The industrial district stretched before them, a graveyard of rust and steel swallowed by the night. Kiera inhaled the air thick with the scent of damp concrete and forgotten fires. This place, once pulsing with life, now stood as a monument to silence, a relic erased from the Architects' version of history.
But not everything had been erased. Not completely.
She kept moving, her boots scuffing against the cracked pavement, eyes darting over the skeletal remains of the city. The buildings, gutted and left to decay, bore traces of a past that refused to die—murals, words scrawled in defiance, symbols etched like scars across the walls.
And then, there it was again. The jagged star.
A flicker of something other shuddered through her mind. Not a memory exactly, but a feeling. Familiar. Alien.
The Architects had taken her memories, scrubbed her clean, rebuilt her into something obedient. Something sharp. Yet here, in the ruins of the forgotten, the pieces of who she once was lurked just beneath the surface, waiting to be unearthed.
A chill ran through her, not from fear, but from recognition.
"Kiera?" Rhys's voice was quiet but insistent. He had noticed her hesitation.
She blinked, realizing she had stopped walking. The others had already taken cover beneath the crumbling arch of what had once been a transit station. The ceiling had partially collapsed, vines curling through its metal ribs like nature itself was reclaiming what the Architects had abandoned.
Rhys stepped closer, lowering his voice. "Are you—?"
"I don't know," Kiera cut him off, her gaze fixed on the symbol. Her pulse thrummed beneath her skin. "I've seen this before. I know it."
Marek, ever the pragmatist, had already pulled out a scanning device. He swept it over the graffiti, and the screen flickered with interference before revealing something buried beneath the surface. A transmission.
The device crackled, distorting as if fighting against the weight of time. And then, a single line of text bled onto the screen:
Kiera. Find us.
Her breath caught.
Rhys and Marek exchanged a glance.
"That's not a coincidence," Marek muttered.
No. It wasn't.
The Architects had spent years erasing history—erasing people. If someone had left this for her, it meant she wasn't just running from them anymore. She was running toward something.
A past that hadn't been destroyed.
A past that was waiting for her to remember.
But before she could process it, a high-pitched mechanical shriek cut through the silence.
A drone.
The patrol unit hovered above the rooftops, scanning the ruins below with its eerie red eye. The hum of its engines vibrated through Kiera's bones.
"We've been scanned." Marek's voice was sharp.
The moment shattered.
No more time to think. No more time to remember.
Rhys grabbed her wrist. "Move. Now."
They ran.
The ruined streets blurred around them, shadows stretching long beneath the artificial moonlight. Kiera felt the adrenaline sharpen her senses—the instincts burned into her by the Specialists igniting like wildfire in her veins. Her body moved faster than thought, dodging debris, vaulting over broken barriers.
And yet, the voice was still there.
A whisper at the edges of her mind.
You are not a rebel. You are an instrument of order. You are ours.
Her breath hitched.
No. She shoved the thought away, focused on the ground beneath her feet, the sound of pursuit closing in. The drones weren't alone. If they had picked up their heat signatures, the enforcers wouldn't be far behind.
A narrow alley loomed ahead—a way out.
But then—
A shadow moved.
Kiera skidded to a stop, pulse hammering.
Someone was standing at the alley's entrance. Not a drone. Not an enforcer.
A person.
The figure was still, a silhouette against the flickering neon of a broken sign. The shape of a long coat, a hood pulled low over their face.
Rhys and Marek tensed.
Kiera took a step forward, every nerve on edge. There was something wrong about this. Something that made her chest tighten—not in fear, but in anticipation.
Then, the figure lifted their head.
And Kiera knew them.
Her mind reeled, her breath stalling in her lungs. It wasn't possible.
Yet the face staring back at her was unmistakable.
"Kiera," the figure said.
A voice from the past. A voice she shouldn't remember.
But she did.
And that changed everything.