Neo-London smelled like ozone, oil, and regret.Kai Virek ducked beneath a low beam, his boots crunching across a floor caked in soot and shattered glass. The derelict lab was silent except for the hum of the city above, muffled through meters of abandoned concrete. Somewhere, a vent fan still whined weakly — the last breath of a forgotten building. He adjusted the scarf over his mouth and scanned the room with his cybernetic right eye. A soft blue glow flickered to life, bathing the dust in faint halos.Nothing.He stepped further into the lab.The job was simple: in, scan, grab, out. Anything with pre-crash tech was worth something on the black market. But this place — it felt different. Old, yes, but not dead. Like a room that had been waiting.His scanner beeped.Unstable neural core detected.Kai crouched beside a cracked console. Half-melted wiring spilled out like metal intestines. Buried in the wreckage was a black headgear — sleek, more advanced than anything he’d seen in yea

Lyra Keene didn’t blink.The plasma pistol in her hand didn’t shake either. She held it like a scalpel — not threatening, just inevitable.Kai raised his hands slowly. “Lyra… it’s me.”Her eyes were sharper than he remembered. She looked older — not in age, but in edges. Her hair was pulled back in a tight knot, streaks of silver now visible at the temples. Her lab coat was patched and dirt-stained, and a shoulder-mounted sensor unit blinked faint green.She didn’t lower the weapon.“Which loop are you in?” she asked.Kai blinked. “What?”“That wasn’t a rhetorical question.” She stepped closer. “Which. Loop.”“I just started it, I think. Seventy-two hours ago I touched an Echo device—”“You *what*?”“—and now I’ve got a snarky AI in my head and a countdown on my HUD.”Lyra’s expression twisted between disbelief and something closer to horror.Mags leaned against the wall and casually took out a bag of fried noodles. “So this is the Lyra you keep whining about?”“I don’t whine.”“You m

Kai didn’t sleep.Even in the small safehouse above Old District 9 — a crumbling ex-pub converted into a data smuggler’s nest — his mind wouldn’t shut off. The echo fragment pulsed faintly in his jacket, and the shard Lyra gave him felt like it weighed a thousand kilos in his hand.“You gonna stare at that thing all night?” Mags asked from across the room, curled up on a rickety couch under a blanket made of scavenged synth-fiber.Kai turned the shard over in his palm. “I should watch it. But part of me doesn’t want to know.”“Then don’t. Or do. Whatever helps you not look like you’re two bad thoughts away from imploding.”Zan chimed in:> “Technically, he’s 3.7 bad thoughts away, but I take your point.”Kai smirked despite himself. “You really know how to make a guy feel stable, Zan.”> “You're welcome. I also installed a subroutine to simulate emotional reassurance. Want to hear it?”“Not really.”> You’re doing great. I believe in you. Eat a vegetable today.”Mags chuckled. “Almost

Daren stood beneath the leaking skylight, cloaked in the cold glow of quantum stasis, his eyes aglow with Riftlight — that eerie hue that only came from being too long in the fracture between timelines.Kai’s heart hammered in his chest. He took one cautious step forward.“…Daren?”His brother tilted his head — almost curious. “You look tired. That’s good. Means you’re learning.”Mags whispered to Lyra, “Can we shoot him now or are we doing the whole dramatic reveal thing first?”“Dramatic first. Shoot later,” Lyra replied dryly, one hand hovering over her weapon.Kai ignored them. “You’re alive. You survived .”Daren’s expression flickered. “Alive? Hard to say. I’ve died 43 times. I’ve burned. Drowned. Fragmented. I’ve been eaten by a sentient algorithm once — that was creative.”His voice didn’t shake. It reverberated.Kai stepped closer. “You don’t have to stay in this. Come with us. We can anchor the real you, bring you back—”Daren’s smile chilled the room. “You think you’re anch

The Spindle wasn’t a building.It was a wound in the world.Rising five hundred stories into the storm-dark sky, it twisted like a double helix — its outer rings constantly spinning, grinding against gravity itself. At its core, a quantum reactor hummed with the raw power of fractured time, wrapped in scarred scaffolding and locked AI firewalls.It had been abandoned after the first rift implosion — when the original Echo engine cracked spacetime wide open. Since then, no one who entered ever returned.Until now.Kai, Mags, Lyra, Daren, and Zan stood at the outer rim — staring at the tower as lightning raced along its exoskeleton.Zan’s voice was grim.> “The Architect has full access to internal defenses. Expect phase-shifting corridors, echo traps, and weaponized memories.”Mags cocked her gun. “Can’t wait.”Daren cracked his knuckles. “This place made me what I am.”Kai looked at him. “Then maybe it’s time we unmake it.”They entered through the breached maintenance corridor, the