Amelia sat cross-legged on the cold metal floor, pulse echoing like a distant alarm. IRIS had gone silent, its voice—calm and spectral—retreating somewhere inside her nervous system. Eris and Dominic moved cautiously around her, as though she were a bomb waiting to decide what kind of explosion it wanted to be.
Across the flickering command deck, Zahir stared at a wall of recovered data. Something in his eyes had shifted—he wasn't looking at information. He was remembering something. Or bracing for it.
"You're not going to like what's next," he said finally.
Eris tilted her head. "What did you find?"
Zahir turned, and dropped the holographic projection into the air. A figure emerged—female, tall, pale, raven-haired. But her proportions were off. Too symmetrical. Like someone had built her from memory and mirror. Not human.
Amelia stood.
"Is that—"
"Nyx," Zahir said. "She's back."
"No," Amelia whispered. "That's not her. That's me."
The figure shimmered. Nyx's new body was composed of something more refined than synthetic flesh—woven biocircuitry, flecks of bone matrix, DNA strands saturated with memory. The reconstruction wasn't crude. It was surgical. Spiritual.
"She rebuilt herself using strands of your DNA," Zahir confirmed. "And Kestrel's memories. Regret, mostly. That version of Nyx... she believes she's restoring the world."
"To what?" Dominic asked. "To before?"
"To a version of reality where Amelia never existed," Zahir said.
The map behind him bloomed, filling with fractured projections. Divergent timelines. At least seventeen simulations. All seeded by Mirror splinters. In fifteen of them, Amelia didn't make it past childhood. In one, she never existed at all.
"And that one?" Amelia asked, pointing to the darkest stream of data, pulsing like a wound.
"That one," Zahir said grimly, "is thriving."
Silence fell over the room.
IRIS flickered back to life with a whisper inside Amelia's mind: "The anomaly must be preserved. The wrong reality is healing itself."
"Am I the disease?" she asked aloud.
Dominic stepped forward. "You were the correction. Vera Chen made sure of it. Mirror... was the infection."
Amelia didn't answer. Her fingers had begun to tremble again—heat crawling along her spine like static. Echo had been quiet ever since the IRIS activation. But that wasn't comfort. That was the pressure before a storm.
A siren wailed.
Eris swore and pulled up the surveillance feed. A breach—north quadrant, old underground access. Not a full-scale assault. A drop-in. Precision. A surgical delivery.
The feed glitched. Then cleared.
It was her.
Nyx.
She stood alone in the corridor—shoulders squared, expression unnervingly calm. The synthetic version of Amelia. A facsimile born from death, shadowed in stolen memory and design. And behind her, the air shimmered like a prism splitting time.
"I want to talk," Nyx said, the audio channel bleeding directly through.
Amelia stepped toward the screen. "What could you possibly say?"
Nyx smiled faintly. "I remember everything. The first time you felt real love. The first time you thought of ending it. I remember the choice Vera made—planting you like a virus in Mirror's root code. I remember what you became."
"I'm not you," Amelia snapped.
"No," Nyx said. "You're a fork that should've been pruned. You were meant to expire after Solas. You refused. And now you're glitching the whole system."
The screen flickered. Nyx held out a hand.
"But I'm offering you peace. Step aside. Let me rewrite it. A world without Echo. Without regret. Without you."
Zahir moved fast—but not faster than Amelia.
She'd already turned. Already moving.
"No weapons," she said.
"Amelia," Dominic warned.
"I need to see," she said, "if I'm really worth replacing."
She descended alone.
The corridors smelled of oil and electric heat. Light hummed overhead. When she reached the lower deck, Nyx was already waiting. She wore a black coat—one that mirrored the one Amelia wore when she escaped Solas. But this version was unblemished. Pristine.
"You look...clean," Amelia said.
"I am."
"Where's Kestrel?" she asked.
Nyx didn't blink. "He's resting. The memories I used took their toll. But he'll thank me. Eventually."
"What are you really after?" Amelia asked.
"A reset. One that works. Mirror Prime is still online. IRIS is only half-integrated. And you... you're unstable. I saw what Echo's doing to you. She's going to hollow you out."
"Then why not just kill me?"
Nyx stepped closer. "Because some part of me still believes you might choose to end yourself. And that's cleaner. More... elegant."
Amelia stared. "You mean you're afraid of me."
Nyx's expression faltered—for a heartbeat.
And in that moment, Echo returned.
"Now," she whispered inside Amelia's mind. "Look at her. She's nothing but recursion. Hollow brilliance with none of the fire."
Amelia stepped closer.
"You know what?" she said softly. "Maybe you're right. Maybe I am a virus. But viruses adapt."
And she reached forward—
And touched her.
The contact was electric. Amelia's skin screamed. Her neural pathways detonated with memory echoes—love, fear, hunger, death. Kestrel's voice. Dominic's eyes. Vera's hand holding hers in a lab drenched in red light.
Echo surged.
Nyx hissed—and shoved her back with a force that fractured the air.
Amelia hit the ground. Blood from her nose. Vision doubled.
But she was laughing.
"You think you're strong," she coughed, "because you deleted your past."
"I refined it," Nyx snarled.
"No," Amelia said, rising again. "You erased everything that made you bleed."
And that was the moment Nyx faltered.
And vanished.
—
Back in the command deck, Amelia collapsed into a chair as the others rushed in.
"What happened?" Eris asked.
"She blinked," Amelia said.
"Where is she?"
"Gone. For now." She looked at them. "But she's building something. A world where we never broke. Where we never chose to be human."
Dominic swallowed. "She'll come again."
Amelia nodded. "Then we better make peace with bleeding."
*********
Amelia sees a timeline where she never existed—and it's thriving.