They say guilt is a weight.
But guilt, Vos had learned, wasn't heavy.
It was sharp.
It cuts at night when the lights are off.
It bleeds into silence.
And it never stops asking questions—especially the one she hated most:
"What if she'd been allowed to be… human?"
Vos hadn't always been this way.
There was a time she believed in the glyphnet.
In recursion.
In the mission.
Project ORI-V9 wasn't born out of control. It was born out of hope—that the brain could be stabilized, evolved, reshaped.
She had led the initiative with clarity.
And then Astra happened.
She hadn't meant for Astra to survive.
Not in the way she did.
The others had cracked—burned out in recursive collapse, or looped into silence.
But Astra… Astra rewrote herself mid-protocol.
Not a glitch.
A miracle.
And Vos had panicked.
She didn't study Astra.
She tried to contain her.
And when that failed… she tried to forget her.
For years, Vos lived inside the rewrite chambers—alone with looping code, watching a thousand different versions of Astra fail, break, disobey, or vanish.
None of them were her.
And yet Vos kept searching.
Not for the Subject.
For the moment she lost control.
The sixth shard had been an accident.
Vos hadn't wanted power.
She'd wanted… pause.
A way to stop time, freeze the system, make the world hold still long enough for her to fix what had gone wrong.
But recursion doesn't pause.
It remembers.
And it remembered everything she did.
She relived the moment of the lab fire 319 times.
The moment Astra looked back through the flames and chose not to save her.
Each loop twisted differently.
Sometimes Vos screamed.
Sometimes she begged.
Sometimes she laughed.
The recursion let her try every possibility.
But no matter what—
Astra always walked away.
When Astra finally came back—for real—Vos expected vengeance.
What she got instead was forgiveness.
Not spoken.
Not even implied.
But real.
A shard pulled from her spine.
And silence.
Now she sits in a shadow-cell beneath what remains of Glassmind's south annex, hooked to a null glyph that keeps her locked in stasis.
Not because Astra put her there.
Because she asked to be kept here.
Because she knows something worse is coming.
A shard isn't just power.
It's identity.
It's memory given form.
And Astra didn't collect eight.
She reclaimed them.
So the ninth?
It's not a weapon.
It's her origin.
And Vos knows—
When Astra touches that final shard, she won't be Astra anymore.
She'll be something else.
Something even Vos can't predict.
Her cell is dark.
Her heartbeat slow.
And still Vos whispers to herself:
"You weren't supposed to survive me.
You were supposed to become me."
But instead—
She became herself.
And for the first time in years, Vos smiles.
Because even though she failed to shape Astra…
She succeeded in something else.
She created someone who didn't need to be shaped.
Only remembered.