The craft trembled as though an unseen weight pressed against its hull. The blue light that had steadied Maya's heart flickered, thinning to pale threads. The override key pulsed wildly in her grip, not like a heartbeat anymore but like an alarm.
Below, Vector and Rei scrambled across the rubble, ducking as fragments of burning carrier rained from the sky. The Division soldiers had fallen back for the moment, retreating to regroup, but their voices still carried through the ruined streets—cold, disciplined, promising they would return.
Maya steadied herself on the platform, the rifle humming against her shoulder. "Ship," she rasped, throat raw. "What's coming?"
The symbols circling her froze. One by one, they dimmed, as if something had frightened even the machine.
"Origin signature detected. Precursor channel active. Vector destabilization imminent."
"English," she snapped, gripping tighter.
The voice softened. "The one who made the Division sees you now."
The sky tore.
It wasn't sound this time—it was silence so total it erased everything else. Clouds split without wind, the stars vanishing as if a curtain had been yanked across them. Where there should have been night, there was only absence. A shape moved in that absence—too large to grasp, its outline flickering like broken glass.
Maya's lungs seized. She felt not watched but measured, like prey weighed before harvest.
Below, Vector shouted her name, but his voice was faint, muffled, as though the world itself didn't want her to hear him.
Rei fell to his knees, clutching his head. "It's here," he gasped. "The Architects… the ones who taught the Division how to erase. They've found us."
Maya's blood ran cold. Architects. A word that belonged in whispered theories, not in her sky.
The ship trembled again. Blue veins of light crawled across its hull, straining.
"We cannot withstand them. We can hide you—only you."
"No," Maya snarled, stepping back onto the platform's edge. "You'll protect all of us."
"Directive locked. Custodial priority: carrier of the key."
Her stomach twisted. It wasn't loyalty. It wasn't mercy. It was programming. The ship would preserve her alone if forced to choose.
The absence in the sky deepened, a pressure pressing on her bones. Her thoughts stuttered. Images not her own clawed through her skull—cities erased in an instant, not burned, not bombed, simply gone. Whole histories folded into blankness. The same emptiness the Division had mimicked, on a smaller scale.
The Architects hadn't just made the Division possible. They had made it inevitable.
The rifle in her hands throbbed with energy, as if begging to be fired. She lifted it toward the rift, but her vision blurred; the shape above was too vast, too old, too wrong to target.
"Vector!" she screamed, voice cracking. "Rei!"
Through the haze, she saw them—small figures waving, one arm lifted, one hand reaching. They weren't retreating. They were fighting their way toward the tower, even as debris fell and the ground shook. Refusing to leave her, even when the world itself bent to crush them.
Her throat tightened. She couldn't leave them behind. Not to the Division. Not to the Architects.
"Ship!" she yelled, forcing steel into her voice. "You anchor them too. Find a way—or I burn this override to ash."
The key pulsed, heat biting into her palm. For the first time, the ship hesitated—not with silence, but with something like… fear.
"Conditional link accepted. But anchoring them risks discovery beyond concealment. If the Architects see them…"
"Then we fight together," she hissed.
The chamber lit in violent blue, the rifle singing in her hands. The platform jolted, lowering closer to the tower. Sparks screamed across its hull as the craft strained against the presence in the sky.
Vector and Rei looked up, faces lit in electric glow. Relief flickered there, and determination.
But before Maya could shout, before they could leap, the sky bent again.
A voice—not mechanical, not human—slid into her mind like a blade:
"Child of Kade. You hold what was never yours. Return it—or be unmade."
The override key flared white-hot, searing her skin. She bit down on a scream, clutching it tighter.
"Not yours either," she spat through gritted teeth.
The world tilted, the platform shuddered, and for one heartbeat Maya stood balanced between salvation and annihilation, her friends reaching for her below and the Architects' impossible gaze pressing down from above.