The train to District Zero wasn't listed on any map.
It didn't appear on navigation grids, didn't respond to voice commands, and never stopped unless you knew the right sequence. Three taps on the central panel. A whisper of coordinates. A thumbprint soaked in heat.
Only someone with access to the old world could summon it.
And Lyra had that now.
She clutched the datachip tight in her hand as she stepped into the cold, humming interior of the train. Finn sat across from her, silent, eyes on the blinking lights lining the curved walls. Mina was reading through a decrypted folder on her wristband. None of them said much. They didn't need to.
District Zero was where WITTED began. And they were about to walk into its bones.
The train moved without sound. Like it didn't cut through space but slipped between it. Lyra kept thinking about Echo's face how it flickered like he wasn't sure who he was. And worse, how familiar he felt.
Was he really unstable?
Or just… unchained?
The train stopped suddenly. No announcement. No doors. Just a shift in gravity and then silence.
Mina stood first. "We're here."
They stepped out into darkness.
It wasn't the kind of dark that waited to be broken by light. This was heavy. Like the air had forgotten how to glow. They used their wrist-lights to guide their way, walking through long corridors filled with glass tanks empty, cracked, some with claw marks inside.
Lyra paused at one. A tiny handprint still clung to the foggy inside.
She shivered.
They passed broken labs, collapsed ceilings, and walls filled with strange symbols the same equations Echo had written. It was like he'd left fingerprints on everything.
At the end of the corridor, a door remained sealed. But it opened with a whisper when Lyra approached.
Inside sat a man.
Old. Wrinkled. Beard gone grey. But his eyes were bright. Awake. Scanning.
He didn't flinch as they entered.
"I was wondering when you'd come," he said.
Finn stepped forward. "Dr. Cael Norren?"
The man nodded once. "They used to call me that. Before I walked out. Before I realised what we were creating."
Lyra narrowed her eyes. "You worked on WITTED?"
"I designed it," he said. "Every neural protocol, every genetic selection, every equation to balance genius with obedience. I built the framework to create you, Lyra."
She flinched.
"You created me?"
"No," he said gently. "They did. I only built the prison. They filled it with children."
Mina stepped up beside her. "Why did you run?"
Norren sighed and turned to a display behind him. It flickered to life, revealing footage years old, maybe decades. Children in glass rooms. Headgear humming. Eyes rolled back. Data streaming from every pore.
"I ran when Subject A03 cracked his code from the inside. No child should do what he did. I looked into his eyes once and saw… not madness. Not evil. Something worse. Clarity."
Lyra sat down across from him. "What is he now?"
"A03?" Norren leaned forward. "He's what happens when you give a child the mind of a god and trap him in a world built by liars."
"Can he be stopped?"
"No," Norren said. "But he can be understood. That's why I stayed hidden. Because you can't fight Echo with weapons. You fight him by knowing the one thing he doesn't."
Lyra tensed. "Which is?"
Norren looked her straight in the eye.
"Yourself."
The words hung there.
He stood and handed her a device small, palm-sized, smooth.
"This is a synaptic recorder. It can map your memories backwards. Every suppressed memory, every data point they removed from your brain… it'll find it."
Lyra stared at it. "What for?"
"To show you who you were before they renamed you A01. You weren't born into this project. You were taken."
Her pulse skipped.
"My mother?"
"She tried to protect you," Norren said softly. "She hacked the WITTED servers and removed your name. Hid your identity. But she failed. They found you. Re-coded your data. That's why you're the spark, Lyra. Because you were never meant to be part of the system. You're the glitch."
Everything suddenly made sense.
Her instincts. Her fear of silence. The strange dreams. She wasn't just a creation of the system she was an interruption. A wild variable.
Mina stepped forward. "What about A03?"
Norren's eyes darkened. "He's looking for her too. Because if Lyra is the glitch, then Echo wants to become the patch. He wants to fix what was broken. And he thinks she's the key to either saving or ending them all."
Lyra whispered, "Why me?"
"Because you remind him of something human," Norren said. "And that's the one thing he can't calculate."
Suddenly, all the lights flickered. The station groaned.
Then came a voice, not from any speaker, but inside their minds.
"Found you."
The walls cracked.
The monitors glitched.
And a shadow moved in the glass behind them tall, slim, twitching, like a boy walking through broken logic.
Echo had arrived.