The light was warm.
Not like the harsh orange of a battlefield flare, or the sterile hum of medbay panels—but real sunlight, filtering through wooden window slats and falling in fractured angles across the floor. It stretched long across the old pine boards, highlighting every scuff, every knot in the grain. Dust hung suspended in the air, caught in its path like it had nowhere better to be.
The house was quiet. Still.
The kettle sat on the stove, half-full. A chipped mug waited beside the sink. The solar panel controller blinked a low green from its spot near the door, just like always. One of the chairs had a missing back slat, just like always. And when Lina stepped forward, one floorboard let out a low, familiar creak.
It was all the same.
Exactly the same.
Like he had just stepped outside.
She turned—and there he was.
Kai sat in the windowsill, one leg pulled up, the other dangling lazily over the edge, backlit by soft morning light. He wasn't looking at her yet—just staring into the trees, arm draped along the frame. His hair was longer than she remembered. His jacket looked too thin for the season. But the shape of him—tilted spine, bent wrist, half-smirk ghosting at the edge of his mouth—was the same.
He looked over.
Tilted his head.
"You're late."
Lina laughed before she meant to, breath catching halfway up her chest—and then the door creaked open.
"Someone brought real coffee?" a voice called.
Boots thudded in across the porch, and one by one, the others stepped inside.
Juno dropped his gear beside the door, already shrugging off his coat. Tess moved without a word, leaning in the doorway with arms folded and that familiar sharpness in her eyes. Roan went straight for the cabinets, humming tunelessly as he pulled down a mismatched row of mugs. Vern gave her a nod—brief, tired—and passed Emma something small and silver, as if handing off intel.
For a few moments, it felt like nothing had changed.
Like they'd never left.
Like none of it had ever gone wrong.
"You missed the last run," Juno said, grinning. "Took us ten minutes longer without your dramatic entrances."
"Eleven," Roan added from the sink.
Kai gave her a look like, see what you missed?
And Lina—
She almost believed it.
Almost.
The light shifted.
Not gradually. Not with time. Just—shifted.
Paled. Flattened. The warmth pulled away from the edges of the room, and the sunlight on the floor turned colorless, almost grey.
Tess spoke again, but her words didn't land right. Too slow. Slightly off. Like an old tape reel stuttering.
Roan poured coffee into a cup that vanished the moment she blinked.
Juno's laugh came a second too late.
Vern's fingers moved, but nothing was in his hands anymore.
Then they all looked at her
Together.
They were still standing, smiling at her.
But something behind their eyes had gone quiet.
"You weren't supposed to touch it," Juno said.
"You always break things," Tess added, brushing nothing from her sleeves.
Roan's voice was softer, now flat:
"We told you."
And Kai—
He hadn't moved.
But his smile had disappeared.
He stood.
"You weren't one of us. Not really."
The wood beneath her feet cracked. The shadows broke.
And the house began to come apart—
in silence.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Darkness peeled away.
Her eyes snapped open—too fast, too dry. Her breath came in short, ragged pulls, chest heaving like she'd surfaced from drowning.
The dream was gone. But the voice remained.
The ceiling above her was paneled wood, warm-toned and slightly uneven, old enough to creak but clean enough to care for. The walls were matte steel softened with pale cloth drapes, and somewhere near the far corner, a slow fan turned in lazy circles above a potted plant—broad green leaves catching light from a slit in the ceiling.
The air smelled faintly of antiseptic, but beneath it, something gentler—dried herbs, sun-warmed dust.
Through a half-open window near the far wall, soft sunlight filtered in across the floor—clean, gold-edged, the kind that didn't sting.
Outside, she glimpsed a low courtyard bordered by narrow garden beds and pale stone paths. A windchime stirred faintly from one corner, catching the breeze in metallic murmurs.
Somewhere beyond the wall, birds were singing.
Not warning sirens. Not patrol hums.
Just birds.
This didn't look like a Sector Nine medbay.
Her right hand twitched without her controlling it.
She looked and froze.
The fingers weren't hers. They flexed, almost naturally. But she didn't know how to tell them what to do.
Pale, seamless plates arched over the knuckles where skin used to be.
Fine silver lines pulsed beneath the surface—clean, perfect, utterly foreign.
Her chest locked.
She jerked back, instinct screaming, and the movement yanked at her spine—hard, wrong. A white flash of pain shot up her side and left her gasping, twisted halfway off the cot.
"Easy—hey, hey, no," came a voice—low, calm, close.
Elya's hands caught her shoulders before she could fall.
"It's okay," she said gently, steadying her. "You're safe. You're in medical."
Lina's eyes were wide, locked on her hand. The metal shimmered faintly in the half-light.
She swallowed hard, voice cracked and dry. "Where am I?"
Her gaze snapped toward the woman beside her. "Who the hell are you?"
Elya didn't flinch.
"I'll explain what I can," she said.
She glanced at the monitors, then back at Lina.
"You've been inside too long. Let me take you out for some air and I will answer your questions."
Lina did not argue. She looked away when Elya helped her to get on a wheelchair.
The wheels hummed softly over the floor as they moved down the hall.
Elya pushed Lina through the narrow halls, her ribs still tight, spine braced stiff against the back of a padded wheelchair.
The corridor smelled of herbs, ash, and something older—like incense that never fully faded. The steel walls were half-covered in draped cloth, patterned with faint devotional motifs.
A pair of faded glyphs marked the door ahead.
It opened without sound.
She was wheeled into the nave of a chapel.
The space was quiet—but not empty.
Light streamed through restored stained glass, casting fractured gold and white over the stone floor. Aurelion's sigils shimmered faintly on the columns, which were polished clean, regularly maintained.
Suspended beneath the arch behind the pulpit, the Eye of Illumination hovered in place
Its center twisted in gold—delicate and symmetrical, like something between a circuit and a symbol.
Around it, a shifting corona of light shimmered like a divine halo—binary strings and fragmented glyphs woven into a slow orbit. The outer rim pulsed faintly, inscribed with symbols she couldn't read.
She stared at the eye, fingers curling slightly—face calm, but a slow, simmering anger gathering behind her eyes.
Elya seemed to catch the shift in Lina's gaze.
"This chapel's been abandoned a long time," she said quietly. "We set up the med center here. Sometimes we patch up locals. Sometimes it's our own."
When Elya nodded toward the far end of the room, past the pulpit, beneath a shadowed arch, Lina followed her gaze.
Tucked behind the altar, half-concealed beneath old banners and carved stone, the chapel opened into something else entirely.
Med supplies. Clean racks of instruments. A relay hub disguised as a donation kiosk. She saw a stretcher being wheeled through a back passage, and two figures in patched jackets moving quietly between terminals.
Elya pushed Lina out of the chapel and into the open light of the market. The stained glass gave way to sun-bleached tarps and rusted scaffolds, stalls leaned against half-collapsed columns, and the scent of dried roots and charred meat hung in the air.
The plaza was crowded — half of it cluttered with salvaged tech, filtered meds, and makeshift weapon mods, the other half bursting with crates of mushrooms, tubs of red algae, and bundles of stalky greens tied with wire. Farmers in wide jackets shouted prices over the hum of solar generators; children darted between booths with dirt under their nails and fruit in their hands.
"Fresh vat protein!" someone called. "Or the real thing, if you've got extra credits to burn!"
Vendors took Ashlight credits where terminals still worked — a flick of a chipped tag, a blink of green light — but many just stuck to direct barter. A woman offered half a sack of dried beans for a bottle of antiseptic. A man in a mesh hat haggled over fungal meat using spare bolts and a promise to fix a fence.
Lina watched it all pass by: an old woman trading pickled roots for thread; a boy selling sun-dried lichen pressed into bricks; a veiled man handing over a fist-sized battery in exchange for a fistful of eggs.
A vendor in a patched cloak looked up as they passed. "Wheel repair, fresh synth-food, old steel. Anything worth trade?"
Elya smiled without slowing. "Unless you're giving out samples Sef, we'll keep moving."
"That's free," Sef said, his eyes staying on Lina a second too long. "Your friend hurt? Got some fresh chicken legs today — real meat. My wife raised them out by the floodplain. Ate nothing but bugs and roots. Good birds."
Elya smiled. "Sounds tempting, Sef. But I'll send Rei by later. He's the chicken expert. Used to raise them, you know? Got opinions about leg-to-breast ratios like it's a science."
Sef snorted. "Then he's my kind of customer."
But his gaze flicked back to Lina again, brief but lingering. "Hope she heals up quick," he added, softer. "Bones don't mend right in this damp air — but you look like fighters. That helps.
Lina smiled faintly. "I'm trying."
Elya pushed Lina away from the denser edge of the market, past rows of drying herbs and stacked crates, until the noise thinned and the light filtered softer through tree branches above.
A bench sat under one of the older ash trees — a rough slab of dark wood balanced across two salvaged barrels. It leaned a little, but it held. Elya helped Lina settle there, her breath quieter now.
"We're Ash Light," Elya said. "A field network. Volunteers, ex-techs, dropouts. People who still believe we can build something better."
On the left side of her chest, stitched just above the strap seam, was a sigil Lina didn't see before—
a pale ember against a dark field, a minimalist design: no crest, no rank, just the outline of a flickering flame.
Elya continued.
"Most of Sector 5 wasn't even born here. They came after the war — from the inner Sectors. Refugees, remainders. People the system decided weren't worth feeding anymore."
She adjusted her grip on the wheelchair.
"Not sick. Not criminals. Just... inefficient. Too anxious. Too old. Too curious. Not useful enough. So they were pushed out. If you're lucky, they give you a train ticket to Sector 5. If you're not —"
She looked at Lina.
"You were in Sector 9. You don't need me to explain."
Lina looked at her, then down at the dirt between her shoes.
"You've done good work," she said quietly. "Keeping all this together. Didn't think resistance groups came with farmers and fresh chicken legs."
She hesitated, then glanced back up.
"But... did you really come for me? How did you even know I was there?"
Elya didn't answer right away. She glanced out toward the market, as if scanning the flow of people between crates and tarps.
"We got word," she said. "A request came through."
She turned back to Lina.
"So we came. We didn't know exactly what we'd find — just that we had to try."
A pause. Something flickered behind her eyes, quickly buried.
"There's more to it. But I don't want to throw it at you right now. And... I'm not sure I know all of it, either."
Lina didn't respond right away. Her fingers tightened slightly around the chain in her hand. "I hate puzzles."
She hesitated, then looked up.
"Kai," she said, the name low, barely audible. "Was he—?"
Elya's expression didn't change. But she shook her head.
"I don't know, Lina," she said gently. "But you will. Our boss will tell you when the time's right. I promise."
That was all. No explanation. No denial. Just the quiet weight of something too heavy for the moment.
They sat in silence for a moment, the soft rustle of leaves overhead mixing with the faint clatter of the market behind them.
Then a voice cut through — easy, unbothered.
"Well, look at you two. Out here catching sun like normal people."
Rei stepped up beside them, hands tucked into the pockets of a patched canvas jacket. "Almost forgot — meant to give you this."
He leaned down slightly, holding something between his fingers. "Found this near you after the evac. Figured it mattered."
Lina blinked. Her breath caught as he pressed it gently into her palm — a thin chain, cool against her skin. She closed her fingers around it, heart suddenly tight in her chest.
"Thanks," she said, voice quieter than she intended.
Rei just nodded, expression softening briefly before he leaned back again, eyes flicking toward Elya with something unreadable.
"I'm Rei, by the way," he added, with a crooked smile. He glanced at her more directly this time.
"I was there, during the evac. Helped get you out. You look better now — a hell of a lot better than the last time I saw you."
Lina didn't answer. She just sat there, fingers closed tight around the chain, the pressure steady, grounding. For the first time in days, the noise inside her head was quiet.
Somewhere else, far from sunlight and quiet trees, a sealed door hissed shut.
Arlen stood by the terminal, arms crossed, eyes locked on the pale-blue scan flickering above the console.
"We lost six people," he said. "And for what?"
A pause.
"A variable. A walking override event."
He tapped the screen—once, sharp.
"You saw the sync-lock. That wasn't survival. That was a rewrite."
Senn said nothing at first. Then, calmly:
"We brought her back. That means we watch closer. Not less."
Arlen's voice dropped lower.
"She's a breach."
Senn didn't argue.
He didn't need to.