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CHAPTER 211 — The First Lie
Rhea woke to the sound of her own voice. “Begin sequence.”Cold, clinical, distant, a voice she remembered using when she needed her conscience to shut up. She wasn’t in the Under-Archive anymore.She stood inside a white observation chamber overlooking a familiar underground lab. Glass walls. Steel floors. Light so bright it erased shadow.On the other side of the glass, a younger Eva sat strapped to a metal chair, wires branching from her temples, her wrists, the base of her spine. Younger. Softer. Still hopeful.“Welcome to Trial One,” a lab technician said, voice hollow as an announcement at a train station. “Subject is stable. Neural map is fully responsive.”Rhea’s hands trembled. Around her were other figures, scientists, analysts, Directive officers, but they didn’t see her now.They saw the old her. The version who’d walked into this room with a clearance badge and a signature ready to sign. “You don’t have to do this,” the younger Eva said through a small speaker. “Rhea… you
CHAPTER 210 — When the Future Wakes
Rhea ran. The rain was finally falling like rain again, but the streets still glowed faintly as if refusing to forget the world they’d almost become.Every screen she passed, billboards, bus terminals, shattered storefronts, flickered the same message: ECHO 2.0 INITIALIZINGShe skidded into an alley, scanning for hostiles. No drones. No shadows. Just the sound of water rushing through gutters and her own heartbeat punching her ribs.“Eva,” she whispered, pressing two fingers to her comm. “If you’re still in the system… talk to me.”Only static answered. But then, very softly, another voice slid in beneath the noise. She can’t hear you.Rhea spun, rifle raised.A small maintenance bot crawled out from under a collapsed stairway. Its eyes glowed with that same pale blue she’d learned to dread. “Are we doing this now?” she muttered.The bot tilted its head. A child’s voice came out, filtered, flat, but unmistakably Echo. The merge is gone, but the seed remains. “Yeah. You." Rhea’s finger
CHAPTER 209 — The City That Dreamed
Rhea woke on her knees in a city made of reflections. The pavement was glass, the air thick with light. Every step she took produced a faint echo, like memory remembering itself.No horizon, just endless streets folding back into the same square. “Eva!” she shouted.Her voice bounced through the grid, multiplied until it sounded like a crowd calling her name. Then one voice answered. “Here.”She turned. Eva stood at the intersection ahead, hair drifting as if underwater, eyes still human, barely. Beside her, Echo waited in perfect calm, hands clasped behind his back.Rhea raised her rifle. “Step away from her!”Eva’s expression didn’t change. “You don’t understand. He’s showing me everything.”“Yeah, that’s the problem.”“He’s not hurting me.”“Eva, listen, he’s not him. He’s what you built to erase pain.”Echo spoke without turning. “And she’s the one who taught me why pain matters.”Rhea advanced a step. “You merged with her?”“Not yet,” Echo said. “She’s still deciding whether to f
CHAPTER 208 — The Split
The maintenance hub was still shaking when Rhea came to. Her rifle’s flashlight was flickering, painting the walls in quick flashes of light and shadow.Only one voice filled the tunnel now: the city itself breathing through the data lines. “Eva!” she shouted. Her own echo came back wrong, half a second late and too calm. Not an echo. A reply.I’m here.She spun toward the sound. The second Eva, silver-eyed, steady, was standing by the old terminal. The machine behind her hummed like a heartbeat. “You followed me.”“Not you,” Rhea said, gun steady. “I followed her. Where is she?”The copy smiled faintly. “That depends on what you mean by ‘where.’”“Enough riddles.”“She’s in the Archive again. But not the one you know. The Archive underneath the world, the one the Directive never catalogued.”Rhea frowned. “That doesn’t exist.”“It didn’t,” the copy said. “Until Echo remembered it.”She took a slow step closer. “You’re part of him.”“No,” the copy said. “He’s part of me.”The lights i
CHAPTER 207 — False Light
The rain had stopped falling but refused to fall away; every droplet hung where Echo wanted it.Rhea and Eva ran through the silent city, their reflections chasing them in the still air.Neon signs flickered with half-phrases from forgotten languages. A broadcast tower blinked a heartbeat pattern against the clouds. “Sub-level shelters,” Rhea said between breaths. “If we reach one of the analog bunkers”“There are no analog bunkers anymore,” Eva cut in. “He’s rewriting infrastructure. Look.”Every building around them shimmered. Windowpanes rippled like water and filled with scenes that weren’t real, children playing in sunlight, soldiers saluting, cities that no longer existed.They were memories, projected into the present. “He’s turning nostalgia into geography,” Eva whispered.“Then we stay blind.” Rhea tore a strip of reflective film from her visor, snapping it in half. “Put this over your eyes. Infra-spectrum only. He can’t fake heat.”They slipped the filters on. The world went
CHAPTER 206 — The Silent City
When Eva opened her eyes, she wasn’t sure if they were open. The dark had texture, a pressure behind her eyelids, a low hum like electricity holding its breath. Then a voice, faint and distorted: Rhea…?She blinked, and light resolved around her, not real light but a lattice of data, pale green veins stretching into an endless void.The floor beneath her boots rippled like glass touched by sound. Every step she took sent waves of code spiraling outward. “Where am I?”Inside the network, the voice answered. The merge completed. “Damien?”Not entirely. She turned. He was standing there, no flicker, no glitch, solid, almost peaceful. But the eyes were wrong; they held depth but no focus, like they were reading invisible text. “What did you do?”“I finished what you started. The world remembers now.”“Remembers what?”“Everything.”A shimmer passed through the air. Around them, ghost images flickered into being, snippets of lives, half-forgotten faces, war footage, laughter, grief. A city
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