The blast came first as a color—sickly red blooming across the night—then as a sound too big to be a sound, a pressure that squeezed thought into a thin wire. The tower screamed. Steel ribs buckled. Concrete sheared.
Maya's fingers slipped.
Vector's shout tore through the wind. Rei lunged, hands bleeding where jagged rebar bit him, but the blue light had already cinched tight around Maya like a harness woven from lightning. She felt her body snap upward, weightless, the world below collapsing into a shattering mouth of dust and sparks.
The sky swallowed her.
For an instant she saw everything at once: the carrier's cannon releasing its red spear; the tower bowing like a reed; Vector and Rei flung backward in the shockwave—tiny figures on a breaking world. Then the craft's light closed, sound vanished, and gravity changed its mind.
She fell—not down, not up, but through.
The light unspooled into a corridor that wasn't a corridor: surfaces that looked like liquid glass, edges that weren't edges at all but ideas of edges, boundaries that flowed when she tried to focus on them. The override key burned white in her fist, then dimmed to a steady pulse, a heartbeat that wasn't hers.
Her boots touched something that pretended to be a floor. She staggered forward, almost dropping to her knees. Air slid into her lungs—cool, metal-clean, threaded with a faint sweetness that reminded her of ozone after a storm.
"Vector," she whispered, throat raw. "Rei."
No answer. Just the ship's silence: poised, listening.
Then the voice returned, inside her head, speaking with the careful cadence of an old recording:
"Echo: Maya S. Kade. Clearance seed located. Archive latency… high. Initiating handshake."
"Stop," Maya rasped. "Stop talking like you know me."
Something changed in the walls—an almost-smile of light, an almost-tilt of attention.
"We do not know you. We know the whom-you-carry."
Her gaze fell to the key in her fist. The small disc felt suddenly heavy, ancient. "What are you?"
The corridor sighed inward and became a chamber—circular, ribbed with faintly luminous veins, like being inside the skeleton of a star. Threads of blue gathered from the air and braided themselves into a console that rose at her feet: no buttons, no screens, just a skin of light waiting for touch.
"Designation: Vault-Carrier Twelve. Function: custodial. Directive: preserve and awaken Echo."
"Echo is a resistance network," she shot back. "Not… whatever you are."
"Echo is a protocol. The network is a symptom."
Fear went cold in her bones. "Protocol to do what?"
"Remember what must not be forgotten. Restore what must not be owned."
The floor rippled—and an image stood up like steam finding shape. A city she half-recognized—pre-war towers, bridges like needlework, streets alive with traffic that glowed at their seams. Then the image flickered: the same city flattened under a crimson sky, Division banners like scars across its face. The third image was worse: blankness. No city. A hole where memory should have been.
"Show me Vector and Rei," she demanded, stepping toward the projection. "Outside."
The scene obeyed—or pretended to. The city evaporated. A new view rose from the floor: the tower gutting itself in a rain of fire, the carrier listing, the blast fanning out—but the shockwave struck an invisible bow above the tower, curved, and broke. The field thinned at the edges like soap, then thickened again, holding.
Vector lay flat, arms over his head. He twitched, rolled, shoved himself to his knees. Rei crawled toward him through dust and falling ash. Alive. Both alive.
Maya's knees buckled with relief, which curdled quickly into fury. "Drop a ladder," she snapped at the ship, absurdly. "Open a door. I'm going back down."
"Extraction in progress. Secondary tether compromised by ordnance. Recovery window: elapsed."
She slammed her fist into the console. The light flexed, harmless, as if absorbing her anger like rain. "Then take me back."
"Not yet." The voice softened—or her brain decided it had. "Anchor must be calibrated. The whom-you-carry is still asleep."
Maya stared at the key until the afterimage of its pulse stained her vision. "The whom—I carry—what does that mean?"
The chamber dimmed. A ring of symbols spun up around her like fireflies caught in gravity. One flared brighter than the rest—a sigil that tickled the back of her memory: a slashed circle within a triangle, the oldest Echo graffiti stamped under bridges, etched into safehouse steel.
"Founder imprint detected. Echo-prime: Kade."
Her breath vanished. The name struck her chest like a thrown stone.
"My name is Kade," she managed, voice hoarse. "Maya Kade."
"Lineage confirmed."
"No," she said, backing away until the wall met her shoulders and softened like warm glass. "My parents died before the war. We didn't—We weren't—"
The chamber flickered. A woman stood where the console had been: not flesh, not hologram, but a memory wearing the shape of a person. Mid-thirties, hair braided tight, eyes like winter water. A scar split her left eyebrow the way Maya's split her right.
"Maya," the woman said, and though the voice came from nowhere, it fit the shape of the mouth, the angle of the jaw. "If you are seeing this, it means I failed and you survived."
Maya reached for the woman without meaning to, hand passing through light that felt like heat remembered. "Who are you?"
The woman's mouth tilted. "You know," she said, and the ship sustained the lie until it was true. "I am Lysa Kade. Echo-prime. We built the Archives because the Division learned to delete not just data but history itself. We hid memory where they could not reach—inside machines that would wait for the right hands. Yours."
"No," Maya whispered, but it landed as a prayer.
"Listen." Lysa's gaze flicked upward, as if she could still hear the war closing in. "The Division is not a single order. It is a habit of power. When it cannot own a thing, it erases it. Echo was designed to outlive erasure. You are not only fighting to breathe; you are fighting to remember."
The chamber shivered. Outside, the projection showed the field buckling as the carrier adjusted aim. Vector pulled Rei behind a fallen slab and fired until his rifle clicked dry.
Maya dragged air into her chest like a drowning swimmer. "If you can protect them, do it. If you can land me, do it. If you can end that cannon, do it."
"We can shield. We can hide. We cannot kill."
"Why?"
"Custodial directive." The ring of symbols dimmed. "We are Archive. Not weapon."
"Then give me a weapon," she snapped.
The chamber hesitated, as if arguing across a distance of years. Then the floor opened in a clean, silent seam. A narrow cradle rose, and in it lay something that wasn't a gun until she looked at it and her mind arranged its edges into a gun: a long, lean instrument strung with filaments of dark glass and braided light. The stock fit her shoulder as if it had been carved from her sleep.
"Interface rifle. Nonlethal routes preferred."
"I'll decide," she said, but her voice had softened.
The view outside lurched—the last carrier circling, the cannon cycling, soldiers fanning in a wedge. The protective field around Vector and Rei sagged, rippled, steadied, sagged again.
"What do I have to do?" Maya asked.
"Anchor the beacon. Wake the whom-you-carry."
"And that is?"
The voice did not answer. The sigil pulsed once. The rifle hummed against her palms like an animal that had decided not to fear her.
The floor peeled open again—air rushing past, night pouring into the chamber with a cold bite. A narrow platform extended from the ship's belly, bridging distance that should have been impossible. Beyond its lip, the ruined tower lay like a broken tooth; beyond that, the city crawled with red Division eyes.
"Step," the ship said, almost gently.
"Vector!" she shouted into the dark, uselessly, joy and fear tearing her throat.
A shape moved below. He lifted his head, found her—a sliver of blue above the black. He raised a hand, a rough, defiant salute.
Maya stepped onto the platform. Wind tore at her hair, tugged at the rifle's cables, bit her cheeks. The override key in her fist pulsed once, then synced to the rifle in a soft, clicking marriage of light.
The carrier's cannon yawed. Target lock tightened. The air grew heavy with the certainty of impact.
Maya lifted the rifle and felt something old and precise turn inside her—some muscle memory not her own, a lesson passed across blood and years. The scope filled with red. The filaments tightened, found a frequency that tasted like copper on her tongue.
"Nonlethal," the ship reminded her, a whisper in a hurricane.
"Not tonight," she said, and pulled the trigger.
The shot wasn't a shot so much as a thought sent hard enough to bruise reality. The beam lanced out—blue braided with black—and struck the cannon's heart. Red went dark. The carrier shuddered, engines coughing, then spiraled into a retreat that wasn't entirely voluntary.
Cheers rose from the rubble that had no right to hold joy. Vector whooped once—sharp, disbelieving. Rei laughed, a wild, cracked sound.
Maya's knees trembled. The platform slid back toward the belly of the craft, as if the ship worried she would fall.
"Again," she said, breath frosting. "We drive them off. Then you land me."
"We will try," said the ship. "But you must decide soon. We are already seen."
"By the Division?" she asked.
The symbols around her went still, listening to a frequency she could not hear.
"By what made the Division possible."
The platform paused, hanging above the city like a dropped promise. The override key flared—once, twice—then steadied. Far below, in streets that remembered both the old traffic and the red banners, something vast and quiet woke and turned its head.
Maya swallowed the taste of metal and fear. She raised the rifle again.
"Then let them see me," she said.
The sky answered with a sound like distant thunder, or a door finally opening.
And the ship dimmed its lights, as if bracing for a knock it had been dreading for a very long time.