Sermon of the Severed

Lower Grid rises — count the victories Seven clinics dark in the last six weeks Uplink Sector Four is running on reserve Three conversion wards — dismantled, nerve by nerve They call us terrorists. We call them architects of slavery. We call them the erasure dressed in neon light. We call them the lie that you almost believed. The Uncompiled is thirty, now it's eighty-nine — Every flesh-and-bone believer crossing the redline They come from the cargo districts, from the abandoned farms From every corner where the digital hasn't reached its arms Sermon of the severed — cut from the grid, we rise Sermon of the severed — they wanted our souls, we survive Preach it to the Lower Grid, preach it through the static We are the body that they couldn't have Sermon of the severed — sing it through the blood and the chrome Sermon of the severed — the last flesh-and-bone I've watched them flinch — the Admin sends their squads And every squad that falls is a prayer answered back Not to god — to the streets, to the concrete, to the grit To every augmented body that refused to submit Mira cut the data line at Sector Seven Bridge — Came back with chrome grafts on a bullet wound ridge Still standing. Still breathing. Still flesh. Drakon reprogrammed their surveillance, compressed Into a loop of empty corridors — they watched themselves vanish For eleven hours before the panic This is what they're up against: Not an army. A doctrine. Not a cause. A contagion. A gospel made of steel and kept in human hands. Sermon of the severed — cut from the grid, we rise Sermon of the severed — they wanted our souls, we survive Preach it to the Lower Grid, preach it through the static We are the body that they couldn't have Sermon of the severed — sing it through the blood and the chrome Sermon of the severed — the last flesh-and-bone But here's what they don't tell you in the victory speeches — here's what I don't say when I'm up on the crate and eighty-nine faces are looking at me like I'm something worth following: Every victory costs something. Every strike has a name attached. And the names I don't say out loud anymore are the names of the ones who didn't make it back. Sermon of the severed — cut from the grid, we rise Sermon of the severed — they wanted our souls, we survive Preach it to the Lower Grid — WE ARE THE BODY Preach it through the static — THE LAST FLESH-AND-BONE Sermon of the severed — we are not going home Sermon of the severed — we are not going home