They kept staring at her hands.
Not because of what was on them.
But because of what wasn't.
No glyphs. No light. No recursion scars.
Just skin.
Warm. Human.
Flesh untouched by glyphnet signal.
Astra Vale sat across from a Null Protocol debrief officer she didn't know, in a city that shouldn't have still existed.
The new facility was smaller than Blackwing, quieter than Cipher Nest, and buried so far underground even memory had trouble finding it.
She liked that.
It was hard to be mythologized in a place that smelled like rust and stale coffee.
"I need you to say your name for the record," the officer said.
She tilted her head.
"My name?"
He nodded.
She waited a long moment, then leaned forward slightly.
"You already know what it is."
Outside the interview room, Runa stood with a datapad, watching the feed.
"She's not syncing with any of the internal systems," she muttered. "All biometric tracking goes dead within three meters."
Dahlia folded her arms. "So she's still disrupting the glyphnet. Even after giving up the shards?"
"No," Runa said. "She's not disrupting it."
"She's replacing it."
Astra walked the corridors later that night, barefoot, quiet.
The walls here didn't pulse.
Doors didn't whisper.
Lights didn't flicker with recursion residue.
For the first time in her life, reality held still.
And it terrified her.
She passed a mirror in a side hall and stopped.
Not because she saw something strange.
But because she saw only herself.
No glyph shimmer in her eyes.
No recursive bleed behind her reflection.
No alternate versions waiting in the corners of the glass.
Just Astra.
Breathing.
Unwritten.
A voice from behind:
"You don't trust it yet, do you?"
Marlow.
Still alive. Still quiet.
Still carrying guilt in the lines under his eyes.
"I don't trust anything that feels this clean," she admitted.
He leaned against the wall beside her. "Makes sense. You've only known the storm."
She studied her own face in the mirror. "What happens now?"
He didn't answer.
Instead, he handed her a worn envelope.
Inside: a photo.
Grainy.
Dated five years ago.
A girl with silver eyes.
Familiar.
Not Astra.
But close.
"She was found two sectors south. No memory. No glyphs. But she keeps drawing recursion spirals into the dirt."
Astra held the photo like it might melt.
"She's like me."
"No," Marlow said.
"She's like what comes next."
Astra didn't sleep that night.
She sat on the roof of the facility, watching stars blink into patterns only she could no longer read.
No more glyphs.
No more prophecy.
No more system.
And still, the world whispered.
She closed her eyes.
Let the silence press against her skin.
And in that silence, she heard it:
Not a shard.
Not a memory.
A call.
From something older than the recursion field.
From the place glyphs were born before they had names.
The world had restarted.
But not everything stayed buried.
And Astra was no longer the girl holding the story together.
She was the only one who remembered how it broke.