Leon didn’t breathe.The voice that spoke his name—that name—didn’t belong here. It was from another life, buried so deep in sealed memory threads he couldn’t even access them without authorization from the neural grid. But the system didn’t know that name.Nobody alive did.Not even Sophia.The silence that followed was louder than the alarms had been.The pod flickered with internal light again, casting a pale glow over the face inside. His face.It was strange to look at himself like that. This version of him had no scars. No exhaustion under the eyes. No memories behind the lines of his face. Just blank potential.Then the body inside the pod stirred.Barely.Leon staggered backward.“No,” he muttered. “That’s not possible.”But the pod beeped. Once. Twice. A heartbeat awakening.:: SYSTEM SYNC INITIATED :::: CORE ID: LEON EZEKIEL CARTER :::: RETINAL MATCH 99.9% :::: MEMORY PATHWAYS ACTIVATING ::The whispers returned. Louder this time.From the walls. From the floor. From the

The road west was quiet.Too quiet.Three days after the collapse of Sector 12, the group moved carefully through overgrown highways and empty border towns. The sky above them had cleared for the first time in years—blue, cracked with light, but still wrong. The world was resetting in pieces. Not the way the system had planned.Leon read the note again.“Find the Daughter. She Remembers Everything.”He didn’t know who had written it. It was in his handwriting—but not his. The edges were frayed like it had aged ten years in a place where time stood still.Mara rode beside him in the old solar skimmer they’d salvaged from the tower wreckage. She hadn’t said much since waking. There were moments she looked normal—sarcastic, sharp, defiant—but sometimes, she'd freeze mid-sentence. Stare into space. Like someone else was listening through her mind.On the fourth night, Leon found her standing alone at the edge of a ruined overpass.She was holding something.He approached slowly. “Can’t sl

They traveled at night now.The system had eyes in the day—satellites still clinging to the remnants of the upper grid, drones scanning highways from miles above, sound-based trackers floating like dust across the wind. But at night, the system pulsed slower. Hesitant. Like it was still trying to predict what they’d do next.Leon could feel the difference.It was like the world was starting to remember how to breathe without permission.Mara rode beside him in the back of the skimmer, silent for most of the trip. Since the memory echo, she had changed again. Not broken—opened. Sometimes she would stop mid-sentence, like listening to voices only she could hear. Other times, she would whisper places they hadn’t passed in years—like she knew what lay just beyond the hills.Calia drove. Sophia slept in the rear. Bren kept watch on the left flank, rifle in hand, though his limp had worsened since the last drone attack.Leon sat up front, map in his lap—though it was barely a map anymore.J

The sky was clearer than it had been in years.As dawn broke across the ruined basin, light struck the glass towers of the Cradle, casting refracted beams across Leon’s back as he packed their gear. He glanced at the others—Calia bandaging her arm, Bren checking weapons, Sophia scanning the air for interference signals.Mara stood still.She hadn’t spoken much since she woke from the Cradle’s memory sequence. Her face looked the same, but something behind her eyes had deepened. Like the knowledge she’d unlocked came with a price.Leon approached her. “You sure about this?”She turned. “It’s the only way.”“Eden Zero might not even exist,” he said, softly. “And if it does—”She cut him off. “Then that’s where it all began. Which means it’s where it has to end.”He nodded.“Then we go.”The trip north took four days.They traveled on foot at first, avoiding roads, system zones, and towns that looked alive but pulsed with false light. By the second night, they’d stolen a glider from an a

The desert stretched in every direction.The coordinates had led him far from the broken halls of Eden Zero, beyond even the edge of the known system zones. Here, there was no grid, no sky-lens satellites, no artificial weather.Just heat. Silence. And a name burned into the sand.“HELIX.”Leon stood at the edge of a rusted plateau, his breath dry in his throat. He’d walked three days, across the remains of a scorched valley once called the Cinder Drift. There were no maps. Only the blinking pulse on his wrist.And a promise.“Come find me.”The sky rippled above him. Not with clouds—there were none—but with code.A shimmering distortion spread across the air like oil on water.He stepped through.And the world changed.Beyond the veil was a chamber.Circular, dark, metallic.Screens hovered mid-air, each showing moments Leon had forgotten—memories stolen from his childhood, from his years in Duskport, from before the Rewriting. He saw himself laughing. Running. Building. Arguing with