The firelight inside the safehouse flickered against worn steel walls, casting long shadows that danced across the edges of silence. Delta-Rose sat curled near the low emberpit, knees tucked to her chest, her synthweave cloak draped over her shoulders like a tattered memory.
Shane watched her from across the room, arms folded, leaning against the wall. Aegix crouched nearby, unmoving, yet vigilant. Caelia worked at the uplink terminal, scanning through encrypted Parallax archives that flickered with hidden locks and redacted horrors.
The silence wasn't awkward. It was anticipation. A breath before the storm.
Delta-Rose finally broke it. "I keep dreaming of a garden."
Her voice was soft, like glass straining under pressure.
Shane stepped closer. "What kind of garden?"
"I don't know if it was ever real", she said, eyes distant. "It's always dusk. There are voices in the wind, familiar, but broken. Sometimes... there's a girl. She looks like me, but her eyes are normal. Not like mine."
She turned to face him fully.
"Do you think memories can grow back? Like limbs?"
Shane knelt beside her. "Memories aren't gone. Just buried. And sometimes what's buried... still grows."
Caelia's voice chimed in from the terminal, low but intense. "I found her designation logs."
Shane and Delta-Rose turned.
"She wasn't just any subject. Delta-Rose was part of the Lysithea Initiative, a Parallax side program built on failed Echo prototypes. She was meant to be a bridge, human empathy mapped onto controlled obedience. But it never stabilized. They burned the project six months ago."
Delta-Rose flinched at the word burned.
Shane frowned. "So she escaped during the purge?"
"Or someone let her out", Caelia murmured, fingers flying over the interface. "Her neural interface is partially self-repairing. That's not standard. Someone tampered with her conditioning."
Delta-Rose shifted, wrapping her arms tighter around herself.
"I remember... screams. Not mine. Others. And fire. And the voice, it told us who to be. What to forget. But then... something cut it off. Silence flooded everything."
Shane nodded. "That silence was Rift's collapse. You're free now."
"But what if the voice comes back?" Her eyes trembled with uncertainty, and behind them, the faint glow of lingering thread-code shimmered. "What if it was never just Rift?"
Aegix stirred, processing. "Her neural logs carry echoes beyond Rift's pattern. There is residual signature… unidentified. Possibly ancient."
Caelia looked sharply at Aegix. "What do you mean, ancient?"
"Fragmentary sequences, non-syndicate. Possibly pre-network. Low-frequency recursion. Waiting."
Shane stood, his voice suddenly colder. "You mean something older than Rift... is still alive in her code?"
Delta-Rose recoiled slightly, guilt flashing across her features. "I didn't ask for this... I just wanted to remember."
Shane softened again, crouching beside her.
"You're not a weapon, Rose. Not anymore. You're a survivor. And survivors make their own story."
She looked up at him, uncertain, but moved. "Then help me write it?"
"We will," Shane said.
Caelia stepped forward, her gaze steady. "We're going to decode your memory core. Piece by piece. Carefully. You'll have a say in what stays and what goes. No more experiments. No more control."
Delta-Rose nodded slowly, then glanced down at her hands, one human, the other partially plated with carbonbone alloy, trailing frayed nerves and exposed microthread.
"Do you think... I can still be a person?"
Shane reached forward and gently took her hand. "You already are."
---
Elsewhere – Network Void
Across black systems, far beneath the old cityscape, fragments of Rift's shattered core spun like rusted stars. But among them, something stirred. Not code. Not even logic. A presence.
It did not speak. It did not blink. It simply remembered.
And remembering was enough to begin again.
---