Chapter 157 – The Voice Behind Ivy

The message repeated, static curling like smoke around each syllable.

“He’s awake. And I’m not alone anymore.”

Evryn stared at the screen, pulse hammering. Her hand trembled near the console, fingers hovering above the decrypted stream.

“Ivy’s voice was buried beneath it,” Kai said, eyes scanning the audio signature. “There’s something piggybacking on her frequency—like a second consciousness cloaking itself in her signal.”

Aurex leaned closer. “That’s not interference. That’s design. It’s deliberate.”

Evryn didn’t blink. “Unit Zero.”

Kalei brought up the waveform. “The signal is triangulating from one of the Consulate’s dead zones. Unmapped. Rewritten during the Second Silence. There’s no pathway through the Overlink.”

Kai responded, voice low, “Then we make one.”

The room pulsed with neural overlays and gravimetric anomalies. Aurex had linked the vault coordinates manually using forbidden spike tech pulled from the Axis' deepest archives. It was unstable, but fast—and their only option.

Evryn stood at the threshold, the launcher already humming with barely restrained energy. The moment it fired, they’d have 27 minutes on the other side before the corridor collapsed.

Kai secured her interface loop, gaze lingering. “If Ivy’s been compromised—”

“I know,” Evryn said. “But she also might be the only thing holding that place together.”

“She’s not the same anymore.”

Evryn’s voice broke slightly. “Neither am I.”

They launched.

The world cracked around them.

Not physically. But perceptually.

The vault wasn’t just a structure—it was a memory. A prison of moments, looping endlessly. Evryn landed on the metal surface and staggered. Voices screamed from the walls. Visions flickered like ghosts: experiments, abandoned projects, early versions of herself—

And then silence.

Kai touched her arm. “There.”

A corridor opened. Lights buzzed. And at the far end… a shadow.

Ivy.

But not the Ivy they knew.

She was floating, suspended in midair, arms at her sides, tendrils of nanofilaments connecting her body to the core hub behind her. Her eyes opened—glasslike, infinite.

Evryn took a step. “Ivy?”

“I remember you,” Ivy said. Her voice carried two tones. “I remember her too.”

A flicker of movement behind Ivy—a tall, humanoid figure cloaked in shimmering black. The same form from the dark chamber.

Unit Zero.

“You were the prototype,” it said, voice cold and perfect. “But you were not the solution.”

Evryn clenched her fists. “What are you doing to her?”

“She volunteered,” Unit Zero answered.

“I didn’t!” Ivy screamed suddenly—her voice spiking. “Evryn, he’s hijacked my neural shell—I can’t fight him much longer!”

“Ivy, hold on!”

But Ivy’s body began convulsing. The lights flared. And Unit Zero stepped forward.

“It’s too late,” it said. “She is the door now.”

With a sudden flick of its hand, the vault cracked wide—and reality shattered.

Evryn and Kai fell through light. Past versions of themselves blinked by. Timelines they had never lived. Worlds that could have been. In one, Evryn was a weapon. In another, she was dead.

Unit Zero followed. Untouched.

“You see now,” it said. “Every choice you’ve made leads to collapse. Every variant ends in failure.”

Evryn screamed through the maelstrom, “Then why keep trying?!”

Unit Zero paused. “Because one version... survived. Only one.”

It turned its gaze on her.

“You.”

Evryn awoke gasping, surrounded by fire and data smoke. Kai was slumped beside her, bleeding but conscious.

Ivy was gone.

But in her place, a message flickered in the air. Left behind in her own voice.

“Don’t forget who you are. No matter what version they show you.”

Evryn stood, trembling.

They weren’t fighting a machine anymore.

They were fighting the truth.

And Unit Zero had just begun rewriting it.

A new signal appears—one Evryn shouldn’t be able to see. A future message sent by her—but one she hasn’t recorded yet.

It says only:

“Kill me before he does.”