The wind off the East Spire Ridge stung Lira's face as she stood at the broken edge of The Scar. Below, the city of New Lyra shimmered with unfamiliar quiet. Days had passed since the broadcast—the cascade event that fractured more than just Cole Harker's neural integrity. It cracked the illusion the city had built its identity upon.
Lira's gloved hands gripped the railing. Her body ached from sleepless nights and tense operations. The aftershocks of the transmission were everywhere: ruptured systems, blackouts, dissent surging through the slums and social tiers. Echo Root had gone from underground relic to front-line resistance almost overnight.
Behind her, the command room buzzed with quiet activity. Nico was running diagnostics on the fragments Cole left behind. The neural cascade had nearly killed him. The doctors said his brain had undergone accelerated synaptic burnout, similar to acute electroshock trauma. But he survived. Somehow.
Lira turned and re-entered the room.
"Any change?" she asked Nico.
He looked up, rubbing his temples. "He drifted out of consciousness again. Pain receptors are unstable. He can barely distinguish the present from the overlays. He keeps asking for Elian."
Her throat tightened. "We can't lose him now."
"I know. But you saw the brain scans. He reabsorbed too many echoes during the cascade. His mind is swimming in borrowed lives. We need to isolate his core identity before one of the residuals takes over completely."
Lira nodded. "I'll talk to him."
Cole lay in a dim med-bay, his frame gaunt under layers of biometric mesh. One eye remained bandaged. The other, dull with exhaustion, tracked her presence with vague recognition.
"You're back," he whispered.
She sat beside him. "I never left."
"What day is it?"
"Thursday. Possibly. Time's a bit of a mess."
He managed a weak smile.
"Is it over?"
Lira hesitated. "It's just beginning. NeuroLease is fractured. CoreMind has gone silent. But there are factions trying to restore order—some want to reform it. Others want to rebuild it exactly as it was."
"Figures."
"The public is divided. Half of them think you're a hero. The other half think you were a puppet."
Cole turned his head. "Both can be true."
She studied him for a long moment. "Who are you now, Cole? After everything?"
"I don't know. Sometimes I still wake up and expect to see Elian's hands. Or feel Caeli's panic. It's like there's no single version of me left. Just a chorus of ghosts trying to remember their own songs."
"Maybe the truth is... you are all of them. And none. A hybrid."
He met her gaze. "Then what do I do with that?"
She reached over and took his hand. "You help us finish this. You help tear down what you helped build."
Echo Root's headquarters had grown more sophisticated. Former tech specialists, whistleblowers, and displaced minds from defunct NeuroLease hubs flocked to The Scar. They brought with them stories, data caches, memory logs.
Nico now led a neural forensics division, tracing stolen lives across decades. Entire identity maps had surfaced—individuals used in leases who had no memory of ever signing up. Many were dead. Some were hollowed out, reduced to neurological shells.
Lira stood with him at a terminal wall, scanning a holographic stream of cascading files.
"Here," Nico said, enlarging a segment. "This is massive. Lease archives disguised as foreign market telemetry. It's a buried registry. Dates, coordinates, transfer protocols. We can use this to track every transaction they tried to erase."
Lira's eyes widened. "How many?"
"Over 1.2 million unique streams. Some go back thirty years. They were experimenting long before the public knew. Before NeuroLease even had a name."
"Any sign of Elian?"
"No confirmed matches yet. But the data's fragmented. It's going to take time."
Lira nodded. "Then we start the process. Line by line. Identity by identity. We bring them back."
Later that night, Lira returned to the med-bay with a portable holo-projector. Cole was awake again, propped up slightly, lucid but raw.
"I brought something," she said, setting the projector on the table. A soft pulse of light blossomed into a three-dimensional memory field. It was one of Cole's earliest overlays—a moment from a lease he'd taken as part of his training. A young man in a sunlit garden, laughing with an older woman.
"That's... my first. Training sim," Cole said. "She was his mother. He... I think he just wanted to remember what she smelled like."
"Do you?"
"Jasmine and synth-oil. Her hands were always stained from machine grease."
Lira sat beside him. "You said once that you didn't know what was real. That your memories felt like rented emotions. But this one... this feels like it mattered."
"It did."
She paused, then asked, "Do you still want to go public again? To testify?"
Cole closed his eyes. "I want the world to know what it means to be erased. To be used as a vessel. I want them to know we were people. Not products."
Lira nodded. "Then we get ready. You won't be alone."
The broadcast announcement came two days later. A formal tribunal had been authorized by the Intercolonial Rights Commission. The charges: illegal identity commodification, neural slavery, corporate mind-harvesting, and violation of consent laws.
Echo Root would be allowed to present their case.
Lira stood in the nerve center, staring at the alert. Around her, survivors wept, cheered, clutched each other. A woman in a tattered jumpsuit sobbed as she saw her original name restored on the screen. A man fell to his knees when a digital echo of his daughter's memory confirmed her survival.
This wasn't just rebellion.
It was resurrection.
And they were only getting started.