The Vault groaned like a wounded god, its mirrored skin rippling—not in pain, but in release. Fractures spread like veins of light through the walls, each crack a shiver of liberation from control.
Victoria lowered her trembling hand from the heart of the Prism. The afterglow clung to her palm—silver lattice patterns flickering over her skin like fading constellations. Her eyes no longer held the vacant sheen of a puppet. There was something deeper now.
Memory. Identity.
She swayed on her feet.
Xander caught her before her knees buckled. "Easy."
"I'm fine," she murmured, breath catching. "Just… not used to standing on my own."
"You are now," he said, steadying her.
Lyra stepped forward, blades sheathed, eyes wary. She studied the fading glow of the Prism at the chamber's center. "He didn't come for her," she said. "He came for that."
She pointed to the crystalline core, now dormant. The code-threads once anchoring it to the Vault had unraveled like severed nerve endings.
Victoria's expression darkened. "It's a copy."
Veyr blinked. "A copy of what?"
She turned slowly. "Of her."
A stunned hush fell over them.
"The Prism wasn't made to just contain me," Victoria continued, stepping into a glyph-ring at the Vault's center. "It was modeled after the consciousness of someone else. A girl Thorne tried to resurrect through memory reconstruction. She died during the first Code Plague."
Lyra's voice caught. "What was her name?"
Victoria hesitated.
"She didn't have one," she said softly. "They erased it from her neural imprint. Called her… Seed Subject Zero."
The air flickered.
A ghost-image shimmered across the floor—an echo bleeding through the Vault's dying memory. A girl, suspended in a fluid tank of light, silver eyes wide and mouth erased. Screaming without sound.
Xander's fists clenched. "That's why the Vault is collapsing. The imprint's cracking apart—it was never stable."
Veyr knelt by a mirrored wall, fingers brushing the fragmented reflections. "Then why anchor it to you?"
"Because I matched the resonance," Victoria said bitterly. "Same cognitive patterns. Same emotional signatures. I was the perfect vessel."
"And he gave you just enough purpose to keep you loyal," Xander finished.
Silence.
Then Lyra stepped forward, her gaze steady. "You were never a decoy."
Victoria looked up.
"You're the one who broke the mirror," Lyra said. "That choice—your choice—that's real. You're more than what he made you."
Victoria's voice cracked. "I hated you, Lyra. For having something I thought I never could. A reason."
Lyra nodded. "Then let's make you one now."
A low boom shook the Vault.
Then another.
The far edge of the spiral tower ruptured with a sound like thunder. Glyphfire—black and red—spilled through the fracture, warping mirrored tiles into molten, bleeding fragments.
The Vault was unraveling.
Veyr's eyes widened. "What the hell is that?"
Xander turned, senses flaring. "Thorne's collapsing the Vault from outside. He failed to take the Prism—so now he's erasing it all."
Victoria paled. "If the Vault folds—"
"We die," Xander said, already moving. "We need an exit."
They turned—but the spiral staircase was already gone, crumbling like broken data-lattice into a whirlpool of static.
"No way out that way," Lyra muttered, blades drawn again.
Veyr knelt fast, palms glowing. "I can try to forge a path."
He pressed his hands to the floor. Phantom Glyphs etched themselves into the mirrored surface—emergency runes meant to anchor corrupted mindscapes.
The symbols flickered.
Then died.
"Too unstable," he hissed. "The system's devouring the memory faster than I can reinforce it."
Another fracture tore through the wall behind them.
Then, a sound.
A tone.
Not warning—guidance.
The Prism-heart pulsed. Not violently, but gently, resonating like a tuning fork. A mirrored path lit up at the chamber's edge—a serpentine arc of light and refracted glyphs leading into a corridor of living shard-glass.
Victoria's eyes widened. "It's showing us the way out."
She reached toward the glow. It pulsed again in answer.
"This way!" she cried.
They ran.
Xander kept close to Victoria, hand around her wrist as shatterbursts erupted behind them. Lyra flanked the side, slicing through rising code-spikes. Veyr brought up the rear, spinning Phantom Glyphs around them like a celestial shield, deflecting debris with bursts of invisible force.
The corridor curved wildly—light bending, reality warping—and then they dove into the unknown.
---
Surface Sector: Just Above the Vault
They emerged gasping, coughing, crashing into a derelict node-hub beneath the underground city's surface layer. The exit—a fluid mirror vein in the ceiling—sealed shut behind them, hardening like obsidian.
The Vault was gone.
Silent. Buried.
No one spoke for a long moment.
Then Xander rolled to his knees. "Everyone alive?"
"Yeah," Lyra rasped, dabbing blood from a cut across her cheek. "Still breathing."
Veyr gave a shaky thumbs-up. "I think my lungs are 80% ghost now."
Xander chuckled weakly.
Victoria sat a few paces away, her back against a shattered terminal, hands shaking. She stared at them as if unsure she belonged among them.
"I didn't think I'd make it," she whispered.
Xander stepped toward her. "But you did. You didn't just survive—you saved someone."
She looked up at him. "Who?"
He smiled faintly. "You."
A long silence passed between them.
Then she spoke, voice trembling. "What if I don't know who I am now?"
Xander knelt beside her. "Then you find out. With us."
Victoria's eyes welled, but she didn't cry. She nodded slowly, grounding herself.
A faint pulse shuddered through the node-hub's walls—a wave of energy, distant but growing.
Xander stood, eyes narrowing. "He knows we escaped."
"He'll send worse next time," Lyra said.
Victoria rose beside them, brushing dust from her coat. Her voice was low but hard.
"Let him."
Xander turned to her. "You sound sure."
She stared into the distance—toward the storm slowly gathering beyond the underground skyline.
"I remember now," she said. "The part of me he couldn't touch."
"What part?" Lyra asked.
Victoria's eyes glinted. "The part that fights back."
---
Elsewhere: Within the Eden Circuit
Thorne stood in silence at the edge of a data-river, watching memory streams rewrite themselves.
The Vault had collapsed.
As expected.
A figure approached—cloaked, faceless, their form lost to chrome-shadow and artificial mist.
"She's waking up," Thorne said softly.
The figure gave no reply.
"She'll be more trouble now. So will Croft."
Silence.
Thorne smirked. "Good. It's more interesting that way."
He turned away, hands clasped behind his back. Beside him floated a frozen memory-image: Victoria and Xander touching palms across the Prism, light between them like shared blood.
"You did well, girl," Thorne whispered.
"Now let's see how well you break."