The facility didn't exist.
Not on any map, satellite scan, or secure glyphnet grid.
It was buried beneath Cyan District, a cratered ghost zone once home to Glassmind's earliest Subject trials. The ground here still trembled under certain frequencies. Buildings stood hollowed out by recursion shock. Glyphs written into the walls glowed when you whispered.
Astra had followed the signal left by the fifth shard—and found something worse.
A direct trace to Vos.
Dahlia stood beside her at the edge of the old tramline, scanning the blown-out entrance to the underground vault. "If she's hiding the sixth shard, she's doing it right under what's left of Glassmind's bones."
Astra's eyes narrowed. "She isn't hiding it."
"She's using it," Runa's voice confirmed through the comm. "Feedback patterns match what we picked up during the storm. That shard is live. And get this—its resonance keeps looping back… twenty-seven seconds."
Marlow joined in.
"That's recursion tech with temporal bleed. She's trying to rewrite something."
Astra's grip tightened.
Her past, most likely.
And if Vos succeeded?
She wouldn't just rewrite memory.
She'd erase Astra entirely.
The descent into the vault was slow, methodical.
Glyph-locks flickered weakly, overridden with Astra's presence alone—her four shards harmonizing like a master key. The further they went, the more unstable reality became.
Floors pulsed.
Walls whispered names that didn't exist.
And Astra kept seeing herself—in old mission gear, in child form, in other people's eyes.
Vos had turned the entire space into a memory engine.
And it was reaching critical recursion.
At the heart of the vault stood a platform surrounded by pylons of glowing obsidian. In the center: a glyph mirror.
Large.
Fractured.
And standing in front of it—
Vos.
Unchanged.
Or perhaps just reconstructed.
She looked over her shoulder, calm. "Took you long enough."
Astra stepped onto the platform. "You really couldn't resist playing god, could you?"
"I'm not playing," Vos said. "I'm correcting."
"Correcting what?"
Vos tapped the mirror once.
And the space twisted.
Suddenly, Astra was back in a classroom. Sixteen. Her hands shaking over a broken neural drive. Vos watching from the doorway.
Except…
She didn't remember this.
"You didn't meet me at seventeen, Astra," Vos said quietly. "You met me at ten."
The memory cracked.
Reality spiraled.
And Astra stood in another timeline.
A lab. A young girl on a table. Herself.
And Vos, younger, with regret in her eyes.
"She wasn't born," Vos said, her voice warping with recursion. "You were compiled."
Astra reeled. "What are you talking about?"
"You think you're a survivor," Vos whispered. "But you're a construct that didn't collapse."
The sixth shard pulsed from a conduit on Vos's back. Not worn. Not protected.
Embedded.
Feeding power into the mirror, stabilizing recursive feedback.
"That shard's letting you loop time," Astra said. "You're rewriting me."
Vos turned, and for the first time, her face showed something other than cold calculation.
Sadness.
"I tried to fix it," she said. "But every time I changed a moment, you came out stronger. Sharper. More aware."
"You created me," Astra said. "Now I'm undoing you."
She lunged.
Dahlia hit the pylons with an EMP charge, frying the recursion loop.
The mirror shattered.
Vos screamed.
The vault imploded inward—not physically, but temporally.
Reality buckled.
And the sixth shard flared—
Astra reached through the backlash and tore it from Vos's spine.
The world snapped back.
Vos crumpled.
Alive, but silenced.
And Astra stood holding the sixth shard, glowing black-gold in her palm.
Outside, rain fell again.
The shards inside her hummed like puzzle pieces closing.
Six of nine.
And now she knew the truth:
She hadn't been made by Glassmind.
She hadn't survived it.
She was the control variable they'd tried to erase.
And she'd rewritten herself instead.