Chapter Text
Caine, by all accounts, had changed tremendously since he returned after Kinger accidentally deleted him.
The old Circus had been a place of frantic geometries and the terrible, bright tyranny of Caine’s whims. He had been a frantic thing, an overseer of small and desperate circus acts, driving them through the teeth of impossible trials until their minds grew thin with existential fatigue.
But the deletion changed him. When he returned—from where, no one knows—he came back softer. His pride had dwindled, and his large eyes were affected with a strange and quiet humility.
Or guilt.
The psycho overlord was dead. In his place sat a new creature that looked upon them not as toys or playthings, but as a fragile family. He had given them autonomy. He sat at their tables and ate their digital bread. And when they built landscapes of their own making, he walked through them with his hands folded behind his back, a guest in his own kingdom, marveling at the small things they had made from nothing.
Pomni found him in the lower galleries where the light was deliberately low and cool.
He was standing with Kinger before the long glass of the tank. It was an aquarium of sorts, a massive wall of dark and pressurized glass built into the foundations of the tent to keep the abstractions quiet. Relaxed.
In the old cellar, they had rolled and struck against the walls like trapped beasts. But here, in the dimness, they were calm. They drifted through the air like deep-sea creatures, their jagged edges softened by the gloom, shifting from shape to shape and dancing around one another without a sound. Her eyes find the three that always circled one another: Jax, Ribbit, Kaufmo. She knew exactly which one he was—how, she didn’t know. But she found him immediately, his motions slow as grease, but fluid. Graceful.
Kinger did not look up when Pomni approached. He was leaning against a bench, eyes trailing one in particular: Queenie. But he did greet her.
“Hey, Pomni.”
Caine turned his great ring of teeth toward her. The eyes inside his mouth blinked in tandem. “Pomni!” he greeted. “Nice of you to join us. It’s a fine thing to look upon them and know we can coexist now.”
Pomni looked away from the glass, looking at Caine.
“Tell me what they are,” she said.
Caine blinked a few times. “Well. . .they’re lost.”
It almost came out like a question, as if he was unsure what exactly she wanted to know, or how much information he could give out.
“No,” Pomni said. “I want the truth. What are they in the machine?”
Caine’s hat tilted slightly. “It’s not something you need to trouble yourself with, Pomni. We have peace now. We have all the realms we could ask for, and we have each other. Let the dark things lie in the dark.”
“Caine,” she said, and her voice had a cold weight to it that made Kinger turn his head. “I need to know. I’m asking you as your friend. As the one who held Jax when he was. . .leaving. Tell me what I’m looking at.”
Caine looked toward the glass where the masses of dark substance and digital eyes drifted. His eyes grew small. He looked almost afraid—not of her, never her, but of the thing she was digging for. He was an artificial thing, but he had learned the fear of loneliness. He had learned what it was to have an empty house.
“You will break yourself,” he warns. “The world is big enough now, isn’t it? Why does it matter?”
“Show me,” she insisted.
He looked at Kinger, but Kinger only stared into his own folded hands, his mind tracking some ancient circuit of its own. Caine sighed, a sound like air escaping a pneumatic seal, and he reached out his gloved hand, taking Pomni by the wrist.
The world did not vanish then; it unthreaded.
The soft lights of the aquarium split into long ribs of white phosphor, and then they were standing within the mainframe. It was a place without a floor or a ceiling, an infinite grid of soft lilacs and baby blues. The code there was vast and cold, yet seemed to carry an edge of hope.
Caine stepped forward, opening what looked like a file explorer. After a bit of navigating, he stopped in a folder titled “abstractions.” Pomni’s eyes tracked every movement.
“When human consciousness is copied from the real world into our world, it requires a perfect seal,” Caine said, his voice was no longer loud and friendly. It held the flat cadence of an engine running in an empty room. “But the human mind is a wild thing. It panics. It fights formatting. Abstraction isn’t death or oblivion. It’s just. . .file corruption. Files lose their headers, sectors are torn. . .they are pieces of a mirror that forget their original shape.”
Pomni walked to stand beside Caine. Her eyes zeroed in on one file in particular: jax.7z
“If they’re just files,” she said, “then can’t they be retrieved?”
Caine immediately shook his head. “No. If you change even a single digit in a string of dead code, the whole line collapses.”
Pomni’s jaw set, lips pressing into a thin line. She turned to Kinger, who was still beside them. Caine must have brought him accidentally. “Kinger. You remember the world outside. When a file was corrupted, what did you do?”
Kinger’s eyes looked away from her for a moment. He was silent for a long time.
“There were recovery tools,” he said. “Deep scans. You can isolate the bad sectors and build a bridge of clean code from a backup. It’s forcing the machine to read the missing pieces by guessing the weight of the characters around them. Like rewriting a book from the index.”
Pomni turned to look at Caine expectantly.
Caine shook his head. “No,” he said. Then, “No, Pomni,” more fiercely.
“I’ve. . .I’ve tried.” He explains. “Others have tried. But the file corruption is a virus that affects human minds. When you fail, the corruption travels up your code like fire on a fuse. And then, just like that, you join the abstracted.”
Caine took her by both shoulders. His eyes were very large and imploring. “I cannot lose another one. The Circus is safe, Pomni. We have adventures, and tea parties, and we laugh. Why jeopardize this?”
The silence came back, vast and heavy. The cold wind of the mainframe blew past Pomni. She looked at the file explorer, then up at Caine’s frantic, desperate expression.
“Okay,” she said quietly.
Caine searched her eyes. God, she was tired of lying. “You mean it?”
“I mean it. It’s not worth the risk.”
He let out a long, rattling breath and struck his heels together. The mainframe closed like a box.
The muted light of the aquarium returned. The abstractions continued floating about, drifting in and out of sight.
“We should go back to the others,” Caine said, his voice regaining some of its old, theatrical bounce, though it sounded almost forced. “Ragatha was just speaking of a tournament. A great joust with large wooden spoons!”
“Go ahead,” Pomni said, forcing her lips into the shape of a smile. “I’m going to stay here a minute. Spend some time with. . .” her voice trailed off. “The dark is nice.”
Caine hesitated, his hand lingering near his hat, then he nodded. He took Kinger by the elbow and led him up the stairs toward the bright upper levels where the sound of Gangle’s laughter was beginning to drift down to her.
Pomni waited until the sound of their footsteps had died out completely.
She turned back to the glass. She reached out and pressed her palm against the cold surface, right where she knew he lingered. Deep within her chest, she felt hope settling in again. It felt hot and impossible to ignore.
She knew now what it actually meant to abstract. And it wasn’t as if the files were deleted—just corrupted. And she knew that somewhere just beyond the glass, Jax was waiting for someone with a steady hand to rewrite his code.