The wind over Zephyr Station never felt like wind.
It was a programmed current—soft, temperature-regulated, humored by the turbines beneath the gardens.
A created nature.
Cael sat on the edge of the suspended platform, watching synthetic petals swirl in a vortex above the reflection pool. The petals were a bright, impossible violet; they drifted upward, not down, caught in the station's magnetostatic loops like they refused to obey gravity.
He couldn't remember the last time something as simple as "beauty" had been allowed to just… exist.
The sky-scar crackled faintly overhead.
A reminder.
A wound.
A warning.
And a promise that the universe could still tear itself in half.
---
1. The Interrupted Quiet
Footsteps approached behind him—light, deliberate, and unwilling to interrupt until they had to.
"Captain Drayen," Lyra said softly.
He didn't turn. Instead, he let his eyes track a single petal as it struggled against the station's invisible wind, fluttering like a captured moth.
"You don't need to call me that when it's just us," he replied.
"Habits are armor," she said, sitting beside him. "They're easier to wear than the truth."
He finally turned.
Her hair was loose today—no tactical binder, no Eclipser bands, just a cascade of pale gold catching the soft station light. It made her look younger. Almost the age he remembered in the broken memory fragments: the girl laughing in the breach, touching his pulseband, promising—
He inhaled sharply.
The petal vortex shivered, as if reacting to his thoughts.
Lyra noticed. "Your resonance is bleeding through again."
"Can't be helped," he muttered. "The Breach…it changed more than just my head."
Cael touched his pulseband.
The twin rings glowed faintly—intertwined sigils that mirrored hers.
Her hand drifted near his, hesitant, like approaching a sleeping animal. But she didn't touch him.
Not yet.
---
2. Mireen's Warning
The station holograms flickered.
A ghost-white silhouette formed across the garden's archway.
Mireen Solis stepped into view, coat trailing behind her like a second shadow.
"You two better have something resembling a plan," she said. "Because the Command Council is sharpening their knives."
Cael blinked. "That was quick."
"Everything is quick when it's about you." Mireen looked at Lyra, then back at him. "The scarring in the sky has grown another six kilometers."
Lyra's pulseband hummed—quiet, but unmistakable.
"What about our theory?" she asked.
"The resonance fields expanding around Cael might be stabilizing it—"
"They also might be tearing it further open," Mireen cut in. "We're past the 'maybe' stage."
The petals in the vortex trembled, shaking like a storm about to spill.
Mireen's voice softened.
"We need you to be ready. If the Echo returns—"
"She will," Cael said. "And she won't ask permission."
He could feel her already:
the distorted mirror-self that lived inside the Breach, the memory that was not him and yet had been him.
A parasite made of possibility.
A voice that whispered you were always meant to become more.
Lyra touched his arm.
"The Echo isn't just a threat," she said quietly. "She's a key."
Mireen scoffed. "Keys also unlock doors we'd rather keep shut."
---
3. The Starless Garden Shifts
The reflection pool rippled—no wind, no movement.
Then the petals stopped rising and began to fall.
Not gently—like lead.
They struck the pool surface, violet dots dissolving into black circles of resonance.
Cael felt the pull inside his chest, like someone was reaching through him, tugging a single organ from the core of his being.
He gritted his teeth.
Lyra leaned forward. "Cael?"
"Not me," he said. "Something is climbing up through the garden's emitter grid."
Mireen cursed. "It should be offline—"
A pulse of black light erupted from the water.
Not a beam.
Not a wave.
A shape.
Humanoid.
Female.
Eyes like prism fractures.
The Echo.
Her feet touched the surface of the pool without sinking, ripples blooming outward like flowers in reverse.
"Always with the gardens," she murmured.
Her voice was every tone he had ever used, layered like chords.
Cael stood.
Pain surged under his ribs, but he refused to flinch.
"We're not doing this here," he said.
Her lips curled. "We are doing it exactly here. Where he first forgot her."
Cael froze.
Lyra's breath hitched.
Mireen stepped forward, blade at her side—but the Echo didn't even look at her.
She looked at Cael with the kind of familiarity only someone who had lived inside your soul could possess.
"You can't hold two futures anymore," she said. "Choose."
---
4. No Answer Is Safe
Cael swallowed.
"You're asking me to pick between unity and collapse."
The Echo's smile was the saddest thing he had ever seen.
"No," she said. "I'm asking you to admit why the universe breaks around you."
Behind him, Lyra whispered: "Cael… don't let her pull you into her logic."
But the Echo's eyes—
they were full of every memory he had lost:
The rain-slick balcony at Zephyr Academy.
Lyra's trembling hand touching his pulseband.
Their pact before the Resonance Trials.
And the kiss—
Cael staggered.
The Echo stepped closer, feet still resting on the water.
"You can either bloom," she said, "or you can wilt with her."
Her gaze flicked to Lyra.
Mireen drew steel.
Lyra tensed.
Cael's pulseband flared—twin rings bursting with azure light.
His voice was raw when he spoke:
"Don't ever reduce her to a choice."
The Echo blinked.
And for the first time since the Breach…
she looked surprised.
---
5. The Garden Answers
The light leapt from his pulseband into the vortex.
The petals ignited—violet turning to a searing white, swirling around him and Lyra like a halo.
The Echo stepped back, expression twisting between awe and pain.
"You're… merging," she whispered. "Not fragments… not halves…"
Lyra gripped Cael's wrist.
Their resonance synched.
Two heartbeats, one pulse.
The petals spiraled upward again—this time willingly, as if choosing the sky.
The station trembled.
The sky-scar thundered overhead.
And for the first time since everything began tearing apart,
the wound in the heavens pulsed not with hunger—
—but with recognition.
---
End Chapter 95