Glass City

Chapter 7

Lyra had never seen the Glass Cathedral up close—only in flickers of stolen memory or archived footage buried deep in rebel data nodes. From the outside, it was beautiful. Shimmering spires of fractured crystal stretched into the gray sky like frozen lightning, each surface catching slivers of sunlight and throwing them across the ruined city like shards of stars. But beneath its gleam, it pulsed with something older. Something that watched.

They approached under the cover of the morning haze, climbing over collapsed overpasses and twisted steel bridges. The old transportation grids had long since fallen into disuse. The silence around the cathedral wasn’t natural—it was enforced. No birds. No machines. Even the wind moved more slowly here.

Elias’s voice came through the comm again. “You’re two hundred meters from the outer shield. Keep your resonance levels low. The perimeter sensors don’t track heat—they track intent.”

Kael arched an eyebrow. “Intent?”

“They’re psychometric barriers,” Elias explained. “Built off neural-mirroring tech—an early prototype of Refractor design. It reads emotional spikes, threat potential. Lyra, you need to stay calm.”

Lyra swallowed hard. “No problem,” she lied.

She took the lead, stepping onto the cracked marble causeway that led to the main entry arch. The instant her boot touched the old stone, something shifted in the air—like a held breath tightening.

Kael came beside her. “If it scans intent, wouldn’t it be safer for me to lead?”

“No,” she said, eyes locked on the spire. “This place was built to stop anyone but me.”

He didn’t argue. He just walked beside her, hands loose at his sides, ready but not aggressive. His presence was a tether—quiet, steady.

They passed beneath the first arch.

Lyra braced for pain. For memory loss. For the world to come undone again.

But nothing happened.

Only the soft chime of permission. Like the cathedral recognized her.

Inside, the air was cooler. Electric with resonance. The walls glowed with blue light that didn’t seem to have a source. Every pane of glass around them shimmered faintly, as though remembering something.

And in the center of the cathedral stood the core.

A monolithic structure of glass and wire, shaped like a human spine—twisting up through the floor into the ceiling above. Light pulsed inside it. Dim. Erratic.

“The original neural map,” Lyra said under her breath.

Kael stepped forward. “Can you access it?”

Lyra approached the core slowly. Her fingers hovered above the base. Her memories stirred. Not just fragments—the blueprint. She knew what to do.

She placed her hand on the interface.

The cathedral came alive.

The lights flared, and the glass screamed—not from sound, but data. Images flooded her mind: cities wiped clean, children rewired, entire lineages vanishing from collective memory. The future of Glass City, should Oblivion activate fully.

And then—her own face. Projected across thousands of mirrored surfaces. The weapon’s architect. The last failsafe.

Lyra’s knees buckled, but she didn’t fall.

“I built this to destroy it,” she whispered.

⸻

The moment Lyra’s palm connected with the core, everything else vanished. Not just sound and space—but time, gravity, even breath. She wasn’t inside the cathedral anymore. She was inside the system.

The glass beneath her skin liquefied into threads of neural light, pulsing outward like veins. Memory code, encoded not in words or numbers but emotions. Fear. Resolve. Betrayal. Her betrayal.

A voice echoed inside the current. Her own—fractured, younger.

“Oblivion is a clean slate. But if you know where to look, you can write back over it.”

That was the sabotage she had embedded. A hidden echo. A backdoor, cloaked beneath the neural scaffolding of the weapon itself. Lyra hadn’t just erased herself to protect the blueprint—she’d rewritten its DNA with the key only she could trace.

And now, she had found it.

Behind her, Kael’s voice filtered in—distant, like through water.

“Lyra, your vitals are spiking. Talk to me.”

She couldn’t. Not yet. Not while the code surged through her.

A web of pathways bloomed around her, spectral and branching. At the center pulsed a shape—something not quite alive, not quite machine. The neural ghost of the Oblivion Protocol. Watching her. Adapting.

Lyra reached for the hidden node, the one marked with her encrypted signature: a symbol burned into her subconscious, a string of characters that formed the words NO FORGETTING.

The moment she touched it, the ghost shuddered.

Error pulses exploded across the neural lattice. The system tried to reject her. It surged back with counter-intrusion logic: memory shock, identity dissolution. Pain seared across her chest as if her consciousness were unraveling.

She gritted her teeth and held on.

“You’re not taking me again,” she growled. “You are me.”

A snap. Then silence.

The ghost broke apart.

And the core shivered.

Back in the physical world, the monolithic glass spine dimmed—and then refracted outward, revealing a hidden chamber beneath the cathedral floor. As if her activation had unlocked the next level.

Lyra staggered back, sweat on her skin, eyes wide. Kael caught her.

“You’re okay,” he said. It was less a question, more a demand wrapped in concern.

She nodded, barely. “I found the seed. The rewrite code.”

“You can stop Oblivion?”

“No,” she whispered. “I can overwrite it. But there’s a cost.”

Kael stared at her. “What cost?”

She looked down at her hands. They were trembling.

“If I push the overwrite through… I’ll be erased again. Permanently this time.”

Kael’s silence hit harder than any siren.

“But,” she added, breath ragged, “it’ll bring back everyone they took. Everyone they deleted. All the stolen minds. Every erased rebel. Every erased child.”

Kael stepped closer. “You don’t have to do this alone.”

She met his gaze. “I already did. Once.”

⸻

The stairs that spiraled beneath the cathedral were not made of glass.

They were old—stone and steel, industrial and raw, relics of a world before memory became currency. Lyra’s boots echoed on each step as she and Kael descended, the light from above fading until only the dim pulse of the neural core behind them offered any glow.

“Are you sure this is where the control vault is?” Kael asked, voice low.

“No,” Lyra said. “But the system responded to my presence. It unlocked this path. That means it still recognizes me as its architect.”

They reached the bottom.

A door waited. Ancient, circular, reinforced with rusting alloy and etched with markings Lyra barely remembered—sigils from the first resistance, symbols of identity and permanence. The opposite of what Oblivion stood for.

At the center of the door was a recessed hand panel.

Lyra stared at it, heart thudding. “This is it. Once I touch that, the system begins final convergence. I’ll have access to the overwrite protocol.”

Kael stepped in front of her. “Before you do this… you need to know something.”

She blinked. “What?”

“I lied to you,” he said, voice taut. “Back then. When I said we had five minutes before the Refractors came. We had time. I chose to push you to act. I believed in the cause, in what you were trying to do—but I also believed that sacrificing your identity would give us a fighting chance. So I let you erase yourself.”

The confession hit like cold water.

Lyra stared at him. “You manipulated me?”

“I followed the mission,” he said, jaw tight. “But I never stopped trying to bring you back.”

Silence stretched. Then, slowly, she stepped forward and placed her hand on the panel.

The door groaned open.

Beyond was a chamber of light and dark—walls covered in neural net arrays, old-world servers humming with long-buried memory. In the center: the overwrite terminal. A pod-like structure of wires and silver, shaped like a cradle.

Lyra moved toward it, breath catching in her throat.

“This is how I end it,” she said.

Kael grabbed her wrist. “Or change it. Let me take your place.”

“You can’t,” she said. “The code is locked to my neural print. If anyone else tries, it’ll collapse.”

He held her gaze. “Then I stay with you.”

Lyra nodded. “Okay.”

She stepped into the cradle.

The system lit up—recognizing its master. Final prompts flared to life, one after another.

OVERWRITE SEQUENCE READY.

WARNING: SUBJECT MEMORY CORE WILL BE TERMINALLY CONSUMED.

PROCEED?

Lyra looked once more at Kael, then closed her eyes.

“Proceed.”

The world lit up in white.