They camped that night in the skeletal remains of an unfinished relay tower. The wind outside was sharp. Inside, silence pressed in from every direction—no comms, no networks, not even static. The world around them had begun to forget itself.
Lyra arranged the Ashglass-fused core in a containment mesh while Trey stood watch. He didn't trust the thing. It pulsed like a heartbeat.
Signal sat apart, head tilted. Listening.
She heard it again.
"You've already died once. This version is only buying time."
"Who are you?" she asked aloud.
No answer. But the voice wasn't from outside. It was in her. Buried in the strands of Cain's code she inherited. Only now it wasn't Cain speaking. It was someone newer. Possibly herself.
Trey glanced back. "You okay?"
Signal nodded, though she wasn't.
Ellian joined her. "What did it say?"
"That we failed."
He didn't flinch. "Figures."
She turned to him. "You're not surprised?"
"We're not exactly winning."
He stared past her, toward the pulse of the Origin Core.
"The thing is leaking timelines. I think it's from futures that never happened—or might."
Lyra called out from across the tower. "It just flashed a location."
Everyone gathered. On her portable display, glowing in sharp white glyphs, was a name none of them recognized.
"Dendura."
Juno blinked. "That's not on any of our maps."
Frost muttered, "Then it's real."
They moved out by dawn.
Dendura wasn't a place—it was a buried structure beneath a dried-out lakebed. The entrance required a code Lyra only discovered after filtering the Ashglass shard through frost temperatures. The glyphs melted into numbers. Coordinates.
They descended into blackness.
No lights.
Only Trey's tracker ticking quietly in the dark.
"Something's wrong," he said.
No one spoke. Just breathing. Metal under boots. The distant echo of footsteps—some theirs, some not.
Then a room opened before them.
Empty.
At its center: a chair.
Strapped to it: a man.
Alive. Breathing. Wired into an enormous lattice of Ashglass.
Evan stepped forward. "That's a witness terminal. But it's…alive."
Maya raised her weapon. "He's watching us."
The man opened his eyes.
"I remember you," he whispered.
Signal stepped forward. "Who are you?"
"I'm what's left. I'm what EXO/ONE left behind to test recursion."
Juno frowned. "Recursion?"
"Every time the world resets, someone has to stay behind and watch the failure. That's me. I've seen your deaths thirty-seven times."
The room hummed. Lights flickered on.
He looked at Signal.
"This time, you brought the Origin Core. That's new."
He smiled.
"This version might survive."
The Ashglass behind him cracked.
From within it, shadows moved.
Figures—twisted, half-formed versions of the team.
Maya's voice broke. "Are those…"
Trey aimed.
"Us."