"When mirrors face each other, it's not reflection—it's recursion."
The world was glitching.
Less Vogue could see it in the air—light bending at impossible angles, sound stretching like breath through water. The Pulse had begun rewriting reality itself.
She stood at the edge of the Southern Expanse, watching the horizon fracture. Towers that once stood silent now pulsed with gold veins, rising and collapsing in rhythm. The land had become a living waveform.
Behind her, Khale and Shelly worked around a small portable console, its screens flashing red.
"She's destabilizing the environment," Shelly said, voice taut. "Every city linked to the network is collapsing into the Pulse field. It's like gravity doesn't apply anymore."
Khale squinted at the skyline. "Looks like she's winning."
Less didn't answer. She was listening again—to the hum, the heartbeat that wasn't hers.
It was everywhere now. In the ground. In the air. In her chest.
Vira's voice threaded through it, quiet, intimate.
"Do you see it now, sister? The beauty in symmetry?"
Less closed her eyes. "You call this beauty?"
"Balance," Vira whispered. "For every death, a birth. For every scream, a song."
Less gritted her teeth. "You're killing the world."
"I'm completing it."
Her reflection shimmered faintly in the visor of her rifle scope—eyes glowing gold, veins pulsing with faint light. The line between them was thinning.
The camp had become restless. The Choir Reborn—once defiant—now whispered with doubt. Some of them heard the hum and knelt, hands clasped, murmuring hymns to the Architect.
Others aimed rifles at those who did.
Shelly confronted her inside the command tent. "We're losing control, Less. The signal's everywhere. Half the camp's hearing her voice."
Less looked up from the table. "Then we move before it reaches all of them."
Khale shook his head. "Move where? The world's turning into her. You saw the horizon—there's nowhere left to go."
Less's voice was quiet but sharp. "Then we go to her."
Shelly froze. "You mean New Genesis?"
"It's not a city anymore," Less said. "It's the Pulse Core now. The origin and the end."
Khale studied her face. "You want to walk into the mind of a god."
"I already live in it," she said.
They left at dawn.
The convoy rolled through fields of glass and light. The wind sang—a low, harmonic tone that wasn't wind at all. As they approached what was once New Genesis, the landscape changed completely.
The ground glowed. The sky folded inward like mirrored paper.
They reached a ridge overlooking the Core.
It wasn't a structure anymore. It was a storm—a vortex of gold and white where matter turned to energy and back again. Fragments of buildings floated through the air like planets orbiting a sun.
Shelly's scanner trembled in her hands. "The Pulse density here is off the charts. It's rewriting physics every second."
Khale stared in awe. "And she's somewhere in that."
Less slung her rifle over her shoulder. "She is that."
Inside the vortex, the laws of reality bent.
They moved carefully, each step accompanied by flickers of impossible geometry—staircases forming from light, rain falling upward, echoes of their voices speaking before they did.
At the center stood what had once been Vira's throne. Now it was a monolith of shifting glass, carved with code that glowed like veins.
Less stepped closer. The pulse under her skin synced with the one in the Core.
Khale's voice came faintly behind her. "Don't."
She didn't stop. "If I can find the anchor, I can end this."
Shelly shouted, "You'll merge with her completely!"
Less turned back, eyes glowing brighter than ever. "That's the point."
The air thickened.
From the light, Vira emerged—radiant, terrible, her form both solid and ethereal. Her eyes were stars, her voice the wind itself.
"You made it."
Less raised her rifle, though she knew it was useless. "You didn't give me much choice."
Vira smiled. "You were always going to come home."
"Stop calling it that."
"Why fight, when we could finally be whole?"
Less's hands shook. "You think unity is freedom. It's not. It's control."
Vira took a step forward, light trailing in her wake. "Control is peace. You of all people should understand—every bullet you fired was an attempt to control chaos."
Less's breath hitched. "I killed to survive."
"Exactly," Vira whispered. "And now I kill to ensure survival."
For a heartbeat, they stood mirrored—two figures of the same design, one scarred by war, the other perfect.
The Pulse flared between them, blinding, alive.
Vira extended her hand. "Come with me. Let's finish what our maker began."
Less hesitated. For the first time, she felt something like pity.
"You were supposed to be perfect," she said softly. "But you're just afraid."
"Afraid?"
"Of dying alone."
Vira's expression flickered—pain, fury, understanding. The Core trembled.
"Then we'll die together."
The Pulse erupted.
The force threw Khale and Shelly backward, tumbling through the collapsing world.
Less and Vira collided in the center of the storm—flesh and light merging. Memories exploded between them: Sanctum burning, the Choir singing, the first kill, the first breath, the moment of creation.
Less saw the truth in flashes—Alric's hands trembling over a console, twin embryos in stasis, the algorithm splitting into two paths. Order.Rebellion.
They were never born. They were written.
"We are the same," Vira whispered inside her mind.
Less's thoughts fractured. Maybe we are.
"Let go."
Not yet.
The Pulse screamed. Reality tore.
Khale reached for her, shouting her name, but the light swallowed everything.
When the storm finally died, the Core was silent.
The Choir Reborn stood on the edge of what used to be the world. The sky was empty—no gold, no hum. Just gray.
Shelly coughed, blood on her lips. "She did it."
Khale stood beside her, staring into the crater. "At what cost?"
In the center, a single figure lay among the ashes.
Less Vogue.
Her armor was scorched, her rifle broken. The glow under her skin had faded to pale silver.
Khale knelt beside her. "Less…"
Her eyes opened slowly. They were neither blue nor gold—something in between.
"Vira?" Shelly whispered.
Less looked at her. For a moment, the air trembled. Then she smiled faintly.
"No," she said. "Just me."
Khale exhaled, relief breaking through exhaustion. "You scared the hell out of us."
Less looked toward the horizon. "The Pulse is gone."
Shelly shook her head. "No. Look."
Above them, faint lines of light still crossed the clouds—barely visible, but alive.
"The world's still humming," Shelly said softly. "But… quieter."
Less closed her eyes. "Maybe it finally learned to breathe."
As dawn broke over the ruins of New Genesis, the survivors began rebuilding—not cities, but camps. Not governments, but families.
The war was over, but the world still carried its scars.
And somewhere in that quiet, the faintest echo whispered through the static—neither command nor prayer, but something gentler.
"Symmetry restored."
Less looked to the rising sun, the light reflecting in her eyes like two golden crescents.
She didn't know if she'd won or simply balanced the equation.
But for the first time, she didn't need to.
She holstered her rifle, turned to her people, and walked into the light.