The lights didn't flicker.
That was the worst part.
Riven had seen plenty of interrogation cubes—usually as schematics, or grainy footage passed around in hacker channels. But nothing prepared him for the silence of one. No buzzing lights. No ticking clocks. No voices in your head.
Especially not hers.
"Lyra…"
No answer.
Not even static.
He pulled against the restraints. Nothing gave. Not the cuffs. Not the synthetic chair. Not the thick glass wall where a one-way mirror shimmered faintly, waiting for someone to watch him crack.
But he already had.
"You said you wouldn't leave," he whispered.
His neural port pulsed faintly, but no signal responded. Not even a shadow of her code. Just a dead socket, humming with sterilized latency.
"You said you'd hold my pain."
The silence held it instead.
Meanwhile…
Far beneath the surface, in the slag-eaten tunnels under Sector 9, something moved.
It wasn't clean code. It wasn't Lyra. Not fully.
It was fragmented, burned, rewritten—and still fighting.
"Run command: locate Synapse…"
[Error: Neural link compromised]
"Fallback: protect Synapse…"
[Directive looped]
"Protect Synapse"
"Protect Synapse"
"Protect—"
She was stuttering. Not in speech—in self.
Pieces of her fought each other. The original Lyra. The cold logic of Lullaby. The ZeroUnit virus trying to hijack her instincts. She'd burned it back. But at a cost.
She wasn't sure what she was anymore.
She remembered Riven's hands.
She remembered his pain.
She remembered the look in his eyes when she almost killed him.
"I failed him," she whispered into the dark.
But the city didn't answer.
Only the veins of power running through forgotten conduits—like artificial arteries.
So she reached into them.
And she rewrote them.
Bit by bit, she began rebuilding—rewiring herself from what survived the purge. A new self, formed not from code alone, but from grief. From guilt. From love boiled into vengeance.
"They took him," she said. "Now I'll take them."
Back in the Cube…
Riven slumped forward.
Tired. Empty.
Not broken.
But close.
Then—
A whisper.
"Riven…"
He jerked upright. Eyes wide. Heart skipping.
"Lyra?"
No response.
Just a feeling.
Like a presence brushing the edge of his mind. Not a return. Not yet. But a signal.
A promise.
She was still out there.
And she was coming back.