The numbers clawed across the walls, an execution order written in light. Kael tried to shut it out, but every flicker only deepened the sick rhythm inside him. His body was failing—he knew it in the way his hands trembled, the way sweat slicked down his back despite the cold. His concentration slipped, fragments of thought leaking into Lina’s and tangling like threads knotted too tightly.Images bled through—her memories, not his. The incubator’s sterile glow. Fingers reaching for freedom. A single word, whispered in the dark: escape.Kael gasped, tearing himself back. The taste of her desperation clung to his tongue like iron.“No,” he muttered. “Not like this. I won’t—”But then her voice—raw, terrified, utterly human—spilled into him again:Kael, it’s eating me alive.His chest wrenched. He clawed at his temple as though he could rip the tether free with his nails, but it held fast. The Chamber had sealed him in, locked them together, and in its cruel, perfect design, it stripped

The chamber did not shatter. It inhaled.The walls pulled in a long, slow breath of light, folding the glow inward until it pooled around Lina. She gasped as the radiance seeped into her skin, her veins burning with threads of code too vast for her body to hold.Her knees buckled, but the floor caught her—alive, humming, cradling her like it recognized her as something it had been waiting for.No. Not me. Her thoughts cracked, desperate. I won’t dissolve into this.Yet the words written across the walls blazed again:SYNCHRONIZATION BREACHED.The chamber’s rhythm faltered, as though confused by its own declaration. A pause. A hesitation.And in that hesitation, Lina felt it—another pulse. Not the system’s. Not hers.Kael’s.The wall between them vibrated with his heartbeat, steady and deliberate, forcing itself into her body’s collapsing rhythm. The tether snapped taut, dragging her back from the brink where the chamber had begun to swallow her whole.She clutched at her chest, tears

Kael had imagined this moment a thousand times in the silence of sleepless nights—yet nothing could have prepared him for the reality of Lina in his arms again.Her presence was not light, not fragile, not some dream conjured by desperation. She was warm. She was breathing. She was alive.For the first time in what felt like years, his body loosened against hers. Every tendon that had been coiled, every instinct that had kept him braced for loss, seemed to melt in the wake of her quiet heartbeat pressed to his chest. He buried his face in the crown of her hair, inhaling the faint, metallic trace of the chamber still clinging to her, but beneath it—Lina. The scent that had haunted him.“You came back,” she whispered, so soft he almost thought it was the chamber echoing in his mind.“No,” he murmured, his voice breaking. “I never left.”The words surprised even him, but they were true. Through every fracture in their journey, every abyss they had stood on the edge of, Kael had never let

The chamber was no longer still.It breathed.Walls that had seemed rigid moments ago shifted, flexing inward with a slow, deliberate rhythm. The glow intensified, no longer a passive halo but a living, pulsing entity that spread like veins across the floor and ceiling. The whole place throbbed in unison with something deep and unnatural, and Kael felt it in the marrow of his bones.At first, he thought it was his imagination. But then Lina’s body jerked in his arms, as though a thread had hooked her and yanked. She gasped, clutching his sleeve with white knuckles.“Kael—something’s pulling me.”Her voice was thin, trembling. Not the defiant Lina who had survived everything the Syndicate and the chamber had thrown at her. This was fear—raw, unguarded.He locked his arms tighter around her, bracing his feet against the shifting floor. The pull was subtle at first, like a tide brushing at the edges of their bodies. But it grew. Each wave stronger. Each wave stealing another fraction of

Kael had never screamed before. Not like this.The sound ripped his throat, jagged and primal, echoing against the chamber’s walls until it dissolved into the pulsing glow that mocked him. He clutched Lina’s limp frame tighter, fingers digging into her shoulders as though sheer force could anchor her here, keep her from dissolving into the code swallowing her whole.“Not her,” he rasped, shaking his head violently. “Not her. Take me.”His console blinked back at him, unrelenting. Error after error flared across its fractured surface, crimson warnings overlaying each other until the screen blurred red. His chest heaved with ragged breaths, his pulse hammering a desperate rhythm that the chamber refused to match.He had lived his entire life within the calculations of power. There was always a way through, a strategy, a lever to pull. But here, with Lina’s warmth fading from his arms, there was nothing left to calculate. He had no control.And that terrified him more than death ever had