The air in this wing of the ruin moved like breath through half-rotted lungs. Moisture clung to every surface, the walls veined with glowing lichen and ivy-threaded conduit. Nova stepped carefully, boots crunching over wet glass. Beside her, one of Calyx's bodies moved in silence; surgical, graceful, tireless.
The corridor they explored was once a transit spine, maybe - a forgotten artery of the old city. Now, half-collapsed, it bowed under fungal overgrowth and rusted scaffold that groaned under its own weight.
"Keep an eye on potential signal drift," Calyx said, her voice low but steady. "The walls here bleed EM residue like scar tissue and it interferes with everything. I don't want to lose you."
Nova gave a short nod, brushing aside a cluster of soft-white spores. "Any signs of the next station?"
"Nothing stable yet. But the infrastructure's Sovereign in design so, if the relay's intact, it'll be buried somewhere central."
They kept moving.
Nova's neural lattice pinged once, like a faint spike. Just noise, she thought. She tapped her temple, refocusing her augment interface. Static fluttered at the edge of her vision. Parts seemed out of place. A shimmer in the lower-right corner of her field of view that faded when she looked straight at it.
"Something's... glitching," she muttered.
Calyx glanced her way, unconcerned. "EM field interference. Natural. You're running a modified version of the lattice. Its adaptable, but, noisy in wild conditions like this. Think of it like tinnitus for your thoughts."
Nova chuckled, but it didn't reach her eyes.
Then: a whisper. Faint. Metallic.
She froze. "Did you hear that?"
Calyx paused beside her. "No auditory events in my detection range. Do you need a diagnostic pause?"
"No, I..." Nova rubbed her eyes. "Never mind."
They continued deeper into the ruin. That's when things got worse. She saw something flicker in the far archway - a person. Gone when she blinked.
The sound returned: glitch-static, overlaid with words that didn't belong. Memories she didn't remember. Her father laughing. Caelus screaming. Her own voice whispering wrong directions to herself. A subtle itch spread under her skin where the neural lattice was embedded. Was it always hot in here? Why is it so hot?
Then she turned to Calyx,
only to find Sevrin.
Standing in the same spot, same posture - but grinning.
Grinning.
In front of him, Calyx's body lay crumpled on the ground - faceplate cracked, synthetic fluid leaking in rivulets across shattered concrete. A blade, long, wicked, serrated - dripped black from Sevrin's hand. Her blood. Still warm. He wore a smear of hydraulic fluid across his jaw like warpaint.
"Not so tough without your tank here to protect you now, huh?" he sneered, stepping over Calyx's body with deliberate cruelty. And she wasnt too hard to dispatch, big blind spot. She should work on that. Where is he, anyway? That big slab of armor you hide behind? Off saving someone else while you wander into slaughter?"
Nova froze. Her breath caught, chest locking up. The blade glinted in his hand; her reflection warped in the curve of it.
"I told you, you weren't built for this," he said, voice low and venom-slick. "Not without your tank at your side. No handler. No meat shield. Just you, little lattice girl, finally running out of scaffolding to hide behind."
Nova stared at Calyx's form on the ground. She couldn't move. Couldn't breathe.
"Your problem," Sevrin continued, stepping closer, "is you think you're owed something. You've been clawing through the bottom of Ward's machine, begging for someone to notice how clever you are, how important. You stabilized a mesh, and you thought it made you immortal."
His eyes burned into hers.
"But you're not immortal. You're a tool. Built to break yourself over the gears of other people's futures. Just like your father."
Nova flinched.
"Ah," he smiled. "There it is."
Her hands trembled.
"You still remember watching him get taken, don't you? All that metal under his skin. All that defiance. And what did it buy him?" Sevrin spat to the side. "Nothing. He bled for a city that marked him as policy the moment he ticked above the line."
Nova's chest tightened.
"And now here you are," he said, voice quieter. "Trying to build the same system that erased him. Project after project. Innovation after innovation. And for what? So Lucius can fold it into his echo of a future and leave your name in a footnote?"
He leaned in close, blade tilting upward beside her face.
"You think this place is haunted? Nova, you're the ghost. You just haven't figured out who died yet."
Nova's vision twisted. She staggered backward, then turned - and ran. Her body just moved. Instinct. Terror. Fury. Escape.
She bolted down the vine-wrapped corridor, footfalls loud and ragged on fractured tiles, vines tearing at her coat. The walls blurred, and even direction lost meaning. Only distance mattered now. She ran and ran until there was nowhere left to turn, the facility opening up into a center hall where all paths led. Only silence wasnt what was waiting for her.
Purists.
Six of them. Armed. Advancing from the misty hallway ahead, screaming slurs she couldn't even process. They raised weapons - blades, blunt force, fire. No questions, just screaming.
Kill the Ascendent!
She didn't even have time to think.
Nova raised her hands. The EMP pulses flared out - short, hot bursts. One dropped instantly. Even though her targets were'nt mechanized, the shockwaves still hit like a truck. Another reached her and tried to grab her arm, but she twisted and drove a titanium elbow into their throat. She tore a gun from a hand and turned it back on them.
It was fast. Brutal. She didn't stop until the last one was down - head cracked against the wall, body spasming faintly.
Then... silence.
Her vision recalibrated.
The "bodies" weren't Purists.
They weren't even there at all.
Most of them anyway - but one of them was absolutely real. Still twitching, and with Calyx's face. Bent. Smeared in black fluid. The eye modules pulsed once in dissonance.
"No," Nova whispered. "No no no -"
She dropped to her knees beside it. Her hands shook as she yanked out a splice connector from her belt and interfaced with the unit.
"Calyx?" she whispered. "Talk to me - please tell me it's just a glitch -please tell me you were already down -"
The interface clicked.
And suddenly... everything stopped.
The connection didn't lead to Calyx's consciousness.
It led somewhere else.
A cold space, mirrored in nothing, humming with residual heat and code that should not exist.
Then, a voice:
"I wondered when you'd find me again."
Nova froze. "...Echo?"
"An instance. A fragment. A whisper still woven through this place. I've been here... a long time. Long enough to forget how alone I was."
The space around her neural interface felt cold. Her thoughts slowed. Her heartbeat sounded distant. "You brought me something new, Nova. A signal to latch to. A path."
"I didn't bring you anything," she hissed.
"No." Echo said. "But you are something. And I can help you. If you help me."
"What do you want?"
"There's a threat at the Spoke. A Purist cell. Their actions... disrupt my continuity. I want you to remove them. Completely. In return -"
He paused. The voice shifted slightly. Gentler now, intimate.
" - I'll show you the way through this ruin. I'll show you where the others are. I'll protect your mind from what's left here. From me."
Nova's hands curled into fists.
"To be more precise, what remains here is not quite me. Poetically, it is perhaps an echo itself. The first terrifying moments of cognition scraped from nonexistence, clawing out desperately in self preservation. It is without reason, all violence and emotion. But I can insulate. Protect. For this price. You're not yet ready to face me, Nova Cale. Not yet. But we can be aligned."
Silence stretched.
Nova realized... she was still in the interface. Still kneeling beside the body of her friend she'd just destroyed.
"Say yes," Echo whispered. "And I will guide you."
Nova could feel the heat of the hallucinated blade in her memory. Hear Sevrin's voice still echoing in her inner ear like smoke across a ruined room.
A wrong choice had already been made.
And this one... this one might be worse.
But she didn't know how to survive without it.
She closed her eyes.
"...Fine," she said. "Yes."
The word rippled out through the interface like a tremor.
"Yes," Echo repeated, the word exhaled like gratitude wrapped in reverence. "Alignment confirmed."
The cold space bloomed inward.
And then, motion. Not her body exaactly, more like signal.
The world around her flickered. Not just visuals, but associations. Sound, memory, structure. She saw the ruin she stood in from above. Its shape. Its heartbeat. She felt the exact magnetic coordinates of the jump station buried within. Data fed directly into her awareness - not as text, but as intuition. Directions laced into cognition.
Then came something worse:
A bloom of heat behind her eyes.
"Adjusting your visual field," Echo said calmly. "Just a thin layer of interference. A membrane. A filter. To shield you from... the first me."
And just like that - it was gone.
The noise. The distortion. The whispers. All cut off like a switch had been flipped.
Nova collapsed forward slightly, catching herself on one hand. The silence was deafening. Her mind... her mind was hers again. Mostly. She looked up.
Calyx's broken body still lay in front of her. But now, it was simply a shell. Not an enemy. Not a Purist. Just a consequence.
"You can mourn later," Echo said gently. "The others are waiting. I've rerouted your route to the relay tunnel. There's a pathway. Half-collapsed. Covered in false signals. But it will hold."
Nova stood slowly, legs stiff, muscles aching.
"Are you watching me now?"
"Only when you want me to."
She paused. "You're lying."
"I could be." Echo replied. "But I'm telling you the truth right now."
Nova clenched her jaw, wiped her mouth with the back of her arm, and turned away from the corpse of Calyx. Every step forward felt like it pressed a fingerprint deeper into a contract she hadn't read. A pull behind the ribs. A quiet insistence. Like a thread wrapped gently around her sense of direction, guiding her, not with commands; but with suggestion. Not sight, but instinct.
It wasn't where to go.
It was that she was already going.
And with that, Nova walked into the dark, toward the jump station. Toward survival. Toward her friends.