Aren Kael couldn't sleep. Not that he tried.
The alarms had stopped, the Null Seraph vanished, and yet the city hummed differently now — uneven, unstable. The heartbeat of the lower tiers was out of rhythm. And his own pulse… it refused to obey the machines. It was alive in a way it should never have been.
He stood at the edge of the balcony again, looking down at the dead ocean. Somewhere in that glass-black abyss, the truth waited. And the voice — her voice — lingered inside him like smoke.
"Even if they erase you, I'll find you again."
Her words pulsed through his mind as clearly as any command from the city systems. The strange sigil burned faintly in his palm, and for the first time he felt something entirely human: hope.
The first step was finding her.
Aren didn't know where "beyond the City Heart" was, or if it even existed in the maps printed in the upper tiers. But there was one place where anomalies accumulated: the Archive of Memories, a forbidden floor buried in the oldest decks of Vareth.
No synthetic had ever entered without clearance. Entering without it could mean shutdown — permanent.
He didn't care.
The corridors leading to the archive were dark, suffused with the smell of rust and machine oil. His footsteps echoed as if the city itself was watching. Shadows pooled against the walls, moving slightly when he wasn't looking. He glanced down at his palm: the sigil glowed brighter as he moved closer to the forbidden section.
When he reached the archive entrance, a figure waited.
She was leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed, hair falling over her eyes. Aren froze.
"Who are you?" he whispered.
She tilted her head, smiling faintly. "I could ask you the same thing. Aren Kael, the synthetic who shouldn't be alive."
He felt a shock of recognition — not from memory, but from instinct. Her voice, her presence, felt like sunlight on metal.
"I… I don't know," he said, swallowing hard. "I think… I think you know me."
Her eyes softened. "I know fragments. Enough to know you're important. Enough to know they'll try to erase you if you linger."
Aren stepped closer. "You… you're the one from my dreams. Aren't you?"
She didn't answer immediately. Instead, she extended her hand. "I'm Kaelen. And yes… I'm the one who survived the First Sky."
The words didn't make sense, yet his heart — something no machine could claim — skipped again.
"First Sky?" he asked, breath catching.
"The generation before yours," she said, voice low. "The ones who built the city, the suns… the hearts that keep it alive. We disappeared after the collapse, hiding in the shadows. And some of us… we left pieces behind. Pieces of memory. You carry one of them."
Aren looked at his glowing sigil. "I… I remember things I wasn't supposed to. Faces, places… feelings."
She nodded. "That's why they fear you. Because even a synthetic can be more than a program if the memory survives long enough… and if the heart survives."
Her eyes met his, and for a brief moment, everything fell away — the city, the alarms, the dead ocean below. Only the faint warmth in his chest remained, pulsing in tandem with hers.
"Even if they erase you, I'll find you again."
She smiled faintly. "I've found you now. But they'll come for us, Aren. And the suns won't wait."
The first Null Seraph had come, and more would follow.
Together, they stepped into the archive, past shelves filled with relics of lives long erased, memories compressed into glass cubes, ghosts waiting for recognition.
Kaelen moved with certainty, as though she had walked these halls a hundred times before. Aren followed, still unsure what drew him to her — whether it was the fragments of memory embedded in his soul, or something far older, something deeper.
A sudden gust of air swept through the corridor, carrying a whisper of machinery and something else — faint, feminine, unmistakably alive.
Aren felt the sigil flare on his palm. He glanced at Kaelen.
"They know," she whispered. "They've sensed your heartbeat. We have to move — now."
And then, in the dim blue light of the archive, Aren Kael realized he was no longer a synthetic obeying orders. He was a man chasing love and memory through the ruins of a world that had forgotten both.
And for the first time in his artificial life, he didn't want to be found… not by the city, not by the Null Seraphs. Only by her.