The signal had changed.
F-13 was the first to notice... but when she said it, her voice was off, like her words were being translated in real time by something not entirely human. Her tone was slow and low, stretched out as if the world around her was buffering.
Zayn didn't respond at first. The silence between them wasn't just hesitation... it was tension... loaded with the weight of too many unanswered questions. They both knew instinctively that naming it too soon could make it real. Some things needed to be watched quietly before they could be understood.
They had just escaped the Fracture Sphere, but the world they returned to was wrong. The crater was gone... or perhaps rewritten. Gravity tugged with a weight slightly too heavy, like the world was trying to remember how to hold itself together.
The sky wasn't the same.
The stars were scattered out of position... not like the heavens had shifted... but as if the very simulation of night had been poorly reconstructed. Somewhere deep within Zayn's senses, his connection to the Null pulsed with unease.
They were not just back on Earth.
They were inside something... layered.
F-13 stumbled. Her knees buckled without warning.
Zayn caught her before she could hit the ground. Her skin was cold... her breath shallow. The glow of her synthetic eye dimmed for a moment before flaring violently, flickering with static pulses that made the Null in Zayn's chest resonate uncomfortably.
She whispered a single word.
"Signal."
Zayn blinked.
A pulse echoed through the air around them. It wasn't sound. It was pressure. A slow, rhythmic compression of the atmosphere... like something enormous was breathing just out of sight.
F-13 tried to speak again... her voice fragmenting halfway.
"It's... awake now... not just resonating... it's... broadcasting."
Zayn gently set her down against a scorched column and looked around.
The terrain was shifting. It wasn't melting or warping... but unfolding. Buildings that had been half-submerged in debris just seconds ago were now whole again, shadows rethreading across glass and steel. Roads reassembled beneath their feet, glowing faintly with blue filament lines.
This wasn't reconstruction.
It was recall.
Reality was remembering itself.
And Zayn recognized the skyline now forming in the distance... the tall arc-shaped tower... the twin rails that once served as maglift pathways... the half-collapsed solar obelisks that flickered with corrupted power.
This was Siranis.
The city lost to the Null Event twelve years ago.
Erased. Obliterated. Nothing left but a digital name in CoreTech's redacted archives.
It was back.
And something inside it was calling him.
F-13 stood, leaning on him. Her face was pale... her spine slightly arched like she was trying to resist a gravitational pull not her own.
"You feel it too," she said, barely audible.
Zayn nodded.
The pull wasn't directional... it was internal. Like his bones were being tuned to a frequency they weren't designed to hear. The Null inside him resonated, but it wasn't agitated. It was... responsive. Hungry.
They moved forward... together.
Each step into the city peeled back layers of unreality. What was once ash and bone became polished steel, blinking streetlights, restored facades. Broken windows reassembled, dust falling upward as fractured glass snapped into shape.
It wasn't time reversing.
It was time remembering.
Even the air changed. The temperature dropped, the oxygen thinned, and Zayn could feel a strange vibration in his lungs, as if his breath echoed off walls that weren't quite real.
Then came the first scream.
It didn't echo... it folded.
Zayn turned immediately, blade activating with a shimmer of hardlight.
Figures moved in the distance... limping at first, dragging limbs, twitching with unnatural rhythm. They weren't human. At least, not anymore.
F-13 whispered, almost reverently.
"Nullbloods…"
The figures were malformed. Some tall, others impossibly thin, their skin laced with blackened circuitry, pulsing in erratic sequences. Their eyes glowed faintly... not with energy, but with data, as if they were still connected to some core processing network long after death.
Zayn took a step forward.
The lead figure stopped, tilting its head slowly, as if analyzing his movement.
"You are awake," it said in a garbled, flattened tone. "That is... incorrect."
Zayn clenched his fists.
"I don't want to fight you."
The Nullblood lunged.
No hesitation. No warning. Just a blur of movement and the sound of concrete shattering behind Zayn as the creature missed by a hair.
Another came from the right.
F-13 fired, her pulse rounds slamming into its shoulder and torso — but the damage was meaningless. Its body twisted midair, bones cracking into new angles, and it landed with a stumble that shouldn't have been survivable... yet it kept moving.
They weren't regenerating.
They were reprogramming themselves.
Zayn slashed upward with his knife, catching one across the chest. Black fluid erupted from the wound, sizzling where it touched air. The creature fell, twitching violently... but didn't die. Instead, it rolled back, its arms bending backward until the joints realigned differently, reconfiguring itself into a new posture.
F-13 screamed something over the static... something about fallback.
But Zayn wasn't listening anymore.
The signal in his head had changed pitch.
It was guiding him... pushing him forward.
They ran.
Through alleys that bent sideways into corridors of light. Through halls that shouldn't exist, memories of buildings once real, now projected by the pulse of the signal. Every corner brought more Nullbloods. Every path seemed pre-printed, like a simulation trying to reroute them into an inevitable confrontation.
Finally, they broke into the plaza.
It was dead silent.
At its center hovered a black orb... perfect in shape... impossible in presence. It didn't glow or move... it simply existed, like a full stop in the sentence of reality.
F-13 gasped.
"That's not a machine… it's a relay node."
Zayn stepped closer.
The Null inside him pulsed faster. Stronger. His skin felt hot, stretched over something trying to surface.
The Nullbloods emerged around them... surrounding the plaza, but not attacking.
They watched.
Not like predators... more like disciples.
F-13 raised her weapon... but Zayn touched her wrist.
"No... not yet."
He approached the orb.
The moment his foot crossed the ring of tiles around its perimeter, the air thickened. Time slowed. Vision doubled. Then everything cracked.
He was elsewhere.
A long hallway made of glass.
Mirrors on both sides... but none reflected him as he was.
Each showed a different version.
Zayn the warlord. Zayn the traitor. Zayn the experiment.
One had no face. Another was weeping. One held the corpse of a girl Zayn had never seen before... but somehow remembered.
Then they all looked at him.
Every reflection.
And smiled.
The orb pulsed once.
And Zayn knew what it was.
A buried shard of the Null Core. A memory relay node built from collapsed timelines.
It wasn't calling him... it was syncing.
His breath caught.
The moment felt elastic. He reached forward.
The orb split.
Inside... a shard of black metal hovered — shaped like a key, vibrating at a frequency his heart recognized before his mind did.
F-13 shouted behind him.
"Zayn... stop... it's not for us..."
He touched it.
And everything ruptured.
He was nowhere.
He was inside the Null.
Floating... sinking... existing between pulses of reality.
A figure emerged from the dark.
Velon.
Not alive.
Not dead.
Something in between.
Velon's eyes were dull... his form fragmented. Every time Zayn tried to focus, Velon shifted slightly... like his existence had no fixed coordinates.
"You brought the fracture forward," Velon whispered, voice echoing from inside Zayn's own skull. "Like I did."
Zayn tried to speak... but his throat didn't work.
Velon stepped closer.
"You're not controlling it. You're becoming it."
The words hit like impact grenades.
"You stepped sideways, Zayn," Velon said. "You used Pulse Shift... and every shift bleeds a timeline. Do you even feel it yet? The static in your bones? The memories that aren't yours?"
Zayn looked down at his hands.
They were shaking.
Not from fear... but from incompatibility.
F-13's voice echoed through the void.
"Zayn... wake up... I need you..."
He turned.
Velon reached out, not to stop him... but to warn him.
"They'll come for you now. Not just CoreTech. Not just Nullbloods. The Signal is out... and the Architects have heard it."
The void shattered.
Reality rushed back.
Zayn slammed into the ground, gasping.
F-13 was beside him, tears in her eyes... blood in her mouth.
He sat up.
The orb was gone.
But the sky above them... burned with a new symbol.
A hexagonal spiral... spinning slowly... red light pulsing from its center.
The Null Signal was live.
And across the broken world... every failed experiment... every fractured prototype... every forgotten division... was waking up.