Then.
Before the fire, before the Coil, before the fracture — there was only silence.
Sila was fifteen when the Order took her name.
Not physically.
Just… gradually.
She was a prodigy. Numbers came easy. Patterns whispered to her in her sleep. At twelve, she cracked a corrupted Helix entrance exam — one meant to weed out the "unfit."
Instead of expelling her, they watched.
They called it the Cognition Advancement Program.
A scholarship. A mentorship. A gift.
"You're gifted, Sila," said the woman with silver eyes.
"We can help you evolve."
They gave her a lab.
A mentor.
A puzzle.
The puzzle was a simulation: a maze with only one exit.
At first, she solved it daily.
Then they changed it.
Removed the exit.
Watched how long she'd keep trying.
"Adaptation is survival," they told her.
"Submission is evolution."
One day, she woke up in the maze.
Not a simulation.
A room.
No clocks.
No sounds.
No windows.
Only her mind.
When they let her out seven days later, she was "ready."
They said she was clear.
Obedient.
Efficient.
They gave her a new name: S-114.
She smiled when they said it.
Because she'd already begun writing a virus.
Now.
She doesn't talk about those days.
But sometimes, when the power flickers, and the servers hum just right, Sila freezes — just for a second — like she's back in the maze.
Aarav once asked her, "What did they want from you?"
She answered without blinking:
"They didn't want me to think.
They wanted me to loop."
He never asked again.
She doesn't wear the spiral on her clothes.
She wears it burned into the back of her neck — a scar from her last test, where they failed to wipe her completely.
She survived the maze.
Survived the memory scrubs.
Survived becoming a number.
And now she burns systems for a living.
Because if the Order teaches recursion—
Sila is the glitch.