt foreign and freeing with no tools and no grid support. There were no access nodes to call down blueprints or calculate measurements. They tied rope made from torn sleeves, scavenged boards from a hunting blind half-swallowed by moss. They cleared stones one at a time from the clearing’s edge.

Exit worked in silence, stacking wood the way he had learned to lay data lines. Tight. Aligned. Clean. Cambri carried branches in bundles tied across his back. He moved with jerks and pauses, but he moved. By choice rather than direction. He halted every time a branch snapped or the wind moved wrong. Sometimes he hummed, low and fast. Sometimes he pressed his hands to his ears until he could breathe again.

Newt did the framing. He had spent years moving through outer ruins, building warmth from debris. He had learned to listen to rot and could tell by touch if wood would hold through winter or collapse under the weight of rain.

The nights came colder than expected. They built the fire close to the base of the shelter and banked it with green wood. Smoke rose slow and steady through the canopy. No one had followed them yet, but fire was still a beacon to friends and foes alike. The signal hole was still holding. Either the Network had not cared enough to chase them or it had not recompiled fast enough to guess where they had gone.

Exit slept lightly. He woke every few hours and walked the perimeter. The scar below his waist was healing into a hard, raised line. It pulled tight when he crouched. That didn’t matter. What mattered was the silence. No buzz of alerts. No pings. No tracking pulses. Just trees.

On the fifth day, they found a stream.

Cambri followed the echo of the water’s rhythm with the same precision he used to decode the grid. His eyes were closed. His hands made shapes in the air and stopped when the stream came into view and stood there for nearly an hour, listening to it ripple against stone. When he touched it, he wept.

Newt found edible roots buried along the edge. He soaked them and wrapped them in fire-heated leaves. That night, they ate slowly, the way people eat when food is no longer assigned to them.

Exit said nothing. He chewed until the ache in his jaw quieted. When the others slept, he sat beside the fire and stared into the coals until they stopped reminding him of red alerts.

On the eighth day, Cambri built a pattern in the dirt. He used pebbles and sticks. He arranged them in a ring of intersecting lines. When Exit looked at it, he saw the old grid maps burned into the walls of his childhood school. Cambri didn’t speak, but Exit understood.

Cambri was charting silence.

The place where they were had no ping. There was no coverage and no reactivation sensors waiting to sleepwalk back into power. It was not offline. It was unlisted. Forgotten. The Network had not cataloged it because no one had expected life here to matter.

That was what they had now. It was not freedom as it had been sold in underground networks or resistance cells. It was not freedom as symbol. It was freedom as unimportance.

They no longer mattered enough to be watched.

Newt dug a small plot behind the shelter. He had brought seeds wrapped in plastic and stuffed into the lining of his coat. He said nothing while he planted them. When he finished, he laid his hand flat against the soil and breathed. Exit watched from a distance. There was reverence in the way Newt touched the ground. It didn't feel like prayer. More like memory.

Exit didn’t ask what the seeds were. It didn’t matter. Anything that lived here would be welcome.

He spent the next days building a second shelter. It was smaller and flatter and closer to the stream. He used old metal from a collapsed rail case they had found deeper in the woods. Cambri helped him carry the sheets. They didn’t speak. When Exit hammered a beam into place and it cracked, Cambri looked up and said it was too brittle. Then he disappeared into the woods and brought back another one.

Newt watched them work. He said they looked like ghosts building bones. Exit didn’t answer.

At night, they took turns watching the sky. Cambri called out constellations from memory. The names he used weren’t the ones Exit had learned in school. They weren’t on any state map. They were older.

Exit listened and watched. He no longer tried to name the stars.

One night, after a long silence, Newt sat beside the fire and asked the question.

“What do we do now?”

Exit stared at the flame for a long time.

“Live.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes.”

Newt picked up a stick and poked at the coals.

“We could find others. Bring them here.”

“We will,” Exit said. “When it’s safe.”

“Will it ever be safe?”

Exit didn’t answer right away. The trees creaked around them. Cambri was asleep under a pile of leaves. He was curled tightly on his side.

“When I cut the Ring out,” Exit said, “I thought I’d feel free. I didn’t. I just felt pain. Then I felt nothing. But later, when we walked past the relay tower and it didn’t ping and I didn’t feel it, I felt clean. It wasn’t new. It was just empty. That’s the best I think it gets.”

Newt nodded slowly.

“Empty is a start.”

They did not talk about Ciphin. At least, not directly.

Exit never told Cambri or Newt what her voice sounded like. He never said how she used to whisper jokes against the hollow of his throat to avoid the Ring picking up laughter. He never explained the sound of the alert that arrived when she was reassigned. He never described the exact way her eyes had looked. They had been rimmed with fear and defiance. That was the last time she passed him.

But some nights, when the fire was low and the forest pressed close, Exit would walk down to the stream and sit with his back to the world. He would trace the edge of his ring scar and look up at the trees.

He would think of her hands. He would think of her laugh. He would think of her stillness.

Then he would let the memory pass and breathe.

One morning, a bird landed on the edge of the shelter. It stared at them for a long time, blinking. Its head twitched. Then it flew away.

It wasn't tagged. It did not send a signal. No echo in the air.

They watched it until it vanished into the sky.

A week later, Newt came back from a scouting walk with a child on his back.

The boy was eight, maybe nine. He was Ringless. A scar crossed his thigh from a tracker lash. Orphaned, he had followed the null signal weeks ago but had lost the others in the ruins near the edge of the sync zone. He had been hiding in a crumbled transport shell, eating mold and drinking runoff. He had been waiting for the Network to reboot and kill him.

Exit did not ask the boy’s name. Newt offered him food and showed him where to sleep. Cambri gave him a stick and taught him how to draw patterns in the dirt.

The boy smiled once. The smile was small, and it didn’t last.

Still, it was real.

Over time, more people came.

They arrived one by one. The numbers were few.

A man arrived with a tattooed scalp. He had burned out his own Ring using an EMP torch.

An old man followed. He had no eyes and had walked all the way from the reeducation plains by listening to echoes bouncing off crumbling buildings.

Two sisters came as well. They had dug themselves out of a collapsed breeding facility after the blackout.

None of them asked for leadership. None of them asked for guidance.

Each one of them only wanted to stop hiding.

Each one of them only wanted to be unmeasured.

Exit never called them a family. That word had been claimed and poisoned by the Foundation.

He simply called them here.

One night, when the air turned warm again, Cambri placed a flat stone in the center of the fire ring. He carved a pattern into it using a piece of broken glass. The design was not a symbol. It was a sequence, a map of signal void, and a memory of how they had escaped.

Newt said it looked like a scar. Cambri replied that it was one.

The trees grew thicker around the shelter and the stream ran louder when spring arrived. The air remained empty of signal or lights blinked in the sky or even names called out from behind locked doors.

No scores waited to be filled.

Exit sat at the edge of the clearing. There was dirt under his nails and smoke in his lungs. He leaned back against a rock and watched a hawk circle high above the tree line. Silent

He smiled, not knowing what day it was.

There was no record of him left in the Network. He had no rank, no score, and no assigned purpose.

What he had was breath. He had space. He had the knowledge that he had broken the machine just long enough for others to slip through the gears.

That was enough. It had to be.

He closed his eyes and let the sun warm his face.

For the first time since he could remember, no one was watching him.

And he was still here.