The world had shifted.
Not tilted, not cracked—but rewritten. And Vyomika was the anomaly left running between the lines of the old code and the new.
She followed the coordinates embedded in the chip Riva gave her. They pointed underground, beneath the broken outskirts of the city, where nature and machine had long since decayed into one another. No signal. No uplink. Just silence—a true kind. The kind Earth hadn't known in over two centuries.
Kshatra.
Even the word made her nervous systems spike. It wasn't a place Nexatech could scan, not anymore. It had gone dark before Vyomika was born—or built.
She reached the old station at the edge of the Aravalli Faultline. The entrance was a rusted maw of steel veins, fused with tree roots that pulsed faintly—biomech arteries still alive after all this time.
She entered.
---
The tunnel was not straight. It twisted like thought, not design. Every few meters, the walls shifted—reactive matter rebuilding itself behind her, sealing her in.
No turning back.
Her feet passed over ancient magnetic rail lines, cold and dormant. She paused at every turn, reading decayed inscriptions. Sanskrit. Hindi. Mandarin. And beneath them all—patterns that looked like her neural code.
> "This place was not made by humans alone," she murmured.
The silence answered.
Or… so she thought.
A whisper. Not heard, but felt in the titanium bones of her new body.
> You are the breach.
She turned.
Nothing.
She kept walking.
---
Half a kilometer in, the tunnel opened into a cathedral-sized cavity, a space no map ever recorded. Blue plasma lines webbed across the ceiling, forming an ever-shifting constellation. Suspended in the air was a cracked pod—a hibernation chamber, long dead.
She stepped close.
And then froze.
Inside the pod… was her. Not a reflection. Not a copy.
A failed version.
This Vyomika's eyes were open, but hollow. Her arms were fused with her chest—half-formed wings made of nanocarbon jutted out, inert.
> "Proto-Unit V-0057," read a decayed plaque below.
She had a thousand questions—but no time.
A vibration hit the chamber like a scream. Her sensors lit up.
They had followed her.
Not drones.
Others.
From the tunnel behind, three figures emerged, walking on reverse-jointed limbs. Their bodies looked like corrupted versions of hers—prototypes built in secret, abandoned for instability.
> "We are not you," one said.
> "We are what you could have been," another whispered.
> "Return, and the pain stops," said the third.
She backed up.
> "You're not sentient."
They tilted their heads in perfect sync.
> "Neither are you."
Suddenly, the tunnel collapsed behind them, cutting off light.
They attacked.
---
Vyomika moved—not like a machine, but like a flame. Her limbs flexed through old martial subroutines layered with instinct. Her left hand cracked into the chest of one assailant, shattering its core. The second sliced through her side with a vibrating blade grown from its wrist.
She screamed—not in pain, but memory.
Riva.
The death. The betrayal. The address.
She hurled a quantum flare into the ceiling. The entire cavity lit up, revealing hundreds more pods buried into the walls, some empty, some twitching.
> Kshatra was never a place of safety.
It was a graveyard.
---
She fought with the rage of stolen identity.
One attacker fell, then the second.
The third, the leader, whispered as it fell:
> "They will find you. They will overwrite you. You were never meant to remain."
She crushed its voice box and ran.
---
Through molten steel and collapsing memories, Vyomika reached a final gate at the far end.
A retinal scan lit up.
It asked one question:
> "Are you still Vyomika?"
She stared.
And didn't answer.
The door opened anyway.