The hovercraft cut low across Altaran's skeletal underlayers, engines thrumming against rusted ferrocrete as the city's carcass bled past in fractured silhouettes. Bio-luminescent fog coiled through forgotten industrial veins, casting warped reflections across the windshield.
I leaned forward, pulse steady, eyes locked to the grid schematics pulsing across the holo-display.
Five shards left.
Five fragments buried somewhere beneath this rotting empire, tucked behind neural encryption so deep it felt like trying to breathe underwater.
Vesper's voice broke the silence. "Your vitals are spiking again."
I didn't respond.
Couldn't.
The seventh shard pulsed sharp beneath my ribs, resonance threads burrowing into my nervous system—unraveling memories in jagged, uncontrolled flashes.
A child's voice. My voice.
"They'll erase you if you run…"
Solis corridors bleeding into my vision—flickering, fragmented—a younger version of myself gripping the edges of a memory-forging rig, teeth clenched, neural threads pulsing faint along my temples.
"You're a liability, Ilyas. You always were."
The hovercraft jostled over a collapsed magline, snapping me back.
Vesper's hand hovered near the stabilizer interface, tension etched across her features.
"You need calibration," she pressed, voice low but sharp. "Memory bleed's accelerating—we don't contain this, the next fragment could crack your entire cognitive lattice."
I flexed my hands, focus tunneling inward. Fragments of identity clawed at the edges of my thoughts—half-formed, jagged like broken glass.
"I don't need containment," I muttered, "I need the next shard."
Her expression darkened, but before she could argue, Ghost's comm signal sliced through the cabin, layered in static and encrypted distortion.
"Rook—new lead surfaced. You're not gonna like it."
"Define not liking it," I shot back.
A pause, then Ghost's voice returned, lower, heavier.
"Mnemonic Order vaults. Central archive. Sector Zero."
Vesper swore under her breath.
My stomach twisted.
Sector Zero wasn't just locked down—it was the birthplace of Altaran's corruption. The Mnemonic Order's crown jewel—a fortified complex buried beneath the city's foundations, wrapped in neural firewalls, memory encryption grids, and enough automated deathtraps to sterilize a small army.
"You sure?" I asked, already knowing the answer.
"Shard resonance spiked three hours ago," Ghost confirmed. "Level three security protocols lit up the grid. They're hiding fragment eight inside—probably deeper than any of your old access codes reach."
Vesper's fingers tightened around the console. "Sector Zero's a fortress. You breach it… you're declaring war on the Order."
I stared at the holo-map—Sector Zero pulsing faint at the city's dead center, surrounded by concentric rings of security layers, neural inhibitors, and forgotten sins.
A fragment buried there made sense.
The Order wouldn't just erase me—they'd archive the pieces.
And now, I wanted them back.
Needed them back.
"Prep the infiltration route," I ordered, shifting course. "We breach at dawn."
Vesper exhaled sharply. "You're not ready."
"No one's ever ready for Sector Zero."
Her silence was answer enough.
The hovercraft veered west, cutting through the underlayers as we approached our fallback point—an abandoned neural workshop gutted during the Ascension Riots, shielded by rusted infrastructure and static interference.
Inside, the walls were lined with fractured memory-forging rigs, containment tanks half-collapsed, Solis insignias burned faint into corroded steel.
It smelled like failure.
And buried ghosts.
I keyed the stabilizer array, syncing neural diagnostics, forcing my body to cooperate. Every breath felt heavier—every shard stitched deeper.
The seventh fragment still hummed raw beneath my skin, its corruption not entirely scrubbed. The echoes of the prototype—the other me—clung like neural scar tissue.
Vesper worked in silence, calibrating equipment, overlaying schematics of Sector Zero's underlayers. I watched her fingers move with sharp precision, noting the tension in her posture—the way her eyes drifted, calculating risks she couldn't speak aloud.
Finally, she broke the quiet. "You sync another shard this fast… your mind fractures beyond repair. You understand that?"
I met her gaze, steady.
"They already fractured me," I said. "All I'm doing is stealing the pieces back."
For a moment, her facade cracked—something unreadable slipping through.
Then the holo-display flickered—Ghost's signal returning, overlaid with encrypted data bursts.
"I've mapped you a route," he muttered. "Partial maintenance access—deep sub-veins feeding into Sector Zero's western perimeter. Not clean, but quieter than the front door."
I studied the blueprints.
Decayed maglines. Collapsed service corridors. Abandoned security subnets flooded with static.
A ghost route, buried beneath forgotten layers of the city's infrastructure.
Perfect.
"Any movement inside?" Vesper asked.
"Mnemonic Order's locked tight," Ghost replied. "But that shard pulse? It stirred old echoes. Someone's watching… and they're not Order."
I frowned. "Define not Order."
"Encrypted signals piggybacking on the grid," Ghost said. "Unregistered. High-grade neural cloaking. Same masked signature from Sector Seventeen—your mystery observer's still in play."
My pulse ticked higher.
The masked operative—the one who'd slipped past Solis security, who'd helped extract Vesper from the vault—was still tracking us.
Or tracking the shards.
The resonance threaded sharper through my system as I processed the implications.
Enemies on all sides.
Time bleeding thin.
Five shards left.
And Sector Zero waiting like a scar beneath the city's bones.
I rose, voice steady, drowning out the static clawing behind my eyes.
"Gear up," I ordered. "We breach at first light."
Vesper's nod was slow, reluctant, but she moved without argument—packing neural inhibitors, weaponized disruptors, stabilizer backups.
Outside, Altaran's smog choked the skyline, neon grids flickering faint beyond fractured spires.
The countdown pressed closer.
The person I used to be—the one they erased—was clawing his way back, shard by shard.
And when I stepped into Sector Zero…
They'd either finish the job.
Or I'd burn their empire to ash.