The sixth shard bled heat through the hovercraft cabin, pulsing in sync with the others—like a second heartbeat buried beneath my ribs, louder now, sharper. The resonance wasn't just humming anymore.
It was speaking.
Fragments—fractured voices, half-forgotten names—whispered along the edges of my thoughts as Altaran's skeletal skyline receded behind us, swallowed by industrial fog and static-stained clouds. My grip tightened on the stabilizer rig. Every recovered shard stitched more of me back together.
And stripped more of me away.
Vesper sat beside me, hunched, eyes darting between fractured readouts and neural diagnostics. The sixth shard pulsed faint light across her wrist, casting fractured shadows along her skin. Her expression told me everything—wary, calculating, already guessing how deep the damage went.
"You're slipping," she said without looking up.
"Define slipping," I muttered, voice rougher than I remembered it being.
"Memory bleed's accelerating. Neural integrity's frayed—see the pattern?" She rotated the holo-feed, bio-metrics etched in erratic red lines. "The more shards we sync, the more overwritten pathways surface. You're losing your stabilizers."
"Or remembering what they buried," I countered, though the lie cracked at the edges.
Because she wasn't wrong.
Since Sector Seventeen, I'd caught flickers—moments that didn't belong to the man I thought I was. Instincts firing before logic caught up. Muscle memory for techniques I never learned. And beneath it all—the same fractured voice echoing through neural glass:
Rook…
The name looped again, buried in the shard resonance.
Rook, not Ilyas.
Vesper's eyes narrowed. "The fragments are syncing ahead of projection. You force another one into your system without calibration… you're not walking out the same person."
I flexed my fingers, knuckles tight. "I'm not interested in walking out the same person."
Her silence stretched long enough for the hovercraft's proximity alert to ping, slicing through the tension. Incoming transmission—encrypted, Ghost's signature burn code layered beneath static.
I opened the channel.
His voice crackled low through interference. "Nice fireworks down in Chime's veins. You're pinging half the grid with that shard—sub-layer sensors lit up across three sectors."
"Any movement?" I asked.
"Too much," Ghost replied. "Blackwell's scrambling retrieval teams. Solis? Radio silent—bad sign. And there's something else…"
The pause dragged, thick with unspoken weight.
"What?"
Ghost exhaled. "Memory pulse registered outside expected range—seventh shard just surfaced. But location's…off."
I frowned. "Off how?"
"It's moving."
Vesper tensed beside me. "Mobile shard?"
"Or someone carrying it," Ghost confirmed. "Either way—west end, under the Veins. Old neural glass foundries near Hollow Point. The resonance is unstable—whatever's carrying that fragment? It's not clean."
I processed that, gears shifting. The underlayers beneath Hollow Point were worse than forgotten—they were quarantined. Black zones from the Mnemonic Order's first neural experiments—glassworks where they cooked up prototype memory architecture before the city fractured.
No one walked out of those ruins clean.
Vesper's hand hovered near her shard. "We're not ready. You can barely stabilize six fragments—going after seven like this is suicide."
I stared at the fractured skyline bleeding past the hovercraft window, the city rotting beneath industrial fog. Every pulse of resonance threaded deeper, memory shards clawing through the static.
The voice—my voice, his voice—echoed again.
Rook… Hollow Point… find it.
I keyed the course manually, overriding autopilot.
"We go now," I ordered, voice flat.
Vesper's eyes burned with frustration, but she didn't argue. Not this time.
The hovercraft banked hard, diving toward the underlayers—the Veins sprawling like broken circuitry beneath Altaran's steel bones. Rusted transit lines, collapsed sub-districts, forgotten containment grids. The air grew heavier, every breath laced with industrial residue and neural static.
Hollow Point emerged like a scar on the map—twisted superstructures, glass refineries gutted by decades of corruption and rot. The place still reeked of failed experiments—old Solis sigils half-burned into concrete, warning glyphs faded by time.
The shard's resonance climbed sharper the closer we got—erratic, pulsing like a fractured signal fighting to stabilize.
I disembarked first, boots scraping across decayed ferrocrete. Vesper followed, her shard pulsing faint along her wrist, scanner active.
We tracked the signal through gutted corridors—broken glass littering the floor, old neural conduits exposed like veins torn open. The resonance spiked near a collapsed production wing—containment tanks shattered, bio-signatures faint but moving.
Then we saw him.
A figure hunched near a derelict assembly platform, movements jerky, eyes hollow—glass embedded across his skull in fractal patterns, neural threads exposed like cobwebs. And in his palm—the seventh shard.
Or what was left of it.
The fragment was cracked, pulsing unstable light, bleeding corrupted data streams across his skin. His expression twitched, fractured memories unraveling behind vacant eyes.
"Too late," Vesper whispered.
I stepped forward, pulse steady, resonance sharpening through my system.
The shard's fragments—my fragments—recognized each other. Data streams threaded between us, neural echoes overlapping, memory constructs clawing to the surface.
His head snapped up, voice glitching through raw static.
"…Rook…"
Recognition. Buried. Twisted.
Then he lunged.
His neural systems overloaded, body moving with jagged, broken speed—an unstable cocktail of memory corruption and rogue shard resonance driving him forward.
I met him mid-charge—combat instincts flooding through me, reflexes firing on borrowed recollections. Our collision cracked concrete, shard resonance burning between us.
Vesper moved along the flank, deploying stabilizers—but the corrupted shard's influence spiraled out, infecting every system nearby. Holo-feeds distorted, neural links flickered.
I drove him back, locking grips, forcing his eyes level with mine.
For a flicker of a second, through the shattered glass embedded across his skull, I saw it:
My face.
His fractured features mirrored mine—older, worn, memories stripped raw—but unmistakably me beneath the decay.
The seventh shard wasn't just corrupted.
It was mine.
The ghost of the person I used to be.
The person they tried to erase.
I tightened my grip as the resonance burned hotter, shards syncing, identity fractures spiraling—memories bleeding wild through the glasswork between us.
Rook…
The voice inside twisted sharper.
And the countdown toward losing myself accelerated.