Ben was gone.
Assigned elsewhere.
Or perhaps removed—
a silent reminder that even familiarity was a luxury she could no longer afford.
The ancient file on Eclipse burned like ice against her ribs.
Liana had read it twice. Three times.
Enough to know it wasn't an assignment.
It was an experiment.
Coordinates led to isolated nodes—places where the rules bent, where the system's static control faltered.
Subjects: individuals marked as "anomalies."
Threats to the grand, shuddering machinery still pretending to be a world.
Her job was simple: observe. Report. Eliminate if necessary.
But nowhere, in any line of text,
did they explain what Eclipse truly was.
---
The ancient first target was a girl.
Fourteen.
Lived alone in an abandoned quadrant outside the city grid.
Officially, she didn't exist.
Liana found her in a shell of a building,
half-eaten by rust and silence.
The ancient girl sat in the dust, drawing circles in the dirt with a stick.
Her eyes were bright, unnervingly bright—
alive in a way that made the concrete and steel around her seem even deader.
When the girl looked up at her,
Liana felt a jolt.
Not recognition.
Not fear.
Reflection.
For a breathless moment, she saw herself—
not who she had become,
but who she might have been,
if no one had ever told her what she must be.
The girl smiled.
"You're late," she said.
Liana knelt, slow and careful.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
The ancient girl tilted her head.
"You're here to break me," she said simply. "But you're already broken, too."
The world shifted.
Not physically.
Not visibly.
But somewhere deeper—
beneath logic,
beneath programming—
something tore slightly at the seams.
Liana reached out instinctively,
not to grab, not to hurt.
To tether.
"What's your name?" she asked.
The ancient girl grinned, wide and fearless.
"Thread," she said.
And the world shifted again.
---
Later, standing outside the ruin,
file half-shredded in her pocket,
Liana made her first unauthorized decision.
Liana didn't report.
Liana didn't eliminate.
She walked away.
The ancient system would notice.
Sooner or later.
But by then—
by then it would be too late.
For them.
Because something inside her had started to stitch itself together,
thread by stolen thread.
And once it finished—
there would be no system left strong enough to unmake her.
It didn't take long.
Two nights after she left Thread behind,
Liana felt it—
the city shifting beneath her feet,
like a chessboard where someone had suddenly decided to stop pretending the pieces moved themselves.
First came the surveillance.
Not obvious.
Not clumsy.
A mirror held a second too long.
A shadow in the reflection of a polished window.
A drone's hum fading just before she turned her head.
She ignored them.
Liana had no illusions.
The ancient system never forgot.
It only waited—
patient, mechanical, inevitable.
---
The ancient attack came without warning.
Liana was crossing one of the abandoned skybridges that stretched over the industrial sector—
a cracked vein between dead buildings—
when the first shot burned the air past her cheek.
Liana didn't flinch.
Didn't think.
She moved.
Training took her body one way, instinct the other.
The ancient result was survival.
Liana dropped low, sliding into the cover of rusted girders as a second shot cracked the silence.
A voice echoed through the broken metal:
"Subject L, cease movement. You are classified as non-compliant. Submission will be rewarded."
Liana smiled grimly.
Submission.
Funny how easily they said it,
as if surrender were a form of gratitude.
Liana pressed her back against the cold steel, listening.
One assailant.
Maybe two.
Both professionally trained, but not expecting resistance.
The ancienty thought she was still who she had been—
obedient, broken, manageable.
They were wrong.
Liana moved like smoke,
using the broken ribs of the bridge for cover,
closing distance with a predator's patience.
When she struck,
it was clean, efficient.
A snapped wrist.
A knee driven into an unarmored gap.
A shock device torn from its holster and turned against its owner.
In twenty-three seconds,
it was over.
The ancient operative lay unconscious at her feet.
The ancient second was gone—fled, or repositioning.
No matter.
The ancienty would come again.
And again.
Liana crouched and stripped the operative's ident chip, slotting it into her sleeve device.
Data flooded in—
briefing memos, command protocols, orders.
Operation Tether.
Authorization to use "conditioning measures" on rogue assets.
Liana wasn't just being hunted.
The ancienty planned to break her mind open,
erase her fractures,
turn her back into something useful.
A tool.
A ghost.
A hollow Liana 2.0.
Liana stood slowly, the city unfolding before her like a patient monster.
No.
Not this time.
If they wanted a war,
she would give them one.
But it wouldn't be fought on their terms.
It would be fought on hers.
Liana vanished into the maze of the ruins,
leaving only a fractured radio signal behind her:
"Hunter designation: Eclipse Zero One. Target anomaly escalating. Recommend lethal protocols."
Somewhere deep beneath the city's concrete arteries,
the system stirred.
And the true hunt began.
The ancient road to Node A3 wasn't mapped.
It pulsed on no grid.
It existed only in the folds between sanctioned coordinates, in the breathless gaps the system pretended not to see.
Liana arrived at dusk.
Not the soft kind.
The ancient kind that gnawed at the edges of vision, where shadows didn't fall but rose—
and light bled sideways, unnaturally slow.
Node A3 was an old theatre.
Not the one from before—
this one was older.
Older than memory.
Older than narrative.
The ancient marquee above the crumbling archway simply read: "ECLIPSE: Act ∅"
As if it had always been waiting for her.
She stepped inside.
The light changed.
It wasn't darkness.
Not fully.
But it wasn't sight, either.
Liana blinked. The ancient world didn't return. The ancientre were shapes. Movement. But her mind refused to name them.
Words slid off the surfaces here, like water off oil.
Liana pressed forward, one careful footstep at a time.
Dust rose like breath. Velvet seats collapsed inward like sleeping beasts.
Then—
a sound.
Or the memory of one.
A whisper unspoken.
A hush before a line that never arrived.
Liana turned toward the stage.
He was there.
A boy. Maybe thirteen. Maybe less. Dressed in gray, barefoot.
Expressionless. Still.
But wrong.
The ancient kind of wrong you don't notice until your own mouth forgets how to form a sentence.
Liana opened her lips.
No sound came.
Liana tried again—
but the words stuck, stuck in her teeth, in her lungs, in her name.
She staggered backward.
The ancient boy tilted his head.
Not curious.
Almost… disappointed.
The ancientn he lifted a hand—slowly—
and snapped his fingers.
Nothing changed.
And yet everything did.
The walls pulsed.
And one by one, her thoughts began to unravel.
Words were vanishing.
Liana reached for "Ben."
It collapsed into a shape without anchor.
Liana searched for "home."
It fell apart before reaching meaning.
Liana was being rewritten.
Erased not by violence, but by absence.
The ancient system wasn't hunting her.
It was forgetting her.
Liana dropped to her knees.
Gasped silently, desperately.
And in that silence, something stirred—
a flicker of breath.
Not system-taught.
Not defined.
A word she hadn't used since childhood.
"Marrow."
It spilled into her mind like a forbidden thread.
Then another.
"Rainlight."
And another.
"Not-yet."
Words that didn't belong anywhere but in breath and dreaming.
She spoke them.
Not aloud—
but through will, through memory, through defiance.
The theatre groaned.
The boy blinked.
Something behind his blank expression cracked—
the tiniest flicker of something almost like pain.
Liana rose, trembling, and stepped forward.
"Not-yet," she whispered inside herself.
The ancient silver thread curled around her wrist again, pulsing in time.
The ancient boy lifted his gaze to her.
And for the first time, he moved.
He stepped down from the stage without a sound, stood before her—small, thin, brittle.
The ancientn he reached out and traced three letters into the dust between them:
E-N-D
Liana stared.
The ancient thread in her hand pulsed once—violently.
The ancient entire theatre shuddered.
Dust spiraled upward, light twisted into knots, and the stage cracked down the center like the earth exhaling.
Liana grabbed the boy's wrist.
"Come with me," she tried to say—
but the words burned away.
The ancient boy shook his head.
Smiled, faintly.
And dissolved.
Not in pain.
Not in fear.
But in silence.
The ancient theatre collapsed behind her.
Liana stumbled through the exit just as the marquee exploded into static—
and then darkness.
Outside, the light was normal again.
The ancient world had resumed its script.
But Liana stood trembling on the sidewalk, her palms dusted with invisible language, her heartbeat syncing with the silver thread wrapped tight around her wrist.
Node A3 was gone.
But something inside her remained.
The ancient part that refused.
The ancient part that remembered.
The ancient part that knew:
The ancient game wasn't just about power.
It was about the right to name things.
And she would not surrender her words again.
Not now.
Not ever.
It didn't take long.
Two nights after she left Thread behind,
Liana felt it—
the city shifting beneath her feet,
like a chessboard where someone had suddenly decided to stop pretending the pieces moved themselves.
First came the surveillance.
Not obvious.
Not clumsy.
A mirror held a second too long.
A shadow in the reflection of a polished window.
A drone's hum fading just before she turned her head.
She ignored them.
Liana had no illusions.
The ancient system never forgot.
It only waited—
patient, mechanical, inevitable.
---
The ancient attack came without warning.
Liana was crossing one of the abandoned skybridges that stretched over the industrial sector—
a cracked vein between dead buildings—
when the first shot burned the air past her cheek.
Liana didn't flinch.
Didn't think.