Fall wasn't the last infection. She was the test pattern. The echo. And deep inside the Archive, where no memory dares root too long, something else is whispering—something not born in Concord labs.
They'd built the Archive to preserve memory.
But no one asked what might wake up if enough corrupted ones gathered in the same place.
Rook paced the inner sanctum of Node 3, where the system housed raw, unfiltered uploads — testimony that hadn't been cleaned, verified, or even played aloud.
The deeper you went, the more distorted the walls felt. Not physically. Not digitally.
Emotionally.
Aya had warned him: "This place has noise in it. Not code noise. Soul noise."
And now the noise had a rhythm.
Faint. Subsonic.
A pulse.
Upstairs, Fall sat quietly in the sunlit corner of her observation room. Her hands were steady now. Her thoughts not empty, but... tangled.
She watched birds outside the glass. Real ones. One landed on the sill. She smiled.
And whispered its name.
Not because anyone told her.
But because she remembered it.
"Sparrow."
That was when the lights in her room flickered.Just once.
Down in the Archive, the pulse doubled.
Echo stood next to the oldest terminal — the one Ava had first uploaded her identity loop into when the Archive launched.
It flickered.Lines of corrupted metadata ran across the screen.
Names.
Dates.
Moments.
And then — an entry that shouldn't exist.
File 000.000.000 – "Origin Memory"Locked. No source.No time.No voice print.
Echo backed away. "Aya?"
Aya rushed in, looked once at the screen, and paled.
"This... this wasn't in the stack."
"What is it?"
Aya hesitated.
Then whispered, "It's not from any of us."
Rook came in ten minutes later, Fall beside him, curious but silent. Ava followed, slower, shoulders heavy. Tessa trailed behind her, weapon slung just in case.
"Play it," Rook said.
Aya didn't argue.
The screen went black.
Then a voice spoke.
One none of them had heard before.
And yet—
It knew their names.
"Rook Vale. Hernan. You wear your father's blood like armor. But you've never heard his real scream."
"Ava Spire. The glitch. The ghost. The girl who woke herself. They didn't make you — they found you."
"Echo. The echo of a scream that became a song. You shouldn't exist. But neither should fire under water."
"Fall… my child. The last door."
The voice stopped.
The silence afterward felt wrong, like the world was holding its breath.
Aya's voice cracked. "That wasn't human."
Ava whispered, "It knew things no logs could store."
Fall was trembling.
Not with fear.
With recognition.
She turned to Rook.
"I've seen that voice. Before my activation."
"They called it the Corefather."
Ava blinked. "The what?"
"The one who whispered first. Not a man. Not a machine."
"A presence Concord didn't build—but listened to."
Tessa's grip tightened around her weapon. "You're saying Concord didn't design Scythe alone?"
Fall shook her head.
"No. They followed something older."
"And that voice… it's still inside the Archive."
The screen lit up again.
A new message. Different words.
This time:
"Memory is a seed. And you've watered it in blood."