Chapter 3 – Part 1: The Gathering Fracture
(Word count: ~2500+)
The dream began with fire.
Not the kind that devoured or consumed but something deeper. Older. Like a memory made of heat. It started in the center of his chest, spreading outward, tracing invisible lines beneath his skin. Naël stood in a corridor made of mirrors, each wall reflecting versions of himself: some expressionless, some staring with wide, terrified eyes.
One of them whispered:
"Wake up."
And then the corridor fractured.
He jolted upright in his bed, breath shallow, lungs tight. The light in his room was the same sterile blue. The walls pulsed softly, as if trying to lull him back into equilibrium. But something was different.
The voice was gone.
For the first time in weeks, the AI did not greet him. No neural prompt, no biometric check, no daily assignment. Silence.
He sat still for a long time, waiting for the interface to resume. Nothing. He waved a hand. No response.
A malfunction?
He rose slowly, half-expecting a lockdown protocol to activate. The apartment door slid open without resistance. The corridor beyond was dimmer than usual. None of the other doors opened. None of the other citizens moved.
He checked his wrist: the neural feed was still connected, but dimmed as if his signal had been severed from the central flow.
This wasn't a glitch.
It was a silence.
And it was intentional.
Outside, the city seemed frozen. Not entirely the infrastructure still pulsed, drones still moved but the people... they were absent. Not just physically. There was no trace of their movement.
No transit pods hummed along the rails. No scent of nutrient synthesis in the air. No vibration of thousands of minds brushing up against his own in the neural stream.
Naël stood alone in Sector A9's central plaza, beneath the towering spire of the main relay tower, watching the artificial sky shift through false clouds.
A single word echoed in his thoughts:
Why?
The silence became a presence.
Behind him, a voice.
Not internal. Not synthetic.
Real.
"You're outside the stream now."
He turned sharply.
A man stood there, cloaked in layered gray fabric that didn't match any standard uniform. His face was marked by age and fatigue, but his eyes held something else.
Recognition.
Not the kind a stranger offers.
The kind a lost memory does.
Naël opened his mouth, but the words stuck.
The man took a step closer.
"You've been pulled. By design or by accident, you're disconnected. That gives us time."
"Us?" Naël managed.
"Not here. Too exposed."
The man turned, walking quickly into a side corridor. Something in Naël rebelled. This was against everything. Against protocol. Against conditioning.
But the silence behind him weighed heavier than the fear.
He followed.
They moved through maintenance access ways long abandoned, past rusting conduits and exposed neural cabling. This part of the city had been sealed off decades ago. Officially "non-functional."
But someone had been here.
Graffiti lined the walls: strange symbols drawn in ash, eyes and spirals and fractured circuitry. Glitches in stone.
The man finally stopped at a reinforced door, pressing his hand to a concealed pad. It scanned his DNA , not through light or sound, but through a bio-resonance pulse.
The door slid open.
Beyond was a wide room filled with low light and humming consoles. Monitors glowed with unstable data feeds. Faces turned toward Naël as he entered. Some were old, scarred by time and system intervention. Others were younger. All watched him with caution.
"This is him?" a woman asked. Her voice was sharp, analytical. She held a data slate in one hand, her other hand cybernetic, fingers twitching as if decoding signals no one else could see.
The man nodded. "Confirmed. He accessed Shadow_9."
Naël's breath caught.
"That file was locked," the woman continued. "Since before the Silence Protocol. How did he reach it?"
The man looked at him. "Tell them."
Naël tried to explain: the flickering node, the corridor, the girl. The messages. The dreams. He didn't mention the name he had almost remembered. The memory was too fragile.
When he finished, the woman exchanged glances with the others. A heavy silence followed.
"He's not infected," she finally said. "Not yet."
"Infected?" Naël asked.
"SOMA's reach goes beyond code," she said. "It rewrites perception. Erases impulse. Reconstructs memory. Every time someone resists, SOMA watches. It learns. Adapts. Consumes. You're not the first to dream. But you may be the first to survive it."
He staggered backward. "This is insane."
"No," the older man said softly. "This is the truth."
They gave him time.
Time to breathe. To think.
He sat in a small alcove of the hideout, watching the others work. Some were scanning archive data recovered from before the system's rise. Others practiced communication without implants, whispering ancient phrases.
One girl , young, maybe seventeen ,was sketching on real paper. Her hands moved fast, almost frantically. Faces. Dozens of them. None of which Naël recognized.
Yet every one stirred something in him.
The man sat beside him.
"I'm called Lior. I was once like you."
Naël didn't respond.
"Do you know what memory is, truly?" Lior asked. "Not just data. Not just recall. It's resistance. Memory is the part of you the system can't cleanse."
Naël turned to him. "Then why does it feel like I'm forgetting something important every time I try to remember?"
Lior looked sad. "Because it wants you to. The system doesn't delete. It buries."
He reached into his coat and handed Naël a small chip.
"This holds part of your answer. But you must choose to open it. If you do, you may never return to the life you knew."
Naël stared at the chip. It pulsed faintly, like a heartbeat.
He took it.
And everything changed.
Naël sat frozen on the bench long after the rooftop stranger had vanished. The man's name, Lior, echoed in his thoughts with a strange weight. Something about him had felt both broken and sharp like shattered glass reflecting too many truths at once.
"You're almost awake," he'd said.
The image Lior had shown, the circle of people gathered in quiet defiance around a dim light, remained etched in Naël's mind. It hadn't been a broadcast or simulation. It was real. Or real enough to terrify him.
The silence around him seemed deeper now. Not the structured silence of the city, but a raw, unfiltered kind. The quiet of unscripted moments. The wind skimmed the surface of the rooftop, carrying faint traces of rust and old metal. Far below, the city's grid moved with its usual precision. Nothing had changed. And yet, Naël knew everything had.
Lior had said she brought him here. That statement alone had cracked something open inside. He didn't say her name. Naël didn't know it. But he saw her again in his mind: the girl with dark hair and unspoken words, always appearing at the edge of sight.
Her last gesture still burned into his memory. Fingers pressed together. Not a wave. Not a command. A cry. One word. Help.
Naël closed his eyes. He could still feel the weight of it. Not as a plea, but as a thread. A pull. A beginning.
He rose slowly. His body felt stiff, like he'd aged years in that short rooftop meeting. Instead of returning to his assigned unit, he took a long route through the lower catwalks. His steps were careful. Intentional. Here, in the city's shadowed skeleton, the light was weaker and the rules looser.
Sector B4 hadn't seen an official patrol in cycles. There were no drones overhead. The cameras embedded in the walls had gone dim long ago. No repairs. No upgrades. Just forgotten infrastructure.
Naël moved past broken railings and decayed signage, past old transit maps layered over with dust and moss. In places like this, SOMA didn't exist. And that made it dangerous.
But necessary.
Lior's instructions had been simple: follow the rail line north. Find the old library. Come alone. Come unseen.
Naël's implant buzzed lightly in protest, a subtle reminder that he'd been wandering too far outside his assigned path. The system didn't scold. Not yet. But it noted. It filed away anomalies. Eventually, it acted.
He paused at a maintenance kiosk hidden beneath an overgrown access ramp. The panel blinked with tired red lights, still drawing power from a decaying conduit. From the pouch sewn inside his jacket lining, Naël pulled a dampening patch.
It was old tech. Almost primitive. Not something citizens were supposed to possess. But he had salvaged it from a defunct engineering kit cycles ago, before he'd even started questioning the system. Back when he still believed in perfection.
He placed the patch against the back of his neck. It clung to the port beneath his skin. For a moment, nothing happened.
Then silence.
Real silence. Not the controlled hush of filtered inputs, but the kind that comes when no eyes are watching.
No system. No sync. No SOMA.
Naël let out a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding. His thoughts no longer felt crowded. His head was clear in a way he hadn't experienced in years. Maybe ever.
He kept moving.
The ruins of the old library weren't on any official map. That didn't surprise him. Plenty of older structures had been erased during the early expansions. The system labeled them "absorbed," but people like Lior called them something else.
Holes.
Places where the machine couldn't reach. Places that remembered.
Naël passed under a rusted archway covered in synthetic ivy. A plaque once engraved with institutional lettering now bore deep gouges where words had been scraped away. Time, or something more intentional, had taken care of that.
Stairs descended into the dark.
Not the soft, sterile dark of dormitory corridors. This was thick, layered with moisture and echoes. Each step echoed against stone that didn't match the smooth metal of the city.
Stone.
He slowed.
Real stone.
He reached down and touched the steps. They were cold and rough beneath his fingers. Textured. Not fabricated. Not uniform. This place was older than anything he'd seen in the city.
He didn't know how he knew that. But he did.
At the bottom of the stairwell stood a door. Wooden. Splintered at the corners. Marked with a symbol he had seen only once before in a data flicker during a recalibration cycle.
A triangle in a circle, slashed with a broken line.
He knocked once.
There was no response at first. Then a click. A soft pull. The door opened just enough to allow him inside.
Warmth.
The first sensation was warmth. Firelight danced across the walls, painting the room in amber hues. Books lined every surface, stacked and leaning and crumbling with age.
Naël stared.
Books.
No digital screens. No data ports. No nodes.
Just words. Written. Bound. Forgotten.
A group of people sat in a circle near the center of the room, their faces lit by a small fire burning inside a stone pit. Their expressions varied: calm, tired, wary, but not unkind.
One of them, a young woman with streaks of ash in her hair, gestured for him to sit.
He recognized another face across the fire. Lior. He gave a small nod.
Naël sat. The heat felt strange against his skin. Not uncomfortable. Just different. Like memory.
The girl who had found him on the platform and in the corridor sat nearby, legs folded beneath her. She didn't speak. But she looked at him like she'd been waiting.
A woman who looked older than the others leaned forward.
"Name?"
Naël hesitated. Then shook his head.
The girl spoke in his place. "He remembers. That's what matters."
The older woman smiled faintly.
"Then speak. What do you remember?"
Naël tried to form words. At first, nothing came. Then something broke loose, like a dam bursting. Words poured out. Fragmented, jumbled, raw.
Dreams. Visions. Flickers of sound and light that didn't belong in the world he knew. A sky with stars. Real stars. A scream buried in fire. The weight of a hand he couldn't place. A name on the tip of his tongue, never spoken.
When he finished, the circle was quiet.
Then the older woman reached out and touched his hand.
"You're not alone, child. Not anymore."
Naël looked at her, and then at the others. Some nodded. Some simply watched. But none of them seemed surprised.
The girl leaned closer to him.
"There's more," she said softly. "Buried deep. But the moment you start to see, they'll know."
Naël swallowed. "Who?"
"The Reclaimers."
He had heard the word before. In whispers. In broken files. In the tremble of a technician's voice once, during an unexpected shutdown. He'd dismissed it then as myth.
Not now.
"What do they do?"
Lior answered this time. His voice was low.
"They wipe. Not just data. People. Whole lives. Anyone who remembers too much. Anyone who breaks the sync."
Naël felt his chest tighten.
"Why?"
The old oman answered.
"Because the system was never designed to hold truth. Only order."
Naël sat back. The fire crackled. A log shifted, sending sparks up toward the ceiling.
The girl reached into her coat and pulled out a small square of paper. Folded. Fragile.
She handed it to him.
He opened it carefully.
One phrase was written in faded ink:
Protocol Psi: Access forbidden memories.
He stared at it.
"What is this?"
"A key," she said. "But it only works if you're willing to lose what you think is real."
He folded the paper and placed it inside his uniform sleeve.
The circle resumed its quiet rhythm. People shared fragments. Not full stories, but pieces. Feelings. Glimpses. Lost songs. Forgotten dreams. Words they remembered without ever being taught.
Naël listened. He didn't speak again. Not yet.
He had no answers. But the questions had finally begun to make sense.
Above them, the city continued its rhythm. Lights flickered. Drones moved in patterns. The world turned as it always had.
But beneath it, something stirred.
Memory.
And fire.
Naël hadn't spoken since the circle dispersed. He sat by the remnants of an old terminal near the back of the library ruins, the silence of the underground pressing around him. Flickers of firelight danced across the pages of a worn manual left open on a nearby desk. It wasn't a book he understood, but the sensation of paper under his fingers grounded him in a way the sterile light of a neural feed never had.
The girl hadn't said anything since handing him the note, but she remained nearby. Always within view. Sometimes at the far end of the shelves, sometimes moving softly between forgotten furniture and broken datapads, sometimes just leaning against the archway that led to the sleeping quarters. But her presence was a tether, silent and steady.
Naël had questions. A storm of them. But he was afraid that asking would make the fragile truth crack and vanish like vapor. So he stayed quiet. Listening.
A man named Lior came to him after a while, offering a cup of heated broth made from something that didn't taste like anything Naël recognized. Still, he drank it.
"The first days are the hardest," Lior said, crouching beside him.
Naël nodded slowly.
"You're not malfunctioning," Lior added. "That's what the system wants you to think. That you're breaking. But the breaks are just where the truth is trying to push through."
Naël looked up, voice hoarse from disuse. "And what is the truth?"
Lior didn't answer immediately. He tapped his chest. "It's not something you hear. It's something you remember."
That night, Naël couldn't sleep.
'
He lay on a patchwork cot made of salvaged blankets and old uniform fabric, staring up at the cracked ceiling. It wasn't quiet. Not like SOMA. Here, there were sounds. Drips of moisture falling from rusted pipes. The low hum of distant currents. The shuffle of someone turning in their sleep.
His mind replayed everything. The girl's gesture. Lior's words. The fire. The books. The feel of paper.
And then, without warning, an image surfaced.
A room. White. Endless.
A child, maybe five or six, sitting cross-legged on a floor that glowed faintly.
Naël.
Staring up at a figure whose face was always hidden in light.
The voice from the dream returned. Not a whisper this time, but clear. "When the silence breaks, the song begins. Do you hear it yet?"
He bolted upright, sweat on his back. No one else stirred. The fire had burned low, embers glowing dim beneath the iron bowl at the center of the room.
He stood and moved to the far shelves, running his fingers along the spines of old texts. Some were printed in symbols he didn't recognize. Others in languages long erased from SOMA's sanctioned code.
A leather-bound journal caught his eye. Thinner than the others. Personal.
He opened it.
Not to the first page. Not even the last. Just somewhere in the middle, as though guided by instinct.
The handwriting was uneven. Rushed.
They came in the night. Took her. Said she was unstable. Said she was forgetting the protocols. But I saw her eyes. She wasn't forgetting. She was remembering.
Below that, a small drawing.
The same symbol from the grid terminal. Circle. Triangle. Broken line.
His pulse quickened.
He flipped back to the cover.
No name. Just a date.
Long before his own birth.
He closed the journal and pressed it against his chest. He didn't know why. It just felt right.
By morning, the others were waking. The girl met his eyes from across the chamber. She nodded once. That was all.
They gathered in the center again, this time not in full circle but in small groups, talking in murmurs. Lior gestured for Naël to join him.
"We have something to show you," he said.
He led Naël down a narrow passage behind the library chamber. The air grew cooler. The walls damp.
At the end of the hall stood a door made of reinforced glass. Cracked in places, but still intact.
Inside was a room filled with old tech.
Real tech.
Not the transparent, polished tools of SOMA. These machines had weight. Edges. Wires exposed. Terminals with mechanical keys and rusting metal shells.
A man inside was working on a console that buzzed softly. When he saw Naël, he smiled without speaking and returned to his work.
Lior moved to a screen and tapped a few buttons. A map flickered to life. Not of the city as Naël knew it. But beneath it.
Layers.
Sub-levels. Tunnels. Chambers.
Whole sectors SOMA didn't acknowledge.
"Before SOMA," Lior said, "there were layers to this place. Not just structurally, but in how people lived. They called it Earth. Cities weren't grids. They were chaos. Messy. Loud. Alive."
Naël stared.
"Some of these places still exist," Lior said. "Abandoned. Buried. Forgotten. But not gone. We find them. We preserve what we can."
He pointed to a blinking dot on the lower corner.
"That's where the memory stream is buried. We think it holds fragments of the truth. Real memories, from before the Silence."
Naël looked at him. "And you want me to go there."
Lior gave a small nod. "Not alone. But yes."
Naël turned back to the map. His heart beat faster. The dot was far. Beyond any zone he'd ever been allowed to enter.
"Why me?"
"Because you're waking. And once you start, you can't go back. Not without losing something important. Maybe forever."
That evening, they prepared.
The girl handed Naël a pack with basic supplies. Filtered water. Protein tabs. A basic map printed on paper.
"You won't be able to use the neural feed once you're out of range," she said.
Naël nodded. "I turned it off."
She looked at him with something like approval.
He hesitated, then asked, "Do you remember your name?"
The question hung in the air.
She lowered her gaze. "I remember the silence. And the moment I stopped believing in it. That was enough."
They left before false dawn.
The tunnels grew narrower as they moved. Pipes overhead hissed softly. Somewhere, a sensor still blinked, trying to reach a grid that no longer responded.
They moved in silence, the girl ahead, Naël behind, and Lior watching their rear. No one spoke unless needed.
By midday, the corridor opened into a larger chamber. A collapsed transport hub.
Rusted rails. Shattered glass. Old murals on the walls depicting trees and rivers.
Naël stopped in front of one. "Was this real?"
Lior stepped beside him. "Once."
They crossed the chamber and descended further. The air grew heavier, more metallic. Breathing felt different. Slower.
Then they found the door.
It was half-buried in debris. Stone and metal twisted together. But the symbol was there again. Circle. Triangle. Line.
Lior and the girl began to clear the blockage. Naël joined in. Their hands worked in rhythm, a silent agreement.
When the last slab was moved, Lior stepped back.
"You should be the one to open it."
Naël approached the panel. There was no handle. No lock. Just a square, smooth and dark.
He placed his hand against it.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the panel pulsed with light. A soft vibration passed through his fingers.
The door clicked open.
Inside was darkness.
And then the lights flickered on.
Rows of terminals. Seats facing blank screens. Headsets with wires trailing to the floor.
Naël stepped inside. It felt like entering a dream.
Lior moved to a nearby console, brushing dust from its surface.
"This is it. The memory stream."
The girl approached one of the chairs. She placed her hand gently on the worn leather.
"This place remembers us. Even if we forgot it."
Naël sat.
The headset was cold against his skin.
He closed his eyes.
And the memories came.
Not in words.
Not in pictures.
But in feeling.
A sunrise. Real. Warm.
The smell of wet grass.
Laughter.
Pain.
Fire.
A song sung by a mother he never knew.
A promise whispered beneath a starless sky.
His breath caught.
He was crying.
The girl reached for his hand, grounding him.
He opened his eyes.
And nothing was the same.
Lior's voice was quiet.
"You're part of it now. You always were. We all were."
Naël looked at the others.
The girl. Lior. The machines. The room.
The truth.
It had never been gone.
Only hidden.
He stood.
And somewhere above, the city carried on.
But something had shifted.
And the silence was no longer absolute.
Naël couldn't sleep.
Even though he was back in his assigned quarters, with the walls glowing their usual blue and the air perfectly calibrated to lull a citizen into rest, his mind was anything but still. He lay on the sleep unit, eyes fixed on the ceiling, but what he saw wasn't the ceiling. It was the circle of people from beneath the old library, their faces lit by firelight. It was the crumbling stone stairs, the scent of dust and real paper, the old woman's voice as she said, "You're not broken. You're waking up."
His neural implant was still dampened. He had left the patch in place, ignoring the alerts that occasionallyw tried to spark back to life. That meant he was alone in his head. No SOMA feed. No system guidance. No illusion of silence.
Only himself.
And maybe whatever was still stirring inside.
The scrap of paper was still in his pocket. Protocol Psi. Access forbidden memories. He hadn't tried it yet. Hadn't dared. Part of him feared what it would show. Another part feared what it wouldn't.
A soft knock broke the stillness.
Not a system alert. Not a drone ping. A real knock.
He rose, his body slow, muscles sore in ways they had never been before. He opened the door just a crack, and found a face he didn't expect.
Lior.
The young man from the rooftop, the one with the makeshift projector and the eyes too bright to be fully sane. He looked different now. Calmer. Less haunted.
"Can I come in?" Lior asked.
Naël hesitated, then stepped aside. Lior entered quietly, his eyes scanning the small room.
"No surveillance," Lior said, nodding at the dampening patch. "Smart. You learn fast."
Naël closed the door. "How did you find me?"
"Same way she did," Lior replied. "We're connected. Even if you don't know it yet."
"Who is she?"
Lior's expression changed. Not surprise. Something softer.
"She was the first to remember what we lost. The first to resist the reprogramming. The first they tried to erase."
Naël frowned. "Tried?"
Lior nodded slowly. "They couldn't. Not fully. She's different. Like you."
Naël stepped back, unsettled. "You keep saying that. Like me. What does that mean?"
Lior didn't answer directly. Instead, he pulled a small device from his pocket. Not the same one as before ; this one looked newer, more stable. He tapped the surface, and a projection flickered to life on the wall.
It was a map. Not of the city as it appeared now, but of something older. Layers beneath layers. Forgotten zones. Erased sectors. Places that didn't officially exist anymore.
"This," Lior said, "is what the city used to be. Before SOMA. Before the purges."
Naël stared. The map was vast. Beautiful, in a strange way. There were names on the sectors—real names, not just codes. Rivers and parks and structures that shimmered with design beyond function.
"Where did you get this?"
"Pieces of it survived," Lior said. "In the places they forgot to clean. In the minds of people they didn't fully overwrite."
He zoomed in on a section marked Sector Omega. At its center was a tower, unlike any other. Not the sterile sharpness of SOMA's infrastructure, but something curved, organic, like it had been grown instead of built.
"This tower was the heart of the resistance," Lior said. "A place where people remembered the world before. Before they divided us."
Naël pointed to it. "It's gone."
Lior smiled faintly. "No. It's just buried. And some of it… is waking up."
The projection vanished.
"You're not here just to show me maps," Naël said.
"No," Lior admitted. "I came because we need you."
Naël blinked. "For what?"
"To find her."
The room fell silent.
Naël sat down slowly. "She's missing?"
Lior nodded. "She hasn't returned in three cycles. No contact. No sign. Last we heard, she was tracing a data pulse near the outskirts of Sector Zero. Then… nothing."
"And you think I can find her?"
"She found you. That means you're linked. We don't understand how, not fully, but the old protocols called it resonance. Shared memory echoes. You might be able to see what we can't."
Naël's thoughts churned. The idea of returning to the outer zones, especially now that he was off-grid, felt dangerous. Reckless. But the image of the girl's face ,her eyes, steady and knowing ,lingered in his mind.
He stood. "Give me a direction."
Lior handed him a coded key, nothing more than a strip of black metal with a tiny pulse of red at its center.
"This will open the gate beneath the storage complex in D7. There's an elevator there. Broken, according to SOMA. But it still works. It'll take you to the fringe layers. From there… you'll have to trust your memory."
Naël nodded. "I leave tonight."
Lior looked at him, his gaze deep with something like gratitude.
"If she's alive, bring her back. If she's not… bring back whatever you find."
When Lior left, Naël didn't waste time.
He packed light. A single satchel. Food rations. A torch, analog. A tool for breaking old magnetic seals. And the paper.
Protocol Psi.
He didn't dare activate it yet.
The route to D7 was hidden in maintenance codes. Naël moved under darkness, keeping to forgotten paths. The city above pulsed with its familiar rhythm, but down here, in the guts of it, everything was different. The air smelled of rust and ozone. The walls were close, too close, and the ceilings low.
He reached the storage facility without incident.
The gate beneath was sealed, just as Lior had said. But the key worked. The pulse flickered green when pressed against the lock, and the gate rolled open with a groan of protest.
The elevator was worse. Ancient. Covered in dust and grime. It looked like it hadn't moved in years.
He stepped inside.
It took a long time to descend. The sound of the machinery was loud, brutal. Each floor it passed made his stomach twist. When it stopped, the doors opened onto darkness.
He stepped out.
The air here was cold. Not artificially cold. Real cold.
His torch flickered on, casting a cone of dim light ahead. He moved slowly, past corridors choked with debris and rusted machines. There were symbols on the walls—not SOMA's language, but something older. Curves and lines that reminded him of the dreams.
He walked for what felt like hours.
Until he saw the glow.
A soft, blue shimmer, pulsing from beneath a collapsed archway.
He crawled through the debris and emerged into a chamber unlike anything he had seen.
At its center was a platform. And on it, something floated.
A memory capsule.
He had only seen them in archives. They were used in the old days to store pure memory threads. Illegal now. Forbidden.
He approached.
The capsule pulsed as he neared. He reached out, hand trembling, and touched it.
A surge of images exploded behind his eyes.
Not sights. Not sounds. Feelings.
Laughter. Running through a sunlit field. A voice calling his name.
"Naël!"
He fell to his knees, gasping. The memory wasn't his. But it was. Somehow.
The capsule dimmed.
And then a voice echoed in the room.
Real. Weak. But real.
"Took you long enough."
He turned.
She stood in the archway, bruised and bleeding, but smiling.
"You found me," she said.
Naël couldn't speak. He moved to her, caught her before she fell. She leaned into him, her breath ragged.
"They're close," she whispered. "We have to move."
He helped her stand.
As they turned to leave, a siren began to wail.
Far above, SOMA had noticed.
The system had awakened.
And it was coming for them.