Altaran's upper skylanes fractured into smog as we climbed—ghost circuits flickering across the city's skeletal infrastructure, the glow of half-buried towers bleeding dimly through the polluted clouds. Behind us, Sector Seventeen's vault shrank into the horizon, gutted and burning, its secrets pried loose.
The fifth shard pulsed against my chest—stronger now, like a live wire braided through my nervous system. The fractured gaps in my memory… they were closing. I could feel him—the version of me they erased—pressing closer, shaping instincts I didn't remember learning.
"Status?" Ghost's voice crackled through the comms as the hovercraft cut through the haze.
"Fifth fragment secure," I reported, scanning the projected city grid. "But they scrambled reinforcements faster than expected. Someone's tightening the net."
Vesper slumped in the co-pilot seat, her face pale, the faint glow of her shard pulsing beneath her collarbone.
"Her sync rate?" Ghost asked.
"Unstable," I admitted. "The fragments are affecting her differently."
"We anticipated divergences," Ghost replied, overlays flickering across my display. "But if the resonance escalates—"
"I'll handle it," I cut in.
Silence settled—thick, heavy.
We banked hard beneath the undergrid, weaving between forgotten transit lines and abandoned industrial platforms. The city below swarmed with shifting shadows—drones tracing patrol vectors, surveillance beams slicing the haze.
"Ravel's fallback site is prepped," Ghost finally confirmed. "Old med-research bunker beneath Greyspire. Off-grid, for now. You'll need to lay low."
Greyspire—the district no map claimed, where failed Consortium projects festered like open wounds.
"Coordinates locked," I confirmed, adjusting course.
Minutes later, we breached Greyspire's boundary—a jagged sprawl of derelict towers, fractured bridges, and rotting infrastructure. The skyline leaned like broken teeth against the smog-choked sky.
The bunker lay beneath an old biotech facility, its facade crumbling beneath rust and vines. I guided the hovercraft to a concealed landing alcove, engines throttling down.
Vesper stirred weakly as I helped her onto the platform—her skin damp with neural stress, eyes glassy.
"Easy," I muttered, steadying her. "You're still stabilizing."
"It's not just the shard," she whispered, her voice frayed. "They buried things deeper than memories, Ilyas. Wounds… coding… echoes of control."
Her words curled cold down my spine.
We slipped into the bunker—corridors stripped of power, walls scrawled with forgotten diagnostic codes. Ravel waited by a jury-rigged stabilizer rig, her expression tight beneath copper clasps pinning back her hair.
"Took you long enough," she muttered, scanning Vesper.
"The vault was hot," I retorted, lowering Vesper onto the stabilizer platform.
Ravel's fingers danced across the interface—scanners humming, neural feedback looping through soft holo-readouts.
"She's over-synced," Ravel concluded, adjusting the rig. "The shards are rebuilding neural pathways faster than her system can anchor. We need to slow it down."
"And me?" I asked.
Her eyes flicked to my chest, to the faint blue glow of the fifth shard beneath my coat.
"You're holding, for now," she said. "But the more you collect, the more the fractures fight to realign. You're not just recovering data—you're reconstructing who they broke."
The air pulsed softly—shards vibrating along my neural map.
"Sixth fragment?" I pressed.
Ravel exhaled and handed me a decrypted datachip.
"North Industrial Divide," she replied. "Deep-grid mining site, blacklisted after a collapse. They buried more than rock down there."
"Security?"
"High," she confirmed. "Solis family seeded mercs in the ruins. Retrieval won't be quiet."
I pocketed the chip, jaw tight.
"We'll be ready," I promised.
Her gaze lingered—sharp, unreadable.
"You better be," she said, turning back to the rig. "Once that sixth shard clicks into place… things break that you can't stitch back together."
The resonance beneath my ribs surged—echoes of the self I was clawing to reclaim burning hot against the fractures they left behind.
The hunt wasn't slowing. It was sharpening.
And I wasn't done yet.