They ran.
The spire behind them shrieked, not a sound, but a ripple through reality itself. As though it had lost a heartbeat it depended on. Rae staggered in the desert light, her body unsure how to inhabit one time again. Elias supported her, though his hands still trembled. One tooth gone. One memory missing. Something taken and something else growing in its place.
"You gave it a part of yourself," Rae said."A part I didn't need anymore," he lied.
The dunes shimmered. Not with heat, but with memory.
The closer they got to the outer boundary of the Red-Spiral City, the more reality bent. Buildings flickered between styles, ancient and modern, raw and crystalline. Elias watched a child throw a stone into the sand, and it split the world for half a second, revealing a second sun and a city of glass beneath the surface.
They were getting closer to the breach point.
And the Watcher knew it.
They found shelter in an old rebel den beneath the city's east ridge. Sand flowed across the metal floor like time refusing to stay put.
Yshari stood watch while Elias examined Rae. She was awake, mostly, though her voice moved in fractured loops.
"Did I say that already?""Say what?""You're still burning.""No, I'm not.""Not on the outside."
He touched his chest.
She was right.
Under the skin, the burn mark of the leap symbol was glowing again, fresh. New. But this wasn't the same leap. This one hadn't begun. Or maybe, it never stopped.
Rae looked at him, her eyes clearing.
"You're going to walk through fire again," she said. "And you won't burn. Not because you're invincible. Because the fire wants you now."
The next morning, the Order came.
They arrived without footsteps, gliding machines in the shape of monks, glass-masked emissaries with no eyes behind the lenses. The air around them shimmered with dissonant memory. When they moved, the past rearranged.
One of them spoke, not with a voice, but a transmission into Elias's spine.
"WALKER 117-Σ. YOU HAVE BEEN FLAGGED FOR DISSOLUTION.""The mirror recognizes you as loop-infected.""Step forward and receive forgetting."
Rae stood between them and Elias.
"You're late," she said."You've already lost."
They fired.
The air tore open.
And fire bloomed.
Elias didn't flinch.
He stepped into it.
And the fire didn't burn.
He walked through flame as if it were fog, the heat folding around him, recognizing him. Every atom of light kissed his skin like a familiar ghost.
Behind him, the Order agents froze.
One dropped to its knees. Its mask cracked.
From within, a human eye stared back, shocked, afraid.
"He's not decaying," one voice whispered."He's evolving," said another."He is the recursion."
By the time the fire cleared, the agents were gone, some scorched away, some pulled into their own memory loops. The breach point in the sky, barely visible before—now shimmered wide and hungry.
Rae took Elias's hand.
"Now do you believe me?" she said.
"I think I always did," he replied. "Even when I didn't want to."
They returned to the rebel den, where Yshari had laid out the next Cipher map, inked across a sheet of skin, tattooed in a spiral across a former archivist's back.
It showed a relic site buried under the heart of the city.
Not one Rae or Elias had seen before.
Relic 61-A.
And Rae's voice lowered.
"That's where it ends," she said."Or breaks.""And if we go there… we don't come back the same."