The light in the control chamber wasn’t light at all—it was a diluted, trembling silver, the kind that felt like it had traveled a thousand years through cold space just to find them. It touched nothing warmly. The walls wore it like frost. Even Savannah’s skin seemed to repel it, leaving her face half-shadowed, her hands pale and still in her lap as if they had been carved from the same steel that lined the floor.Julian stood across from her, his profile half-consumed by darkness, the blade-edge of his jaw catching only the faintest scraps of illumination. The effect made him look not entirely real—less a man than a negative space the light refused to inhabit.“You need to understand something,” he said. His voice didn’t rise, but it carried, a low frequency that seemed to vibrate inside the bones of the room. “This was never about choice. Not yours. Not Colton’s. Not mine.”Savannah’s lips parted, but the words stayed buried somewhere between her lungs and her teeth. The events of
The hallway seemed longer than it should have been. Savannah knew this stretch of the penthouse well—its champagne-colored marble, the gilt-framed mirrors, the tall windows that looked down upon the dark city—but tonight, the proportions felt wrong.Her heels struck the floor in a measured rhythm.Click. Click. Click.Yet with every few steps, the sound doubled, as though someone else followed behind her, just out of sight.She stopped once, glanced over her shoulder. Empty.But the mirrors told a different story—her reflection was already mid-step, one pace ahead, as if it had not paused when she did.A faint metallic taste lingered on her tongue, though she couldn’t remember eating anything. The air was warmer here than in the rest of the penthouse, scented faintly of magnolia blossoms. Not fresh flowers—no, this was the thick, honeyed aroma of blooms that had been shut away too long, their sweetness turning toward decay.She thought of Magnolia.And the memory did not feel like a m
The silence between them was not silence at all—it was a pressurized chamber, humming faintly, filled with the low throb of something unspoken. The kitchen light, a pale yellow pendant over the island, illuminated Savannah’s trembling hands as she stood across from her.“You don’t get to tell me what’s real,” Savannah whispered, her voice so low it was almost lost beneath the ticking of the old wall clock.Mira-Eve—if that was even her—only stared. The faintest smile tugged at the corner of her mouth, the kind that wasn’t joy but possession.And then it happened. Savannah’s hand moved before her mind caught up, an arc of motion that cracked against the side of Mira-Eve’s face. The sound was sharp, like porcelain fracturing.For a moment neither of them breathed.Savannah’s chest rose and fell, shallow and quick, the room tilting under her. Then the dam inside her burst. She covered her mouth with both hands as sobs tore their way out—ugly, uncontrolled, the kind that seemed to come fr
The laboratory’s light was dim—more shadow than illumination—casting jagged ribbons across the floor where the blinds had been drawn halfway, as if the sun outside didn’t dare enter all the way. Screens hovered in a half-sleep state, their green cursors blinking like tired eyes struggling to stay awake.The air felt over-filtered, too clean, carrying a faint antiseptic tang that clung to the back of the throat.Delaney stood at the far end of the console, her fingertips resting against the glass surface—not in idle thought, but as if she were feeling for the faintest sign of life. She kept her gaze fixed on the sleeping data lines scrolling across the screen.“We can’t keep patching her,” she said, her tone a controlled flatness that made the words feel heavier than they were. “The fractures are too deep. If we rebuild E0 from the ground up—reboot it—we can stabilize everything. We use Echo’s neural lattice to reconstruct the original architecture.”She didn’t turn toward Rhett. Her v
The hum in the walls was almost human.It wasn’t the mechanical drone of a server farm, nor the metallic shiver of cooling vents that she’d grown used to in Echo’s facilities. This sound was warmer—alive, the way a pulse can be felt through skin if you press your ear against someone’s chest. Savannah had the irrational sense that if she leaned in toward the wall, she would hear it breathing.The room had no windows, no vents, no visible seams where light could bleed in from the outside world. Instead, its boundaries were made of smooth, black panels that drank in the shadows but fractured every reflected shape into splintered, jagged masks. Savannah caught sight of her own face in one of them, distorted into a dozen angular pieces—none of which looked like her.She stood in the exact center of the room, a lone point on an unmarked map. Her breath left faint ghosts on the surface of the polished glass table before her.The ledger lay there.It wasn’t a device, not a file, not anything
The hum in the walls was almost human.It wasn’t the mechanical drone of a server farm, nor the metallic shiver of cooling vents that she’d grown used to in Echo’s facilities. This sound was warmer—alive, the way a pulse can be felt through skin if you press your ear against someone’s chest. Savannah had the irrational sense that if she leaned in toward the wall, she would hear it breathing.The room had no windows, no vents, no visible seams where light could bleed in from the outside world. Instead, its boundaries were made of smooth, black panels that drank in the shadows but fractured every reflected shape into splintered, jagged masks. Savannah caught sight of her own face in one of them, distorted into a dozen angular pieces—none of which looked like her.She stood in the exact center of the room, a lone point on an unmarked map. Her breath left faint ghosts on the surface of the polished glass table before her.The ledger lay there.It wasn’t a device, not a file, not anything