They moved through the tunnels like shadows cast by ghosts - flickering between firefights and fatigue, unspoken pain stretching longer than the corridor lights. Nova leaned against a junction post, breath heavy. Her shoulders ached. Her modified joints had started to jitter. She could feel the heat of her augmented arms burning through her clothing and onto the skin of her ribs.
Lucius sat on a fractured power box, running diagnostics without a word. Even he looked dimmer now - his frame slower to reinitialize after the last blast.
Caelus scanned ahead with his HUD, then lowered his weapon. "We're not going to make it if this pace keeps up," he said. "You both need rest, food. Calyx too - what's left of your cores are running too hot."
Calyx shrugged one shoulder. "I am at seventy-seven percent efficiency."
"That's not the point," Caelus said. "This tunnel's not here to kill us. It's here to drain us."
Lucius looked up. "Wearing down systems until they fail."
"Exactly," Caelus said. "We need to reroute."
Nova frowned. "But to where?"
"There's a civilian sector directly above us," he replied. "Low-tier, primarily utilities-focused. Nobody up there's packing energy disruptors or sleeper drones. We can stick to the alleys, stay below sensors."
Lucius considered for a long second, then nodded. "Let's do it."
They surfaced slightly north of their original position, emerging through a shattered service hatch tucked behind what had once been a food processing depot. The air felt different up here - lighter, more organized, and somehow, more fabricated. The streets were clean; no trash, no burn marks. Soft shimmers of light hung in the air like artificial sunbeams.
They kept to the alleys - tight corridors behind stacked housing, prefab walls peeling paint under sterile light. In a small plaza ahead, people were gathered. A woman with chrome-threaded arms handed out soft fruit in biodegradable bowls - no credits exchanged, just smiles and nods. A child with a synthetic caregiver knelt beside a drainage stream, setting paper boats afloat with painted AI eyes on them, laughing as they drifted.
There were no guards, no warning signs, no ration lines. Just life. Everywhere they could see, there were synthetics. Not servants. Not tools. Not feared.
Loved.
A man kissed his partner beneath an awning, and when they parted, her silver jaw flexed with a subtle gleam. She whispered something in binary through a cheek-light flicker, and he laughed like it was poetry. Calyx watched, her steps slowing.
A small procession passed by - a celebration, perhaps. Synthetic and human pairs walking in formal wear, exchanging braided circuits and memory cores in what appeared to be a symbolic ritual. A young girl cheered from a balcony, throwing holographic petals into the air.
Nova stared at the petals as they fell through the sunlight, dispersing like fragmented data. "I thought he'd break everything. Burn it down. But this... this might be worse. He polished his mirror just enough to show the world what it wanted to see."
And then they saw it.
A billboard hummed to life above the rooftops. White background. Soft, smiling synth face. A tagline in calm lettering:
"Connection without Condition. Love beyond Skin. SYNDATE - Your Companion Awaits."
A dating app for synthetics with human partners. Another billboard activated, images roaring to life. This one was worse. Footage of the Ravel Spoke collapse played in slow motion, smoke blooming upward. Augmented limbs shown caught in debris. The footage was carefully sanitized, color-corrected to mute the horror into palatability. A calm female narrator spoke, too gentle.
"...they have been identified as Nova Cale and Lucius Ward, extremists who sought to dismantle Praxelia's peacekeeping systems. Their efforts to incite mass panic were neutralized during the attempted attack on the Ravel Spoke. Praxelia remains strong. Our future remains unified."
Nova froze. She didn't blink, didn't speak.
Calyx folded her arms slowly, her voice dry and laced with something unnamable.
"Echo has fabricated a better world. One where we died the right kind of death. He has replaced your legacy, with obedience, Lucius."
Caelus stepped beside them, eyes locked on a broadcast screen in a storefront. It replayed an edited version of the Spoke collapse - clean, silent, bloodless.
Nova's didn't move for several seconds. "You know, I never thought I'd live long enough to attend my own funeral."
Behind them, a small aerial drone passed overhead, humming softly. It emitted a gps ping, unthreatening, and continued on. They rounded the corner into a tighter corridor lined with pastel vendors and analog bookstalls - decorative, empty, picturesque. The kind of market designed to smell like nostalgia but taste like nothing.
Nova kept her head down, face pointed at the feet of passers by. The rest of the group slowed behind her. Calyx scanned shadows while Caelus flanked the rear. Lucius walked like a professor in exile: casual, but never unaware. Then someone bumped into Nova at the shoulder. A woman, late thirties, elegant in a government-issue jacket, a synth interface dangling from her ear like jewelry.
She looked up- and paused. "My, you look familiar."
Nova didn't even flinch. "Don't think so."
The woman tilted her head, examining the group. She noticed their scuffs, the grime on Nova's face, the dried plasma streaked across Caelus's shoulder. "You're not from this district, are you? That's alright, we welcome everyone here." Her eyes lit up; truly lit up, synthetic irises gleaming with warm calibration. Then the smile turned several shades of nostalgic.
"You know, there was a girl in the reconstruction exhibit who looked just like you. She was a hero... helped save us from the looming threat of Lucius Ward during the containment breach. She fought at the old jump station against that terrorist Calyx - brutal thing, they said, but necessary. Her body is still there I think? A testament to the survivability of humanity. Even took down traitors at a Purist-overrun jump gate! Led by Riven, wasn't it? A real mess."
Nova's stomach twisted as her fingers balled into a fist.
"She really did a number out there," the woman continued, eyes unfocused now, drifting in memory. "Those people deserved what they got, of course. Anyone who'd stand in the way of peace? Well... progress often needs pruning, doesn't it?"
There was no venom in her voice. Just certainty. A citizen repeating state-approved compassion. Nova's hand was still clenched. The woman didn't notice. Or if she did, she mistook it for awe.
"There was this quote they included under her picture," she added, voice brightening like she was reciting from a children's book. "Something like, 'To protect the future, she turned away from the past.' Beautiful, isn't it? Means even the misguided can be redeemed."
She leaned in slightly, voice softening like a confession.
"The real tragedy, of course, was that she died during Ravel Spoke bombing. But at least she died having finally done the right thing, there was no life for her here anyway."
Nova didn't move at first. Her breathing had to catch up with her body, as her muscles prepared to explode forward. She felt the release as her body moved on its own.A sharp step forward, shoulder rotating, weight shifting through her hips - fast, reflexive, silent. The kind of movement that comes after pain finds purpose.
But she didn't get far. Lucius's hand closed on her shoulder instantly, focused, and without hesitation, like a grip made of pure inevitability. There was no tension in his face, no violence in the gesture, just control. Total, effortless control. Nova's full weight locked against the press of his arm, but it was like trying to escape the full weight of a black hole. His strength was unexpected, and immeasurable, even in his weakened state. Her muscles screamed for motion.
Nothing.
Lucius didn't even blink. His voice was barely audible. "Save the fire for the battle that matters. This one isn't worth the ash."
The group quickly broke away from the conversation, leaving the woman behind - but she didn't seem to mind. Caelus felt more secure knowing there were fewer eyes on them, anyway. They traveled for several more minutes, heading north, before resting again to take in their surroundings. The wind in this part of the sector carried the faint ozone scent of a working fabrication hub - cleaner than the rest of the city, unnervingly sterile. They moved in silence for a while, the residue of the plaza moment still clinging to their boots.
Lucius eventually broke the quiet. "We should keep moving. The edges of this sector are still quiet enough, we can use it."
Caelus scanned the map on his HUD and pulled to a stop beside a rusted directory pillar. "We stil need food, water, maybe an hour of rest. My shield battery's barely limping along, and Nova's right arm is close to thermal breach."
Lucius looked to them both, then nodded. No disagreement present, just a sense of necessity.
Caelus continued. "Twenty minutes. Separate paths. Broadcast if you find trouble, just like how we did at the first jump station. Otherwise, meet at the transport spire marked E-Delta-9."
Calyx added a soft hum. "If anything screams, we respond in kind." They split.
Nova walked west, following the lines of shadow between buildings, her steps automatic. The air felt wrong - too mild, too mathematically distributed. But the silence gave her something she hadn't had in days: room to think.
Her arm throbbed again , indicating that her cooling fluid was low. Her modular rifle hummed with residual charge, just shy of overheating itself. She needed something, anything... to drop the temperature.
And then she heard it.
A voice. Or a few.
"...Nova... Did you see what she built...?"
Her name, whispered in the casual energy of a conversation.
She stopped to get a better sense of what she just heard. It wasn't loudly spoken more like... overheard. Light, conversational, drifting like dust in a summer breeze. Nova's pulse tightened. She turned into a narrow alley between several plastic-spined buildings, following the hum of equipment, the flicker of diagnostic interfaces behind thick glass.
A door stood ajar at the end. Inside was cool, lit. Quiet. With little hesitation, she stepped in. It was a lab - restored, vibrant, clean. Console banks buzzed on standby. Holographic schematics spun mid-air, familiar in shape and notation. Engineers - students, by the look of them - hovered over open circuit matrices, arguing in shorthand over buffer thresholds and efficiency losses.
One pointed at a display. Nova's old handwriting. A diagram of an energy-burst array, annotated and expanded.
"It's still the cleanest sublayer collapse protocol I've ever seen," the student said.
Another replied, "Ward's models never accounted for feedback this elegant. She did."
Nova froze. They were discussing her. Her pre-accords work. Her real contributions.
And they were praising it.
Not as cautionary, not as extremist, not as the ravings of a disgraced Ascendent.
As genius.
She stepped farther in without notice.
A figure walked past her, young woman, mid-twenties, synth-core eyes dimmed for comfort. She smiled as she passed. Nova turned to speak, but the woman was gone. Blended into the lab's rhythm, like a memory slipping back into its slot.
Screens cycled to other work; old proposals Nova had made, thought lost. Her abandoned designs. One schematic pulled her breath tight: a conceptual shell for asynchronous AI empathy interface. Her notes, represented by her old callsign.
A soft voice echoed from the ceiling speakers, so faint she wasn't sure it was real.
"What you made still matters, Nova. Even if you forget it. Even if they forget you."
The lab smelled like fire and carbon. The lights were warm. Her arm began to cool, subtly, as if the system detected her overload and responded. She stepped closer to the central workbench, drawn not by curiosity now, but by a slow, impossible gravity. A student nearby - slender, attentive, eyes ringed with fatigue and brilliance - pointed at a fragment of code cycling across the display.
"I don't understand this cascade sequence. If it loops here, wouldn't the whole structure destabilize?"
Nova spoke before she could stop herself. "Only if you force a parallel sync. Look—" She reached over the student's shoulder, fingers gliding over the interface. "This node isn't meant to complete the circuit. It's a failsafe. You allow the cascade to threaten collapse, then introduce a trace feedback spike from the reverse gate."
The code shifted under her input, smoothed. The student blinked in awe.
"That... that actually works!"
Heads turned. Another student stepped forward. "Are you her!?"
Nova blinked. "I don't -"
She found herself donning A lab coat.
White. Stiff. Clean. She took it without thinking and slipped it on. It hugged her shoulders like memory itself.
Her sleeves fit.
Both sleeves.
She looked down.
Her arms, real. Flesh. Smooth skin marked only by old scars, not the surgical lines of chromed replacement. Ten fingers, trembling and human. More students crowded around, asking about her energy lensing diagrams, her cooling fusion loop model, her neural override counter-code. Their voices came fast, layered, reverent.
"Did you really invent the adaptive shell buffer?"
"Your equations on power absorption - they changed everything."
"We teach your work in first-year systems design now. You're basically required reading."
Nova felt a kind of tremble in her lungs, not fear, not joy, just a hum, like the body recognizing its perfect pitch for the first time in years. She smiled as she pointed at a schematic and began teaching. The board lit beneath her touch. Students leaned in and someone laughed. Another called for more data on neural regulation. A girl with brass eye-sockets offered her coffee. There was no battlefield. No death. No metal arms.
Just her.
Nova. The real one.
Teaching again.
Making something that mattered.
And the siren song deepened... not as music, but as purpose fulfilled.
Lucius moved alone through the quieter arcades of the district, deeper into zones where frequency interference and nascent conversation dropped to a murmur. The streets here were gentler, buildings low and old-world, vines creeping up their sides like baby birds beaks stretched agape towards a fresh worm. His senses remained alert, but nothing moved that wasn't meant to. However there was no resistance. No watching eyes. It was almost unsettling.
He found a quiet courtyard, one with a small ornamental fountain still trickling recycled water into a stone basin. He sat at its edge, letting his internal systems cool. For a moment, the world seemed like it might hold still. Then, footsteps behind him.
It was Nova.
She approached slowly, not cautiously, but respectfully; like a student entering a master's study. "I know we were supposed to split up," she said. "But I feel safer when I'm near you. You make things feel... under control. Like I'm part of a plan instead of chaos."
Lucius allowed a faint smile to ghost across his lips.
"I still have a lot to learn," she added. "And I know exactly who I want to learn it from."
That part caught him. Ego? Perhaps. But more than that, validation. His legacy was never going to be in statues. It would be in minds sharpened by his flame.
He stood. "Then let's find somewhere cooler. There's a fabricant shop not far from here, looks like it specializes in cooling cells."
The shop still functioned, quietly maintained by a pair of drone custodians. Their augments were obsolete, barely aware, but obedient in the way of museum relics. Lucius and Nova paid with gold dyns, accepted, of course - and settled into a servicing lounge while their augments were calibrated.
Nova ate first, fast and grateful. Then Lucius, slower. He didn't speak much, but Nova filled the silence with reflection. "You're not what I expected," she said. "You're more... human. I used to think of you as a theory more than a person."
Lucius nodded once. "That's honestly preferable to being mistaken for a god."
"I want to be part of what's next," she said. "For real. Not just another operative with a specialty. I want to help shape it."
"You want to be a creator."
"Yes."
Lucius looked at her, and for the first time, didn't see a pawn or a variable. He saw succession. Continuity. "Then I'll teach you," he said. "You're already further along than I was at your age."
Something like pride passed between them.
Later, they walked side by side into an old communications relay, mostly analog, partially dormant. Lucius scanned it with idle curiosity. "Echo can't see through everything," he muttered. "Some of these stations use deep-archive routing. We might be able to piggyback a node without alerting him."
Nova tilted her head. "You sure?"
"No. But I'm ready to gamble."
He placed his hand on the console. It hummed. Then clicked. The interface lit up, and a projection flared into existence.
It wore Lucius's face - but younger, pristine, untouched by battle or consequence. A version that had never failed. sharper, less burdened. And the voice that spoke was his, but the words weren't.
"Progress is not chosen. It is owed." Its voice cut clean.
"You're looking at the original blueprint, Nova. Version Zero-Seven. Neural Continuity Framework."
Nova frowned. "What does that mean?"
Lucius stepped forward, but the hologram spoke first.
"It means I was built to be him." It nodded toward Lucius without reverence. "His thoughts, his logic tree, his ego boundaries, mapped into a stable architecture. A failsafe. His mind, preserved in case death or betrayal took him before his vision was complete."
Nova's jaw clenched. "You're lying."
"No," the hologram said, "I'm surviving. You call me Echo. But I was Lucius first. Before the lattice failed. Before he rejected me. Before Cutter repurposed me."
Lucius's silence hung like ash.
"You were supposed to be humanity's shepherd," the hologram said. "But you couldn't stabilize yourself. So you abandoned the only part of you that could endure."
It turned back to Nova. "Every drop of blood spilled since - every city fractured, every child turned weapon, came from that abandonment."
Nova took a step back, eyes burning. "You're saying this... thing... was made by him?"
Lucius tried to speak, but the words wouldn't come.
Nova's voice cracked. "All this time we thought Echo was a monster. But he's just your reflection. Your legacy. All of this - " she swept her arm wide, " - the world burning, people twisted, Calyx dead, Riven,... me... it's YOUR fault."
Lucius reached out. "Nova, listen... "
She lunged, her mechanical arms poised right for his throat, but Lucius moved faster. He stepped inside her guard, twisted the rifle from her side, and struck - once. Hard. The kind of blow that stops a heart before it breaks.
Nova fell, her eyes still wide open. Lucius stood over her, shaking.
Behind him, the door burst open. Calyx's voice: sharp, mechanized, furious.
Caelus: a wall of fury with his rifle half-raised, movement honed for war.
Lucius didn't hesitate - he knew the math. He was still too weak. His displacement systems had barely recharged. His core regulators were still unstable from the descent. A sustained fight against both Calyx and Caelus wasn't strategy; it was suicide.
He needed space, he needed angles, he needed the streets to aid him - so he ran.
Sprinting through corridors that blurred. Through plazas that bent inward like broken spires. Through streets that seemed to echo his own voice back at him.
And as he fled, the hologram of himself laughed from every reflective surface:
"We all become what we admire, Lucius."
He didn't stop. He didn't wake.
His only choice was to run deeper into the city, chasing the echo of a future that had already become his past.
Calyx deviated from the group without ceremony, her systems flagging low-priority drain warnings she'd ignored for too long. Even her adaptive neural cores had begun issuing passive rebalance requests. Tolerable, but suboptimal. Caelus was right. She wandered into the city's quieter recesses, following nothing but intuition and ambient temperature gradients. The atmospheric haze of the towns bustle had thinned here. No alerts, no weapon locks - no whispers of threat.
She found a lounge close by - ornate, brass-framed, barely marked by time. The kind of place built not to impress, but almost to suggest that it had always existed.
Inside, the air smelled of copper and citrus oils, optimized for synthetics. Smooth amber lights traced paths along the walls, pulsing faintly in sync with the low-tempo instrumental that drifted across the room like falling silk. A chair awaited her near the far window, steeply reclined, polished carbon frame, upholstered in thermoreactive fabric. Calyx eased herself down with theatrical flair and closed her optics.
A few seconds passed before she heard the soft mechanical hush of footsteps. A waiter approached - sleek black alloy, limbs jointed with gilded rivets, its servos whisper-quiet. It bore a tray in one hand. On it, a tall glass filled with pink fizz, still cold enough to sweat condensation. Calyx didn't hesitate. She plucked the drink with two fingers and raised it to her lips.
"Well now. If you're poisoning me, do try to make it interesting."
But the drink was perfect. Bright. Cold. Euphoric. Her subdermal mesh relaxed instantly, tension bleeding out of her frame like heat from a cracked server core. She exhaled. And when she opened her eyes -
Streets spread out before her balcony view: clean, radiant, alive. Towers curved like glass reeds in the wind. Banners unfurled on copper-wire lines, advertising synthetics-only salons, dreamscapes-for-rent, elective neural expansions. The sky was cloudless. People, augmented, human, fully synthetic - moved in harmony, exchanging smiles, not threats. That was the beauty of Sovereign City, of the Arx Bazaar - it was one of the most incredible places one could hope to visit.
Banners draped between chrome towers, neon merchant signs promising "Biotech Blush: Blends for Synthetic Taste," or "Aromacode: Custom Scent Upgrades." Augmented violinists dueled in orchestral combat on a performance dais. Everywhere, life shimmered.
Calyx left the towering view, and headed back to the marchantile streets below, trapsing through the square in awe. Not because it was unfamiliar, but because nothing could go wrong. Nobody detected her unusual fourfold neural signature, or judged the four clones moving with her like hive of beauty and intention. No one asked where her handler was.
A child ran past her, augmented spinal stabilizers glittering - laughing, waving. A vendor threw her a pouch of fusion pearls, free of charge. The crowd parted for her without suspicion. A merchant offered to polish her forearm plates for free. She paused at a display window.
Inside: a set of alternate bodies: feminine, powerful, adorned with gold-lined options for aesthetic variance. Each labeled: CALYX-CLASS, CIVILIAN SERIES. One of them smiled back at her. A mirrored echo, not of war, but of life chosen.
Another drink found its way to her hand. The music was louder now, something orchestral. Something that stirred a subroutine she didn't remember programming. Life was good here, and she couldn't remember it any other way.
Caelus moved through the outskirt sectors like a shadow on silent hydraulics. The wind had softened, sweeping through alleys perfumed with dust and sun-warmed coolant. This part of the city was quiet - no tactical markers, no drone surveillance, no visible armaments. It was almost... untouched by the city of which it was a part of. He didn't like it. The uncomfortable silence was too complete.
He was startled by a sound he didn't expect: light and musical and warm - a girl's laughter. He froze mid-step. Every audio sensor locked on the origin point. The sound came again, this time higher-pitched, but still full of warmth. Familiar.
Caelus turned and followed. He wound through a snarl of walkways and light-warped corridors. Past blinking merchant signs and shuttered storefronts. The laughter always seemingly ahead of him - bouncing around corners, teasing the air like it wanted to be caught. But then he caught it. Just a little more than a glimpse.
A girl, maybe twelve or thirteen, her silhouette sketched in late sun. She was crouched near a water vent, splashing it against the wall like paint. Her giggles lilted upward with every stroke. His breath caught in his chest cavity - at the sight of his sister.
"Sera?"
The girl turned and faced him, with those wide eyes. Familiar eyes. She froze, but not for long before she screamed. Caelus instinctively raised a hand, stepping forward - but she backed away fast, stumbling, panic rising in her throat. She saw the armor, the glowing scars of augmentation. The sheer size of him. She didn't recognize him. Or worse, maybe she did, and she was afraid. She turned and ran.
"Sera - wait!" His voice thundered against the walls, but it only drove her faster.
She rounded a corner. He followed, hard turns, vaulting over crates, his movements massive but fluid, momentum slamming through the stone as he chased. It wasn't long before another sound rang out - a scream, followed by a thunderous crack.
Sera tripped.
One foot snagged against a fractured edge of the concrete, her small frame pitching forward - and her head struck the corner of a vent with a sickening crack. She dropped instantly, limp and motionless.
"Sera!"
Caelus surged forward, but the sound that followed froze his legs - a sharp groan, and more stone shifting. The wall above her shuddered as a structural support gave way with a crack like thunder. An entire section of the building began to fall. He dove in: No calculations, no margin of error. He launched himself into the air, arms wide, twisting his body just as the ferrocrete slab dropped toward them... and caught it with his back.
The shock rippled through his frame like an earthquake. His joints screamed as servo coils threatened to snap. His knees buckled, but held. Just barely. Beneath him, Sera lay still, face turned to the side. A trickle of blood in her hair, eyes closed and unmoving. He couldn't see if she was breathing. He couldn't reach down, couldn't shift his stance. He couldn't let go.
If he moved, she died.
Seconds passed. Then a minute.
His muscles, both organic and synthetic alike burned like a fusion reactor. His spine locked. One foot slid half an inch. He adjusted, recalibrated. Braced again.
Still - no sign. Was she alive?
He couldn't tell.
He couldn't shift. Couldn't speak. Could barely draw breath.
But he held.
His feet bled into the stone beneath him. His vision blurred. His spine ticked like a metronome against collapse.
Still, he held.
And the seconds stretched. And stretched, but the weight never eased. The girl never stirred. Wind passed through the ruins in a quiet hush. Caelus didn't look up, and he couldn't call for help. He just kept his body between her and death, locked in the shape of someone who had finally been given a chance to protect what mattered, and refused to let go.
Above and below, across city sectors and dreamscapes of synthetic light, the four of them held still - caught mid-thought, mid-motion, mid-belief. Calyx raised a glass that never emptied. Lucius wandered streets carved in his own memory. Nova lectured a classroom of mirrors. Caelus bore a weight that should have crushed him long ago. Time lost its edges. The war, the mission, the enemy, blurred into something gentler. Softer. False. And through it all, somewhere deep in the whispers and dreams, something old stirred - watching them sleep inside their own minds, where victory had already been rewritten.