The river district was quieter than Theo remembered.
Gone were the resistance banners, the coded flare signs painted along underpass walls. The crash-safe markets, the hidden tech-swaps, even the community garden grown in repurposed server crates—vanished. In their place were scorch marks, broken glass, and ash-washed silence. The kind that settles not just after defeat, but after forgetting.
"They scrubbed it," Ayen murmured beside him, crouched at the edge of a collapsed tunnel. "Warden scouts. Probably after the last threadline pulse."
Theo scanned the area, picking his way over debris. The air here still carried the acrid tang of scorched polymers and fractured energy cells. "They weren't just cleaning up. They were erasing history."
"Your favorite thing to fight," she said with a grim smile.
"Not anymore." Theo turned his eyes toward the remnants of what had once been a message relay tower. All that remained was a rusted framework and a tangle of severed data fiber—like veins cut mid-transmission.
He reached into his coat, pulling out the portable core reader he'd carried since before the collapse began. The same one Nova had repaired for him back at the marsh safehouse. It blinked once, then settled into standby. No signal. No code threads. Nothing left.
Ayen sat on a chunk of collapsed street divider. "So what now?"
Theo stared at the wreckage. "We find what they missed."
"You think they missed something?"
"They always do."
He moved toward the foundation of the garden space. Beneath the remains of melted hydrolines and shattered nutrient pods, he found the edge of a panel—one he remembered hiding with Nova and Rell during a scanner sweep weeks ago. He dropped to his knees, fingers prying at the cracked plating.
Ayen crouched beside him. "You're sure this is it?"
He didn't answer, just pulled. With a groan, the panel gave way, revealing a hollow beneath. Dry. Untouched. Inside sat a dust-caked terminal wrapped in insulation foam and shielding gel.
Theo connected his reader. Static. Then—a flicker. A heartbeat of data.
"Yes," he whispered. "It's still here."
Ayen leaned in. "What is?"
Theo brought the display to life. Lines of stored memory flickered across the cracked interface—old meeting logs, partial blueprints, decoded threadline patterns, voice memos tagged from Nova, Rell, even the kid from the harbor camp who'd first talked about "time making loops in his dreams."
"Everything we gathered before the Seer began the sweeps," Theo said. "Unedited. Real."
Ayen stared. "You're telling me we have the actual records? Not filtered Warden archives or corrupted remnants?"
Theo nodded slowly. "More than that. We have the firsthand proof of the threadline breaches. The project manipulations. The names of the engineers who started the Origin sequence."
"That's... enough to indict the entire regime."
Theo looked up at her. "It's enough to begin a new one."
For a long moment, neither of them spoke. The wind moved through the crumbled beams like breath through hollow lungs.
Ayen straightened. "So we bring it to the public? Broadcast it?"
"No." Theo unplugged the reader, wrapping the terminal in cloth. "We make copies. Distribute it to the truth nodes still running underground. To teachers, codecasters, rogue archivists—anyone who still remembers how to listen."
"You're not afraid they'll twist it?"
"They will. Some will. But that's the point. Let it be questioned. Let it be studied. Let it live."
Ayen smiled softly. "You sound like someone who believes in people again."
Theo didn't smile back, but his voice was steadier than it had been in days. "I believe in the ones who survive. Who carry memory even when it hurts."
They stood together, wind tugging at their coats. In the distance, a low chime rang from one of the old communication pillars still standing near the riverbank. Not a Warden tone. A local one. Resistance code.
Ayen glanced at him. "You think it's Rell?"
"I think it's time we found out."
They moved down the broken slope toward the water, Theo carrying the last breath of the old world in a cracked core reader wrapped like a relic. The sun broke through cloudbanks overhead, casting shadows longer than ruins and warmer than silence.
It was the sound of history resurfacing.
Of ghosts turning into witnesses.
Of a future, finally unhidden.