The dot was still there.
Pulsing, rhythmic—steady enough to be annoying. It hadn't moved since she woke up. Her system hadn't labeled it either, which was odd. Ava's interface loved to slap tags on everything from "unidentified anomalies" to "sock location missed again."
But this one?
Just a dot.
But it felt old. Deeper than code. Like it was written into the architecture of her system, not its programs.
Lucas hadn't mentioned it at breakfast. He was already gone, buried in war maps and economic simulations before his coffee had cooled. William had said only one thing:
"If something follows you back from the Mindspace, check the legacy cores. Some of them think they're still alive."
So Ava followed the dot.
The trace led her deep into her own system, past even the custom interfaces she'd written. This wasn't blueprint territory anymore—this was buried code, pre-loaded before she'd even known she had a system.
She wasn't in her bracer anymore.
She was in the root.
