The train car was silent.
Runa sat across from Astra, flipping through decrypted files projected into the air—records that technically didn't exist. Null entries, burned timestamps, neural erasures.
And one name, barely visible beneath the ruins:
Subject Aera-9
Status: Voluntarily Erased
Glyph Pattern: Unknown
Last Seen: Cipher Nest—Sector Null.
"People don't just disappear," Runa said. "They get deleted. They get overwritten. But she? She wrote herself out."
"And the eighth shard went with her," Astra replied.
She leaned back, watching the barren landscape rush past the window. Beyond the edge of the city grid, nothing had form—just recursion haze, and occasional flickers of reality trying to remember itself.
Dahlia's voice crackled in over comms.
"Cipher Nest's been sealed since the Collapse. No power, no uplink. You won't get in unless she lets you."
Astra looked at the glyph on her palm.
Seven shards.
And every one of them felt heavier than the last.
The entrance to Cipher Nest wasn't a door.
It was a signal—buried inside a recursive glyph loop encoded into old graffiti near the foundation of a crumbling tower.
Runa traced the pattern slowly, one finger glowing with a sync-glyph.
"Last chance to pull out," she murmured.
Astra smiled faintly. "I passed that point seven chapters ago."
The glyph blinked once.
And then the world inverted.
They didn't walk through a threshold.
They fell.
Straight into memory.
Not Astra's.
Hers.
A city unfolded around them—silent and enormous.
Black towers shaped like broken thoughts. Streets paved with reflections. Lamps glowing in colors the human brain wasn't built to process.
And through it all… whispers.
Not language.
Questions.
Astra could feel them brushing against her mind.
"What name did you forget to protect yourself?"
"What version of you survived the rewrite?"
"When you rewound time, what did you leave behind?"
She staggered slightly.
Runa steadied her. "This place is a trap."
"No," Astra whispered. "It's a test."
Then she saw her.
Walking barefoot across the sky above them, as if gravity had been politely asked to move aside.
Aera.
Slender. Short hair. Eyes glowing violet with recursive code.
She looked down at Astra—and smiled.
"I expected you three loops ago," she said.
Astra blinked. "You knew I'd come?"
"I left breadcrumbs," Aera said. "Buried in the glyphs. You were always meant to reach me once you'd gathered enough."
"You have the eighth shard."
"No," Aera said. "I am the eighth shard."
Runa's breath caught.
"That's not possible."
Aera descended slowly, standing atop a lightless fountain. "Every other shard? It's a code fragment. A piece of a pattern."
"But I," she said, touching her chest, "was the first attempt to make a living one. To see if a mind could hold recursive memory without breaking."
Astra narrowed her eyes. "And you chose to disappear."
"I chose to remember only myself. To become unreadable. And in doing so… I became the shard."
Astra stepped closer. "Then you already know why I'm here."
Aera nodded. "To finish what we started."
She touched Astra's wrist.
And the city shifted.
Suddenly, Astra stood in two timelines at once.
In one: she was young. Aera beside her. Two girls in a lab, reciting glyph sequences, laughing. Aera handing her a carved data key.
In the other: chaos. The lab burning. Aera trapped behind a recursion field.
"You told me to run," Astra whispered.
"I told you to forget me," Aera corrected gently. "And you did. It was the only way you could survive."
Astra looked at her own hands.
The glyphs were glowing brighter than ever before.
She wasn't collecting shards.
She was retrieving pieces of herself.
The city collapsed.
Reality peeled back like paper.
And Aera stood in front of Astra one last time.
"When the ninth shard awakens," she said softly,
"You'll stop being Astra Vale."
"And become what you were meant to be."
They embraced.
Aera smiled.
And dissolved into light.
The glyph on Astra's spine flared.
The eighth shard locked into place.
Back in the real world, Astra gasped awake.
Runa knelt beside her. "You were gone twenty seconds. That's it."
Astra looked up at the sky.
"Felt longer."
Dahlia's voice returned over comms.
"Did you get it?"
Astra stared at her palm.
The glyphs no longer shimmered.
They shone.
"Yes," she said quietly. "She's part of me now."
That night, Astra stood alone on a rooftop.
Eight shards.
And only one left.
The final piece.
The original glyph.
The Zero Core.
And it wasn't waiting anymore.