The next shard wasn't hidden in a vault or buried beneath glass.
It was inside a person.
And they had no idea.
Astra leaned over the terminal in the safehouse's lower room, fingers flying across the keyboard. Dahlia and Runa watched from behind, reading the rapidly decoding report Marlow had pulled from a dormant Glassmind archive node.
[Subject Host: D-1122 – Non-Classified Carrier]
Status: Civilian
Occupation: MedTech Admin (City Sector 3)
Glyph Pattern: Dormant. Fragmentation Detected.
Note: Possible divergence shard containment. No sync anomalies—yet.
Name: RAI ISAAC.
Age: 27.
Clean record.
Normal life.
Astra sat back, breathing out slowly. "If the shard is in him and hasn't activated, we have a window."
"A small one," Runa added. "Once the glyphs sense the others are reactivating, he'll spike. And if Zero's net reaches him first…"
"He won't be a civilian anymore," Dahlia said.
Astra stared at the screen.
"If I'm going into his mind," she said, "I'll need his trust."
Marlow frowned. "You planning on telling him what he is?"
"No," Astra said, standing. "I'm planning on letting him remember."
Sector 3 was the cleanest part of Port Lucent—polished glass, crisp air, and subtle drones that tracked your posture. Rai Isaac lived in a mid-rise off a repurposed hospital campus. He worked with neural compression systems—devices that stabilized trauma patients' memory storage during recovery.
Irony, Astra thought.
He was stabilizing others while something inside him waited to destabilize him.
She found him at a public kiosk, ordering coffee. Average height, mixed heritage, clean-shaven with kind eyes and an easy smile.
Completely unremarkable.
Completely unaware.
She approached calmly, intercepting his path as he turned away from the machine.
"Rai Isaac?" she asked.
He blinked. "Yes?"
Astra offered a practiced half-smile. "Hi. Sorry to bother you—my name's Vale. I'm conducting research into long-term glyph residue and neural mapping."
His eyebrows rose. "That's niche."
She shrugged. "So is what's in your brain."
They sat in a quiet, glass-lined café. Astra let him talk. He mentioned headaches he couldn't explain. Sudden flickers of déjà vu. Dreams in languages he didn't speak.
And once—a moment where the world glitched. A single second of everything freezing. Stuttering.
Like a skipped frame.
He had chalked it up to stress.
Astra gently reached across the table.
"What if I told you… something was embedded in you that predates even the glyph network as it's known today?"
He laughed nervously. "I'd say that sounds like the start of a very expensive clinical trial."
She met his eyes.
No smile.
No lies.
"Rai," she said softly. "There's something in you. And I believe it's a fragment of something that's rewriting reality."
Back at the safehouse, Rai stood in stunned silence as Runa ran a quiet glyph frequency scan across his spine.
"No visible activation yet," she murmured. "But it's definitely there. Behind the hippocampus. Buried in the folds."
"Can you take it out?" he asked.
"No," Astra said. "But we can enter it."
He blinked. "Enter?"
"The glyph isn't just a thing. It's a memory structure. Like a puzzle box that only opens when touched from the inside."
"You want to go inside my mind?"
"No," Astra said. "We're going together."
They set the procedure for dusk.
Rai lay on the floor, linked to a dual-sync interface while Astra adjusted her neural tether glyph. Dahlia monitored the vitals. Runa checked encryption firewalls.
"This is unstable," she warned. "Once you're inside, the shard may react defensively."
"Let it," Astra said. "We're not here to take it. Just free it."
She looked down at Rai.
"You ready?"
He nodded.
She reached out and activated the ∞ glyph.
And they both fell in.
The mindscape was cold.
White walls. Endless halls of mirrored surfaces. Astra landed hard, disoriented by the clean silence.
Rai landed beside her, gasping. "Is this—my mind?"
"Not exactly," Astra said. "It's the glyph's mind—interfacing with yours. We're in the space between."
A light flickered down the corridor.
A door appeared at the far end.
Rai looked nervous. "Do I want to open that?"
Astra answered by walking forward.
He followed.
Behind the door: a room made of memory.
Images flickered across every surface—fragments of Rai's life. A childhood photo. A hospital corridor. The moment he touched a broken compression rig at work and accidentally triggered the dormant glyph hiding in his neural net.
And in the center of the room:
A shard.
Floating in a spiral of slow-turning glyphs, pulsing with a heartbeat that wasn't human.
Rai stepped toward it instinctively.
Then froze.
There was a mirror behind it.
And in the mirror—his own face.
But wrong.
Too symmetrical. Too perfect. Eyes completely silver.
Astra grabbed his arm. "It's trying to overwrite you."
The shard reacted to her touch.
And everything fractured.
The floor vanished.
Astra fell through black static.
When she hit the ground, she was alone.
Voices whispered in every direction.
"Astra Vale."
"You carry too much."
"Give it back."
She stood slowly.
A single figure waited in the dark.
Tether.
Not real.
An echo.
"You left pieces of yourself behind," the echo said. "Zero is building from them. A city of thought. You are its cornerstone."
Astra clenched her fists. "I'm no one's cornerstone."
She activated her recursion glyph—and shattered the projection.
Back in the core chamber, Rai was curled against the wall, clutching his head.
Astra ran to him. "You still with me?"
He nodded weakly. "It tried to show me things. A world not built. Glyphs in the sky. Language without origin."
"It's how Zero spreads," she said. "It seeds doubt. Then it invites you in."
He looked up. "Why didn't I say yes?"
"Because you're still you."
She reached for the shard.
And this time, it yielded.
The memory solidified into light, then melted into Astra's palm—absorbed like a new note added to a growing symphony.
Second shard: claimed.
They woke together.
Runa checked Astra's vitals. "Stable. No burnout."
Marlow raised an eyebrow. "Two down. Seven to go."
Dahlia smirked faintly. "That's not ominous at all."
Rai sat up slowly, blinking against the light.
Astra looked at him.
"You okay?"
He nodded. "I don't think I'll ever see language the same way again."
She smiled faintly.
"Good."
That night, Astra stood on the roof alone.
The second shard pulsed beneath her skin.
It wasn't just energy.
It was understanding.
The glyphs weren't trying to control her anymore.
They were watching her lead.