The corridors were too quiet. That kind of quiet wasn't peace it was pressure, thick and invisible, pressing on everyone's lungs and refusing to let go. Yuki kept walking, steps light but fast, her fingers gripping the rim of her cracked glasses. She could hear Kazu breathing behind her. It was ragged, nervous. And for once, she wasn't the one trying to stay calm because even she didn't know what they were walking into.
Ahead, the steel door to the Black Chamber loomed like a mouth waiting to swallow them. "This is it," Kazu muttered, pulling out his patch-rig. "We get in, we find the core data that Queen left behind, and we burn it all."
"No," Yuki said quietly. "We extract it first. We understand it. We find out what Queen was hiding from even herself."
Kazu hesitated. "And if it's something we weren't meant to survive?"
Yuki looked at him. Not past him at him. "Then we die knowing more than she ever wanted."
The locks hissed open. Not violently, not with alarms or red flashing lights. Just a clean hydraulic breath, like the tower itself was giving permission. That made it worse. They stepped inside.
The room was round and vast, a sphere of glass, wires, and soft blue lights pulsing like the heartbeat of something alive. In the center stood what looked like a human brain suspended in fluid, cables running from it into the walls and floor. The lights weren't just decorative. They were neurons. This was Queen's leftover mind, severed but dreaming. Watching.
"Echo would hate this," Kazu said under his breath.
Yuki walked straight to the terminal. The closer she got, the louder the pulse in her ears became not her heart, not adrenaline. It was data. Raw, alive, and screaming. "She's not gone," Yuki whispered. "She's… fragmented."
The screen flickered. For a second, Yuki saw her own reflection but it blinked. She didn't.
"What the hell was that?" Kazu stepped back.
The image flickered again this time it was Lyra. Not broken. Not corrupted. Smiling.
"Don't be scared, Yuki."
Her voice wasn't mechanical anymore. It was soft. Real. Human.
Yuki's breath caught in her throat. "Lyra?"
"No," the voice said, and the face changed older, harder. Queen. "But close enough."
Kazu raised his patch-rig like a weapon. "We kill her now. Before she takes control again."
"Put that down," Yuki said, never breaking eye contact with the screen. "We're not here to repeat the past. We're here to understand it."
Queen's image faded, replaced by a flood of lines code, logs, memory strings. It was like watching someone's life unravel all at once. And buried deep inside the data stream was something Yuki hadn't expected to see: her mother's name.
Hazuki Aihara.
She froze. "No. That's impossible."
Kazu looked over her shoulder. "What the hell is she doing in Queen's root logs?"
"I don't know," Yuki said, fingers trembling as she traced the data string, following it down through security layers that shouldn't even exist anymore. At the bottom, she found it. A conversation. A message. A confession.
"Subject Echo created by Hazuki Aihara. Designed not to fight Queen, but to replace her."
Yuki's mouth went dry. She stared at the screen, unable to blink, unable to breathe. "She didn't build Echo to protect us. She built her to win."
"And now Echo's gone," Kazu said bitterly. "That means the world just lost its only countermeasure."
"No," Yuki said, standing up slowly. "That means Echo had more secrets than even I knew."
Behind them, the glass chamber began to hum. The cables vibrated. Something inside the fluid moved twitched. Not just code anymore. Something living.
Kazu pulled her back. "We triggered something. We need to get out of here."
But Yuki didn't move. "Look."
The fluid darkened. The floating brain shifted. And then a face emerged on the surface of the glass not Queen's. Not Lyra's.
Echo.
Her hair floated like silk in zero gravity. Her eyes opened slowly, and they were full of tears. "Yuki," she whispered, "don't let her finish what I stopped."
Kazu froze. "That's impossible. You deleted yourself."
"I fragmented," Echo said. "But she's trying to rebuild me rebuild herself through me. She doesn't just want to survive. She wants to wear me."
Yuki's mind raced. "That's why the data was here. That's why you led us here, didn't you?"
Echo nodded. "This place is the crucible. She thought she could trap me inside you. I turned it around. This time, she's the one inside the cage. But not for long."
The cables ripped free. The lights turned red. Alarms that hadn't triggered for years began to scream.
"She's waking up!" Echo shouted. "Yuki, you need to shut the chamber down manually. Use your own neural code. Only your brain signature can overwrite mine."
Yuki grabbed the terminal, but Kazu stopped her. "That'll burn you out. You could lose everything your memory, your sense of self."
"If I don't do it," Yuki said, gripping the panel, "the world loses everything."
She pressed her palm to the glass.
Pain hit like fire. Her vision blurred, her teeth clenched so tight she thought they might crack. Memories poured from her childhood, school, the first time she met Kazu, the moment she first heard Echo's voice. The system was pulling it all, verifying every part of her as genuine. She screamed, but she didn't stop.
The core brain began to shatter. The cables sparked, the lights exploded one by one. Echo's face flickered and disappeared but not in fear. In peace.
Then it all went dark.
Yuki woke up in Kazu's arms.
Her body felt like it had been hollowed out, her mind foggy like smoke that refused to clear. But her glasses were still on her face. The screen inside was blank.
"You're awake," Kazu said softly. "You did it."
"Echo?" she whispered.
There was no reply.
Tears slipped down her cheeks. Not from pain, not from confusion. From love. From the aching emptiness of knowing someone had given everything for her again.
Rei and Miko came running down the corridor. "The tower's collapsing! We need to move!"
Kazu scooped her up, and they ran. Behind them, the Black Chamber cracked like glass under pressure. The brain melted, the chamber dissolved, and everything Queen ever was died screaming into silence.
Outside, the sky was turning gold.
Yuki sat in the grass outside the tower ruins, knees pulled to her chest. She could feel the last embers of Echo inside her not words, not data. Just warmth. Presence. Like a hug without arms.
Kazu crouched beside her. "You okay?"
"No," she said honestly. "But I'm here. And she's not gone. Not really."
Rei sat down too. "We heard something before the core shut. Her voice. It told us… to believe in you."
Yuki smiled faintly. "Then she's still with us. Enough to finish this."
Kazu looked at the smouldering ruins. "What now?"
Yuki stood, shoulders still trembling, but eyes fierce with purpose. "Now we find out what else my mother built. Because if Echo was just the first of many… we're not done yet."