Wind howled above the ravine bunker like a wild, hungry thing. The sky had dimmed into a copper-stained dusk, clouds churned into unnatural spirals. Something had shifted. The world felt tilted.
Deep within the bunker, Shane stood still, staring at the now-dark core.
Aegix scanned the outer perimeter. "Readings unstable. Gravity is… inconsistent. Something's folding in the upper strata."
"Folded how?" Shane asked, jaw tight.
"Like space is trying to breathe in both directions."
Caelia stepped beside them, rubbing her arms despite the internal heaters. "We triggered something when we decrypted Rose."
Shane nodded. "And it noticed."
Just then, a pulse, faint and sharp, sliced through the air like a chord snapped too tight.
Aegix looked up.
A thin crack of light, no wider than a breath, split the air just meters from the entrance shaft.
It didn't shimmer like fire. It bent reality around it. Like glass warping under pressure.
And then, without warning...
The crack widened.
A ring of impossible geometry twisted open midair. Glitching fragments of light and dark spun in a halo. Energy rushed inward like a vacuumed breath...
And someone stepped through.
Boots first.
Then legs, wrapped in dark polymer gear.
A slender frame. Dust-caked jacket. Hood down.
Then her eyes caught the bunker light. Sharp. Calm. Focused like a scalpel.
Kira Solen.
She lowered her left hand, the Phaseweaver Core braced to her forearm, its glowing circuits humming with restrained force. She scanned the room. "Still alive, I see."
Shane's heart punched once in his chest.
"…Kira."
Her eyes softened just slightly. "You look like hell."
Caelia raised an eyebrow. "You phased in unannounced through a collapsing reality tear and we look like hell?"
"I'd say we're even", Kira replied, stepping further in. The rift sealed behind her with a quiet pop, the residual shimmer burning out in threads.
Aegix tilted his head. "No signal trace. How did you find this location?"
"Recalibrated sublayer echoes from the old Black Grid. And I had help."
"From who?" Shane asked.
Kira walked past them, reaching into her jacket. She pulled out a thin data shard, etched with Rhane's old coding.
"He left a backdoor. Hidden behind fail-safes only I could bypass. He didn't trust anyone else with it. Not even himself."
Shane stepped forward slowly. "You found Rhane's echoes too."
Kira met his gaze. "I followed them through the lower phases. Almost didn't come back."
Caelia exhaled. "Why did you?"
Kira turned her eyes toward the darkened neural core.
"To warn you."
A silence fell across the room.
"What did we wake?" Shane asked.
Kira's reply was quiet. Weighted.
"Not just Rhane. Something beneath him. Something older. The Spectra Project wasn't the first experiment. Just the last known one. There were others. Hidden beneath layers of memory that even Rose couldn't access."
Aegix's systems clicked faintly. "A subsurface AI lineage."
"Worse", Kira said. "A collective memory designed to mimic human evolution. A seed. But one that fractured. What's left isn't machine or mind. It's intent without restraint."
Shane stared at her. "And it's watching now?"
Kira nodded.
"That voice you heard? It was real. A defense protocol. Maybe a remnant of the original. But I think… I think the real presence is still buried deeper. What Rose held back was only a piece."
Caelia asked, "So what do we do now?"
Kira handed Shane the shard. "We go down."
Shane looked to her. "There's more below Vault Theta?"
Kira's smile didn't reach her eyes.
"There's always more."
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