Time no longer passed cleanly. The days since the vault had blurred into vapor, hours folding into themselves, memories running backward when he closed his eyes.
Zayn sat alone in the remains of a CoreTech field shelter on the ridge above the fractured ruins. The silence here wasn't natural. It was held in place by something beneath the earth. Even the wind passed in careful loops, never rising high enough to disturb the thin veil of dust that blanketed everything.
He hadn't spoken since the vault.
Not to F-13. Not to himself.
The Null wasn't quiet inside him either. It moved in slow tides now, pulsing in rhythm with his breath, curling softly against the inner lining of his ribs like it had grown roots. It didn't speak in words, not really. It communicated in feeling... presence, weight, memory.
He had buried his father yesterday. Or rather, the preserved shell of the man who had once been him. He didn't want to bring the body out of the vault. That place felt more tomb than prison. But F-13 helped him move it. They set it beneath the broken statue with no face. A fitting monument, he had thought.
The grave wasn't deep. Nothing here was. Not anymore.
Zayn closed his eyes.
He didn't sleep. He drifted.
In the drift, he saw his mother's face. Not the way he remembered it, but the way he feared it had been before the Null touched her. Her eyes were brighter than his, full of something he didn't understand... peace. She had given herself to something she barely understood… and in return, it had taken her voice, her future, her child's name.
Then, he saw the Ark burning. Again. Slower this time. The screams didn't come first. It was the color of the flames, wrong shades of orange, almost blue at the tips, curling backward in time as they devoured metal. And standing in the center of the fire, untouched, was the Cleanser.
That mask.
Those eyes.
Still watching.
Zayn jerked awake.
The Null flared slightly in his chest, as if checking on him. As if listening for something more than breath.
He rose from the cold stone and looked out at the ruins again. Somewhere far beneath this dead city was a signal... faint, warped, constant. F-13 had detected it first. A repeating Null spike that bent nearby readings, like a fractured heartbeat. She said it was calling to him.
She didn't mean that metaphorically.
The signal was real.
And it was waiting.
He gathered what little gear remained. Most of it was damaged or burned from the last two encounters. Only the hardlight knife remained intact, humming faintly. He clipped it to his belt but didn't activate it.
He didn't expect weapons to help where he was going.
F-13 waited at the edge of the southern crater, her expression unreadable. She had changed since the vault. She hadn't said much, but Zayn could feel her… thinning. Not in body. In presence. The Null inside her pulsed irregularly now, flickering beneath her skin like unstable code.
"You ready?" she asked.
Zayn nodded.
"Do you feel it now?" she asked.
He did.
The signal wasn't just a sound or a data ping. It was embedded into the terrain, hidden in the folds of space just beneath perception. And now that Zayn had absorbed the vault's memory, the signal was no longer faint. It felt like a path... carved into the atmosphere itself.
He stepped forward.
The moment his boot touched the crater's inner edge, the air shifted.
Space restructured around him.
The world blinked.
And they were somewhere else.
He didn't remember the transition. One blink, one step, and they stood not in ruins, but in an entirely different reality. The sky above was a patchwork of broken color, like someone had tried to repaint it and failed halfway through. The stars pulsed in and out of existence. The ground beneath them shimmered in waves, a living topography that moved as if breathing.
This was not a place.
It was a fracture.
A sphere.
The air was thicker. Not hot. Not cold. Just heavier, like it was full of unseen layers.
Zayn took another step.
The terrain around him did not move, but the shadows changed direction. Behind him, the crater faded. Ahead, a structure began to rise. Not like a building. Like a memory uncoiling from the ground.
The Fracture Sphere was awakening to his presence.
F-13 stumbled slightly.
He turned to her.
She gritted her teeth and pushed forward, her body flickering for a moment, not vanishing, but repeating. For half a second, there were three of her, overlapping. Then one.
"The place is bleeding," she said through clenched teeth. "Temporal shifts are loose here. Hold your thoughts close or they'll echo."
Zayn focused his breathing.
With each step, his own memories tried to surface again. The vault. The screams. His younger self running through a corridor that never existed. A voice whispering his name backward.
He forced them down.
The structure ahead now fully stood. A tower twisted into a spiral, floating inches above the ground. No doors. No windows. Just an opening that hadn't been there a moment ago.
They stepped through it.
Inside, the walls bent away from each other, revealing a chamber too large to fit inside the visible tower. Five platforms hovered around a circular void, and on each platform stood a figure.
The Fracture Council.
They didn't speak right away.
They didn't need to.
Their presence filled the air like density.
Each one was wrong in a different way.
The Mute Prophet hovered two inches above the floor, wrapped in bands of static. His face was covered in a shifting veil that showed images instead of features, wars, fractures, cities Zayn had never seen.
Glass Skin stood with arms folded, her entire body semi-transparent. Zayn could see the outline of organs and nerves, and deeper still, he saw flashes of other faces inside her… flickering, looping, screaming.
Aether Rot stood in a shroud of warped CoreTech armor that pulsed like a dying star. His movements dragged trails of color behind him. His voice, when it came, layered three tones at once.
The Hollow General wore no insignia, no armor. Only a black coat and eyes that did not blink. He held nothing. No weapons. No symbols. But Zayn knew power when he saw it.
Mother Coil was the last. Or rather, she was the platform. Her voice came from the floor itself, a vibration that trembled through their feet. The air near her glitched in waves.
They had been waiting.
Zayn stepped into the center.
None of them welcomed him.
The Hollow General spoke first.
"You are the Architect's echo."
Zayn didn't reply.
Aether Rot moved slowly, twitching as though fighting feedback.
"The Null bends around you. Not in orbit… in obedience."
Mother Coil's voice emerged in sound loops.
"…you-were-not-supposed-to-form-this-way…"
Glass Skin took a step forward.
"We survived the first fracture. We formed this place to hold back the second. Now it calls to you. And we need to understand why."
The Mute Prophet did not speak.
He projected.
Images formed in the air. Zayn dead. Zayn alive. Zayn killing the Cleanser. Zayn burning the Ark again. Zayn opening a door into something that could not be closed.
F-13 stepped forward.
"He didn't choose this."
Glass Skin turned toward her.
"No. But the Null did."
Zayn clenched his fists.
"Why bring me here?"
The Hollow General spoke again.
"You are becoming unstable. As the Null deepens, your body will fragment. Your memories will divide. You will forget the shape of yourself."
Aether Rot hissed.
"Unless you break first and become what we were. What we are. Fragments."
Zayn looked up at them.
"I didn't come here to be judged."
Glass Skin's eyes narrowed.
"Then why did you come?"
Zayn said nothing for a long moment.
Then, "To learn what happens next."
The Mute Prophet projected a new image.
The world broken.
Time looping.
Zayn standing alone at the center of it, with no name left.
A voice echoed in the chamber.
"You are not a man anymore. You are a faultline."
The trial hadn't started yet.
This was just the greeting.
And still, Zayn's breath came slower now.
The Null inside him expanded.
The chamber began to warp.
And the Council… stepped forward.