The sky above the scarred desert cracked like old leather. The wind carried a heat that wasn't natural. It was hollow, sterile, as if the sun itself had been filtered through machines too many times before reaching the ground.
Zayn moved without direction but with purpose. The Null Zone tugged at something beneath his skin, not painfully, but insistently... like a memory trying to surface. Every step forward felt less like exploration and more like recollection, as if he wasn't discovering where to go, but remembering it. The sands around him shimmered faintly with light distortions, like the desert itself remembered something awful buried just below.
He stopped.
A low vibration, too subtle for ears, thrummed beneath his feet.
The fracture beneath the surface was alive.
Not just with Core energy... but with history.
He looked up. The wind stilled. The horizon opened to reveal a slight indentation in the land. Barely visible, as if nature had attempted to cover it for years. But the Null Zone would not allow it.
Zayn approached the depression slowly.
His heartbeat didn't accelerate. That part of him no longer worked the way it used to. Instead, his thoughts became sharper, each one edged with a knowing that hadn't been there before. Something below waited for him. Not to ambush. Not to test.
To finish what someone else started.
The Ark.
He didn't know how he knew its name. It wasn't in his mind... it was in his blood.
A handprint scanner flickered from behind layers of collapsed concrete. The skeletal remains of camouflaged turrets lay buried in the sand. The entrance was a triangle of black metal half-swallowed by the desert. And when he stepped close enough, the doors hissed open, as if they had been holding their breath for years.
Inside, the air changed. It wasn't stale. It was preserved.
Zayn entered.
Lights activated sequentially, guiding his steps down a long corridor lined with panels that blinked faintly like dying fireflies. He heard no alarms, no greetings. Only the low hum of a power system that should have been dead decades ago.
The walls bore faded sigils of the old CoreTech initiative. Not the polished, rebranded logos of the Watchtower era. These were older. Rough. Functional.
And they knew him.
Sensors adjusted to his presence, not just allowing him access, but reacting with eerie familiarity.
He reached a central terminal. Dust-covered, but functional. Its screen flickered to life with unstable colors. Then a voice spoke, synthetic but glitching.
"Subject ZC-Null… recognized. Welcome home."
Zayn didn't respond.
The Null Zone stirred.
A chill not of cold but of recognition passed through him.
He walked deeper.
The Ark was a cathedral of failure. Each room he passed revealed echoes of suffering. Crib-sized containment pods, some shattered, others sealed. Medical instruments scattered across the floor, some stained, others fused to the metal.
And recordings. Fragments of voices.
"Subject F-04 shows signs of rejection—"
"Don't move him! He's still—"
"Her pulse is stable but the Aether response is—no, wait—"
The sounds faded with distance, but not with time. They had lived too long inside these walls.
Zayn approached a reinforced chamber.
Its door opened slowly, reluctantly. As if the room did not want to be remembered.
Inside, a large cylindrical tube stood vertical, filled with faintly glowing fluid. Inside it, suspended, was a girl no older than fifteen. Electrodes ran from her spine to the ceiling. Her eyes were closed. Her hands floated near her face like she had once been reaching for something... and stopped.
The panel on the front read:
Subject: F-13
Status: Suspended Stasis
Designation: Null-Linked Variant
Cognitive Echo: Active
Genetic Match: 67.8% — Subject ZC-Null
Zayn stared.
His mouth opened, but no words came.
The Null Zone inside him recoiled slightly. Not in fear. In memory.
This wasn't the first time he had been near her.
He stepped forward. The fluid inside the tank rippled.
The girl's eyes snapped open.
They glowed with inverted light.
She didn't move. She only looked at him.
Then, slowly... her mouth formed a word.
"Brother."
Zayn stumbled back.
She spoke again, but this time not with sound. The Null responded, carrying her thoughts into his.
"You left me."
He shook his head. "I never—"
"You did. Or maybe... you weren't ready. But now you are."
Zayn reached for the terminal beside the tank.
No hesitation. No fear. Only a choice that had already been made the moment he stepped into this place.
He keyed in a release.
The tank drained with a soft hiss. The girl collapsed forward into his arms, weightless and cold.
Her skin shimmered faintly with the same strange void-light as his. But weaker. Like an echo.
She looked up at him, eyes wide.
"You're real."
"So are you," he whispered.
She smiled. A small, broken thing.
Behind them, alarms started to blink, though no sound followed. Only red lights pulsing with urgency.
Failsafes. Of course.
Zayn picked her up and began to move.
As he did, the facility shook. The walls groaned with reactivated pressure locks. Doors sealed. Ventilation halted.
The Ark had been waiting for this. It was never meant to be revisited.
And now it was dying.
Zayn ran through the corridor, boots splashing through shallow coolant.
Panels burst with sparks. The lights dimmed.
In the observation room above, three stasis pods shattered.
From them crawled remnants. Not human. Not fully.
Twisted by Core instability, fused with metal, blind and twitching. They moved without pattern, like memory given legs.
Zayn didn't stop.
The girl in his arms opened her eyes again.
"I remember you," she said.
He didn't respond.
"I saw you once... in the tank. Before the light came. You were screaming."
"I've done a lot of that," he muttered.
"I didn't scream," she said. "I dreamed."
The Null around her shimmered. Her skin flared slightly, glowing for just a second with lightless radiance.
And in that instant, the creatures ahead froze.
Their movements staggered.
Then they backed away.
Zayn didn't question it.
He moved through them, down another hall, through a blast door half-melted from the inside. The exit was ahead... and behind it, freedom.
They burst through.
The desert hit them like a breath of fire.
The Ark collapsed behind them in a low rumble, the ground swallowing its secrets once more.
Zayn set the girl down.
She stood on shaky legs. Looked around. Her eyes scanned the horizon.
"I'm F-13," she said.
He looked at her.
"I'm Zayn."
She nodded.
"I know. I used to hear your name in the dreams. The zone remembers everything."
He knelt to meet her eye level.
"What did it show you?"
She didn't hesitate.
"Pain. Yours. Mine. Others. You weren't the only one born to fracture."
Zayn's stomach twisted.
"What does that mean?"
She pointed to the north.
"There's a place they took the ones who failed. The half-born. The broken. They didn't die. They were stored. And now... the world's cracking. And they're waking up."
Zayn stood.
"How many?"
She looked up.
"Too many."
He turned to the horizon.
The Null trembled faintly.
Something else was coming.
And far above, in the Omen Spire, Velon's seat lit for the first time in weeks.
A woman in shadow turned toward it.
He's moving, she thought.
And this time, the world might not be able to contain what follows.