The silence after Renna vanished was the kind that lingered in your bones.
Zeke hadn't spoken to Mira since the confrontation. He stayed close, watched her too carefully, like he was waiting for her to crack the way Renna had. Lys, on the other hand, kept moving. She always did. Survival wasn't about standing still.
Mira couldn't sit still anymore either.
She had to find the lab.
The place where her Shard was "grown," as Renna had put it.
If she didn't know the truth, how could she trust herself with the power she carried?
Lys didn't hesitate when Mira told her the plan. "There's one place we haven't searched."
"Where?" Mira asked.
"The Annex."
Zeke paled.
"You mean the Old Annex?"
"That place was sealed years ago," Mira said. "After the fire."
"Exactly," Lys replied. "They said it was an accident."
"But?" Mira asked.
Lys's expression was grim. "It wasn't. It was a purge. A cover-up."
They broke into the Annex at night.
The school campus was too quiet—like it knew something sacred was being trespassed. The Annex loomed like a forgotten limb of the academy, cut off and left to rot.
The outer walls were scorched. Windows cracked. The stairwell twisted as if warped by heat and something more… unnatural.
They climbed three floors up.
Then, behind a charred library door, they found it.
The lab.
Or what was left of it.
Steel panels warped by fire. Broken tanks. Scattered paperwork, all half-burned or soaked through. Glass shards littered the floor like fallen stars.
Mira's breath caught.
Her hands trembled as she moved through the wreckage, something inside her screaming that this was familiar.
"Lys…" she whispered. "I've been here before."
Lys knelt beside a collapsed shelf. "There's still something intact."
Mira helped lift it.
Behind it: a storage locker, half-buried under debris.
Zeke opened it—and froze.
Inside, preserved in a cryoglass container, was a notebook.
Mira reached for it slowly, heart in her throat.
Property of Dr. I. Thane.
Project: Starling.
Her father's name.
The notebook wasn't just filled with research.
It was a journal.
Drawings of Shards. Lists of trials. Error margins. The word "resonance" circled over and over.
Then she found it.
A page marked with a triangle and her initials:
M. T.
Mira's hand hovered over the ink.
"Mira's neural attunement to Riftlight exceeded expectations. Genetically stable. Rapid absorption of prototype Shard's resonance. Her empathy levels remain dangerously high—could interfere with control parameters. Need to recalibrate emotional resistance."
Her throat closed.
"I was an experiment."
Zeke stepped forward. "No, Mira, you were a person they used. That's not the same."
Lys touched her shoulder. "You were never the weapon. They were."
But Mira wasn't listening anymore.
Because the next page wasn't written by her father.
It was a message.
"I kept her alive. I hid her. You need to know the truth."
"Find me in the Depths."
"Mother."
Mira's world cracked again.
"My mother was alive."
Zeke swore under his breath. "No one's ever come back from the Depths."
The Depths weren't a place. They were a Rift fracture, an unstable cavern below the school, sealed off after a Riftquake swallowed a dozen students and several staff years ago.
Mira had always believed her mother died in that quake.
Now?
She wasn't sure what she believed.
"Then that's where I'm going," she said.
"Mira—" Zeke tried.
Lys shook her head. "She's right. If her mother's alive, she may be the only one who knows what Mira's power really is."
"And how to stop Renna," Mira added.
They prepared in silence.
A descent into the Depths wasn't just dangerous.
It was almost always final.
The entrance to the Depths was a broken tunnel behind the chapel ruins. One they weren't supposed to know about.
But Lys had a knack for forbidden paths.
They stepped through, the air thick with Rift pulse. The walls themselves seemed to breathe.
Lights flickered the deeper they went, until finally, their shardlamps were the only glow left.
Mira led the way.
Her Shard responded before she even called to it.
As if it remembered this place.
As if it had been here before.
They passed bones.
Some human.
Some… not.
And then, they found it.
A door.
Not stone. Not wood. But Riftsteel.
It shimmered with violet veins, spiraling outward like roots.
Zeke exhaled slowly. "This is a containment seal."
Lys pointed to a lock.
Not a keyhole.
A palm scanner.
Mira stepped forward instinctively.
Placed her hand on the scanner.
It lit instantly.
And the door slid open.
The chamber beyond was cold.
Filled with humming lights and softly pulsing crystal. A lab, intact. Preserved.
And in the center, surrounded by monitors, her back to them, was a woman with midnight-dark hair braided tightly down her back.
She turned slowly.
And Mira forgot how to breathe.
The woman's face was older, worn, but unmistakable.
Her mother.
"Elira…" the woman whispered.
Mira froze. "That's not my name."
The woman's eyes shimmered. "No. They changed it. To protect you."
Zeke and Lys stepped in behind her.
But Mira didn't move.
"Are you real?"
"I'm real."
"You died."
"I ran."
"Why?"
Her mother's face crumpled. "Because the people funding your creation turned on us. They wanted to weaponize you before you were even born."
Mira's hands clenched. "I'm not a weapon."
"No," her mother said softly. "You're a wound. A rift in human form. But wounds can heal, Mira. They can also become scars. Reminders of survival."
Mira felt the world around her tilt.
"I don't understand."
"You don't have to yet. You just need to listen."
Her mother reached for a panel.
The crystals brightened.
And the entire chamber lit up with a projection:
Renna.
Smiling.
Standing beside a much younger Mira.
And behind them, shadowed, watching
Another girl.
One Mira didn't recognize.
Until she stepped forward and whispered a name Mira hadn't heard in years.
"Arlen."
Mira gasped.
"She died."
"No," her mother said softly. "She never died."
The projection shimmered
And Arlen's eyes flashed Riftlight blue.