They walked single file now, no one daring to break the line. The corridor ahead didn't branch—it narrowed, slowly, like a throat closing. Steel gave way to some kind of dense, matte material—smooth like ceramic, but too warm to be dead. The walls pulsed faintly, not with light, but with a low static charge that danced across their gear like warning whispers.
Tessera broke the silence, her voice low.
"This structure… it's not standard Wing engineering. There's no welding, no joins. It wasn't built—it was grown."
Vash snorted. "Great. Now we're walking through a giant tech intestine."
Gearjunk chuckled dryly behind him. "That'd explain the smell."
Cathex hissed. "Hush. It's remembering through us. Echoing our noise. Be careful what you say here."
"Let me guess," Dogend rasped. "Words become weapons?"
"No," Cathex whispered. "They become roots."
Ink's form shimmered subtly. Their tattoos peeled across their shoulder blades, flickering words like pressure warnings:
DO NOT NAME WHAT YOU CANNOT BURY
Lyra slowed.
They were approaching a central atrium—a circular space that yawned open from the narrowing corridor like an artificial womb. The ceiling was high, sloped like a dome, with holes where piping or sensory nodes had once been, now weeping coolant and memory fluid in slow, rhythmic drops. It was the sound that got them first—something like breathing, but farther away than any lungs could live.
At the center stood a massive column of cable-bound plating—scorched, cracked, and partly shattered at the base. A broken interface ring hovered nearby, fractured glyphs blinking once every few seconds like it was trying to remember the alphabet.
Tessera stepped forward, scanning.
"This was some kind of spinal uplink. An input conduit. Something massive connected here. Recently."
"Recently?" Vash echoed.
"There's no dust buildup," she said. "Coolant flow's active. Whoever tore out of here did it within the last few months."
Dogend paced the outer edge of the room, boots crunching something brittle beneath the coolant. He crouched and lifted a handful.
Teeth.
Not human.
Not synthetic.
Just… wrong.
"Still think we're on a recon op?" he growled.
Lyra said nothing. Her eyes scanned the high walls—lined with black smears, dried fluid, and deep impressions like something clawed at the metal from the inside. Not out.
"This wasn't containment," she said. "It was catalysis."
"English, please," Vash muttered.
"It wasn't holding something. It was trying to change it. Or finish it."
Gearjunk knelt by the shattered base. "The link node's been overloaded. Not broken—overused. Whatever was connected here, it wanted to stay."
Cathex began twitching violently, voice glitching into short, overlapping phrases.
"—mirror-noise—spiral remains—memory shedding skin—"
Lyra turned sharply. "Cathex. Look at me."
The seer's head jerked up. Her mask lit with a flare of reflected light.
"The floor remembers," she rasped. "It's dreaming in our footsteps."
Ink moved to the far side of the chamber, scanning the wall. Their sigils dimmed—then flared again, across their legs and chest:
SOMETHING CRAWLED OUT OF HERE AND LEFT ITS MIND BEHIND
Suddenly, the air trembled.
Just once. Like a pulse. Not seismic. Not structural.
Sensory.
Every HUD flickered.
Vash clutched the side of his head. "What was that?"
Tessera grimaced. "Not a signal. More like a… residual thoughtform. Psychic imprint."
Gearjunk's helmet hissed as his filtration kicked to max. "Yeah, well, tell the thoughtform to knock first next time."
A panel on the far wall suddenly blinked to life.
A visual distortion crackled across it—jagged, fractured like broken film. And then, slowly, a shape resolved.
Not a face.
A spine.
Not flesh. Not machine.
Something that looked like it remembered being both.
And a voice—corrupted, distant, disassembled—echoed from unseen speakers. Not in language. Not words.
A pulse of meaning that drilled straight into their minds.
Lyra's eyes widened.
It had said her name.
No sound. No form. Just a thought slithering into cognition.
"…Lyra…"
Everyone turned to her.
Vash was first. "Did you hear that?"
She nodded slowly. "It knew me."
Tessera's voice was tight. "That wasn't a hallucination. We all registered the imprint."
Cathex had collapsed to her knees. Her mask flashed like a broken prism.
"The Godspine stirs… it knows the architect… it remembers the ones who fed it…"
Dogend readied his scatterblades, voice low and hard.
"This thing's alive. And it's watching through her."
Lyra stepped toward the image on the wall, her voice flat.
"I think it's calling me."
Vash moved with her, staying close.
"Then we answer."
Ink's body flickered violently. The words across their back rolled like static.
EVERY STORY THAT STARTS THIS WAY ENDS IN A BODYPILE
"Then we make sure it's not ours," Vash said.
Lyra stared at the wall.
"Forward."
The wall opened for her.
Not through mechanics. No servos. No pneumatics. It peeled—a seam splitting down the center of the wall, folding inward like an eye dilating. Cold air poured from the opening, thick with the scent of sterilized fluid, scorched carbon, and something older—like dust trapped in a dying brain.
Lyra stepped forward.
The others followed. Weapons unslung. Jitters masked behind training and instinct. No one said anything now. Not even Gearjunk. Not even Vash.
The corridor beyond was unlike the others. This one was alive.
Veins of luminescent fluid pulsed beneath the translucent floor—like nerve pathways connected to something deeper below. Above them, bundles of fiber-optic strands swayed in the still air, like hair underwater, responding to their presence without touching them.
Every footstep echoed, not once, but twice.
Once in the present.
Once in memory.
Tessera paused to scan the walls. Her slate lit up with distorted metadata.
"This corridor isn't just a passage. It's a signal channel. It's listening to us… and writing us down."
Cathex giggled, her voice shaking.
"We're being translated. Into pulse. Into spine. Into thought."
Gearjunk grunted, keeping his cannon low. "If this place tries to copy me, it better get the attitude right."
Dogend's scatterblades stayed unsheathed. He didn't speak, but his steps were slower now. Controlled. Like walking through the ashes of a dream he didn't trust.
Ink's sigils were shifting constantly, an unreadable mess of glyphs dancing across their limbs like static. Something had rattled them. And that wasn't easy.
Lyra led them without hesitation.
She didn't need the map. She felt it now. Like a frequency only she could hear.
Every turn matched something in her bones.
The corridor ended at a chamber shaped like a reversed lung. It pulsed in silence. A high ceiling supported by rib-like arches made of something between alloy and calcified data. The walls were inscribed with lines—perfect, parallel, impossibly fine.
And in the center stood a terminal.
Not made for hands.
Just a polished plate set into the ground, pulsing red-blue, red-blue. It was shaped like a fingerprint drawn out into a spiral.
As they stepped closer, Lyra's HUD began to fail. Visuals corrupted. Readouts inverted. The phase field on her bow shut down with a low whine.
Then a voice.
Not synthetic. Not mechanical.
Familiar.
"…Lyra…"
It wasn't just a call.
It was a recognition.
Vash stepped in front of her. "That thing say your name again?"
Lyra didn't respond. She walked past him. Toward the plate.
Cathex was shaking now, head bowed low. "The daughter returns. The echo made of silence. The lattice knows its core."
Tessera's voice was tight. "She's connected. That Singularity in her—it's not just tech. It's heritage."
Lyra stopped one step from the terminal.
Her hands trembled. For the first time since the Spiral. Since she buried everything human in her under cold steel and mathematics.
"…You were part of this," she whispered.
The floor pulsed beneath her boots.
Tessera's scan burst to life. Symbols screamed across her slate.
"Lyra, this system—it's responding to your Ecliptic Lattice. Your version is fragmented. This one is full. Unrestricted."
Gearjunk's helmet hissed. "You're saying this is a mother unit?"
"No," Tessera replied. "I'm saying hers is the child."
Lyra stepped onto the spiral.
The chamber sank—not physically, but perceptually. Like gravity no longer belonged to this place. Time slowed. Her thoughts fragmented into packets. Her heartbeat synced to the rhythm of something vast.
And then—like a thought whispered into the base of her skull—came the memory.
A facility.
Hana sigils on walls. Before it all fell apart.
Screaming.
Not hers.
A name. Cut from her. Erased.
The voice came again. From the air, from the walls, from the core.
"You were never meant to forget."
The others didn't hear it.
Only her.
Vash placed a hand on her shoulder. "Lyra. You with us?"
She nodded slowly.
"Yeah."
She stepped off the plate. The spiral dimmed. The room exhaled.
Ink's glyphs slowed. Tessera's slate cleared. Dogend stopped pacing.
But Lyra—her breath was shallow. Her face unreadable.
Cathex laughed, soft and broken.
"She's part of the root now."
Vash's jaw tightened. "If this thing's in her head, we cut it out."
"No," Lyra whispered. "We follow it."
Gearjunk blinked. "You're serious?"
"She's already bound," Tessera said. "Whatever's down here… it's been looking for her this whole time."
Dogend raised a blade. "And what happens when it finds her completely?"
Lyra looked forward. Into the dark beyond the chamber. The next corridor unfurled like a path of memory yet lived.
"We find out."