There were no doors to the Spire. Only a hole in the sand, like a mouth that had long since stopped screaming.
They reached it at dawn.
Yshari called it a non-place, a term the rebels used for landmarks that only existed during certain memory-states. In other words: if you didn't remember it, you couldn't find it. And if you remembered it wrong, it might kill you.
The locals had names for it: The Spire of Teeth, the Tower That Consumes, the Unhome.But in the cipher's root language, Elias recognized the original title:
MNĒM:SPIRAL."Memory Engine."
And it was still humming.
Descending into the spire was like diving into a throat made of bone.
The walls weren't carved, they had grown, ribbed with calcified ridges that pulsed faintly, responding to the electrical current in his blood. Every step Elias took, the lights grew brighter.
"It's reading you," Yshari whispered, wary. "Just like the mirror did."
"I know," Elias said. "But this isn't a mirror."
It was something worse.
Halfway down, they found the first corpse.
Or rather, what was left of one, cloaked in the robes of the Order of Glass, but twisted, melted, fused to the bone-wall.
His mouth was still open.
His eyes were filled with spirals.
Yshari recoiled. "We should turn back."
"We're already in," Elias murmured. "And besides…"
He knelt beside the corpse and pried open its hand.
A note was clutched inside.
Written in cipher.
His cipher.
"YOU BUILT THIS, PROFESSOR. WE'RE JUST LIVING IN IT."
His breath caught.
Professor. Not Walker. Not Leaper.
That word again, slipping through time. Sliding between loops.
Somewhere in this spiral, a version of him had lived long enough to be known. Feared. Hunted.
At the base of the spire, the floor opened into a cathedral-sized hollow.
And in the center was the engine.
A spherical lattice of tooth-colored bone, humming with memory radiation.
And chained to its base, Rae.
But not the Rae he knew.
This one was older. Her body was suspended mid-leap, caught in some suspended moment of fracture. Her face was broken into facets, shimmering with light from multiple times.
"Don't wake her," Yshari warned. "Not unless you know how to catch her when she falls."
But Elias stepped forward.
He reached toward the bindings, wires of crystallized sinew that wrapped her wrists in symbols.
He touched one.
And the engine screamed.
Suddenly, he wasn't standing anymore. He was falling, through data. Through memories.
Through her.
Through himself.
He landed on a floor made of glass. Beneath it, he saw every version of himself that had visited this place.
Some had destroyed the engine.Some had fed it.One had become part of it.
Rae's voice echoed in his ears, twisted into multiple tones.
"You always try to rescue me. Even when I don't want you to."
"Even when I'm not me anymore."
He fought to climb back, up through thought, through the screams, through the ache in his skull.
And when he opened his eyes again…
He wasn't in the spire.
He was in a lab. Cold, sterile, familiar.
One of the first labs.
He saw a young Rae working at a console. Behind her stood Malik Darwish, hands behind his back, watching.
They were building something.
He realized what it was.
The cipher.
The language of recursion.
And then he saw his own face reflected in the screen, distorted.
He wasn't in the past.
The Spire had tricked him.
He was still in its memory loop.
And Rae was still chained below.
When he returned, he was screaming.
Yshari caught him before he collapsed.
"You touched the binding," she said, shaking him. "What did you see?"
"Too much," he whispered. "But I understand now. The Spire isn't keeping her prisoner."
"She is the engine," he said. "She powers it. Rae is the recursion made flesh."
And the teeth that lined the walls?
They weren't architecture.
They were hers.
Elias made a choice.
He reached into his own mouth.
Tore out a tooth.
And pressed it into the engine's core.
The engine stilled.
The scream died.
And Rae opened her eyes.
Not fractured. Not ghosted. Just… her.
And for the first time in what felt like lifetimes, she looked at Elias and whispered:
"We have to go. The Order is coming."
"And they brought your name."