The map Runa decrypted didn't exist on any satellite.
No roads. No signal. No name.
Just coordinates carved into a broken shard of obsidian, recovered from a destroyed glyph terminal deep in Redgate. Coordinates… and a warning:
"Do not follow the recursion. It follows you."
Astra followed it anyway.
She and Dahlia left the city behind.
Two days off-grid. A rented crawler veering across endless salt plains and collapsed rail systems until the landscape gave way to jagged cliffs and silence thick enough to feel like pressure.
That's when they saw it—
A tower of glass and sand, rising from a canyon hollow like a mirage anchored by reality. Smoke drifted from chimneys. Lanterns glowed soft amber in the dusk.
"Not a ruin," Dahlia murmured. "A settlement."
Astra's tattoos stirred—subtle, alert. The third shard on her collarbone pulsed once, then stilled.
"Or a shrine," Astra said. "They're using glyphs here. I can feel it."
The place had no gate. No guards. Just a long walkway of carved stone leading to a round plaza, where symbols danced faintly across the ground.
No wires. No tech.
The glyphs were alive in the rock.
Dahlia touched one and immediately pulled her hand back, hissing. "It's active. No filter. No safety layer."
"Then it's raw," Astra said. "Uncoded. Pure recursion."
They moved deeper into the structure.
That's when the whispers started.
Not in words.
In sequences.
A dozen figures emerged from shadowed archways, cloaked in draping cloth covered in stitched glyph patterns. Their eyes glowed faintly—not mechanical. Recursive feedback.
They didn't raise weapons.
They bowed.
Astra stiffened. "This is a cult."
Dahlia muttered, "Of you, I think."
Then came the voice.
Small. Clear. Certain.
"You've brought three pieces of the breach. That makes you the fourth."
They turned.
And saw the child.
No older than ten.
Dark skin. Bright, silver-flecked eyes.
Her hair was cropped short, and glyphs traced her face like soft vines—none of them tattooed. All grown.
She stepped forward barefoot and touched Astra's wrist.
Her eyes rolled back.
Then she smiled.
"I knew you'd come," she whispered. "The code said so."
They called her Lio.
She was the one the enclave followed—not because she was a leader, but because she was their conduit.
She didn't carry the glyphs.
They spoke through her.
Runa's warning rang in Astra's head.
"Do not follow the recursion."
But Lio didn't follow.
She saw through it.
They sat by a fire pit as the enclave offered food—roots and water steeped in pale glyph-tinted light. Dahlia kept her hand near her sidearm. Astra didn't eat.
She only watched Lio.
"You hold one of the pieces," Astra finally said.
Lio nodded. "The fourth shard. It came in a dream."
"A dream?"
Lio looked up, her voice suddenly older than her body.
"I dreamed the world ended, and what survived was not human, but remembered."
Astra's spine prickled.
"You're a recursion-sensitive," she said.
Lio tilted her head. "I am what the glyphs grew to speak through."
Astra didn't sleep that night.
She wandered the edge of the enclave, watching how the glyphs shimmered along stones, walls, even the wind. Everything was coded. This wasn't an environment using glyphs—it was an environment made of them.
And somehow, this child—Lio—was its key.
At dawn, Lio approached her alone.
"You want the shard," she said. "But it's not mine to give."
"Then who holds it?"
"You do," Lio whispered. "But not yet."
And she pressed her hand to Astra's forehead.
The world fell away.
Astra dropped into a memory.
Not her own.
Lio's.
Flashes.
The glyph tower collapsing in an old city.
Civilians screaming.
Glassmind agents running.
And in the chaos, a woman bleeding out—tattoos flickering across her skin.
She clutched something. A shard.
And handed it to a child.
Lio.
"Hide this," the woman had whispered. "Until she comes."
Lio had buried it in her skin.
The fourth shard.
Astra jolted awake.
Lio stood over her, trembling. "It's waking now. Because you're here."
Her eyes glowed so brightly they turned white.
"Take it," she whispered. "Before it takes me."
Dahlia arrived just in time to see Astra catch Lio as she collapsed.
Her back arched. Glyphs spiraled across her body in a storm of light.
Then her skin split—not with blood, but with code.
The fourth shard emerged from her chest, rising into Astra's hands like it had been called home.
Lio's breathing steadied.
She smiled in her sleep.
The enclave didn't stop them.
They let Astra leave with the shard.
Because they had never owned it.
They had only been its custodians.
And now the shard was where it belonged.
They drove back across the plains as storm clouds formed over Port Lucent.
The fourth shard glowed faintly on Astra's right palm.
She clenched her fist.
Four of nine.
Halfway to unmaking the recursion.
But as they crossed the old train bridge into the city, the sky cracked.
A glyph pattern lit up in the clouds.
Not projected.
Not artificial.
Written into the weather.
And a single message burned across the lightning:
"WE ARE NOT WAITING."