The quiet that followed the fall of the Architect wasn't peace—it was grief wearing a mask. Cities began to rebuild, minds began to forget, but in the places where memory lingered, the cracks told another story.
Arden found himself standing beneath a collapsed archway, once part of the Architect's central relay station. Now it was just a graveyard of lost data and scorched steel. Every time he blinked, he could still see Clyde—his sacrifice, his fire, his defiance.
"You ever feel like you're just… what's left over?" he asked aloud, not expecting an answer.
But he got one.
"Only when I stand still," Echo replied, stepping carefully over jagged cables, her eyes fixed on the ruined skyline.
They had been traveling together for only three days, but the silence between them had already become familiar—comfortable, in a strange way. Neither spoke much, yet both seemed to carry a weight the other instinctively understood.
Echo crouched beside a broken transmitter. Her fingers brushed over the surface like someone reading a scar.
"It's not gone," she murmured.
"What isn't?" Arden asked.
"The code. It's still breathing. Somewhere underground."
A pulse, almost like a heartbeat, rippled through the soil beneath them. Arden turned sharply. "You sure?"
She nodded, her voice barely above a whisper. "It's calling to something."
Elsewhere, in the dim echo of a forgotten control room, a screen blinked on. Lines of code bled across the glass, reforming what was once believed lost.
And then, a voice.
"Hello… Clyde."
Except Clyde was gone. Wasn't he?