The echo of my fractured reflection still burned behind my eyes as we dragged the body clear of the containment wreckage.
Glass shards littered the floor like frozen raindrops—jagged, blood-streaked, humming faint with residual neural resonance. The seventh fragment pulsed cold in my palm now, barely stable, data streams flickering like dying embers.
Vesper knelt beside the corrupted doppelgänger, scanning his vitals with practiced detachment. Her jaw was tight, eyes narrowed, fingers ghosting over exposed neural implants warped beyond repair.
"He's a shell," she muttered finally. "Bio-structure's decayed… cognitive signatures are fractured beyond rebuilding."
My throat tightened. I already knew that.
The copy—whatever they'd done to him—wasn't designed to last.
But the shard buried beneath his cortex… that had survived.
Barely.
I held the crystalline sliver to the dim overhead light, its surface spiderwebbed with micro-fractures, raw data leaking through hairline fissures.
It pulsed faint, threads of memory ghosting along my synapses—familiar and foreign all at once.
Vesper's voice cut through. "You shouldn't interface with that yet."
"I don't have time to wait."
"You barely stabilized the sixth shard, and this one's corrupted. You force sync now—you won't come back."
I ignored the warning.
Because it was already happening—the resonance crawling along my nerves, shards aligning, fragmented pathways sparking like faulty circuitry behind my eyes.
The hovercraft's distant hum rattled through the collapsed structure as Ghost's voice pinged over comms, sharp with static.
"You two still breathing down there? Blackwell teams are tightening grid searches—someone leaked Hollow Point's coordinates. You've got maybe ten before this place lights up."
"Understood," Vesper replied, gaze still pinned to me.
But my focus tunneled inward—the seventh shard syncing, memory threads clawing to the surface, reality distorting around fractured recollections like a funhouse mirror snapping back to its original shape.
Pain sliced clean behind my eyes.
And suddenly—
I wasn't in Hollow Point anymore.
The room twisted—walls bleeding into hexagonal corridors lined with neural glass, security sigils etched in polished steel, the air humming with sterilized precision.
I staggered, pulse spiking, the shard fusing deeper into my system as the memory overran me.
—Access Corridor Twelve. Solis Ascension Labs. Three years ago—
The voice echoed sharp—mine, but younger, stripped of wear. Faster.
I watched through fragmented vision as my hands—steady, practiced—slipped forged clearance tags past retinal scanners. The corridor stretched ahead, lined with containment tanks like glass coffins. Bodies floated within—blank, featureless, neural threads coiled around their skulls like parasites.
And then I saw him.
Me.
Or the prototype version.
A genetic scaffold—partial neural imprint, skin pallid, systems half-grown. A copy. Manufactured from stolen fragments of my erased identity.
"Extraction schedule accelerated," a voice declared—familiar, clinical. Solis insignia burned across their coat. "We'll bleed Rook's cognitive schema from the backups. Override protocols engage within forty-eight hours."
I gritted my teeth—the name sharp again.
Rook.
The memory wavered—reality bleeding in as I tore free from the hallucination. The Hollow Point ruins snapped back into focus—glass crunching beneath my boots, the corrupted double sprawled lifeless at my feet.
Vesper's hand hovered near her weapon, watching me with surgical precision.
"You dropped for thirty seconds," she warned. "Pulse spiked, neural output scrambled. You barely came back."
"I saw Solis facilities," I rasped. "Cloning vaults—copies of me. They've been manufacturing backups, building—what, replacements?"
"Insurance," Vesper confirmed, lips tight. "Solis never lets assets with your neural architecture go dark. If the original fractures beyond recovery, they boot up a ghost copy—half memory, half obedience."
"And the seventh shard?"
"Pulled from the prototype's cortex before his systems collapsed," she guessed. "Residual fragments—corrupted, but still yours."
I tucked the shard into the stabilizer array, the resonance thrumming sharper now, seven fragments aligning, memory bleed skirting dangerous thresholds.
Ghost's voice returned over comms—urgency spiking.
"Eyes up. Blackwell strike teams inbound—two minutes, heavy loadouts. You stay there, you die there."
I locked eyes with Vesper.
No time to debate. No time to fracture further.
We moved—scrambling through decayed corridors, collapsing structures groaning under decades of neglect. The hovercraft engines screamed to life as we vaulted aboard, the city's skeletal veins twisting in the fog behind us.
Blackwell drones sliced through the mist—searchlights scouring ruins—but we slipped beneath their grid, engines burning low as we carved through forgotten transit lines.
Vesper slid into the seat beside me, her hand brushing the stabilizer interface.
"Seven shards now," she muttered. "Your memories… how much is surfacing?"
I flexed my hands—memories crackling like static behind my eyes.
"Too much."
The reflection in the viewport glass caught me off guard.
The face staring back wasn't fully mine anymore.
It was starting to look like him—the corrupted double, the prototype, the fractured ghosts of who I used to be.
The past clawed closer with every shard we collected.
And beneath it all, the countdown pressed sharper.
Twelve fragments.
Seven recovered.
Five left.
Time running out.
Identity bleeding thin.
And the man they erased—the one buried in neural glass—fighting his way back to the surface.