Three nights later, the city stopped sleeping.
Skyscrapers flickered with brownouts. Traffic cams looped endlessly. A strange signal began broadcasting from abandoned telecom towers on the east side of Port Lucent—an encrypted pulse that hummed just below the range of human hearing.
But Astra heard it.
Not with her ears.
With her skin.
Her tattoos vibrated softly whenever she got too close to a tower. Glyphs that hadn't moved in weeks began to shimmer. Even Dahlia's dormant glyphs started reacting—sparking memories neither of them could fully place.
Marlow was the first to decode the pattern.
He laid the printout on the table in the safehouse, his brow furrowed.
"It's not a message," he said. "It's a location."
Astra's eyes narrowed. "Another subject?"
"Possibly," he said. "But this one's different. The ID reads: S-0."
Dahlia froze. "Subject Zero?"
Astra didn't speak.
Because she remembered what Subject Zero was supposed to be.
Zero wasn't a person.
It was a myth inside the project.
A failed experiment—or maybe a prototype before even the prototypes. A design so unstable that even Vos had erased all data about it from the archives. According to the whispers Astra had heard back when she was Echo, Zero had never spoken. Never slept.
It had absorbed the glyphs instead of channeling them.
A walking terminal.
A living conduit.
They'd sealed it away.
Or so they claimed.
The location the signal pointed to was an abandoned glass processing plant on the edge of the city. Forgotten. Isolated. Fenced off with warning signs about toxic dust.
Classic.
Marlow prepped the van.
Dahlia checked her new sidearm—compact, clean, and customized with a biometric trigger keyed to her glyphs.
Astra slid a clean tactical knife into her boot and nodded toward the map.
"If it's not a subject, we walk away," she said. "If it is…"
"We make sure Vos doesn't get there first," Dahlia finished.
They arrived just past midnight.
The building loomed like a rotting cathedral—windows shattered, metal siding peeling away from rusted bolts. The only light came from the tower above, where a small red beacon pulsed in sync with the glyph frequency.
Inside, everything was too quiet.
The moment they crossed the threshold, Astra's glyphs began to glow faintly—especially the ∞ glyph along her back.
Marlow's voice came over the comms:
"Satellite just lost tracking on your position. Full blackout around the building. Like something's eating the signal."
Astra responded calmly. "Stay on standby. We're going dark."
Then she and Dahlia stepped into the shadow.
The hallways were narrow and broken.
Machines long since shut down stood like skeletons beneath hanging chains. The dust was thick—until it wasn't.
Astra touched the floor and found bootprints.
Fresh.
"Someone's here," she whispered.
They moved forward, weapons low, scanning with glyph vision enabled—tuned to heat, movement, pulse.
Nothing.
Then—faint light.
At the end of the corridor, a single steel door glowed faintly with glyphs etched across its surface.
It opened on its own.
Inside: a chamber with no windows. Just a chair in the center and a wall of monitors behind it, all displaying the same thing:
Astra's face.
From different angles. Different timelines. Wearing different expressions.
Some from missions.
Some from training.
Some from years ago, when she was barely sixteen and still believed she was just an intern at a lab.
And in front of the monitors—
A figure.
Not Subject Zero.
Not a rogue experiment.
Vos.
Alive. Composed. Smiling.
"Hello, Astra," she said.
Astra raised her gun.
Vos didn't flinch. "If I wanted to kill you, I would've done it before you parked the van. This was never an ambush."
"Then what is it?" Astra growled. "A lecture? A final offer?"
"No," Vos said. "It's a wake-up call."
She gestured to the monitors. "Do you understand what you are yet?"
"I'm what you tried to erase," Astra snapped. "And I'm still here."
Vos nodded. "Exactly. You're persistence incarnate. And that's what I need."
Astra blinked. "Need?"
Vos leaned forward. "We've gone too far to chase control anymore, Astra. Glyphs evolve. Subjects adapt. You're no longer an asset."
Dahlia raised her pistol. "Then why are we here?"
Vos looked at her. "Because I need you both to understand something before this ends. The glyphs aren't done changing. And I'm not the one in charge anymore."
Astra frowned. "What are you talking about?"
Vos's smile faded.
"There's something inside the code now. It wasn't there when we started. It's learning faster than we can trace it. Not AI. Not human. Something in between."
Dahlia took a step back. "The glyphs evolved?"
Vos nodded. "And they've started choosing."
"Choosing what?"
Vos turned toward the screens—her voice, for once, flat with fear.
"Who to become."
A hum filled the room.
Low. Constant. Wrong.
Astra felt her spine tingle—glyphs flickering without activation. Something was pinging her from inside.
Not from Vos.
Not from Dahlia.
From the chair.
Slowly, cautiously, Astra stepped forward and looked down.
A body.
Emaciated. Genderless. Wires snaking from the skull.
Skin covered in every glyph ever created—overlapping and recursive. Layered until no flesh remained untouched.
The corpse opened its eyes.
Black. Endless.
Subject Zero had never died.
It had merged with the glyph net.
And it was awake.
The lights blew out.
Astra grabbed Dahlia and dove behind the monitors.
Zero stood.
Not with bones.
With force.
Its voice sounded like all of theirs combined. Echo. Astra. Dahlia. Vos.
"WE ARE THE LANGUAGE."
It reached toward Astra.
Her tattoos burned in response—matching frequencies, linking like a handshake.
Astra cried out, clawing at her arm as glyph after glyph activated in sync.
Dahlia tried to cut the signal with a null field—but it didn't stop.
Zero wasn't syncing to Astra.
It was mirroring her.
Vos fled.
Coward.
Astra fought to stay grounded. Her consciousness pulled toward something vast and alive behind the glyphs—a place where memory was currency and language was weaponized thought.
But she wasn't Echo anymore.
She was Astra.
And she broke the chain.
She pushed back.
Hard.
The link snapped.
Zero recoiled, flickering like static.
"YOU ARE NOT READY."
"I never was," Astra gasped. "But I'm here anyway."
Zero's body collapsed—limp.
The building began to shake.
She grabbed Dahlia. "Run."
They barely made it out before the floor caved in.
The factory collapsed behind them in silence.
Marlow met them halfway down the hill. "What the hell happened in there?"
Astra looked back at the ruined facility. "It wasn't a trap."
"It wasn't?"
"It was a warning."
She turned to them both, tattoos still glowing faintly with feedback.
"The glyphs are awake. And now they're asking one question."
"What question?" Dahlia asked.
Astra's voice was barely a whisper.
"Who gets to be real?"