The hovercraft skimmed low over Altaran's eastern sectors, engines rattling from damage sustained in the Choke. I kept my hands firm on the throttle, eyes tracing the skyline: fractured high-rises, flickering spires of broken neon, the underbelly of the city coiled beneath a sheet of industrial ash.
Beside me, Vesper steadied herself, still pale, but upright now. Four shards synced in my neural map—fragments burning against my ribs like buried wildfire. Her embedded shard pulsed faint blue along her wrist, the resonance thrumming like a second heartbeat.
"Ghost will have eyes everywhere," I muttered, banking hard into a forgotten transit route carved between the spires. "We need cover, full off-grid."
Vesper's gaze swept the horizon, tension tight in her frame. "If they track the resonance spikes—"
"They already tried," I cut in, adjusting course. "But they won't outrun this."
The safehouse loomed ahead—one of Ghost's relay points, half-collapsed, wrapped in old-world antenna arrays and glitched holo-panels stuttering static into the haze. Hidden beneath forgotten infrastructure, buried so deep even Consortium surveillance struggled to map it.
We slipped inside, the hatch sealing behind us with a mechanical groan.
The bunker's walls pulsed faint green—data feeds flickering, encrypted overlays peeling Altaran's surveillance net apart layer by layer. Hollowed server cores hummed, code streams twisting like spectral veins across the space.
"Four recovered," Ghost rasped, stepping from the shadows. His cybernetic gaze swept over us, lingering on the faint glow beneath Vesper's skin.
"They're syncing," I confirmed, dropping into the reinforced chair, tension bleeding from my limbs in sharp fragments. "But not cleanly."
Ghost's fingers danced across floating schematics—our neural patterns projected midair, latticework of fractured memory tangled with glowing shards. His expression tightened as diagnostic threads unraveled across the room.
"Integration's accelerating," Ghost muttered. "Faster than they ever planned. The resonance isn't just restoring fragments… it's rewriting neural boundaries."
"Meaning?" I pressed, watching the schematics distort.
"Meaning," Ghost's expression darkened, "the person you were—the one they tried to erase—he's clawing his way back. And every shard sharpens the edge."
A faint chill pulsed beneath my skin. Memory reconstruction wasn't supposed to happen this way. The Order engineered failsafes. The Consortium buried layers of safeguards. The Solis family? They rewrote entire identities for less.
"How much bleed-over?" I asked.
"Significant," Ghost confirmed. "You're recovering more than isolated moments. Emotional resonance, instinctual patterns… skillsets, even." His fingers tapped rapid sequences, neural overlays distorting. "By the time you reach all twelve—there may not be room left for the version of you walking around now."
Vesper's stare sharpened, a quiet calculation behind her storm-grey irises.
"We need to risk it," I said, the hum beneath my ribs coiling tighter. "If I don't rebuild the fracture…"
"They'll rewrite you permanently," she finished. "Or kill you trying."
Ghost shifted projections—maps of Altaran spooling midair, red-marked zones pulsing across the undercity.
"The fifth shard's buried deep," he said. "Old industrial vault beneath Sector Seventeen. Bio-locked, neural gates hardwired to Solis encryption standards."
"Which means," I muttered, "they'll expect us."
"They always expect you," Ghost countered, tone dry. "The question's whether they can stop you."
I flexed my hands, the resonance humming along my bones.
"They can't," Vesper said firmly, stepping forward.
Her embedded shard pulsed brighter—the fragments syncing deeper, history bleeding back into fragile clarity. Flickers of locked-away memory swirled beneath her skin—fractured glimpses of sterile corridors, restraints, whispered threats in dim-lit rooms.
"Every shard we recover," I added, "we bleed their control."
Ghost transmitted encrypted coordinates—fragments of a forgotten district tangled beneath Altaran's foundation grids. Industrial ruins, half-flooded, unstable. The kind of place Blackwell sends their failures to rot.
I downloaded the data into my retinal system, the map etching itself behind my vision.
"Prep your neural shields," Ghost instructed, gaze lingering on me. "The deeper you dive, the harder the old you fights to surface."
"Let him," I answered, slipping the stabilizers onto my wrists. "It's his city to burn, too."
Outside, the city pulsed beneath layers of ash, secrets, and buried sins.
Altaran wasn't done hiding its ghosts.
But neither were we.
The fractures they'd engineered? They were crumbling.
One shard at a time.