Glass City

Chapter 6

The night air was unusually still as Lyra crouched beneath the decaying remnants of a subway terminal. Her breath came shallow, the pulse at her throat fluttering like a trapped signal. A flickering overhead light revealed slanted graffiti on the crumbling walls: Truth isn’t erased. Just buried. Fitting. She traced the faded words with her eyes but didn’t stop. Every second mattered now.

Elias had rerouted them through the old commuter network, a relic from before the Index had converted it into a sensory grid. The rails no longer carried trains—only data. Memory pulses. Surveillance threads. Ghosts.

She turned back. Kael followed her, silent but tense, the corners of his mouth drawn into a frown that never left him. She didn’t need his words to feel the weight of his distrust. It pressed against her like smoke. She understood it. Even if she didn’t remember betraying him, she’d betrayed someone. Maybe everyone.

“This way,” Elias’s voice buzzed through the comm-link in her ear. “South tunnel junction. You’re close to a vault node.” He sounded calm, but beneath it, there was a nervous edge he didn’t bother hiding anymore.

Lyra approached the hatch embedded in the tunnel wall. The scanner blinked red. “You sure this one isn’t still connected to Index sensors?”

“Eighty percent.” Pause. “Seventy-five.”

Kael scoffed behind her. “I liked it better when you lied.”

“I’ve grown fond of reality,” Elias replied.

She placed her palm on the access plate. A brief sting as the interface read her pulse, then—click. The hatch unsealed with a whisper of escaping pressure. Lyra stepped into the narrow chamber first.

The room beyond was a neural vault.

Or what remained of one.

Glass tubes lined the walls—cracked, some empty, some filled with decayed neural cores swimming in blue suspension gel. Above her, the ceiling was scorched. A memory extraction had gone wrong here once. Violently.

“This is one of the early safe nodes,” Kael murmured. “We used it when the Refractors started targeting rebel sympathizers. Before the Purge.”

Lyra paused in front of a console half-buried in debris. She brushed the dust off the surface. The interface shimmered to life, dim and reluctant. Her fingers hovered over the glyphs. They were familiar in a way that made her stomach twist.

“Elias, I need a decryption link.”

“Sending now. Careful—some of those cores are deep-layered. If you jack in raw, you could end up pulling fragments directly into your cognitive stream.”

She didn’t flinch. “I’m counting on it.”

She sat down, attached the neural thread to the base of her skull, and closed her eyes. The world dropped away.

⸻

Lyra fell.

Not physically, not in body—but in the half-light between mind and machine, she plummeted into a sea of fractured color and noise. Data packets whipped past like shrapnel. She gritted her teeth, forcing her consciousness to anchor as the neural core spun open.

And then—stillness.

She stood in a room she knew instantly, though the name of it sat on the edge of thought. Stark white walls. A wide glass window that once overlooked the old rebel compound. A storm outside, lashing the glass in silvery arcs.

She was in Command Delta.

A memory. Not someone else’s. Hers.

The door burst open. Kael entered, younger but already hardened. His jaw was bloody, one arm cradled as if recently broken. “They’re in the west corridor,” he said. “We’ve got five minutes before Virex sends in the Refractors.”

Lyra—her past self—was calm. Standing by the data terminal, she inserted a thin black drive into the console. The screen lit up with neural maps—familiar now. Oblivion Protocol, in early formation. Still incomplete.

“They’ve almost cracked my engram,” she said. “I can’t let them get this.”

“You don’t have to do this—”

“Kael,” she said softly, urgently, “I have to. If I don’t, the Index will get the weapon. They’ll erase every soul between here and Sector Eight. Entire bloodlines. Children.”

“I can carry it—”

“No.” Her voice shook then, barely. “They won’t come for you like they come for me. I’m the architect. They need me alive.”

Lyra’s chest twisted. She was watching herself make the decision. The ultimate erasure. Not an accident. Not sabotage. A choice.

“You won’t remember me,” Kael said. “Not even this. Not us.”

“I know.”

“I’ll hate you.”

“I know.”

And then he kissed her—not out of desperation, but out of mourning. A parting sealed in silence.

Present-day Lyra staggered back, heart hammering.

She ripped the neural thread from her spine and gasped as the real world slammed back into her senses. Kael was standing in front of her, arms crossed, concern flickering behind his storm-gray eyes.

“What did you see?” he asked.

Lyra’s voice was hollow.

“I saw the day I erased myself.”

⸻

No Going Back

Kael didn’t speak right away. He just looked at her—really looked at her—and Lyra knew he’d seen the shift. The fragility in her limbs, the tremor she couldn’t quite suppress. The storm of recognition still surging behind her eyes.

“You knew,” she said softly. “About the memory. About what I did.”

He nodded once. “I found the vault logs a year after you vanished. Elias confirmed it. We tried to recover you, but the Index flagged your erasure as treason. You were a ghost with a bounty. We had to let you go.”

She swallowed. The weight of the truth bore down like gravity. “I thought someone stole my past. That I was a victim.”

“You were,” Kael said quietly. “You just volunteered.”

Elias’s voice cut through the silence, buzzed and sharp over the comms. “Lyra. I intercepted a sublayer signal burst from the vault—someone knows you accessed it. You have ten minutes before this location is no longer safe.”

Lyra turned back to the terminal. Her fingers trembled over the interface. “The rest of the protocol—can you extract it?”

“Already done,” Elias said. “But there’s more. The vault wasn’t just storing memories. It was masking a live access line to something deeper. I think… I think it’s the original core housing Oblivion’s neural map.”

Kael frowned. “I thought the Index had it under full lockdown.”

“They do. But they’ve cloned it. The original’s still buried. And based on these pings… it’s under the old central cathedral.”

Lyra’s breath caught. “Glass Cathedral.”

The place where the city got its name. A forbidden zone now—sacred, quarantined, off-limits even to Enforcers. Rumor said it was cursed. She now knew better.

“It’s not cursed,” she whispered. “It’s shielded. And it’s hiding the only map that can break Oblivion.”

Kael’s eyes narrowed. “Then that’s where we go.”

“But it won’t be enough,” Lyra said. “We need more than the map. We need someone who can read it—and survive the feedback.”

Kael tilted his head. “Someone like you?”

Lyra looked up at him. “No. Not like me.”

She stared at her own reflection in the shattered panel of the vault door—wide eyes, streaked with fear and understanding. The mirror didn’t lie.

“Only me.”

And in that moment, with the past stitched into her bones and the future closing in fast, Lyra stopped being a fugitive.

She became a weapon.