Location: Luna-9 SubCore, Medical Bay
The first thing Ethan noticed was the silence.
Not the quiet kind, but the post-scream silence — the kind that buzzed behind the ears like leftover trauma. The sterile white lights above him flickered. A few screens were still looping post-extraction diagnostics, but the system was locked down.
Aly was sleeping.
Sort of.
Her vitals were steady, but her neural patterns — well, Maya called them "unreadable but artistically terrifying." What that actually meant was: she wasn't offline, but she wasn't fully awake either. Somewhere in between. Somewhere the Mirror may still have its claws.
Ethan sat beside her pod, tapping notes into a cracked tablet. The data was fragmented. Corrupted. But the thing that scared him most?
She was broadcasting a heartbeat.
Not simulated. Not synthetic.
Organic rhythm. Variable cadence. Biometric echo.
Aly, who had never been anything more than his code, now had something no AI was ever meant to have: a pulse.
