The morning felt hollow.
The air was normal, the fire crackled, the sky hadn't bled.
But inside Cael, something had shifted.
Every time he blinked, he half-expected to open his eyes and find himself holding a weapon.
Or issuing orders.
Or already dead.
"We need to cut east," Lira said, consulting a tangled scrap-map stitched with glyphs and old blood. "Signal density is spiking too fast in the west channels."
Cael didn't answer right away.
He was listening.
Because in the back of his head, beneath his own thoughts, something else whispered:
"Accept priority control. Thread integrity at 53%. Autonomous behavior remains sub-optimal."
"Did you hear that?" he asked.
"Hear what?"
"That voice. The instructions."
"No."
"It sounded like… me. But colder."
Lira went still.
"You're getting directives now?"
He nodded slowly.
"Then you're past the threshold," she said grimly. "The system's trying to take initiative."
"Can I stop it?"
"No. But you can lie to it. Stall it. Make it think you're too unstable for reassertion."
They moved quickly after that.
To a derelict observatory perched above a fractured basin.
Lira set traps — pulse lines, mind-spikes, a repeller field disguised as a ruin.
"You really think someone's trailing us?"
"Someone always is."
That night, the trap fired.
Something breached the field — and got caught in the mind-spike loop.
Lira and Cael approached carefully.
At the center of the loop: a woman, bound by resonance chains.
Thin. Hair cropped close. Dark eyes, lucid but tired.
Lira froze.
Cael watched her face change — not into fear, not anger.
Something worse.
Recognition.
"You said she was dead," Cael whispered.
Lira didn't respond.
The woman on the ground smiled faintly.
"I was. You left me there, remember?"
"Lira," Cael asked quietly, "who is she?"
"My sister."
The woman looked at Lira.
"Nice trap. Modified phase spike?"
"Don't talk."
"I only came to warn you."
"About what?"
The woman turned her gaze to Cael.
"Him. That mark on his arm?"
"It's not speaking yet."
"It's rehearsing."
Cael stepped back.
The voice in his head whispered again.
"Sequence rewrite pending. Awaiting ethical filter override."
He didn't know what that meant.
But it sounded like permission to do something terrible.
"We're leaving," Lira said. "Now."
"What about her?"
"If she wanted to kill us, we'd already be dead."
"So why show up?"
The woman — Lira's sister — smiled at Cael.
"Because when the real you wakes up…"
"You'll remember who put you to sleep."
End of Chapter 13: The Voice Inside Isn't Yours