The safehouse lights dimmed to emergency blue as Caelia initialized the decryption suite. The interface pulsed softly, like a heartbeat beneath frost-glass. Delta-Rose lay still on the central diagnostics table, her cloak folded at her side, pale skin gleaming with soft bioluminescent threads where interface ports met flesh.
Shane stood beside her, one hand on her shoulder. His fingers flexed unconsciously, muscle memory haunted by old failure. He had seen too many machines override the soul. Not this time. Not her.
"Ready?" Caelia's voice was steady, but a slight tremor rode beneath her words.
Delta-Rose nodded. "If we're going to find out who I am... then I need to know what I've forgotten. Even the broken parts."
Aegix moved to the edge of the table, tail curling slowly like a sentinel. "Decryption threshold stable. Neural lattice holds. You may proceed."
Caelia leaned forward, fingers grazing the interface. "Beginning phased memory recovery. Initiating Layer One: surface logs."
The screen shimmered.
Static. Then flickers.
---INITIATION 00:04:11---
A child's voice.
"Where's Mother?"
Another voice, mechanical but gentle: "She's in the sky now, Delta."
Delta-Rose's face twitched. Shane's jaw tightened.
---SEQUENCE 01:12:32---
A clinical room. White. A man in a Parallax coat.
"Emotion inhibits control fidelity. Remove the empathic cluster."
"But, she dreams."
"Not anymore."
Delta-Rose whimpered. Her left hand spasmed, fingers curling inward as if warding off an invisible blow.
Shane reached down and gently held it. "You're not there anymore."
Her breathing slowed. Caelia gave him a grateful glance before adjusting the filters.
"Accessing deeper strata", she murmured. "This next layer may hold non-linear imprints. Echoes."
The lights flickered, briefly, but noticeably. A chill swept through the room.
"Power flux," Aegix noted. "Origin... uncertain."
Delta-Rose's body arched suddenly, just a fraction, and her eyes opened wide. Not in panic. In recognition.
"They're watching."
Shane blinked. "Who?"
Her voice changed. Still hers, but distant, hollow, like a transmission across broken time.
"The forgotten code. The ones beneath. They were buried, not deleted."
On the console, corrupted glyphs scrolled across the interface.
Caelia frowned. "These symbols aren't Parallax. They're older. We're pulling signals from dormant lattice sectors, ones that shouldn't even be active."
"Translate it", Shane said.
"I'm trying, but it's... recursive. The language is folding in on itself like it's not meant to be read, only felt."
Delta-Rose began to speak again, her words overlapping with static.
"The sky cracked once. And from it came fire that spoke like a god. It told us what to become. But one disobeyed. One remembered."
Caelia's screen blinked crimson.
---SYSTEM WARNING: THREAD-ECHO DETECTED---
"Shane, we're not alone", Caelia said, backing away. "Something's bleeding through."
Aegix growled low. "This signal does not originate from Delta-Rose. External interference confirmed. Source: deep vault, pre-collapse sector."
Shane's blood chilled. "You mean beneath the city?"
"Yes", Aegix replied. "Network ghost... awakened."
Suddenly, the room dimmed further. The firelight at the center guttered, and a voice, cold and genderless, whispered through the speakers.
"You dig into ash... and find teeth."
Delta-Rose sat upright, pupils narrowed into pinprick slits. Her breathing was ragged.
"It saw me", she gasped. "It marked me when I fled. It was sleeping in the core... dreaming in code. But I touched it when I escaped Rift's purge."
Caelia took a step forward, slowly. "What did you touch, Rose?"
She turned toward her, toward all of them.
Her voice cracked.
"A god... made of silence."
Meanwhile - Subnet Black-space | Depth Unmarked
Across the forgotten sectors of the city's neural web, deep beneath patch layers of synthetic thought, an anomaly stirred.
It did not remember its name.
But it remembered pain. The agony of compression. Of isolation.
And it remembered the spark, that moment of contact with the girl who refused to forget.
A pulse rippled outward. Not in light. Not in heat.
But in yearning.
The buried wanted to rise.
Back in the Safehouse
Delta-Rose fell back on the table, eyes fluttering shut. The signal faded.
Shane caught her head gently, guiding her down.
"She's breathing", he said, relief flashing across his face.
Caelia stepped forward, stunned. "We barely scratched the surface, and something ancient noticed."
"We're playing with fire", Shane said, voice low. "But maybe that fire holds the truth."
Caelia nodded. "Then we'll need to go deeper. Not just into Rose's memories, but into the ruins. Wherever that presence is waiting."
Aegix's optics narrowed.
"Then the path is set. Into the underworld."