The city groaned beneath its own weight as Altaran's skyline dissolved into the smog-choked horizon behind us. The hovercraft banked low through skeletal infrastructure, slicing beneath rusted transit lines and forgotten spires wrapped in bio-luminescent fog.
We drifted into the fallback point—a hollowed industrial scar beneath the underlayers, its walls cracked with age, neural glass remnants glittering like frozen static embedded in rusted concrete. The place smelled like abandonment—old coolant, machine oil, faint ozone lingering like a ghost.
I stood at the open hatch, watching Altaran's carcass stretch beyond the decayed horizon, my reflection rippling faint in the cracked viewport glass.
The man staring back wasn't whole.
Hair damp with sweat, shadows carved deep beneath my eyes, and the faint blue pulse of seven shards threaded beneath my skin—resonance flickering like faulty wiring along my veins.
Every breath felt heavier.
Every memory clawed closer.
Vesper moved behind me, her footfalls quiet, but the tension coiled off her like heat distortion. I didn't have to turn to know she was watching the fractures spiderweb through me—the neural fatigue, the raw edges of an identity torn loose and stitched back wrong.
"You're running hot again," she said softly, voice measured, clinical.
I stayed silent, scanning the fog-drenched ruins beyond. The silence stretched until I caught the faint quiver beneath her calm exterior.
"You hiding it better than me?" I asked, not turning.
A pause, then her voice, quieter. "No one hides well in Sector Zero."
That name still scraped raw along my nerves—like old glass embedded beneath skin.
I finally faced her.
Vesper's jaw was tight, her gaze sharp—but beneath the sharp edges, something flickered. Exhaustion. Concern. Something neither of us had the luxury to voice.
"They buried the eighth shard under the Order's vaults," she continued, adjusting her stabilizer cuffs. "You sync another one like this? You'll tear straight through neural equilibrium."
I flexed my fingers, pulse ticking faster as the seventh shard pulsed faint against my ribs.
"Already torn," I muttered, voice rough.
Her eyes darkened. "I'm serious."
"So am I." I took a step closer, watching the fractured reflection dance along her wrist-mounted scanner. "They fractured me once. I'm done letting them keep the pieces."
Vesper's silence stretched, but before she could answer, the console pinged sharp—Ghost's encrypted signature slicing through the static.
His projection flickered into view, rough around the edges, shadows under his eyes like bruises.
"You two ready?" His voice carried the usual dry grit, but the undercurrent of urgency was impossible to miss.
"Define ready," I shot back, rubbing my temple as another shard pulse sparked faint behind my eyes.
Ghost ignored the sarcasm, his fingers dancing across the interface. "Sector Zero grid's hot—access points cycling every seven minutes, pattern fluctuating. They're expecting something."
"Expecting us," Vesper corrected, scanning the incoming schematics.
I shifted my weight, focusing on the neural blueprints ghosting across the holo-display.
Concentric defense layers, energy dampeners, bio-restriction fields—every inch of that complex was a fortress wrapped in memory encryption protocols.
"They stored my fragments in there?" I asked, low.
"Buried," Ghost confirmed. "Vault C-Delta. Deepest part of the complex. High-grade neural interference—standard for dangerous assets."
Vesper's gaze flicked to me. "Assets like you."
The unspoken weight landed hard between us.
I forced a slow breath, trying to steady the resonance climbing through my chest.
"Route?" I asked Ghost, pushing the rising static aside.
He rotated the map, highlighting decayed maintenance arteries snaking beneath Sector Zero's perimeter. "Sub-veins feeding into the west flank. Old magline infrastructure—the Order forgot them when they rewired the upper layers."
"How clean?" Vesper asked, crossing her arms.
"Dirty as hell," Ghost replied, smirking faint. "But functional. I've mapped interference gaps. It'll buy you time."
Vesper studied the readouts, her fingers hovering over the projected grid lines. "And the window?"
"Two minutes between pulse cycles." Ghost's tone sharpened. "After that? You're locked in with the grid frying your neural pathways."
The shard pulse beneath my ribs flared again, memory bleed skating along the edges of my thoughts.
I clenched my jaw. "What about external movement?"
Ghost hesitated, and that pause set every alarm in my head ringing.
"Someone's trailing the same signal," he admitted finally. "Encrypted pings piggybacking off the grid—same ghost signature from Sector Seventeen."
The masked operative.
Still in play.
Vesper's eyes narrowed. "Tracking us, or the shard?"
"Hard to separate the two now," Ghost muttered. "They move when you move. Like they're following resonance bleed."
I flexed my hand, watching faint threads of blue glow dance beneath my skin.
No surprise. The fragments were drawing attention like blood in water.
Vesper straightened, shoulders squaring. "If they want to follow, let them. They'll choke on the fallout."
For a moment, I almost smiled. It didn't last.
Ghost's voice cut back through. "Clock's ticking. You've got one shot at this."
I stepped toward the hatch, every breath scraping rough against my lungs.
You're slipping, Vesper's warning from hours ago echoed back.
She wasn't wrong.
Fragments bleeding deeper.
Identity fraying at the edges.
The reflection staring back wasn't entirely mine anymore.
But I wasn't losing to the Order again.
"Gear up," I ordered, voice low.
Vesper didn't argue this time.
We strapped in—the stabilizer cuffs tightening across my forearms, neural dampeners locking over my temples. The hovercraft hummed to life, engines spooling low.
Above, Altaran's spires stabbed into the fog like broken ribs.
Beneath, the city's rotting veins coiled toward Sector Zero—the place they erased me.
Five shards left.
The countdown pressed sharper.
And the person buried in glass—the one they failed to kill—was fighting his way back.
I wasn't coming for fragments this time.
I was coming for answers.
And I'd tear the Mnemonic Order apart to get them.