They moved through the tunnel in silence.
Signal led with a scanner, its needle twitching.
Frost and Maya kept to the flanks. Lyra watched the ceiling. Trey never blinked.
At 3.6 kilometers in, the tunnel opened into a steel cavern.
Lights clicked on one by one. Power was already flowing.
There were no doors. Just a wall of reinforced glass behind which an enormous vault sat—open by a sliver. A dense mist leaked from its edge.
"This place shouldn't have power," Lyra muttered.
Signal stepped forward.
"It's breathing."
The mist pulsed with a slow, steady rhythm. In. Out.
Inside the glass wall, rows of empty cryopods lined the chamber. Most were shattered. A few were burnt from within.
But at the far end—intact.
Pod #13.
Frost moved to it.
The inside was empty.
No frost. No residue. Just clean glass, as if nothing had ever been stored.
But on the floor in front of it: a metal cuff, torn in half.
Scored with marks from inside.
Maya scanned the interior. "I've seen these in Pale Court black files. They called them deep-sleep chambers. Used for unstable types. Mindlocks."
Trey frowned. "Then why leave it here?"
Lyra answered. "Because whatever was in it—wasn't human."
They turned.
Behind them stood a woman.
Not aged. Not young.
Pale. Silent.
Eyes bright with veins of ashglass.
She wore no armor, no uniform—just a dark coat and gloves that didn't hide the marks around her wrists.
Frost raised his weapon.
The woman spoke.
"You found the envelope. You kept opening doors."
Signal stepped forward. "VANTA-13?"
"No."
She looked past them to the empty pod.
"She's still asleep. I'm her echo."
She didn't attack. She didn't run.
She walked with them through the vault, showing corridors sealed with ancient metal, black-out archives marked with old Pale Court symbols crossed out in blood.
Trey stopped at a door labeled "A-Division."
Maya opened it.
Inside: rows of preserved data cores.
Files on versions—not memories. Clones.
Each one bred with different directives.
Different failure points.
Evan Mercer's name was on more than one.
Back in the main vault, the echo woman paused before a terminal. She entered a code none of them could see.
The ceiling split open.
From it descended a single item:
A sealed black envelope.
Frost stepped forward. "Is that—"
"It's the last one," she said. "If you open this, the Architect wakes up."
Signal took it. Didn't open it.
"What happens if we don't?"
The woman's face darkened.
"She wakes anyway."
Above ground, the coast facility's security grid sparked to life.
Someone had activated it remotely.
Turrets rotated.
The vault doors slammed shut.
The team was locked inside.
The echo woman vanished.
And overhead, in the dead sky, a broadcast went out across the continent:
"ALL PROTOCOLS FAIL. UNIT VANTA-13 HAS BREACHED CONTAINMENT."