Chapter 9: The Lie of the Moonless Sky

Panic was a jolt of electricity, shocking Michael’s system back online. The Siren’s song, moments ago a symphony of perfect, dissolving bliss, was now a nauseating dirge layered over the wet, grinding rhythm of the abattoir. The beautiful lie had been stripped away, and the raw, monstrous truth was a physical assault on his senses. The air was thick with the coppery tang of blood and the sweet, chemical stench of the drinks that pacified the herd. The very ground beneath his feet seemed to vibrate with the chewing of the colossal maw.

He had to get out. But his gaze was locked on June.

She stood at the very edge of the precipice, her toes just inches from the chasm filled with the glowing, bloody river. Her body swayed in a slow, graceful dance, a final offering to the beautiful, glitching monster of light that promised her an eternity of peace. The horrors unfolding just yards away were invisible to her, filtered out by the perfect, personalized heaven being piped directly into her soul. She was a moth, hypnotized, flying directly into the filament of a bug zapper.

“June!” he screamed, his voice a ragged tear in the fabric of the music. He lunged, his fingers digging into the thin fabric of her crop top, yanking her back from the edge. The motion was jarring, and for a second, her ecstatic trance was broken by a flash of annoyance.

“What are you doing?” she asked, her voice a dreamy, melodic whisper. “It’s starting. Can’t you feel it? It’s perfect.”

“Look!” Michael yelled, shaking her, his panic making his words sharp and desperate. “Look at the stage! It’s not a stage, it’s a mouth! Those aren’t speakers, they’re teeth! It’s eating people!”

He tried to force her head towards the carnage, towards the limp, blissful bodies being torn apart. But it was like trying to show a color to a person who was born blind. Her eyes, wide and black, stared right through the horror. The Siren’s song was a firewall for reality, and it was still running perfectly in her head.

“All I see is light,” she murmured, a serene smile returning to her lips as the music inside her reasserted its dominance. She pulled against his grip, trying to return to her dance of surrender. “You’re just scared, Michael. You have to let go. Just let the music take you.”

He was losing. The system was too strong. The paradise it offered her was a bespoke fortress, built from the bricks of her own pain and mortared with her deepest desires. His truth was an alien concept, an attack from an outside world she had paid a bloody price to leave behind. He couldn't fight the song with raw facts; it would simply overwrite them.

Desperation clawed at his throat. He was a hacker. He didn’t brute force his way through a firewall; he looked for a vulnerability, an exploit, a single flawed line of code in the programming. What was the flaw in this world? What was the one thing that didn't quite add up?

His mind raced, sifting through the chaos, through the memory of Eric, through the blood and the light and the grinding sound. And then, it hit him. Not a memory of horror, but a memory of connection. A single, cynical observation from their first conversation, back when they were just two lost souls shuffling in a silent field.

'Welcome to the party,' she'd said. Then, later, a wry smile touching her lips. ‘Nomoon.’ She'd gestured vaguely at the perfect, starless sky. ‘Pretty on the nose, don’t you think? Like they’re trying too hard to sell the brand.’

It was a crack. A seed of her own doubt, planted before the music had fully taken root. She had questioned the world’s branding. The name itself. The lie of the moonless sky.

That was the exploit.

He couldn’t force her to see his hell. But maybe, just maybe, he could force her to see the lie in her own heaven.

“You were right, June!” he yelled, his face inches from hers, his voice desperate to cut through the melody in her skull. “You were right from the start!”

She frowned, a flicker of confusion in her serene eyes. “What are you talking about?”

“The name!” he shouted, his grip on her shoulders tightening. “Nomoon! You said it yourself, it’s a lie! They’re trying too hard!”

He didn’t wait for an answer. He stopped trying to make her look at the stage. The Siren was the source of the power, the heart of the illusion. To break the spell, he had to make her look away from it. He had to make her confront the one piece of this world’s foundational lore that she herself had questioned.

With a surge of adrenaline, he spun her around, forcing her back against his chest. He clamped one hand over her eyes, blocking out the hypnotic, blinding light of the Siren. With his other hand, he grabbed her chin and forced her head upward, wrenching her gaze away from the altar of death and towards the endless, sapphire-black void above them.

“LOOK AT THE SKY, JUNE!” he roared, his voice cracking with the strain. “IT’S A LIE! THE NAME IS A LIE!”

His words, combined with the objective reality of his own panicked rejection of the simulation, acted like a denial-of-service attack on the system. The act of acknowledging a foundational inconsistency, of actively looking for the flaw, was a virus.

And the system glitched.

For a single, heart-stopping second, the perfect, seamless sapphire of the sky fractured. A visible tear appeared in the dome of the world, like a crack in a digital screen. The sound of the Siren’s song stuttered, hitting a sour, discordant note that scraped across their nerves like nails on a chalkboard. The very air around them seemed to pixelate, the illusion struggling to maintain its integrity.

And through the crack in the sky, through the brief, catastrophic system error, something impossible shone through.

It was pale. A cold, ethereal white against the digital black. A slender, perfect crescent, pitted with the familiar shadows of craters and seas. It was an object of objective, undeniable, and utterly alien reality in this manufactured world.

The real moon.

It was there for only a fraction of a second, a single frame injected into the wrong film. But it was enough.