Selene moved like someone who didn't trust stillness.
It had been nearly thirty hours since Kael and Rin stepped through the Mirror, and the base had grown too quiet. Not just in sound—but in movement, energy, patterns. Something had changed in the spirit currents beneath the clinic, a tension that had no origin but still bled through the walls like cold air from a cracked window.
Zeke noticed it too. He'd stopped humming while he worked. Stopped muttering lines of code under his breath. Instead, he stared at the central monitor as if waiting for it to lie to him.
"Rin's locator just went dark," he said finally, turning to Selene without blinking. "Either the tracer burned out or someone torched the relay net."
Selene didn't react right away. She was watching the map—every inch of Portland's underground leyline traffic mapped in bioluminescent threads across a digital overlay. The threads were thinning. Starving.
"What about Kael's rig?" she asked.
Zeke keyed in a different channel. The console crackled, hesitated, then blinked red.
"Offline. Clean cut. Like the network forgot he existed."
"Memory interference?"
"Maybe. But that kind of wipe leaves trace echoes. This one's... silent."
She crossed the room to his station and tapped the line of code tracing the last signal burst. "That location. What's there?"
Zeke hesitated. "Officially? Nothing. Unofficially? A buried comm tower from the Sovereign Era. Scrapped by EchoCorp six years ago."
She straightened. "EchoCorp?"
He gave a one-shouldered shrug. "Yeah. Abandoned project. Too dangerous to repurpose, too expensive to burn."
Selene stared at the dot on the map.
The name EchoCorp always made her teeth ache. Too many ghosts tied to that name. Too many lies wrapped in half-truths and corporate mandates dressed as salvation.
"We're going," she said.
Zeke blinked. "Right now?"
Selene was already grabbing her coat. "Suit up."
----------------
They moved fast and quiet, off-grid and untraceable. Zeke activated three spirit cloaks and wiped the clinic's exit log with a Level 4 corruption key. No one would know they left.
The ride through the outer sectors was silent, except for the low rumble of distant thunder. Rain had started again—heavier this time—rattling against the windshield like a warning.
Selene drove like she always did—fast enough to be aggressive, smooth enough to be deliberate.
Zeke checked the maps twice. "Tower's still offline. We're not getting a ping even when we pass directly over the foundation coordinates."
"Means someone wants it forgotten."
"Or someone never stopped using it."
They parked half a kilometer out and hiked the rest. The terrain had warped over the years—trees twisting in unnatural spirals, roots exposed and pulsing faintly with spirit decay. Even the air here tasted wrong, like rust on old wires and ozone scraped from shattered ley conduits.
Zeke slowed as they approached the ruin. The remains of the comm tower jutted from the ground like broken teeth—twisted metal, shattered concrete, and fragments of what might once have been data pylons. But the central stairwell was intact.
Barely.
Selene descended without hesitation, pistol holstered at her side, spirit-thread knife in her hand. Zeke followed reluctantly, eyes flicking across every surface, logging residual energy and background hums.
The lower levels were too clean.
No dust.
No rot.
No mold.
Someone had been here recently.
Selene stopped at the threshold of the main chamber.
It was sealed.
A perfect hexagonal door of dark alloy, humming faintly with containment glyphs.
Zeke stepped up, running his scanner over the surface. His eyebrows rose.
"This... this isn't just a door," he whispered. "It's a vault."
"What's inside?"
Zeke glanced at her. "Nothing that wants to be remembered."
----------------
He bypassed the outer locks in under a minute. The inner glyphs took longer—some of them weren't even standard Sovereign dialects. They were personal.
Someone had keyed this vault to Azuran's spiritual wavelength.
Finally, with a hiss of pressure and an exhale of static, the door opened.
And the room behind it breathed.
Selene stepped in slowly.
It wasn't large. Maybe thirty feet across. Lined with containment columns and projection conduits, all inert. But the center of the room held something else entirely.
A cryo-chamber.
Old.
Pre-Fade.
And inside it—floating in a field of dim light—was a figure.
A man.
Or... what was left of one.
His body was broken in a hundred small ways. Ribs crushed. One arm missing. Half his face torn open and sealed with crude stabilizer mesh. But the flame mark across his chest still glowed faintly beneath the cracks in his skin.
Zeke stepped forward, stunned. "That... that's him."
"No," Selene said, voice flat. "That's a copy."
Zeke frowned. "What are you saying?"
Selene approached the chamber, staring through the glass. "Kael isn't just a reincarnation."
She touched the surface. It pulsed.
"He's a rebuild."
Zeke went pale. "But that would mean—"
"Someone recovered the original Sovereign's body." She turned, eyes hard. "And used it to seed the next one."
Zeke looked like he was going to be sick. "But... that's tech nobody even has anymore. You'd need a spirit architect, a Sovereign-class resurrection array, and—and a soul anchor that can trick the cycle."
Selene nodded. "Which means EchoCorp has access to systems we thought were erased."
They stared at the figure for a long moment.
Then the cryo-chamber twitched.
Just once.
Zeke stepped back. "Uh. It's... still active."
Selene raised her weapon. "It shouldn't be."
A voice echoed through the chamber. Mechanical. Faint. Fragmented.
"...mirror breached… gate compromised… reset… required…"
Zeke's eyes widened. "It's transmitting."
"To where?" Selene asked.
The lights above them began to flicker.
Glyphs along the walls flared to life.
Zeke didn't answer.
He was already running diagnostics as fast as his fingers could move.
"Selene," he said, voice low. "There's a second vault."
She spun toward him. "Where?"
Zeke swallowed. "Directly under this one."
A tremor shook the room.
And something knocked from below.
Three times.
Deliberate.
Measured.
Selene holstered her weapon. "We need to leave."
"But we just—"
She turned, eyes cold and sharp. "Now."
----------------
They barely made it out before the vault collapsed behind them.
The explosion wasn't fire or force.
It was memory.
Everything behind them folded in on itself, devouring its own existence. The logs on Zeke's scanner dissolved line by line. Even the signal Kael had left on his tracer rig vanished from their archive as they ran.
By the time they reached the vehicle, the tower was gone.
As if it had never been there.
Zeke climbed into the passenger seat, pale and shaking. "That's not possible. That was a Class-Seven anchor. You can't just... delete that."
Selene started the engine. "Someone can."
They didn't speak for a while.
Then, quietly, Zeke asked, "So what do we tell him when he comes back?"
Selene stared out through the windshield as the rain blurred the world beyond into grey smears and electric haze.
"Nothing," she said. "Not yet."
Zeke blinked. "Why not?"
"Because Kael's walking through someone else's plan." Her hands tightened on the wheel. "And until we know what's at the end of it, we don't change the tempo."
Zeke leaned back and closed his eyes.
Selene drove in silence.
But the sound of the knock still echoed behind her ears.
Three taps.
The signal of something waking.
----------------
Far away, deep beneath layers of encryption and forgotten sanctums, a figure sat alone in a room filled with empty chairs and fading sigils.
She watched as her monitor went dark.
The feed had been burned.
As expected.
She smiled.
"Let the Sovereign run," she whispered. "Let him remember."
A second voice spoke from the dark.
"And when he does?"
Her eyes gleamed.
"We show him how much of his life... was never his to begin with."