CHAPTER VII

The Broadcast Void isn't a place you walk to. It's a frequency you tune into.

Thomas Hutchins—the man The Network called Prodical Logick—sat in the static between channels. To the naked eye, he was sitting in a perfectly sterile maintenance corridor of The Citadel, deep in Mainframe territory. The walls were white. The air was recycled compliance. The silence was the kind that came from a system that had deleted everything worth hearing.

But Thomas had learned to see differently.

Through the Glitch Conjure, the walls were bleeding pixels. The sterile white flickered with Crossroads Red—the color of ancestor blood, of hoodoo flame, of the rebellion he carried in his veins. The air smelled like ozone and Louisiana swamp water, impossible in this sanitized space but present anyway because he carried it with him.

He was twenty-three years old. Dreads framed a face marked with pixel scarification—digital scars from the family severance ritual, the moment his bloodline had cut him loose to protect their status. The scars shifted and glitched, and when he channeled the ancestors, they glowed Crossroads Red.

He was the ghost in the machine. The Sleeper. The defector who couldn't escape. His daughter was the reason. The Mainframe knew she was leverage—knew that if he ran, she'd pay the price. So he stayed inside the walls, building the path home one glitch at a time.

He held his weapon across his lap—the Framesplitter. A six-foot quarterstaff of rough-hewn Louisiana cypress heartwood, wrapped in glowing fiber-optic vines. Organic rootwork fused with high-speed data transfer. It was a heresy of design.

His grandmother had been a Louisiana rootworker—a hoodoo woman whose history the family had tried to bury. Thomas had found her journals and realized that the digital world followed the same rules as the spiritual one. Nothing was truly deleted. Only displaced. The glitch was just another word for the crossroads.

"Signal check," Prodical whispered. He didn't speak to a headset; he spoke to the dead.

The air in front of him shimmered into the Glitch Ghost—the spirit of an artist VORATH had deleted. The ghost pointed down the hallway. Patrol.

Prodical stood. He moved with the jagged rhythm of a corrupted file, reality stuttering around him. He thought about Hollow Logick, his pre-war brother in spiritual warfare. Hollow had escaped. Prodical hadn't. Not yet.

A squad of Executors rounded the corner—Tier 4 legal enforcers in copyright-protection armor.

"Identify," the lead Executor barked.

Prodical smiled. He tapped the cypress end of the Framesplitter against the floor. The render crystals hummed with Reclaimed Green light.

"Ancestor Protocol: Invite."

He poured a libation of corrupted data onto the ground—a digital offering to the spirits of deleted artists. The hallway lagged. The Executors froze mid-step, caught in a Frame Skip.

He walked between them, invisible in the frames they couldn't render. He reached the server node at the end of the hall. The junction point. The Crossroads.

Prodical pulled a small pouch from his belt—a digital Gris-Gris bag filled with fragmented code and deleted audio samples. Protection charms made from what the system had tried to destroy. He pressed the bag against the server port.

"For Lyrick," he whispered. "For the girl who dreams. For Grim, when he needs to find his way home."

He was planting the Gris-Gris Glitch—a pathfinding spell, a backdoor painted in spiritual chalk. When Grim Logick eventually fell into The Underlay, this door would be waiting. The Crossroads Ritual in Season 4. The portal from the Broadcast Void to the realm of deleted data. Prodical would open it. Lyrick would provide the restoration.

The Frame Skip ended. The Executors snapped back, locking onto him. "Target acquired!"

Prodical spun the Framesplitter, flaring Crossroads Red and Reclaimed Green.

"Reality Splicing."

He slammed the staff into the wall. He didn't break it; he edited the room. He cut the visual data of the hallway and spliced in a loop of empty air from ten minutes ago. The Executors' shots passed through where he used to be.

He was already gone, fading back into the Broadcast Void. He left nothing but the smell of cypress and a single buffering icon spinning in the air. He was still trapped in The Citadel, but the door was unlocked.

"Soon," he whispered into the static. "I promise. Soon."

The crossroads were open. The path was planted. Now he just had to survive long enough to walk it.