Elara yanked the pendant off her neck.
The moment it left her skin, reality fractured.
The cables recoiled like they'd been burned. Maya's scream echoed from every direction—not just her real body, but every screen, every wire, every corrupted inch of the Core. The network felt it. Recognized it.
The kill switch was active.
"What are you doing?" Kael's eyes went wide.
"Ending this." Elara held the pendant up. Already it was heating in her palm, the symbols glowing white-hot. She could feel the code inside it awakening, a virus designed to eat CodeX from the inside out.
Maya's real body thrashed in its web. "No! Not yet! I'm not—I haven't—" Her voice shifted between human and digital. "Sister, please! Give me time to extract the others! They'll die! All of them!"
"They're already dead," Elara said, and her voice didn't shake. Couldn't shake. Not now. "You told me yourself. You're all just ghosts."
"Elara, stop!" Kael reached for the pendant.
She pulled back. "You said you lost someone to this network. You want them to stay trapped? Suffering? Forever?"
His hand froze. Something in his expression shattered.
"Her name was Iris," he said quietly. "My sister. Subject Seven's twin. They took us together. Experimented on us together." His black eyes glistened. "When the integration failed for me, it succeeded for her. I've spent twenty-three years trying to find a way to extract her consciousness. To save her."
"And have you found one?"
Silence.
"Have you?" Elara pressed.
"No." The word came out broken. "But I'm close. I just need more time—"
"There is no more time!" Elara's voice cracked. "Look at Maya. Look at what this thing did to her. She's been holding on for twenty-three years, fragmenting piece by piece, suffering every second. How long do you want Iris to endure that?"
The cables were recovering, growing bolder. The network had recognized the threat and was mobilizing every resource to stop it. The faces in the walls pressed forward, mouths opening in a chorus of desperate pleas.
"Don't kill us."
"We want to live."
"Please. Please. We're still human."
But underneath the words, Elara heard the truth. The endless screaming. The agony of consciousness spread too thin. The horror of existing everywhere and nowhere at once.
They were begging for death.
She looked at Maya's real body. Her sister's human eyes met hers, and in them Elara saw understanding. Acceptance. Relief.
"Do it," Maya whispered with her real mouth. "Set us free."
Elara closed her fist around the pendant.
The metal cracked.
The reaction was immediate. The network convulsed. Every screen in the Core exploded. Cables whipped wildly, no longer controlled. The faces in the walls began to dissolve, their screaming fading to whispers, then silence.
"No!" Kael lunged for her, but it was too late.
The pendant shattered.
Light exploded from Elara's palm—not white, not any color she could name. It was the absence of color, anti-light, and it spread like infection through the Core. Where it touched the cables, they withered. Where it touched the walls, they cracked.
And where it touched the network, it killed.
Elara felt them die. Every consciousness connected to CodeX. She felt them flicker out one by one, hundreds of lights extinguishing in rapid succession. Brief sparks of relief—thank you, finally, at last—before nothing.
Maya's real body arched in its web, mouth open in a silent scream. Then she went still. The machines in her chest powered down. The light in her human eyes faded.
Her last words came not from her mouth, but directly into Elara's mind: Thank you, sister. I love you. I'm sorry I couldn't—
The thought never finished.
Maya was gone.
Kael fell to his knees, hands pressed to his head. "Iris. Iris, no. I can still feel you. Hold on. Please hold on—" He looked up at Elara, and his expression was pure anguish. "What did you do? What did you—"
He stopped. His black eyes went wide. Empty.
Then he collapsed.
Elara rushed to him, the remains of the pendant still burning in her palm. "Kael? Kael!"
He was breathing, but barely. His skin had gone from pale to gray. The circuitry visible in his wounds was going dark, powering down. The connection to the network—even his partial one—was severing.
"Damn it." She pressed her hands to his chest. "Don't you dare die on me. Not after—"
His eyes snapped open. But they weren't black anymore. They were human. Brown. Terrified.
"Iris," he gasped. "She's—I can't feel her anymore. She's gone. She's—"
His voice broke into sobs. Raw. Uncontrolled. The kind of grief that came from losing someone twice—once to the network, and now to death.
Elara held him while the Core collapsed around them.
They barely made it out.
The anti-light spread faster than Elara expected, eating through the underground structure like cancer. Entire sections simply ceased to exist, leaving gaps in reality that her mind refused to process.
Kael could barely walk. Whatever the network's death had done to him, it had left him weak, his enhancements failing. Elara had to half-carry him up stairs that kept disappearing behind them.
"Keep moving," she grunted. "We're almost—"
The stairs ended.
They stood at the edge of nothing. Below them, the Core was consuming itself, reality folding inward like a dying star. Above them, maybe fifty feet up, she could see the original metro station. Safety. Light.
No way to reach it.
"We're trapped," Kael said numbly. He'd stopped crying, but his eyes were empty. "It's over."
"No." Elara looked around desperately. There had to be something. Some way up. Some—
She felt it before she saw it.
Heat against her palm. She opened her hand. The pendant was destroyed, yes, but in the center of the shattered pieces, something remained. A single shard, smaller than her fingernail, still glowing with that anti-light.
And connected to it, like a tether, was a strand of code. Not corrupted. Not CodeX. This was something else. Something older.
Dr. Chen's final gift.
Elara didn't know how she knew what to do. Maybe it was instinct. Maybe it was the memories still downloading from the pendant's destruction. But she took the shard and pressed it to the empty air in front of her.
The air solidified.
A step appeared. Then another. A staircase made of light and code, leading up to safety.
"What—" Kael stared.
"Don't question it. Move!"
They climbed. Each step felt solid enough, but Elara could feel the strain. The shard was dying, using its last energy to maintain the structure. Below them, the Core's collapse was accelerating. The nothing was rising, hungry, seeking to consume everything the network had touched.
Twenty feet to go.
The shard's light flickered.
"Faster!" Elara pulled Kael harder.
Ten feet.
The bottom steps dissolved.
Five feet.
The shard went dark.
Elara threw herself forward, dragging Kael with her. They hit solid concrete, rolling away from the edge as the staircase collapsed. The ground shook. A sound like reality tearing echoed from below.
Then silence.
Elara lay on the cold floor of the metro station, gasping. Her palm was burned where the shard had been. Gone now. Dissolved. The last piece of the pendant erased.
Maya was dead. The network was destroyed. CodeX was finally over.
So why did she feel like she'd lost?
"Elara."
She turned her head. Kael was sitting up, staring at his hands. His normal, human hands. The circuitry was gone. The enhancements dead. He was just a man now. Ordinary. Breakable.
"I'm disconnected," he said, and his voice held wonder and horror in equal measure. "For the first time in twenty-three years, I'm completely human."
"Is that good or bad?"
He looked at her with those new brown eyes. "I don't know. Ask me when I stop feeling like I cut off a limb."
Footsteps echoed in the station. Multiple people. Elara tensed, but Kael put a hand on her arm.
"It's okay. They're—" He paused. Frowned. "I can't sense them anymore. Can't feel their biometrics or heat signatures. I'm really just human now."
The footsteps resolved into people. Three of them. Two men and a woman, all dressed in tactical gear that looked expensive and illegal. The woman in front had salt-and-pepper hair and eyes that had seen things Elara couldn't imagine.
She stopped a few feet away, assessing them with a professional's gaze.
"Elara Chen. Kael Morrison." Not questions. Statements. "I'm Colonel Vance. I lead the Containment Division for the government agency that doesn't exist. We've been monitoring Section 7 for twenty-three years, waiting for CodeX to either die or break containment."
"It's dead," Elara said flatly. "I killed it."
Vance's expression didn't change, but something flickered in her eyes. Relief, maybe. "We know. Every monitoring station went dark six minutes ago. The seismic sensors picked up the Core's collapse." She glanced at the edge where the stairs had been. "You destroyed the network."
"Had to."
"A lot of people died when you did that."
"They were already dead." Elara's voice was hard. "I gave them peace."
Vance studied her for a long moment. Then nodded. "Agreed. CodeX was an abomination. Should never have been created." She turned to her team. "Clear the area. Full quarantine protocol. Nothing from down there reaches the surface."
"What about us?" Kael asked.
"You're coming with me." Vance's tone left no room for argument. "Both of you. There are questions that need answering. Debriefing that needs to happen. And Elara—" Her eyes sharpened. "You may have destroyed the network, but you absorbed twenty-three years of its data when you put on that pendant. Your brain is full of classified information that died with CodeX. We need to extract it before it degrades."
Elara's blood went cold. "Extract how?"
"Carefully." Vance's smile was thin. "Don't worry. We're not CodeX. We won't turn you into a machine. But you're the only remaining record of what happened down there. The only proof that any of this was real."
"And if I refuse?"
"Then you become a security risk." The smile vanished. "And we handle security risks permanently."
Kael stood, placing himself between Elara and Vance. Even weakened, even human, he was still dangerous. "She just saved the city. Possibly the world. That's the thanks she gets?"
"That's reality," Vance said coldly. "She can either help us make sure this never happens again, or we make sure she can't become a second CodeX herself. Her choice."
Elara met Kael's eyes. Saw the question there. Saw him ready to fight if she asked him to.
But she was tired. So tired. And Vance was right. She could feel the data in her head, foreign and vast. Memories that weren't hers. Code that shouldn't exist in a human mind.
She was dangerous now.
"Fine," she said, standing on shaky legs. "I'll cooperate. But I want immunity. Full immunity for everything that happened down there."
"Done."
"And Kael comes with me. He's the only other survivor. He stays with me or I don't say a word."
Vance's eyes flicked between them. "Fine. But you both understand—what you saw down there, what you experienced, it can never be spoken of publicly. CodeX stays buried. Forever."
"Good," Elara said. "I never want to hear that name again."
As Vance's team led them away, Elara glanced back one last time at the edge of the platform. Down there in the dark, her sister's body was being consumed by the nothing. The Core was collapsing. The network was dying.
It was over.
So why did it feel like it was just beginning ?