The underground sanctuary was stifling, its narrow corridors carved from old metro tunnels and repurposed data lines. Lira adjusted her thermal jacket, the static charge in the air making the edges of her cropped hair bristle.
"How long since Elian's shard went silent?" Nico asked, his voice low, wary.
"Four days. Maybe less. Could be they've started phase-locking the memory vaults," Lira replied, eyes scanning the makeshift monitors arrayed before her. They were in one of Echo Root's mobile safehouses—hidden even from NeuroLease's quantum grid.
"And the message from Cole?"
She glanced at the cracked datapad in her hand. "No signature, but it came from his encrypted subchannel. And it wasn't a threat."
"He said, 'The floodgates are cracking.'"
"Exactly. Either he's hallucinating under identity drift, or... he's seen something they've kept buried."
Nico leaned forward, hands steepled, the faint blue glow from the screens dancing across his face. Despite the wear of sleepless nights and mental fragmentation, he was focused—determined.
"He's coming apart. The layers they built into him—personas, leases, resets—it's all collapsing. And if he's reaching out, that means there's a way in."
Lira nodded. "Then we don't wait. We pull him."
The plan was reckless.
They knew that going in.
Cole's private vault was embedded in the Continuum Tower's core—a neural sanctum sealed behind the most sophisticated security in the hemisphere. Only a handful of authorized consciousnesses could access the deep stream: Cole was one of them.
Nico wasn't.
But he had something even better: residual imprinting from his last lease cycle. His neural patterns still bore traces of the Continuum framework. Risky, volatile—but with Lira's injection algorithms, they might just pass the authentication threshold for long enough.
"Once we bridge the shard socket," Lira explained, as she tightened the trans-spike interface into Nico's spine, "you'll be ghost-riding Cole's mental corridor. He'll feel you like a whisper—if we're lucky."
"And if we're not?"
"You'll fracture. Or he will. Or both."
"Good odds." Nico smiled, though his eyes didn't.
Lira slipped the headset on him, fingers lingering at his temple. "I'll pull you out if the signal stutters. Don't go deeper than Level 4. Do not follow any stray shards unless I give you the mark."
"Understood."
Then the world tilted.
Cole's mind was not a place. It was a weather pattern.
Nico dropped into it like a diver into a storm. Thoughts slashed by like wind. Images burst and dissolved—flashes of campaign speeches, protest footage, a child sobbing in a rented body. He fought to stabilize, focusing on the core resonance he remembered from their last encounter.
Then: stillness.
He stood in a long white hallway. Clean. Unnatural.
And at the far end—Cole.
The real Cole.
He stood rigidly, staring at a wall of mirrors, each reflecting a different version of himself. A child in a uniform. A slick politician. A dying old man with blank eyes. A laughing woman. A soldier. A shadow.
Nico stepped forward.
"You're not supposed to be here," Cole said quietly, without turning.
"Neither are you."
Silence. Then:
"I used to think I was the future. Now I can't even tell if I'm the present."
Nico moved beside him. The mirrors flickered. He saw himself in one, screaming, lost in someone else's skin.
"They buried Elian in you, didn't they?" Nico asked. "And others. Leases that never disconnected fully. You're the pilot template. But they overloaded you. Now they can't control the bleed."
Cole's eyes glistened. "I see their lives when I dream. I wake up with hands that remember pulling triggers, or building temples, or dying in oceans I've never seen."
"They're not ghosts. They're survivors. And they're part of you now."
Cole's hand trembled. "I want to help. I want to stop Continuum. But I don't know what parts of me are real anymore."
Nico placed a hand on his shoulder. "Then let's find the part that is. Together."
Suddenly, the hallway shook.
"Signal breach!" Lira's voice cracked through the cognitive feed. "You've got NeuroLease black traces incoming. They've detected the spike."
The mirrors shattered one by one.
Cole gasped. "They're cutting the internal lines. If they lock me out, they'll reset everything. Including me."
"Then we get you out. Now."
Back in the physical world, alarms screamed.
NeuroLease security forces had traced the override.
Lira yanked the cradle uplink from Nico's neck. He convulsed, then sat upright with a gasp.
"Did it work?" she asked.
Behind them, a second cradle lit up.
Cole.
His real body.
He'd followed Nico's exit pulse like a beacon. Somehow, through the breach, he'd routed his mindstream back to a clean host body Echo Root had prepared.
He opened his eyes.
For the first time in months, they were clear.
"You got me out," Cole whispered. "I didn't think I wanted out."
Lira handed him a coat. "We've got thirty seconds before this place lights up. Move."
The trio burst through the underground tunnel, surfacing into the rainy neon blur of New Lyra's subdistrict. Sirens wailed somewhere in the distance. Above, drone clusters searched the alleys.
They ducked into the back of a waiting hover-truck. Inside, Echo Root operatives stared wide-eyed.
"Is that—?"
"It's him," Lira confirmed. "But not the version the board controls."
Cole looked at them all, rain dripping from his hair, his expression unreadable.
"I remember everything," he said. "And it's time the world did, too."
The floodgates weren't cracking anymore.
They were opening.