The air in Sector South-9 tasted wrong.
Not polluted.
Not toxic.
Just… familiar.
Astra stood at the edge of the ruins where the girl had been found. Half-melted streetlamps leaned sideways like wilted skeletons. Every third window was missing, and the roads were cracked with recursion scars—glyphs burned into asphalt, then erased, then burned again.
"You sure she's in there alone?" Astra asked.
Dahlia, perched nearby with a scanner, didn't look up. "She's not in there alone."
Astra turned sharply.
"She's in there with herself. Over and over. The scans say she's looping. Fragmented time field. Same eleven-minute cycle."
"Like Limbre."
"No," Dahlia replied, her voice quieter now. "She's not trapped. She's holding it together. Like she doesn't want to leave until someone finds her."
Astra took one step toward the ruins.
And the glyph net flickered, even though Astra carried no glyphs anymore.
The girl was in a courtyard made of broken chairs and rusted rebar.
She was maybe fifteen. Pale, barefoot, hair hacked short. She crouched at the center of a broken fountain, drawing a spiral in the dirt with her finger—again and again and again.
She didn't look up when Astra approached.
Didn't speak.
Didn't blink.
But the spiral changed.
It aligned.
Became familiar.
Astra froze.
That spiral—
It was the one she used to draw in her sleep before she knew what recursion was.
"Hey," Astra said, gently.
No response.
"I know what this feels like. The world is too loud. Time won't stop asking questions."
The girl's hand stilled.
Then she spoke—so quietly Astra almost didn't hear her:
"Am I real yet?"
Astra knelt down beside her.
Close, but not too close.
"You don't have to be real," she said softly. "You just have to be."
The girl looked up for the first time.
Her eyes weren't silver.
They were fractured.
Like mirror glass held together by pressure and will.
The field shimmered.
Reality buckled for a second.
And then Astra saw it:
The girl wasn't looping.
The world was looping around her.
She was the anchor now.
A recursive soul trying not to fall apart.
Astra held out her hand.
The girl stared at it for a long time.
Then—
Slowly—
She took it.
And the spiral faded into the dirt.
Back at the facility, Dahlia ran tests.
No glyphs. No recursion bleed. No name.
The girl only said four words over and over again:
"I saw the door."
She couldn't describe it.
Only draw it.
Every line was different.
Every sketch wrong.
Except for one.
When Astra saw it, she went cold.
A spiral, again.
But this time—not inward.
Outward.
"You think she's another shard?" Runa asked.
"No," Astra said.
"She's something else."
That night, the girl slept under observation.
Monitors hummed.
Wires blinked.
But the spiral reappeared on her palm—faint, fading, but alive.
A new glyph.
Unclassified.
One not from the old recursion system.
Astra traced it gently, then looked at her own hand.
Still blank.
Still real.
Still her.
But for the first time, she felt something stir in her chest.
Not power.
Not recursion.
Calling.
Something in the spiral had opened.
And it was waiting.