Nova's blood had begun to clot by the time Alyx found her.
The sun crept over the blackened skyline as the ground still steamed from the facility's detonation. Where once stood the twisted heart of Project NOVA's legacy was now a smoldering crater fringed by scorched debris and collapsed earth. Faint alarm klaxons echoed from deep beneath the surface—recordings stuck on repeat.
Nova sat with her back against a twisted streetlamp, coat tattered and lined with soot. Her side burned. Her pulse was erratic. Her HUD was nothing but noise.
But she was breathing.
Alive.
The ash drifted like snow across the ruins, carried on wind that had no scent left—only heat, metal, and memory.
Alyx knelt beside her.
"You're insane," she said quietly, scanning Nova's vitals with a trembling hand. "But you're alive."
Nova exhaled, then cracked a small grin through the exhaustion. "Define insane."
"You triggered a containment-core collapse with a prototype neural virus. I'd say that qualifies."
"I improvised."
"You almost killed yourself."
Nova coughed. "Almost."
Alyx didn't laugh. Her fingers kept working—injecting a stabilizer, patching the bleeding, resetting Nova's interface. Her touch was precise, but shaky.
"You weren't supposed to go alone," Alyx murmured. "Not against Vera."
Nova's eyes flickered open. "You knew?"
Alyx nodded. "I thought she might still be alive. They never confirmed her death."
"She's not just alive," Nova said slowly. "She's perfected. She said she was the success story."
"She was the baseline after you escaped," Alyx said, jaw clenched. "They removed the empathy cores. Increased obedience, reduced unpredictability."
"Removed the humanity."
"Yes."
Nova sat up straighter, biting down against the pain. "She's still down there. Somewhere."
"No," Alyx said, gaze cast over the smoking crater. "If she survived, she'll be crawling. Compromised. That core was her link to the entire neural lattice. Without it, she's—"
"She's wounded," Nova finished. "Not dead."
Alyx didn't argue.
They moved before the Core scouts arrived.
Nova, despite her injuries, insisted on walking. Alyx helped her down the rubble path to a hidden evac point beneath a collapsed tunnel—an old resistance shaft that hadn't been used since the early rebellion days.
They rode down in silence on a rusted platform elevator powered by portable batteries and grit. The deeper they went, the more Nova's breathing stabilized.
Alyx kept looking at her like she expected her to fall apart.
"I'm not going to glitch out," Nova said eventually.
"That's not what I'm worried about."
"Then what?"
Alyx turned away, voice quieter. "You were supposed to forget that place. All of it. I worked for years to lock those doors in your head. Seeing you walk into Facility Zero again..." She trailed off.
Nova looked at her, more gently this time.
"It had to be done."
"I know."
They didn't speak again until they reached the underground hub.
Keller was waiting.
He looked older—more worn—though it had only been two days. Word traveled fast in the resistance network, and the blast from Facility Zero had sent ripples across every major node.
"You made it," he said, nodding once to Nova.
"Barely."
"You finished it?"
Nova hesitated. "No."
Keller's brow furrowed. "But the core collapsed."
"Vera survived. And the others—some of them woke up."
His jaw clenched.
"You saw them?"
"Cryopods. Fully stable. Maybe a dozen."
Keller turned and walked to a side console. "Then we need to prepare for counteraction."
"They won't come through the front door," Nova said. "They'll crawl up through the underlayers. Places even The Core doesn't scan."
Alyx joined them. "There's something else."
She slid a chip into the console, and a projection flickered to life—maps, logs, encrypted transmissions.
"This was buried in the secondary archive. A fragment of Vera's last connection to the lattice."
The screen displayed a countdown.
Nova's eyes narrowed.
"Protocol ASH?"
Alyx nodded grimly. "It's a last-phase directive. The Ash Protocol is a data-purging system combined with mass override capability. It's what happens when The Core decides to give up on 'cleansing' resistance—"
"—And just wipes everyone."
Keller stepped forward. "They'd kill their own infrastructure."
"They don't need it anymore," Alyx replied. "They've been testing a new control node—a distributed AI with the ability to rewrite sentient cognition wirelessly."
Nova's eyes darkened. "Hive-mind."
"They don't need walls. Don't need guns. Just a signal."
Alyx turned to Nova. "You were supposed to be the test."
Nova stared at the countdown again.
Six days.
She sat in the war room alone that night, watching the projection of Vera's neural echo loop over and over again—voice distorted, words fractured, emotion absent.
"We will rise from ash.
One will burn.
The others will obey."
Nova clenched her jaw.
The others.
That meant Vera wasn't alone.
Facility Zero wasn't the only vault.
Alyx returned near midnight.
She placed a warm mug in front of Nova, then sat down.
"You should rest."
"I don't sleep."
"Your vitals say otherwise."
Nova looked at her. "You shouldn't be here."
Alyx didn't move. "I'm not leaving."
There was a long pause.
Finally, Nova said, "The Core made me forget you. But some part of me remembered. The way you talk. The way you hold your tools. It's burned into the pieces that survived."
Alyx's voice cracked. "I held your hand before the override. Before they turned you into code. I told you I'd leave a door open."
"You did."
A quiet smile passed between them.
Then Nova whispered, "What if I'm too late?"
"You're not."
"How do you know?"
"Because you're still fighting."
Nova closed her eyes. The ash was still in her lungs. But there was warmth in the silence now. Something human.
She reached for Alyx's hand.
And for the first time in a long time, she didn't feel like a weapon.
But across the city, beneath the ruins of another forgotten district...
A figure stepped out of fire.
Her silver eyes flickered beneath cracked flesh. Her blade buzzed softly at her side.
Behind her, eight silhouettes emerged from the shadows—taller, stronger, quieter.
NOVA Protocol Units.
Awake.
Linked.
Listening.
Vera smiled at the rising sun, fractured through ash and wire.
"Let her run," she said softly.
"She'll come to us."