The glow of the console still pulsed in the corner of the room, red digits marching forward with unrelenting certainty. 10:39:47.But Kael ignored it.For once, he turned away from the storm and let his gaze fall wholly on Lina. She lay against the pillows, her breathing shallow but steadier than before. Her skin still carried that strange, ethereal pallor—the mark of what she was, what the Syndicate had designed—but her hand was warm in his, and that warmth anchored him more than any victory on a screen ever could.Her lashes fluttered open. She caught him watching her, and a faint curve of her lips appeared. “You look like you’ve just wrestled a god.”Kael huffed a broken laugh. “Feels like I lost, if I’m honest.”“You didn’t.” Her voice was soft, barely more than a whisper, but it carried with it a weight he couldn’t shake. “I’m still here.”The words nearly undid him. He bent his head, pressing his forehead to the back of her hand, breathing in the fragile reminder that she wasn’t

The hush that followed Kael’s confession had been fragile, like glass suspended on a string. For the first time in days, there was stillness, almost peace. Lina sat curled in the thin blanket, her breathing steady, her face softened in the lamplight. The shadows no longer seemed to press so heavily against the walls, and for a fleeting moment Kael allowed himself the dangerous indulgence of imagining this could last.Her eyes lifted to him. “You look… different,” she murmured.“How?”“Less like you’re fighting shadows,” she said. “More like you’re here with me.”The words rooted themselves in him, and he almost smiled—almost. But the console at his side hummed faintly, a reminder that peace could not be trusted. His half-written algorithms still pulsed across the screen, waiting. Tempting. He had not told her how many failed attempts had already brushed too close to unraveling her stability. He had promised her calm tonight, yet the code whispered with promise.One more attempt, he to

“Access request detected.”The words pulsed across the console, each syllable echoing like a drumbeat in Kael’s skull. He lunged forward, fingers flying over the keys, trying to bury the alert beneath manual overrides. But the system didn’t yield. Instead, new lines of script unfurled on the glass—sharp, invasive, foreign.Lina stirred on the cot, her breath hitching as though the words themselves had reached inside her. Her eyelids fluttered, her body caught between waking and something far stranger.“Stay with me, Lina,” Kael murmured, though the plea felt useless. He wasn’t sure who he was talking to—her, or the hidden presence pressing against the edges of her programming.The access probe deepened. Kael recognized the pattern. It wasn’t random. It wasn’t some stray echo of the Syndicate’s abandoned systems. It was deliberate, controlled—like fingers sliding a key into a lock he’d sworn no one else could touch.“No…” His throat tightened. “They shouldn’t even know how to reach you

Darkness.It wasn’t the kind that simply swallowed light. It was the kind that pressed against skin, suffocating, heavy—like the world itself had been switched off.Kael’s eyes darted wildly, searching for the faintest gleam, any signal from the console, from the room, from the walls. Nothing. The Syndicate’s system had cut everything.Except Lina.She lay before him, her body trembling, threads of white light pulsing through her veins. In the void, she was the only source of illumination, fragile as candlefire in a collapsing universe.Kael’s chest hammered. He forced himself forward, reaching for her wrist, desperate for the reassurance of a pulse—though he knew a pulse wasn’t what kept her alive.Her skin burned cold against his fingertips.“Lina…” His voice cracked, barely audible against the silence. “Talk to me.”For a moment, nothing. The silence stretched so taut it threatened to break him. Then—“…Kael.” Her voice was faint, a ripple across the dark, but it was hers.Relief c

Darkness.That was Lina’s first awareness—not soft, not natural, but engineered. A void so absolute it pressed against her skin, muffling thought and breath alike. She stumbled forward, hands outstretched, but there was no floor, no wall, no sense of direction. Only endless black.Then—light.A square of white opened beneath her feet, expanding into a floor, smooth and metallic. The rest of the void recoiled, leaving her standing on a platform suspended in nothingness. Above, fractured projections hummed to life—fragments of her memories flickering across invisible screens.Her mother’s laughter. The hum of the incubator chamber. Kael’s face, eyes burning with impossible promise.But each image warped, twisting at the edges until it dissolved into static.“Where am I?” Lina whispered, voice trembling.“Partition chamber online,” a synthetic voice intoned, cold and genderless.“Subject: Lina Ward. Relocation successful. Time limit: seventy-two hours.”Her heart seized. Seventy-two. She