The room collapsed like a memory fragment.
Shards of light cracked the ceiling, and the air began to vibrate not from sound, but from pressure. Lyra clutched the synaptic recorder as the world around her tilted sideways. Finn shouted something, but it came out warped, like his voice had been twisted through a broken speaker.
"Found you."
The voice echoed again, not through the room, but inside Lyra's skull. It wasn't a whisper, not exactly it felt like a memory being replayed out of order. She grabbed her head, heart thudding.
Norren slammed a button on the wall. Emergency protocols flickered to life: red lights, magnetic seals, backup core power. "He's not here physically," he shouted. "He's hacking your synaptic signals!"
Mina raised her wrist device and started typing furiously. "He's projecting through the neural grid. He's inside our bio-feedback."
Finn aimed his pulse gun at nothing. "What does that even mean?"
"It means," Norren barked, "he's inside her."
Lyra gasped. The air grew heavy. Like the room had too much gravity and not enough oxygen. Her legs gave way. She hit the ground, and suddenly she wasn't in the lab anymore.
She was six years old again.
Standing on a beach.
Alone.
The sky was purple, the waves moving in reverse, like time itself had hiccupped. She looked down and saw her small hands. The white dress. The same dream. The one she'd been having since she could remember.
Only now, it was sharper. Louder. Real.
And someone stood in the water, facing away.
A boy.
She tried to call out, but her voice failed. The boy turned, just a little, and she saw silver eyes.
Echo.
But younger. Human. Before whatever had turned him into… whatever he was now.
"You remember this, don't you?" he asked softly, his voice carrying across the impossible tide. "The day they erased you."
Lyra stumbled backward. "This isn't real."
"No," he said, stepping toward her. "This is the only real thing left. Everything else they made you forget. But not this."
She looked at the waves.
At the sky.
At the crumbling stars above.
"Why are you showing me this?"
"Because you're like me," Echo said. "We were both meant to burn. But they tried to bottle the fire instead."
She clenched her fists. "You're in my head."
He stopped inches away.
"You let me in."
Then he touched her forehead, and the world broke.
Lyra jolted back to consciousness.
She was still in the lab, but something was wrong. Finn and Mina were frozen like time had paused. Norren was gone. The lights flickered like a heartbeat. And Lyra could see code now.
Not written.
Floating.
Every object around her pulsed with strange strings of symbols, like someone had pulled back the skin of reality.
"What did you do to me?" she gasped.
Echo appeared again half-glitch, half-boy. "I showed you the interface. The way I see the world. You're not blind anymore."
She tried to move, but her limbs lagged behind her mind.
"You feel it, don't you?" he continued. "The system doesn't fully bind you. Because you were never meant to be part of it."
"What do you want from me?"
Echo knelt beside her. His face was calm. Almost sad. "To understand why you survived, and the others didn't."
Lyra blinked. "Others?"
He stood and waved his hand. A holographic spiral bloomed around them dozens of faces.
Children.
All gone.
"All of them were part of the original WITTED trials," Echo whispered. "You were the only one they rescued. But not because they saved you."
Lyra's breath caught. "Because someone hid me."
"Exactly." His expression darkened. "But not from me. From themselves."
He turned to face her again, and his image crackled. For a second, she saw the real Echo eyes too sharp, mouth twitching like he was on the edge of control.
"You want to know what's really coming, Lyra?"
She couldn't speak.
"You're not the hero of this story."
Then everything exploded.
The lab's wall blew open with a deafening blast, and reality snapped back like elastic. The time freeze shattered. Finn tackled Lyra out of the way as debris rained down. Mina pulled them behind a console.
"Lyra, stay with me!" she shouted. "Your neural feedback spiked! What did he do?!"
"I saw him," Lyra gasped. "He showed me… the interface. The spiral."
Norren, bloodied but alive, crawled back in through the debris. "Then he's chosen you. He won't stop now."
"Why me?" Lyra demanded, tears stinging her eyes.
"Because you're his opposite," Norren wheezed. "You break systems. He builds them. He's pure control. You're raw instinct. He thinks if he understands you, he can upgrade himself."
Mina scanned Lyra's vitals. "She's syncing with the system now. Faster than any subject I've seen."
Finn looked up at the smoke swirling outside the broken wall.
"Where does that leave us?"
Norren stood, eyes grave.
"It means we don't just have to run. We have to find the origin point the first interface node. The beginning of Echo's mind."
"And where is that?" Lyra asked.
Norren looked at her.
"In you."