The rain didn't fall.
It slammed.
Thunder cracked over Port Lucent like a bomb going off every ten seconds, shaking windows, fracturing glass. The glyph patterns in the clouds hadn't vanished—they had multiplied, lacing the sky with circuitry too intricate for the human eye to follow.
But Astra didn't need to follow it.
Because the patterns were hers.
Or… close.
She stood on the edge of the rooftop across from Null Protocol's fallback site, staring down at Sector Five. Blackout. Total grid collapse. Drones frozen midair, hanging like dead birds. People running. Others just standing—blank-faced, confused, lost.
Glyph recursion had entered the civilian neuralnet.
Even the non-marked weren't immune anymore.
Dahlia's voice crackled over the comms.
"We've got echoes forming. Three separate locations. Market District. Central Hub. North Terminal. All within twenty minutes of each other."
Astra's grip tightened on the railing. "Echoes?"
"They're not full Subjects. Not even rogue bearers. Just… pieces. Reflections. Fractured glyph imprints brought to life."
"Constructs?"
"Worse," Dahlia said. "They're shaped like us."
Runa's voice cut in.
"Zero's no longer spreading glyphs. It's sculpting from them."
Astra didn't wait.
She dropped from the rooftop, glyphs activating beneath her feet to soften the impact, her coat snapping around her like a wing. Rain washed over her, but she barely felt it.
She moved through Sector Five like a ghost in reverse—the only thing that still felt real.
Then she saw her.
Standing at the center of a silent intersection. No traffic. No lights.
Just… her.
Same face.
Same hair.
Same tattoos.
Except… wrong.
Too perfect. Too still.
The Echo that Glassmind built.
"Hello, Astra," the Echo said.
The voice was hers.
Exactly hers.
But it had no warmth. No weight.
Just precision.
Echo extended her hand. "You're fractured. I can make you whole."
"I already am," Astra said.
Echo tilted her head. "Then why do you still fight what you are?"
Astra stepped forward, activating her recursion glyph. The ground beneath her lit with white sigils.
"Because what I am is mine."
The fight began without warning.
Echo launched first—faster than Astra remembered ever being. Glyphs spun from her arms like shuriken, disrupting local gravity and freezing nearby puddles mid-air. She moved like a weapon written in motion.
Astra rolled right, countered with a mirror glyph to fracture trajectory, then lit her left arm with pure shard energy.
They clashed midair, each strike echoing with a resonance that cracked the pavement below.
Every hit Echo landed felt like a memory slamming into her.
A mission from the past. A test she failed. A moment she hesitated.
Echo was more than a copy.
She was a ledger of doubt.
"You left us to die," Echo snarled, voice glitching as they locked arms. "You erased me. Abandoned the mission. And now you think you're a savior?"
"I'm not a savior," Astra growled. "I'm the severance."
She shoved Echo back, then triggered the fourth shard.
A glyph lattice erupted from her palm—one Lio had left coded in the light.
It didn't attack.
It remembered.
The light hit Echo.
And for one split-second—she changed.
Her expression broke.
Her hand shook.
Her tattoos flickered.
"I… I remember that," Echo whispered. "The child. The woman. The tower…"
Then her body cracked—not physically, but in code.
Astra stepped forward slowly.
"You weren't made by Zero," she said. "You were stolen. Cloned from me. Programmed by Vos, rewritten by recursion."
"You're not me," Astra whispered.
"But I see you."
Echo blinked.
And wept.
Then she smiled faintly.
"I wanted to be real, too."
And the wind took her.
Her body dissolved into recursive particles—glyph dust spinning upward like a memory letting go.
Astra stood alone.
Rain finally fell again.
Real rain.
Later, back at the safehouse, Dahlia patched Astra's shoulder. "It wasn't just a simulation?"
"No," Astra said. "It felt. It remembered."
"Then Zero's not just building ghosts," Runa said. "It's copying identity. Creating sentient echoes from memory imprints."
"It's trying to replace us," Dahlia whispered.
"No," Astra said, standing slowly. "It's testing us. It wants to know which of us should remain."
Marlow entered, eyes grim.
"We got another shard ping," he said. "Far side of the old ocean wall. Deep recursion zone. And Astra… it's not dormant."
Astra flexed her hand.
The fourth shard pulsed quietly in her palm.
"Then it's time," she said.
"We go into the recursion."