-prototype30p2- -ryuu01- | Bound Town Project

Prototype30p2 was not a map. It was a wound.

The assignment had been simple in the brief: Locate the Anchor. Sever the red thread. Do not look at the windows. But nothing in Bound Town was simple. The buildings grew too close together, their eaves almost kissing across the alleys. Ropes—not decoration, but intention —crisscrossed the sky. Some were knotted with care. Others had been tied in haste, pulled taut by something that had needed to hold on.

Ryuu01 had been designed for this. A third-generation chassis with a reinforced spinal column and emotion-dampened cognition. "The Unbreaker," the techs called him. They’d uploaded seventeen dialects of despair into his linguistic matrix and told him to listen for the sound of a promise breaking. Bound Town Project -Prototype30p2- -Ryuu01-

Ryuu01 didn't turn. He didn't need to. The girl in the yellow raincoat was standing three feet away, barefoot on the wet stones. Her eyes were the same gray as the sky.

Bound Town Project had started as a containment exercise. A place to store broken oaths, forgotten promises, the psychic residue of people who said "I'll be right back" and never were. But somewhere between Prototype28 and 29, the town started answering back. Prototype30p2 was not a map

"You don't have to cut it," said a voice behind him.

The rain in Bound Town doesn’t fall. It presses . Sever the red thread

"If I cut it," he said slowly, "do you disappear?"

She smiled. It was the saddest thing he had ever seen.