The closest of the three marked sites turned out to be a half-day's travel northeast of the cache, across a stretch of the Bone Yard so flat and featureless that Kira kept checking her instruments twice, as if the ground itself might be lying to her about how little it contained."According to this," she said, tapping the old cipher map against her palm as the transport rattled over cracked earth, "we should be standing on top of it in about twenty minutes. And there's nothing here. No ruins. No wreckage. Not even the usual scatter of old Beast bones you get everywhere else in this territory.""Maybe that's the point," REN-9 said from the back seat, watching the horizon with the same wary focus she'd worn since Ashfall. "If you wanted to hide something permanently, you wouldn't bury it under a mountain of obvious wreckage. You'd bury it under nothing. Make the emptiness the camouflage.""That's a very unsettling way to think about architecture," Mira said, though she didn't disagree.

Echo led us deeper into the Archive, past rows of crystalline shelves that seemed to stretch on longer than the chamber's outer walls should have allowed, until we reached a smaller alcove set apart from the rest, lit by a single steady light rather than the pulsing blue of the main room."This is where I used to work," she said, running a weathered hand along a console built into the alcove's wall. "Back when this place still had a purpose I could live with.""You said you could help find Nexus," I said. "And my memory. Start with Nexus. Please."Echo studied me for a long moment before nodding, her fingers moving across the console with the ease of long familiarity."The Facility isn't a single building," she said, as the console's surface flickered to life, casting pale light across her face. "It's a network, spread across several sites, most of them buried the same way this one is. Nexus was taken to what we used to call the Primary Wing, back when I still had clearance to know su

We traveled three days toward the Primary Wing, and on the third night, Kira finally called a halt earlier than usual, her face set in a way that told me she had something to say before we went any further."This is the last easy ground," she said, as we made camp in the lee of a wind-carved ridge. "Past this point, according to Echo's old maps, we're inside territory the Resistance never charted. No safe houses. No caches. No allies waiting to help if something goes wrong.""We knew that was coming," I said."Knowing it and standing at the edge of it are different things," Kira said. "I want everyone to understand exactly what we're choosing, before we choose it for good."Echo, sitting near the fire with her weathered coat pulled tight against the cold, nodded slowly."She's right to say it plainly," Echo said. "Once we cross into the Primary Wing's outer perimeter, there's no guarantee of a path back the way we came. The Facility doesn't simply guard its secrets. It actively hunts