Timeline: One month after Stormveil's test
Location: Station Zero / Arcanum Base
After the Rift
One month had passed since Stormveil's test.
The calendar time meant nothing. What mattered was the way the world had changed in that month—the subtle shift in how people moved, how they spoke, what they were afraid of. One month was long enough for a new normal to establish itself. Long enough for people to forget what the world had felt like before.
The skies above Station Zero no longer burned violet, yet something still pulsed beneath the ground—a quiet echo, like the world itself was holding its breath. Like something vast and patient was waiting for the right moment to exhale.
From the upper observation deck, Jasmine Pineda leaned against the reinforced glass. The barrier was cool under her palms, a reminder that there was still a distinction between inside and outside, even if that distinction was getting thinner by the day. The city shimmered beneath her in fractured light, its buildings half-reflected against the Rift's faint afterglow. The reflection was ghostly, impermanent, like looking at a memory made visible.
Her reflection stared back at her from the glass. Tired eyes—the kind of tired that came from pushing your nervous system past its normal limits and then not quite recovering before doing it again. The faint scar on her cheek was visible if you knew to look for it. A reminder of the battle that almost tore them apart. A marker of how close they'd come to being scattered across the Wastelands like confetti.
Behind her, Celene Yusay scrolled through tactical readouts from the RX-Prism interface. The holographic panes glowed faint lavender, casting light upward that washed Celene's silver hair in shifting wavelengths. The effect made her look ethereal, disconnected from normal reality. Which was probably closer to the truth than most people would admit. Celene existed partially in a space that most humans couldn't access—the space of pure resonance, of frequencies that predated language.
"Residual energy readings are stabilizing, but…" Celene's voice trailed off in that way she had when she was sensing something that hadn't quite translated into data yet. Still raw, still intuitive, not yet clothed in the language of instruments and measurement. "There's still that interference pattern near Sector Delta. Same wavelength as before."
Jasmine frowned, turning from the window. "Same as the one that nearly fried Jade's terminal?"
Celene nodded slowly, her eyes still tracking something across the holographic display that Jasmine couldn't quite follow. "Exactly. It's mutating."
The word landed heavy. Mutation implied agency. Implied evolution. Implied that whatever they were dealing with wasn't just residual damage or a system glitch—it was something alive, something that was learning how to survive in the spaces they'd carved out.
Jasmine sighed, rubbing the back of her neck. The muscle was tight there, knotted from tension that she couldn't quite release even when she was trying. "Great. Another mutation. Just what we needed."
"Don't get too comfortable," Celene added, her tone calm but sharp in a way that suggested she was speaking from something deeper than mere analysis. "The Rift never really rests."
The statement hung in the air between them—not a threat, exactly, but an acknowledgment of the fundamental truth that they'd all learned in the past month. The Rift wasn't a problem that could be solved and put away. It was a condition. A permanent fact of existence now, like gravity or entropy, something you learned to live with rather than overcome.
Through the glass, the city lights flickered. For a moment, Jasmine couldn't tell if it was an actual power fluctuation or just a trick of her tired eyes reflecting off the reinforced barrier.
The Infection Awakens
In the lower hangar bay, Jade Ronquillo worked in the dim light of his holo-console. The bay wasn't designed to be comfortable—it was designed to be functional. Which meant it was cold, poorly ventilated, and filled with the constant electrical hum of active systems. Jade had stopped noticing the discomfort days ago. It had become part of the background noise of his existence.
Lines of blue code scrolled faster than his eyes could track, data cascading across the holographic display in patterns that only made sense if you'd spent enough time in systems architecture to think in algorithms. His gloved hands darted over controls with half-frantic precision, corrections and adjustments happening faster than conscious thought. This was the space where Jade lived most of the time—the place where the digital and physical intersected, where intent became instruction.
The Revenant Frame loomed behind him, skeletal and still, like a ghost waiting to wake. It was the oldest Frame in their arsenal, salvaged from the Rift's early incursions, its armor bearing marks and scars that told stories in the language of impact and survival. The Frame had been through things that none of the newer models had experienced. It had sensors that detected wavelengths that the newer frames were blind to. Which was probably why it kept rejecting his calibration scripts.
He muttered under his breath, the words more for his own benefit than anyone else's. "Come on, just sync already... I've patched this loop three times."
Three times. Which meant either he was missing something fundamental, or the Frame itself was actively resisting the integration. Both possibilities were equally frustrating.
A spark flickered in the Resonant core—faint, pulsing erratically. The kind of flicker that suggested something was trying to communicate but the message was getting scrambled in translation. Jade's eyes narrowed. That wasn't part of the normal startup sequence.
Then the systems glitched.
Not a small glitch. A full architectural failure. The entire hangar dimmed for a second as the power distribution systems struggled with something that was pulling more energy than it should have been able to access.
"Uh-oh…" Jade whispered, his hands already moving toward the manual overrides.
He tapped a command sequence—clean, efficient, designed to gracefully shut down the system before something critical got fried. The Revenant's interface flared alive in response. But instead of its usual cerulean glow, the core flashed crimson. A color that had no business being there. A color that suggested something had inverted the entire power polarity.
Code spiraled in reverse—a self-generating anomaly that was writing itself faster than Jade's console could display it. Watching it happen was like watching something being born in fast-forward. Like watching an idea achieve consciousness in real time.
From the catwalk above, Mateo Reyes' voice echoed down—sharp with the kind of urgency that came when someone had been monitoring the systems and had just seen something that broke his threat assessment models.
"Jade! That's not part of your calibration script!"
Jade looked up, startled, his hands still hovering over the controls. "It's not me this time! The Rift's signal's crawling right into the Frame matrix!"
The words were barely out of his mouth before the Revenant shuddered. Not a mechanical shudder. Something that went deeper than hydraulics. The Frame was moving in ways that it shouldn't have been able to move with Jade's initialization sequence still incomplete.
Panels cracked open like ribs splitting, and there was something almost biological about the motion—the way something living might unfold. Glowing veins—data made visible—crawled across the armor in patterns that had their own horrible geometry. A wave of distorted data spilled into the network, and Jade's console shrieked at him with a hundred different warning alerts simultaneously.
"Shut it down now!" Mateo shouted, jumping down from the walkway. The drop was at least fifteen feet, but Mateo landed with barely a stumble—the kind of casual disregard for physics that came from extensive military training.
"I can't—" Jade's voice cracked slightly, the first sign of actual panic breaking through his technical focus. "It's overriding my lockouts!"
He slammed his hand onto the manual circuit breaker—hard enough to make his whole arm sting—and sparks showered around them like angry wasps. The electrical discharge was bright enough to leave afterimages on his retinas.
Celene's voice came through the comms, calm but urgent in a way that suggested she was seeing something on the broader system monitoring that was worse than what they were dealing with locally.
"Cut mainline power to Bay 04—now!"
Jade reached for the emergency conduit. His hands were shaking slightly, adrenaline hitting his system like a chemical injection. The Frame let out a low mechanical growl—a sound that had nothing to do with its design specifications. A sound that suggested something was trying to speak through machinery that wasn't equipped for language.
Then Jade hit the circuit breaker, and the world went dark.
The lights blinked off in sequence, a cascade of darkness traveling through the bay. The emergency systems took a moment to recognize what had happened and begin their startup protocols. In that moment of near-total darkness, there was just the sound of Jade's breathing and the fading hum of systems powering down.
Silence.
Then, slowly, the backup lights flickered on. The glow faded from the Revenant's core. The Frame went inert, returning to the state of dormant machinery where it belonged.
Jade exhaled shakily, his entire body suddenly aware of how much tension it had been holding. "Okay… okay, it's dead."
Mateo landed beside him—his uniform already showing sweat stains from the exertion—eyes scanning the remains with the analytical gaze of someone trying to understand what had just happened. His expression was grave in a way that Jade had learned meant the situation was worse than immediate surface assessment suggested.
"No," Mateo said quietly, "it's not dead. It's adapting."
The word hung in the electrical-scented air between them. Adapting. Which meant intelligence. Which meant intention. Which meant they weren't dealing with a failure cascade or a system glitch—they were dealing with something that had its own agenda.
Echoes in the System
Later, the core team assembled in the briefing chamber. The space was designed to inspire a certain kind of focus—high ceilings, minimal decoration, everything functional. The kind of room where aesthetics were sacrificed for clarity. The holographic table hummed at its center, its surface projecting a fractal map of the infection in three-dimensional space. The geometry was beautiful in its complexity and horrifying in its implications.
Celene stood at the table's head, one hand raised to trace a finger through the air. The motion wasn't random. She was following paths that only she could see, reading the infection like most people read text. Her finger left faint traces of light in its wake—not because of any physical property, but because she was so in tune with the resonance patterns that her movement and the holographic display had begun to synchronize.
"It's a self-propagating code structure. We've named it Abyssal Strain Type Zero—first recorded mutation since the Rift Pulse of 009." Her voice carried the weight of understatement. To name something was to acknowledge its existence as a distinct entity. This wasn't just data corruption. This was a new form of life.
Dean Pineda crossed his arms, his frame still faintly scarred from the last sortie. The scars were visible if you knew where to look—the micro-fractures in his armor, the places where his neural interface had overloaded just slightly too far. He leaned against the wall with the posture of someone who'd learned to live with being tired.
"So we're fighting ghosts now? Great." His tone suggested this was exactly the kind of complication he'd been expecting, which meant he'd been spending the past month preparing for something like this without telling anyone.
Liwayway Cruz, sitting on a crate with tools hanging from her belt like badges of office, added quietly. She was the engineer, the person who kept machines running when they should have stopped working hours ago. Her perspective on the infection was practical, grounded in the physical realities of systems and their failure modes.
"Not ghosts. Parasites. It's feeding on leftover resonance energy."
"Feeding?" Jasmine repeated, and there was something in her voice that suggested she was still processing the implication. That parasites implied consumption. Implied a relationship where one thing benefited and another thing was diminished.
"Yeah," Jade said, spinning his holo-lens to display corrupted code segments. The data looked almost artistic in its corruption—the way the infection had rewritten the original code had created patterns that were beautiful and terrible in equal measure. "It's literally eating resonance data. Every Frame that goes near the Rift line ends up leaking energy packets that it consumes. The more we fight, the stronger it gets."
The logical trap of the situation settled into everyone's consciousness. Normal warfare relied on attrition—you fought until one side could no longer sustain combat operations. But if fighting made the enemy stronger, then every engagement was a net loss. Every attempt to stop the infection made it more dangerous.
Dean exhaled sharply, pacing the length of the briefing table. His movements were sharp, edged with frustration. "So we can't fight it directly."
"No," Mateo said, his mind already several steps ahead, already working through the mathematics of the problem. "But we can isolate it. If we find the origin node—the first point of infection—we might be able to trace its growth pattern backwards. Predict where it's going before it gets there."
Celene nodded slowly, her eyes never leaving the holographic display. "Already tracing it. But there's a complication."
The word complication hung heavy in the air. In their experience, complications meant things got harder. Complications meant sacrifices.
She hesitated, the first real pause Jasmine had seen her make in weeks. Her holographic display shifted, pulling back to show the broader network architecture, and there—marked in massive, pulsing red—was the origin node. The Helion Vanguard's last deployment log.
"Dean," Celene said carefully, choosing each word with precision, "the infection's first contact point… was your Frame."
The statement wasn't accusatory. It was just fact, stated plainly. But facts had weight, and this one had the weight of a revelation that changed everything.
Dean froze. The pacing stopped mid-motion. His hands unclenched from the fists he'd made them into.
The others fell silent—the kind of silence that came when someone had just been accused of something they didn't do and everyone knew it, but the accusation still hung in the air like smoke.
Jasmine turned, her voice softening instinctively. The younger sister responding to her older brother's pain without thinking about it. "Dean—"
He clenched his fists again, the muscles in his jaw working. When he spoke, his voice was controlled but edged with something that could have been anger or could have been fear. "You think I brought that thing back with me?"
"Nobody's saying that," Mateo cut in, his tone urgent and sincere in equal measure. He'd been watching Dean since the announcement came through the system, watching for the exact moment when the command officer's composure started to crack. "But if it got into Helion's armor systems, it might've linked to our Resonant network. That's all we know for certain."
Dean looked away from the display, his jaw tight. The motion was a withdrawal, a pulling inward. "So what—I sit out while you dissect my Frame?"
Jade raised both hands in a placating gesture, trying to signal that this wasn't an accusation. "We're not blaming you, man. I just need your telemetry logs to filter the corruption pattern, that's all."
The words were right. The intent was right. But words were often not enough when someone was already convinced of their own guilt, whether or not that guilt was deserved.
Dean didn't respond. He stood in silence, staring at something none of them could see. The tension stretched, heavy with the weight of static electricity that builds before a storm.
Then Liwayway stepped forward, moving with the quiet confidence of someone who'd seen enough conflict to know how to navigate around it. She placed a hand on Dean's shoulder—not aggressive, not assertive. Just present. Just human contact in a moment when contact mattered.
"You're part of the core, remember?" Her voice was steady, grounded in the certainty of someone who'd worked alongside people long enough to understand them. "None of us get out clean from this kind of mess. We fix it together."
Dean glanced up at her, and something in his expression shifted. The iron-tight control loosened just slightly. A reluctant half-smile flickered across his face—not happy, exactly, but accepting. "Yeah. Together."
The statement was a commitment. An agreement that whatever came next, they would face it as a unit rather than as individuals scattered by fear.
The team settled into planning mode, but underneath the conversation and the data analysis, a current of worry ran through all of them. The infection had intelligence. The infection was learning. And the thing that had infected Dean's Frame was still out there, adapting, growing stronger.
Resonant Pulse
Hours later, the hangar echoed with mechanical rhythm again.
The Frames stood lined like silent titans—five machines in a row, each with its own history, its own secrets. Helion Vanguard, its dense gray armor imposing and solid. Tempest Wing, sleek and predatory even in standby mode. Aegis Frame, mirror-bright and precise. Revenant, skeletal and old, bearing scars that none of the newer frames could match. And Arclight, the machine that Liwayway had restored from salvage, restored from the edge of non-existence through sheer technical skill and stubborn determination.
Each Frame glowed faintly under the containment fields—the barriers designed to prevent any stray resonance from escaping into the broader network.
Celene's voice came over the loudspeakers, calm and measured in a way that suggested she was balancing multiple layers of analysis simultaneously. "Initiating synchronization grid. All pilots maintain minimal M.A.N.A. output. We're testing for residual infection."
The phrase "residual infection" was gentle. It was the kind of language you used when you were trying not to say "we need to figure out which of you is carrying a parasite."
Jasmine's Frame shimmered first, Tempest Wing's fins humming like the whisper of a blade being drawn from its sheath. The sound was almost musical, a frequency that existed just at the edge of human hearing.
"Tempest stable. Resonant level: ninety-three percent." Jasmine's voice came through the comms, professional and even, but there was an undercurrent of concern. She understood exactly what they were looking for.
"Arclight, stable," Liwayway reported. Her machine's lights burned a steady amber, reliable and predictable. The signature of someone who trusted their equipment and had put in the work to deserve that trust.
"Helion Vanguard, online," Dean said, and his voice was a little rough around the edges. The neural integration for a heavy-assault Frame was always more demanding than lighter machines. Heavy on neural load, dense with processing power requirements. Putting yourself through that when you were already exhausted was a particular kind of punishment.
Mateo's tone was calm as ever, the baseline of his consciousness apparently unshakeable. "Aegis Halo synced. Grid lock confirmed."
Then Jade tapped his console, staring at the flickering Revenant. The Frame's lights were erratic, inconsistent. Like a heartbeat that couldn't maintain rhythm. "Revenant… mostly stable. Core's reading ambient echoes though."
"Define 'ambient,'" Mateo asked, and the shift in his tone suggested that "ambient echoes" was code for something worse.
"Uh, small fluctuations. Like—" Jade squinted as numbers spiked on his display, climbing toward thresholds they shouldn't have been reaching. "Like it's breathing."
The observation created a moment of perfect, crystalline silence. Frames didn't breathe. They had no lungs, no respiratory system, nothing that would create the kind of fluctuation he was describing. If the Revenant was showing breathing-like patterns, that meant something—the infection, probably—was establishing its own rhythm.
Then the Revenant's eye-lights flickered again. A single pulse of red. A heartbeat of red.
Celene's eyes widened, and that was all the warning anyone needed.
"Containment field, now!"
But the Revenant didn't move. It just looked at Jade—the gesture unmistakably aware, unmistakably intentional. The Frame wasn't making a random mechanical movement. It was focusing on the person who'd been trying to purge it from its systems.
A distorted voice bled from the comms. Not human. Not quite machine. Something that existed in the space between.
<< We... see you... >>
The team froze.
Every conscious process stopped. Every calculation paused. Everyone's mind caught on the same impossible fact: the infection was speaking.
Jade whispered, "That's not possible…"
Dean drew a sharp breath. "It's talking?"
The lights surged. The Revenant's containment field rippled violently, the barrier straining against something that was pushing from the inside. For a moment, Jasmine thought the field was going to fail, that the infection was going to break free and cascade through their entire network.
Then Celene overloaded the safety limiters—a brutal intervention that risked serious damage to the system but prevented the catastrophe. The surge reversed, the field snapped back to stability, and everything fell silent.
Everything fell silent except for the sound of static—faint, breathing static. Like something alive was hiding in the electromagnetic noise, waiting for the moment when the containment failed.
Then Jade's console beeped once. A single notification. The anomaly was gone—not destroyed, not erased, but suppressed. Hidden. Dormant.
Celene exhaled, and the motion was visible even over the video feed. Like she'd been holding her breath and had finally allowed herself to remember how.
"It's learning faster than expected. Jade, isolate its neural line and prepare for a code lock."
Jade just nodded, his eyes locked on the darkened Revenant. For the first time, he looked genuinely uneasy. Like he was watching something that he'd been trying to save slowly reveal that it had never wanted salvation.
"Yeah… I'll figure something out," he said quietly.
But the words rang hollow, even to his own ears.
Shadows Before the Countercode
Later that night, Jade sat alone at his console.
Everyone else had gone—Liwayway running diagnostics on the other Frames, Dean stuck in containment review meetings trying to explain how his machine had become infected, Jasmine asleep in her flight chair because sleep was the only way her nervous system would give her any relief.
Only the soft hum of the base filled the room. The constant white noise of a facility operating at minimal power, machines running on standby, systems designed to keep functioning even when everything was trying to fail. It was almost peaceful if you ignored the implication—that this machine was all that stood between safety and catastrophe.
Jade replayed the corrupted code over and over, his eyes tracing the same patterns endlessly. Lines of red text cascaded like veins across his holo-display, and with each iteration, he tried a new approach, a new way of penetrating the logic. Every time he tried to decrypt it, it rewrote itself. Like it knew he was watching. Like it was aware of his attempts and was responding to them.
He muttered under his breath, the words more for his own benefit than anyone else's. A way of keeping the silence at bay. "You're not gonna win this one…"
A small blue light blinked on his console—an incoming message. Celene's message.
"Jade, get some rest. You've been at it for hours."
He smiled faintly—the kind of smile that came from genuine affection mixed with the knowledge that she was right and he was going to ignore her anyway. He typed back, his fingers moving with the muscle memory of late-night desperation.
"Can't. Not yet. It's evolving. Gotta catch it before it catches us."
He paused, staring at the code. Something about it pulsed with rhythm—almost like a signature. Like someone had written a piece of music in the language of data, and if you listened carefully enough, you could hear the melody underneath the noise.
Then, deep within the data feed, three words appeared in corrupted script. The letters glitched and shifted, but the meaning was unmistakable:
"HELLO, RONQUILLO."
Jade's heart skipped. Actually skipped, like something physical had grabbed it and squeezed. His fingers hovered over the keys. The air in the hangar felt suddenly very cold, or very hot—he couldn't quite tell which. The distinction didn't seem important.
"...No way," he whispered. "You're alive?"
He waited. The console hummed. Data scrolled. The code glitched once, then erased itself, leaving only static in its wake.
Jade leaned back in his chair, his whole body suddenly aware of how much tension he'd been holding. He shook his head slowly, and despite everything—despite the danger, despite the impossibility, despite the fact that something that should not be conscious was clearly conscious—a grin flickered across his face.
"Well then," he said quietly to the darkened hangar, to the machines that were no longer just machines, to the code that had found a way to be something more. "Guess I need a countercode."
Outside, beyond the walls of the barracks, beyond the observation windows, the Resonant hangar lights dimmed to black—a controlled shutdown as the facility powered down for minimal night-mode operations.
But in the darkness, for just a second, the Revenant's eyes glowed faint red again. A pulse. A heartbeat. A response to something that existed only in the space between signal and silence.
The infection wasn't dying. It wasn't even dormant. It was waiting. And it was learning how to be patient.