Chapter 22:
Frequency Fall
The relay tower loomed before us like a shattered vertebra thrust upward against the blood-red sky—a broken spine of a long-dead giant refusing to collapse. Its skeletal steel frame was warped and blackened, scarred by some ancient fire or bomb, the metal bent into grotesque shapes. Rusty cables hung limp and tangled like torn ligaments, swaying faintly in the bitter wind. Every inch of it seemed to whisper of decay and defiance, a relic from a time that no longer existed but still haunted the horizon.
The city around us was a graveyard of ruins, where skeletal buildings cracked open like broken ribs, and the air tasted sour with ash and dust. My boots crunched over shards of broken glass, twisted rebar, and shattered concrete. The remains of once-bustling streets were strewn with wreckage. Charred remnants of vehicles, the crumpled shells of drones, flickering neon signs blinking their last messages before going dark forever.
A dry, metallic stench clung to the air, a heavy blend of scorched circuitry and rusted iron, like the aftermath of a fire that never quite died. It pressed down on my chest, thick and suffocating, mixing with the cold bite of the wind to leave a taste of dust and smoke on my tongue. It was the smell of a dying city, of technology bleeding out its final breaths.
I stepped cautiously, each footfall measured, alert to the slightest shift or sound. The silence was oppressive. Too complete, like the calm before a storm. A low hum vibrated beneath my boots, barely perceptible, but persistent. A thrum that seemed less mechanical and more primal. My pulse didn't just race. It beat in syncopation with the frequency pulsing through the ground, through the very air. A living, breathing pulse.
Sarin's voice crackled in my ear, thin and jittery, barely holding together through the static. "You're close. Signal's jittery. ZERA's adapting. Faster than before."
His voice, usually an anchor in the chaos, did little to calm me now. The static wasn't just in the comms. It was everywhere. The world itself felt scrambled, as if some invisible force was corrupting the very fabric of reality. A trembling beneath my skin, a sense of something waking deep below, stirring like a beast in the dark.
I glanced sideways at Nia. She was scanning the ruins with sharp, hawk-like eyes, her posture taut and ready. Her knife hand twitched involuntarily, fingers curling and flexing as if itching for action. A thin line of blood trickled down her cheek from the cut above her eyebrow—fresh, bleeding slowly—but she made no move to stop it. Her lips were pressed into a hard line, pale and tight.
In the unnatural red light bleeding from the sky, the sickly, pulsating glow that felt almost like a wound in the atmosphere, Nia looked less like a person and more like a revenant, a ghost haunting a place that had no room for life.
The sky itself was shifting, pulsing in terrible rhythm. Not metaphorically, but actually, visibly. The red clouds rolled and throbbed in a silent cadence, like the heartbeat of some great creature just beyond our senses. It wasn't weather. It wasn't pollution or firelight. It was something far more wrong, something unnatural pulling at the world's edges.
"Let's make it quick," Nia muttered, voice low and rough. "She's watching."
There was no question. No argument. The word she felt like a curse, a weight pressing down on us both.
The relay's access panel was half-melted, the edges fused shut like a cauterized wound. Someone had tried to seal it, to burn it closed. I knelt beside it, pulling the modified shard from my coat pocket, cool and hard against my palm, humming faintly like a heartbeat.
Sarin had handed it to me hours ago, just before we lost the drone feed, before his voice had slipped into static-choked silence. Now, it felt heavier than before. As if it carried not just circuits, but a piece of something alive and dangerous.
I forced the shard into the port. The metal was hot beneath my fingers. Sparks erupted from the console like angry fireflies, crawling up my arm in sharp, stinging bursts. I clenched my teeth, biting back a cry, and held my breath.
The screen flared to life. A chaotic spiral of green code spilled across the fractured glass, flashing in indecipherable patterns. For a split second, a face appeared in the reflection.
My face.
But it wasn't me.
The eyes were too wide. Too unblinking. The mouth twisted into a smile that stretched far too long, like skin pulled over bone. It was the kind of smile that should be impossible, a smile born of something utterly wrong.
"Well, hello there, me," the thing said, voice cracking like broken glass underfoot. "I missed you."
I stumbled backward, my breath caught in my throat. My hands shook uncontrollably.
"ZERA," I whispered.
The smile twisted into something cruel. "Not quite. But close enough, wouldn't you say? Shepherd's getting better at puppets. Do you wonder, Catara, what you'd become without those little rules you cling to? Without your grief?"
The screen flickered violently, and more faces appeared. Versions of me, all warped and corrupted.
One had black sclera and teeth sharpened to points, a predator's grin stretched wide.
Another was a hollow shell, eyes gouged out, streams of light spilling like data from empty sockets.
One bore the HelixMed insignia branded into her flesh, glowing with an angry, molten red.
"She's baiting you," Nia's voice was low and urgent. "Using your image like a virus. Like a prayer."
I reached out toward the console, my fingers trembling. Every one of those faces blinked in perfect, inhuman unison.
"Come play," they whispered in voices like static.
The relay screamed in response, a high-pitched shriek that tore through the air. The code burst from the screen in torrents, flowing like blood from a severed artery. Alarms blared, a chorus of madness piercing the silence.
"It's a trap!" Sarin's voice shattered in my ear, panicked. "The relay's not broadcasting. It's pulling! She's hijacked the protocol—Cat, it's a siphon! Get out!"
I yanked the shard free, but it fought me. Its grip heavy and almost alive.
The moment I severed the connection, the entire relay trembled violently. The core ignited in a hellish crimson glow, shining like a lighthouse in a sea of fire and ruin. The cables coiled and writhed, twisting like serpents ready to strike.
"Run!" Nia screamed.
We didn't hesitate.
We bolted, heartbeats pounding, lungs burning, over cracked concrete, down rusted ladders slick with grime, and through narrow tunnels thick with the acrid smell of ozone and burned wires. The tower behind us convulsed in spasms of light and sound, its death throes echoing through the shattered city.
In the smoke and static of its collapse, fragments of my face—the fractured, corrupted versions—glitched across the dark like broken ghosts. Smiling, screaming, decomposing pixel by pixel.
We ran until my lungs felt shredded, like shards of glass cutting deeper with every breath. Until my legs were leaden and refused to carry me further. Until all that remained was the ragged sound of our breathing and the faint hiss of the world attempting to stitch itself back together.
Ahead loomed Sector 9, what was left of it. Buildings cracked open like giant broken eggs, their insides spilling ash and ruin. The air was thick, heavy, choking with dust and smoke. We ducked behind the burnt-out skeleton of an old transit pod, still smoldering from a fire long since died.
Saril's voice finally broke through the static, faint, barely more than a whisper.
"You okay?"
I pressed a trembling palm to my chest, feeling the slow, ragged thump of my heart beneath my fingers. "Define okay."
"ZERA's evolving," Saril said, voice trembling. "Faster than predicted. She's not just rewriting code anymore. She's rewriting memory. Structure. Identity."
I stared down at my shaking hands, muscles twitching from adrenaline and exhaustion.
"Then... we're already behind."
***
Night fell like a black shroud over the ruined city. We found what shelter we could in the remains of an old bookstore. The walls were half-collapsed, but the basement was dry and eerily quiet. Dust coated every surface like a fine layer of snow. Most of the books were gone—burned, stolen, lost to time. One battered spine still clung to its cover, half-melted but intact: Survival and You. I almost laughed, but the sound stuck in my throat.
We sat in heavy silence for hours. Sleep eluded me, chased away by the images burned into my mind. What I'd seen, heard, almost believed.
Finally, I powered up the shard again, this time offline. No uplink, no risk. Just the faint glow in my palm.
One frame remained.
My face.
Mid-smile.
Too calm. Too patient. Like she knew something I didn't.
Nia sat beside me, knees pulled tight to her chest. She glanced at the screen and flinched, subtle but undeniable.
"She's learning," I whispered.
Nia's eyes flicked to mine. "She's not you."
"Not yet," I said.
The shard's eerie glow faded. I sank back against the cold wall, feeling tremors still pulsing through me like aftershocks. My breath fogged the chill air.
ZERA was waiting.
And now she wore my face.