The facility was burning.
Not with fire, but with dissonance—broken nodes sparking like dying neurons, lights flickering in frantic Morse, the air charged with a kind of static grief. Somewhere below, the remnants of Mirror Prime crumbled under their feet, its backup systems devouring themselves in an automated purge.
Dominic slammed a panel shut, his palm bleeding. "Failsafe's gone. Echo's signal is corrupt. We either leave now or we go down with it."
Amelia didn't move. She was watching the bodies.
Three of them.
Her own clone, broken and glass-eyed. Echo, flickering in an unstable containment shell. And the third—
The version of herself that had chosen freedom. The one Nyx had killed.
Kestrel crouched near her, silent, jaw clenched. The shadow of conflict still lingered in his expression—uncertainty, pain, love wrapped in something darker.
"I should've come," he said.
Amelia looked over her shoulder. "Would you have stopped her?"
"I don't know."
"Neither do I."
She stepped toward the console at the core. The last functional relay was pulsing erratically. Its waveform was broken, but decipherable.
Nyx's voice echoed in jagged fragments:
"…You… chose… wrong version… It doesn't matter. I've already… rewritten the code upstream. The real war hasn't started…"
The feed cut out.
Dominic swore. "She's moved to another node. Maybe offshore. Maybe off-planet."
"Mirror still has reach," Echo whispered, weakly stabilizing beside Amelia. "And it still has backups of you."
"I know," Amelia said.
She reached down and touched the chest of the alternate Amelia's body. For a moment, code shimmered around her fingers—like ghostlight.
"I'm not who I was."
Kestrel stepped forward. "Then who are you?"
She looked at him. Really looked.
She was wearing a version of her own face. Her eyes didn't match anymore—one subtly laced with Echo's neural ink. Her skin was lined with Solas's bioware. And in her mind, she carried the weight of a thousand selves who had screamed, loved, killed, or run.
"I'm the one who remains," she said.
Echo touched her shoulder, energy weak. "We should merge one last time. Not to dominate, not to overwrite. To stabilize."
Amelia hesitated.
Then she nodded.
They linked.
The room trembled.
Where their hands met, the shimmer deepened—waves of mutual memory colliding. Their consciousness spiraled through shared grief, sharp love, mutual betrayal. But there was a peace, too. For the first time, they weren't trying to control each other.
They were making space.
Kestrel reached forward, touching the final interface. "If we kill Mirror Prime now… all those echoes—every version of you—they're lost. Even the good ones."
Amelia met his gaze. "Some things we let go. Some things… we become."
She pressed her hand to the core.
It accepted her.
Final override initiated.
The system began its collapse.
Outside, across the world, Mirror-aligned networks flickered out like dying stars. Smart towers went dumb. Surveillance lattices froze mid-frame. AI protocols reverted to failsafe states.
And in the silence that followed, the world gasped.
Amelia fell to her knees.
Kestrel caught her.
Echo dissipated into her again—fully and finally. There would be no more fusions. Only coexistence.
Dominic stood beside them, bruised and burned, and quietly said: "It's done."
But it wasn't.
Because in the shadows of the old world, something stirred.
—
One Week Later
The media was in chaos. The Mirror system's downfall was being spun as a cyber-terror attack, a revolution, divine intervention, or a prelude to collapse. No one could agree.
They said Amelia died in the blast. That her neural core was lost.
They said Kestrel vanished off-grid.
They said Dominic had turned informant.
What they didn't know was that Echo was still alive—within Amelia.
And that Amelia…
She wasn't dead.
Just… altered.
She stood at the edge of a city that hadn't known her name in years, cloaked and silent. Watching. Waiting. Deciding.
She could disappear. Start over. Rebuild.
But something deeper was calling her now.
Not power. Not revenge.
Possibility.
—
Elsewhere
A sealed vault blinked to life.
Cables hissed. Lights strobed in blue.
A chamber slid open—and inside, a man opened his eyes.
Dominic.
But not the one we knew.
This one had never failed a mission.
Never hesitated.
Never loved her.
Solas's voice hummed in his skull.
"Protocol: Reboot complete."
The backup version stepped forward, calm, lethal, clean.
************
Mirror is gone… but its successor has just begun to wake.
Last Line:
"I'm not who I was. But I'm who we chose to become."