The searing heat from the vault explosion hadn't reached Aeris—at least not completely. She'd barely managed to trigger her embedded phase-jump module, blinking herself into the loading bay of a nearby abandoned tram depot two levels above the blast. Her jacket smoked. Her palms were blistered. But she was alive.
She dropped to her knees behind a broken console and took a shallow breath.
"Trust no one. Not even Solara."
Kael's words refused to leave her mind. The data spike in her gloved hand pulsed faintly, reacting to her bio-signal. Still encrypted. Still unknown.
Solara Hadrix had been her only constant since the reset. A rebel intelligence analyst turned dissident informant. The one who had helped Aeris rebuild her fractured identity. The one who whispered truths while the rest of the city screamed lies.
And now Kael—who had vanished into the Grid's void—was warning her against her only ally?
Aeris shoved the thought aside. She needed answers, not paranoia.
She activated the comms node buried in her wrist. "Sol, I've got the spike. Echo Protocol was real."
A pause. Then static.
"...Aeris?" Solara's voice cut through the noise, strained. "Where are you?"
"The depot. Sector B-9. Don't send drones, it's unstable. I need a clean decrypt. And a reason why Kael told me you couldn't be trusted."
A beat of silence.
Then: "We need to talk. Face to face."
Aeris's fingers tightened. "That's not a denial."
But she didn't switch off the line.
Solara met her three hours later in the ruins of the old skyline observatory. It overlooked what used to be the sea—now a grey field of synthetic fog and forgotten solar panels. The stars above blinked through the haze, barely visible behind city glare.
Solara's hood was down. Her face unreadable.
"You look like hell," she said.
"You should see the vault."
They sat without speaking for a long time.
Finally, Aeris held up the spike.
"You knew," she said quietly. "About Echo. About what I did before they scrubbed me."
Solara didn't flinch. "Yes."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because it would've broken you before you were ready."
"That's not your call."
"I didn't have a choice!" Solara's voice cracked for the first time. "You designed the memory fail. You chose to be erased. You begged Kael to bury the code so deep no one—even you—could find it."
Aeris froze.
That… felt true. Even without remembering.
"So why warn me about you?"
Solara looked away. "Because Kael didn't understand what I had to do after he vanished. What I had to trade. Who I had to become."
Aeris's stomach dropped.
"You're working with them."
"Not with," Solara said. "Inside. Embedded. I made compromises, yes. I leaked just enough intel to keep them from finding you. But it's getting worse. They're onto the spike. Onto you. If I break cover now, we both burn."
Aeris stood, trembling. "You lied to me for five years."
"I protected you."
"No. You used me."
They stared at each other, both breathing heavily.
Then Solara stepped closer, eyes raw with something between fury and grief.
"I don't regret saving you. But if you want to run now, run. If you want the truth—about Kael, about what you really locked away—you'll need me."
Aeris hesitated.
The data spike burned cold in her palm.
Behind her, the skies above Vireloch crackled with red warning lines.
And somewhere, the Grid had just gone live.