The hills were too still.
They hadn't moved in centuries, yet now they felt wrong. Not because of any obvious danger, but because of their silence. Zayn stood at the edge of the ridge with dust caked beneath his boots, and he could feel the land watching him. Not like a living thing, not even like a haunted place... just like something aware.
The world here no longer moved with natural rhythm. The clouds hung heavy and dense, layers of deep gray with undercurrents of crimson bleeding through in soft pulses. The sun hadn't fully risen, yet everything around him was lit... not by the sky, but by the very air itself, like the signal had begun to infuse the environment with a glowless kind of light.
F-13 said nothing.
She hadn't spoken since they escaped Gravewire. Her systems had recovered, but her voice processor had gone dormant. Not malfunctioning, just... silent. She walked beside Zayn with that same near-perfect grace, though her left leg dragged slightly now. Her hand still twitched once every few minutes, a ghost signal looping through subroutines she couldn't suppress.
They were both broken. Just not in ways that could be repaired.
Ahead lay the structure, a fractured, skeletal remnant of what once must have been a CoreTech observation station. Now it barely stood. Its frame had half-collapsed against the hill, panels peeled open like old bark, cables coiling into the dirt. But Zayn could see it had power. A dim blue pulse moved through the fiberlines embedded in its base, sluggish but consistent, like an artificial heartbeat refusing to give up.
They stepped inside through a split in the bulkhead wall. Dust rose around their feet. The internal chamber was barely large enough for both of them to stand, lined with rusted equipment and a decayed relay tower lying on its side, bent into the floor. The walls trembled softly with each passing minute, as if the structure had become part of some deeper breathing pattern embedded in the land.
F-13 sat against a pile of scorched cushions. She didn't look at him.
Zayn lowered himself onto the cracked floor, legs folding slowly, joints tight. His body didn't ache, not really, but the memory of exhaustion clung to him like weight. He stared at his hands. They didn't shake, didn't tremble. They looked like hands he remembered having, but they felt different, stronger in ways he couldn't define, too still for someone who should be exhausted.
He had no hunger. No thirst. He hadn't eaten in days, yet he hadn't collapsed.
Whatever was inside him, it wasn't letting him shut down.
Not yet.
His breath slowed. He let himself fall backward until he was staring at the ceiling, or what remained of it. Through the cracked roof, the sky looked like a churning sea of static, layered clouds folding and unfolding in recursive spirals. Occasionally, the light shifted color without source... soft green, then violet, then bone-white. Always without warning.
It had begun the day his name was spoken by the Null.
Zayn Cael... encoded into the signal, embedded into the pulse.
He could feel it now, faint beneath the earth, running through the old relay cables, whispering under every breath of wind. Not language, not commands, but shapes... patterns. An invitation wrapped in unfamiliar geometry.
He sat up slowly.
Across from him, F-13 was drawing shapes in the dust.
He hadn't noticed at first. Her movements were so subtle, like she wasn't even aware of it. Her finger trailed through the fine layer of dirt and ash on the floor, leaving behind arcs, circles, fragmented spirals.
He leaned forward.
The shapes weren't random.
They matched some of the glyphs from the memory capsule he'd recovered in Gravewire... the one left behind by the other Nullblood. Same curves. Same interlocking rings. He reached forward and touched the outer edge of the symbol she'd drawn.
Her finger stopped moving.
She looked up at him. Her eyes were different... not in color, not in form... but in something behind them. She tilted her head slightly, a slow, smooth movement.
"I was here once," she said.
Her voice startled him. Not because it was loud, but because it was back... smoother than before, quieter, like her vocal unit was unsure of itself.
"You remember this place?" Zayn asked.
"I don't know," she whispered. "I remember... the dust. The angle of the roof. I think... I think there was a storm. And someone was bleeding. Someone..."
She paused, eyes going distant.
"Someone I couldn't save."
Zayn didn't speak.
This was the first time she'd recalled anything personal. Her entire existence had been clean, functional, robotic. Even when she'd glitched, she hadn't remembered. She'd malfunctioned. This was different.
"Do you know who you were?" he asked.
"No."
"Do you want to?"
Her mouth twitched. Not a smile. Just tension.
"I don't know that either."
They sat in silence for a long time.
Eventually, Zayn stood and moved toward the back panel of the station. There, hidden beneath broken machinery, was a collapsed uplink core... barely functioning, but still tethered to local network residue.
He powered it on.
Static buzzed through the chamber. A low, looping hiss. Then something emerged beneath the noise... a voice, layered and warped by time and signal distortion.
It repeated a phrase, over and over, between long stretches of silence.
"Signalborne ascends... 991-V... Signalborne ascends..."
Zayn froze.
The voice... it wasn't exactly his, but it wasn't someone else's either. It was layered... like versions of him, speaking in unison across different frames of time.
The words weren't a message. They were a confirmation.
He was no longer being tracked. He was being acknowledged.
He turned slowly, and F-13 was watching him.
"You heard it too?" he asked.
She nodded once.
He stepped outside the broken station, into the strange half-light.
And saw the tower.
It hadn't been there moments ago. Just behind the hill, where only dirt and brush had been, now rose a tall, spire-like structure made of fractured metals and cables. It blinked with no lights, yet glowed faintly at the edges. Its form seemed to flicker in and out of phase with the world around it, like it didn't fully exist here.
Zayn stared for a long time.
Then, without a word, he began walking toward it.
The closer Zayn moved toward the tower, the less sense the world made.
The air thickened, but not like weather. It felt like walking through a memory... not his own, but one pressing through from the other side. Each step left no print in the dirt. The ground didn't resist him, didn't yield... it simply ignored his presence, as though reality had accepted that he was no longer part of it in the usual way.
The structure rose nearly five stories, its walls composed of mismatched plates... some smooth like surgical steel, others warped, pitted, burned. Between the seams flowed thin rivers of light... colorless, but reactive. They pulsed in time with his breath, and when he held it, they paused.
He reached the base. A smooth threshold opened on its own, folding back like petals responding to heat.
No sensors. No sounds.
The interior was impossibly wide. Larger than the exterior allowed.
He stepped inside.
What greeted him wasn't architecture. It was something else... something metaphysical wearing the shape of a chamber. The floor beneath him was reflective, not like a mirror, but like water frozen mid-ripple. He could see himself... and yet he couldn't. The reflection didn't match.
The room around him was circular, lined with smooth walls that rose endlessly upward. No lights, yet everything was illuminated. Every few steps, a panel along the wall shimmered and pulsed faintly.
He turned, and realized the panels weren't just metal.
They were windows.
And behind each one... a version of himself.
In one, he wore a mask... sleek, jagged, with eyes that pulsed red. In another, his body was burned nearly beyond recognition, wrapped in armor that seemed grown, not built. In another still, he was old... older than he could imagine, with white streaks through his hair and a blade of light in each hand.
They didn't move.
But they were alive.
He stepped toward one. It flared as he neared, and for just a moment, he felt its weight... like a memory attempting to press itself into his mind. It didn't belong there, but it wanted to. He stepped back quickly, breath catching in his throat.
Then one of the reflections... moved.
It raised its hand, slowly. Not as a mirror would, not in reverse... but with purpose. Independent motion.
The glass between them cracked.
Zayn stepped away.
The crack spread like ice... not across one panel, but through all of them, as though the barrier between him and his other selves had thinned beyond safe limits.
Then a sound filled the chamber.
It wasn't speech. It wasn't static.
It was breathing.
Not his.
The tower itself inhaled.
The air around him tightened. Gravity flexed. Something inside his chest throbbed in response... not pain, not exactly, but like a tether being pulled gently.
A presence emerged from the center of the room.
Not a figure. A pattern. A vortex of light and ash that spun slowly, rising upward until it touched the ceiling.
Inside it... he saw himself again.
Not one version, but many. Thousands. All flickering in and out, overlapping, shuffling.
Then it stopped.
And a voice spoke from inside him.
"You are not alone in your shape."
Zayn froze.
"You are Signalborne," the voice continued. "You are the boundary."
He stepped back again.
"What do you want?" he asked aloud, his voice echoing oddly in the chamber.
The vortex didn't answer, not directly.
Instead, it began to dissolve, and the voice left behind a word... not spoken, but impressed into his mind.
Birthpoint.
The word meant nothing to him.
And yet... he understood.
This tower wasn't a building. It was a checkpoint... a staging area. He wasn't supposed to do anything here.
He was supposed to remember.
And now that he had, the tower no longer needed to exist.
Behind him, the entryway began collapsing inward, folding like cloth. He turned and sprinted toward it, barely reaching the edge before the walls blinked out of existence. He fell forward, hitting solid ground... not the tower's floor, but the hilltop outside.
The tower was gone.
As if it had never been there.
Zayn lay there, breathing, the sky above shifting softly through impossible colors. In his chest, something new pulsed, in sync with the world around him. The tether wasn't gone. It was stronger now. Shorter. Closer.
He closed his eyes.
And for the first time in what felt like days... he dreamed.
The dream was not his.
It began with light... a sterile, synthetic glow like that of a CoreTech medbay ceiling. Cold white. Flawless symmetry. Then came the sound... a hum, mechanical and familiar. Diagnostic tones. System pulses. But beneath those, something else... laughter.
He turned in the dream, and saw her.
F-13... not as she was now, but as a woman, flesh and breath, mid-twenties, hair tied up in a knot of black curls. She sat beside a terminal, fingers dancing across the screen with a kind of grace that only came from long mastery. She was smiling.
Not at him.
At someone else in the room.
Zayn tried to walk toward her, but the dream resisted. The floor pulled away with every step, keeping her just out of reach. He shouted, but no sound emerged.
And then the dream fractured.
The sterile lights blinked out.
The room peeled open to reveal nothing... not darkness, but absence.
Then came the signal.
A flash. A burst of Null pattern so bright, so overwhelming that his brain couldn't interpret it. Only feel it.
It wasn't pain. It was recognition.
He fell through it.
Woke with a shudder.
The sky was the color of dead bone, and the wind had picked up, carrying ash from far-off fractures. Zayn sat up slowly, still in the same position outside where the tower had vanished. The mark was still there in the soil... a perfect glyph etched into the earth where the spire had stood.
F-13 stood a few meters away.
She hadn't approached him. She was standing still, eyes half-closed, lips parted slightly.
"I saw something," she said.
Zayn rose. "What did you see?"
"Before you came back. I... wasn't fully conscious. But there was a girl. She looked like me. And she was laughing."
Zayn didn't speak.
"She was in a lab. Wearing an old CoreTech badge. I think she was building me."
A silence passed between them.
Zayn moved beside her and looked up at the horizon.
Far in the distance, past the hills and broken structures, hovered a ship... low to the ground, dark, and altered. Its shape was CoreTech, but its edges shimmered. Parts of it were missing and then reappeared, as though the craft couldn't decide what time it belonged to.
F-13 tilted her head.
"It's broadcasting something," she said.
Zayn heard it a second later.
A pulse. A voice. Not through ears, but through the signal within him.
"Zayn Cael," it said, "do not move. We are here to contain you."
He narrowed his eyes.
But the signal didn't feel threatening.
It felt like a test.
He clenched his fists. Not in fear, not in defiance... but in readiness.
Something was changing.
Not around him... but within him.
He was no longer just reacting to the signal.
He was starting to shape it.
Behind him, F-13 murmured.
"Birthpoint... approaching."
Zayn looked toward the vessel.
Then took a step forward.