Three days east, the land turns black.
Not burnt. Not scorched. But… rewritten.
The earth itself shimmers with veins of corrupted code—strange fractal patterns crawling over stone and soil like a virus that never finished loading. The sky overhead flickers, like we're walking through a glitch in reality.
Ashen pauses often.
"This zone is unstable," he warns. "Residual Cycle architecture. Fractured memory nodes."
Translation: bad things happened here.
And they left scars.
Still, we press on.
The maps we found in the dome show a relay tower near the heart of this zone—a last-ditch signal point used by old resistance networks during the early collapse. If anything remains of the world's memory, it might be stored there.
Or buried.
By midday, we see it.
The tower juts out of the earth like a broken tooth—leaning, half-collapsed, cables spilling like intestines. But the top still blinks faintly. Red. Rhythmic. Like a heartbeat.
"There's still power," Kara says, surprised.
"Something's broadcasting," Navi adds, raising his scanner.
And then:
The signal hits us.
Sharp. Piercing. Not sound, but presence—a wave of static emotion that crashes through the air like a scream with no mouth. Liora falls to one knee, clutching her head. Kara staggers. Even Ashen flickers with a surge of blue static.
Only I stay standing.
But I feel it. Like something just reached into my mind and whispered:
Remember me.
We climb the tower slowly, muscles burning, the air thicker with each level.
At the top, we find the source.
A console. Still running.
And a voice.
Female. Glitched. Looping over and over from a damaged holopad:
> "Initiating fallback… encryption key active… request broadcast… please, someone respond…"
The voice stutters. Then again:
> "…Sector Heartfall lost… Liora, if you hear this…"
Liora jerks toward the console like she's been shot.
"That's…"
She doesn't finish.
Her hands tremble as she reaches for the controls.
Ashen steps forward. "This voice carries quantum resonance. It knows you."
Kara glances between us. "Is it a trap?"
"Or a call for help," I offer.
The console flickers. Then a name appears on the cracked screen:
VIREN.
Liora's voice is a whisper. "He was my partner. Before the Cycle took him."
Navi frowns. "But that was years ago. He should be…"
"Gone," she finishes.
Silence falls.
Until the console pulses again.
A final message—just a single string of coordinates. East. Further than any map dares go.
Into the Unreconciled Zone.
Ashen tilts his head.
"That sector is forbidden. Even to us."
"Then that's where we go," I say.
Because I see it now.
The Cycle may be broken, but it left ghosts behind.
And some of them still remember our names.
End of Chapter 18