Elias read the first line of the manual again.
"This device is not for escape. It is for separation."
The Shatterwake sat half-buried in a relic vault, deeper than any the rebels had dared to go. It was shaped like a spine, metal vertebrae, each carved with ciphered runes. Not dead tech. Not alive. Something in between.
According to Rae's notes, it had been used only once, long before the fall of the Red-Spiral City. Its sole function: to cleave a person's mind from the loop.
"A stabilizer," Rae had written."For Walkers who lose their thread."
Elias was already losing his.
He heard Rae's voice in water. Saw reflections of her in glass, even when the room had none. He remembered conversations they'd never had, places they'd never gone.
But this wasn't madness.
This was echo infection, a bleed of time-stamped identity through recursive memory strata.
And the Shatterwake was a scalpel for souls.
The vault sealed behind him. The rebels refused to enter. Yshari had called it a "hunger site", a place where time forgot to move forward and simply sat, accumulating.
The deeper Elias stepped, the heavier his limbs became.
Not from gravity.
From selves.
Images flickered beside him, walking step for step: alternate Elias-forms. Some younger, some older. One was bleeding. One wore the robes of a Mirror cultist. One had Rae's voice.
They did not speak.
They watched.
And with every step, another version peeled away into the darkness, consumed by the weight of unfinished memories.
The Shatterwake pulsed once.
It knew him.
It unfolded with a soft, cracking sound, like knuckles stretching after centuries of stillness. A control surface rose from its spine: no keys, only lines of shifting cipher that matched the scar on Elias's chest.
When he touched it, his skin sizzled.
"State intent," the device whispered in a voice that mimicked Rae's tone almost perfectly."To remember," Elias said. "To be one."
The relic hesitated.
"One cannot be one in a broken loop."
Then it made him an offer:
Trade a memory you love mostFor a thread that cannot be cut.
Elias thought of Rae. Not the Rae he'd lost, but the first time they met, in that tiny observatory at the edge of Loop Theta. She'd been half-asleep. He'd been terrified. She'd smiled anyway.
The memory shivered.
And then it was gone.
The Shatterwake tore through him like a scream made of metal and sand and childhood.
He fell, body arched, nerves burning, as the echoes inside him howled.
Names. Lives. Rae. Roe. Malik. Kéon. Ayélè. Marise.All crashing into each other, trying to form a coherent line.
"Stabilizing," the device whispered.
The glyph on his chest split open like a blooming eye.
Light, not just light, but sequence, rushed outward, illuminating the vault with layered timelines folding into one another.
At the center: Elias.
The first.
The last.
The only one still trying to hold it all together.
He awoke on the floor, gasping.
The Shatterwake had folded shut. Silent. Spent.
But the reflection in its polished casing was not his.
It was Rae. She looked straight at him, her face calm but distant, and said:
"You traded memory for thread. Now you can follow me."
Then she was gone again.
But this time, Elias didn't panic.
He could feel the connection now, a thread sewn into the core of his being, pulled taut across recursion.
And something else…
A warning written on the floor in Rae's handwriting:
"The next breach is not in the desert.It's in you."