The desert swallowed sound.But not her voice.
Rae was mid-sentence, describing a Cipher pattern growing across her forearm, when she froze.Mid-word. Mid-breath.As if someone had pressed pause on the world.
Her eyes locked on Elias.
Not with fear. Not even confusion.
With recognition.
And then she vanished.
Not in a burst of light. Not with the shimmer of a leap.She simply… blinked out.
Gone.
All that remained was a glyph burned into the sand where she had stood. A shape Elias had seen only once before, etched into the back of a dying Watcher:
The Eye Split Twice.
The rebels scattered across the ruins, shouting her name, calling into radios that fizzed with nothing but echo. The relics in the area hummed, erratic and hot to the touch, as if reacting to some cosmic contradiction.
"This isn't a leap," Yshari whispered."No," Elias agreed, his voice flat. "This is a removal."
Someone had edited Rae out.
Not just from the moment.From the memory.
The glyph in the sand pulsed when Elias touched it.
Pain lanced through his palm, not burning, but erasing. The world around him blurred, and suddenly he was not in the ruins but inside the memory Rae had left behind.
A hallway of mirrored walls. A recursion loop.
And across from him, walking slowly, calmly, was a Watcher.
But it wore Rae's face.
Not Rae-as-he-knew-her.
Rae as she might have been: older, more angular, cloaked in the silver-gray of a Mirror-Sister. Her mouth moved, but her voice came in layers:
"Do not try to retrieve me.""Where are you?" Elias asked aloud."Where you put me."
The hallway buckled. Mirrors rippled like water. Behind the mirrored Rae, figures blurred in and out of existence, other versions of Elias, other Watchers, broken timelines stitched poorly together.
One screamed. One burned. One was on their knees, whispering Rae's name over and over.
"Am I the only one left?" Elias asked.
The mirrored Rae stepped closer.
"You are the one that remembers."
He snapped back into his body with a scream.
Blood ran from his nose, and his left hand had turned cold, pale like glass. Part of him had not returned.
But the glyph remained.
Yshari approached, grim-faced. She didn't ask what Elias had seen. Instead, she handed him a black-bound book.
"Shatterwake Protocol," it read.
Inside were diagrams. Symbols. Notes in Rae's handwriting.
At the bottom of the first page, a phrase repeated over and over:
"If I disappear, follow the echo. Not the person. The echo."
They set out that night, beneath the twin moons, moving across dunes that shimmered with memory.
Every few miles, they found another glyph burned into the sand. Each one slightly different. A breadcrumb trail, encrypted in paradox.
But the Watchers were moving, too.
And one of them had taken Rae's form entirely.
Elias awoke to her voice whispering in his ear:
"Wake up, Elias. She is still watching."
But when he turned, there was nothing there.
Only his reflection in a shard of relic-glass.
Smiling back at him.