They didn't linger on the rooftop.
Kade secured Marei in a borrowed skimmer bike they found in a nearby service lot—hotwired with the help of the system—and launched into the lower atmosphere lanes before any surveillance bots could pick up their trail. The Echo's arrival changed everything. That thing hadn't been a regular agent. It was something else—sentient code maybe, or something worse. The system hadn't offered clarification. And that made it dangerous.
"You still bleeding?" he asked as they zipped beneath a glowing arc bridge.
"No," Marei muttered, pressing her hand to her ribs. "I'm more worried about my memory. There are gaps. Big ones."
"We'll deal with it later. Right now we need to lay low. I know a place."
The safehouse was buried in the sublevels beneath District Ten, in a zone so irradiated by corporate sabotage that not even drones dared map it anymore. Kade had lived there for weeks once, during a mission that never made it to the records.
He guided the bike through a cracked underpass, past collapsed streetlights and rusted security mechs frozen mid-crawl. At last, he found the iron bulkhead door hidden behind a row of dead vending machines.
Voice ID still worked.
It opened with a reluctant groan, revealing a dim chamber lit by a single filament strip.
They stepped inside.
"Not cozy," Marei said.
"Safe enough."
The room had no windows, only concrete walls and a bunker-grade generator that rumbled softly. A shelf of nutrient packs sat beside an old mattress and a retro tablet hardwired into the wall. Kade tossed Marei a clean thermal coat.
She caught it one-handed. "So. What now?"
He sat down on a metal crate, resting his head against the cold wall.
"Now, we figure out what Catalyst's next move is. And what it's already changed."
She joined him.
"There's something I remember," she said slowly. "Before I went into the pod—someone came to see me. Someone high up."
Kade turned his head. "A government suit?"
"No. Private sector. One of the founders of UmbraTech."
He frowned. "That name hasn't come up in years. I thought they collapsed during the Mars Collapse scandal."
"They didn't collapse," she said, voice low. "They were absorbed. Quietly. Dispersed. But Catalyst was built on their early research. Thought-mirroring. Predictive neural threading. All the things that make a reality rewrite possible."
"So you're saying Catalyst… isn't a state project?"
"I'm saying Catalyst was never national. It was privatized from the start. They sold it to the Republic as a defense initiative, but it was always about control. Quiet control."
Kade exhaled.
"Then this goes higher than I thought."
Marei nodded. "And deeper. You said the system chose you. Why?"
"I don't know. It speaks in pieces. Gives me tools when I ask, but never tells me where it came from."
"Or who made it."
He nodded. "Exactly."
She stood, beginning to pace the room. Her eyes flickered as she sorted through internal data, memory strings resurfacing like broken files being patched back together.
"There's a location," she said finally. "Project Heartline. Buried server core. Somewhere in the Wastes outside the city. I remember building protocols for it. That was before the Catalyst framework was finalized. Before they made it into a weapon."
Kade stood too. "Coordinates?"
"Vague. But the system inside me might know more. If I can interface with the right hardware, I might be able to ping its location."
He rubbed his temples. "That's going to draw attention."
"I know."
"But if we're right—if that's the origin point of Catalyst's seed code—then taking it out might collapse their entire surveillance web."
She nodded. "That's the idea."
Kade started moving. Grabbed gear. Ammunition. A low-power EMP rig he'd stolen from a blackout zone years ago.
"We move at first light," he said. "Tonight we rest. Tomorrow, we take our first shot."
But rest didn't come easy.
Kade stared at the cracked ceiling for hours, haunted by what the Echo had said.
You weren't supposed to return.
How many more were like it? How many fragments of deleted futures still lingered in the code of the world, ready to strike if the system detected deviation?
Around 0400, he rose and stepped outside the safehouse. The city above rumbled like a slow beast, unaware of the infection growing in its spine. And deep beneath it all, the roots of Catalyst writhed—ready to rewrite again.
His system activated without prompt.
Incoming transmission. Level-2 access key recognized.
A voice filtered into his thoughts.
Not robotic. Not synthetic.
But human.
"You're not alone anymore," it said.
Then silence.
Kade stared into the dark.
A new player had entered the board.
And the game was shifting again.