The world fractured.
Light bent, space folded, and sound turned into memory.
Adrian opened his eyes to find himself no longer in the sterile Syndicate cell, but standing in a vast white corridor that stretched endlessly in both directions.
No walls, no ceiling. Just light.
His restraints were gone.
But so was the sense of self he carried moments ago.
He looked down, his reflection wavered on the floor beneath him, flickering between the man he was, the soldier he'd been, and something in between.
A voice echoed softly through the white.
"Adrian…"
Elena.
She emerged from the haze, barefoot, her expression dazed but calm. Her hair drifted slightly, as if underwater.
"Where are we?" she whispered.
"Inside the Eidolon core," he replied slowly. "Selene said she'd trigger the link."
A flicker of light pulsed between them, a heartbeat made of data.
He felt it brush against his mind, cold but familiar, like a forgotten memory waking up.
Meanwhile, in the real world, somewhere above them, Selene stood inside the central data chamber.
Cables coiled from the ceiling like metallic roots, glowing blue.
She slid a neural interface across her temples, connecting herself directly to the core.
"Initiating protocol override," she whispered.
The machine responded with a low hum, then a thousand whispers overlapping into one.
EIDOLON: "User identified: Selene Voss. Access denied."
Selene: "Override: Voss Sigma-Nine. Engage crosslink with subject Cross-Adrian."
EIDOLON: "Crosslink established. Warning, cognitive contamination risk: critical."
She gritted her teeth. "I know."
Then she pressed the final key.
Inside the mindscape, everything changed.
The corridor around Adrian and Elena darkened, walls of white melting into translucent glass. Beyond it, fragments of their lives drifted in the void: Elena's apartment before the raids, the night sky above the Borderlands, the burning camp.
And there, a figure standing in the distance.
Selene.
But her eyes glowed faint blue, like the machine itself had reached through her.
"You shouldn't have come," her voice echoed, doubled, distorted.
"Selene, it's us," Elena said, stepping forward.
"No," Selene whispered, her tone fractured. "It's me, and not me."
The glass beneath them cracked, spiderwebbing in all directions.
Adrian reached for her, but the world pulsed violently, memories exploding like shrapnel.
He saw flashes of Marael's face, of missions long buried, of Elena reaching for him through smoke.
Then, something deeper, a memory he didn't remember having: Selene, laughing, sunlit, before the world went dark.
"They're rewriting you," Selene said, clutching her head. "The AI is merging us. You'll lose everything if I don't stabilize the link."
"Then do it!" Adrian shouted.
"You don't understand!" she gasped. "It feeds on emotion. It's using what you feel to rewrite the structure."
Elena's eyes widened. "Then it knows what we love."
The machine around them pulsed again, the floor becoming water, the air a field of light.
Whispers filled the air: Adrian Cross. Elena Ward. Selene Voss.
Names fading and reforming.
In the real world, alarms blared.
Selene's vitals spiked across the console. The core was overloading.
EIDOLON: "Human emotion unstable. Source conflict: affection versus guilt."
Selene trembled, blood trickling from her nose. "Lock it down, focus on the anchor point…"
She reached out through the connection, her voice echoing directly into Adrian's mind.
"Adrian… listen to me. You have to choose one memory to keep. One that defines you. Everything else will collapse."
Adrian stood between the two women, one representing the life he could build, the other the life he'd lost.
Elena whispered, "Choose what makes you who you are."
Selene, her tone breaking, said softly, "Choose what makes you free."
The corridor began to crumble.
The glass turned to shards, the light dimming into shadow.
Adrian clenched his fists, breathing hard. He closed his eyes, and reached.
Not for pain. Not for guilt. But for something pure.
The memory that came wasn't of war or betrayal, it was the moment Elena had found him bleeding in the tunnels, refusing to leave him behind. The first time someone had seen him as worth saving.
He held it close, and the machine screamed.
EIDOLON: "Anchor detected. Core destabilizing."
The mindscape cracked apart. Selene smiled faintly, relief cutting through her exhaustion.
"That's it… you found it."
"Selene!" Elena cried.
But Selene was already fading, light spilling from her body as the system began to consume her projection.
Her last words echoed faintly as the world began to collapse around them:
"Tell him… I was never your enemy."
In the physical world, Selene's body convulsed as the chamber burst into chaos.
Sparks rained from the core as containment alarms screamed.
Adrian and Elena woke gasping, their restraints gone, smoke filling the lab.
Selene lay on the platform, barely breathing, cables severed.
Elena reached her first, shaking her shoulder.
"Selene! Stay with us!"
Her eyes fluttered open, pale and unfocused. "Did it… work?"
Adrian looked at the cracked interface, the words blinking faintly:
EIDOLON: SYSTEM FAILURE. HUMAN MEMORY RESTORED.
He exhaled, voice breaking. "Yeah… you did it."
Selene smiled faintly, then slipped into unconsciousness.
The alarms kept wailing.
Above them, the Citadel began to quake.
Ash's voice crackled through the comms, broken but alive:
"Adrian, if you're hearing this, get out now! The core's going critical!"
Adrian met Elena's gaze.
They both looked at Selene, then back toward the collapsing corridor.
"We're not leaving her," he said.
And as the glass world above them began to fall apart, the three of them vanished into the smoke, carrying the last fragments of humanity the Syndicate could never erase.