Three weeks after the Core collapse, the city still hadn't stopped humming.
You could feel it if you stood still long enough — a faint vibration under the pavement, like the whole place was breathing too slowly. They said it was aftershock from the resonance grid crash. But I knew better.
It was her heartbeat.
The Bureau had gone quiet. Too quiet.
Officially, the Resonance Division was "under audit." Unofficially, everyone knew it was a purge. The higher-ups wanted someone to blame, and since Aria was gone, I was the next best ghost to chase.
My badge had been suspended. My gun confiscated. I wasn't supposed to leave the quarantine sector.
So naturally, I did.
The city's underbelly had changed since I last walked it. The alleys were darker, the neon colder. Even the demons that roamed the black markets seemed jittery — like something deeper was watching them too.
I passed a wall tagged with glowing script. A resonance sigil. Unauthorized. Crude, but pulsing faintly with psychic feedback. Someone out there was experimenting with resonance tech again — and not the Bureau this time.
I touched the pendant beneath my shirt. It was warm.
"Yeah," I muttered under my breath. "I feel it too."
The pendant had started whispering to me two days after I woke up.
Not words, not exactly — more like impulses, memories, half-formed emotions. Sometimes I saw her face in reflections, heard her voice between radio static.
At first, I thought it was grief. Or guilt. Or both.
But then the whispers started pointing me toward things — people, locations, secrets.
That's how I found the warehouse.
It sat at the edge of the Lower Docks, abandoned and unlit, except for a single flickering security lamp. The metal door was sealed with Bureau-grade locks, but I'd learned a few tricks during my suspension.
The air inside smelled like ozone and rot. Resonance residue.
Someone had been conducting field tests here — crude psychic amplification rigs lined the walls, jury-rigged from stolen Bureau tech.
And in the center of the room stood a chair.
A resonance chair.
Not unlike the one they used on Aria.
My pulse quickened. The pendant grew hotter.
She was reacting.
"Ren."
I froze. The voice wasn't in my head this time. It came from the shadows.
A figure stepped forward — tall, wearing a long coat. His eyes glowed faintly, one human, one augmented.
Takeshi.
He looked older, more exhausted than I remembered. The lines on his face had deepened, the guilt heavier.
"I knew you'd come here," he said.
"Yeah?" I replied, keeping my voice steady. "You always did like leaving breadcrumbs."
"This isn't about you anymore," he said, walking past me to the resonance chair. "The Bureau's moving forward. They've already rebuilt part of the Core under a new name — Project Mirrorfall. They're trying to resurrect her pattern."
I clenched my fists. "Aria's dead."
He shook his head. "No, Ren. She's fragmented. Her resonance data still exists inside the network. They want to extract it — rebuild her consciousness as a controlled AI construct."
"An echo."
"Exactly."
He turned to me, his mechanical eye scanning the pendant faintly glowing under my shirt. "And they'll come for that next."
For a moment, the silence between us was heavy. The kind that carried years of shared regret.
"You knew they were doing this," I said finally.
"I tried to stop it."
"By helping them?"
He sighed. "By staying close enough to sabotage it when the time came."
"Yeah," I said coldly. "That's what everyone says after the damage is done."
Takeshi didn't flinch. He just looked tired. "You think I wanted this? I watched them tear apart minds, Ren. Do you know how many officers we lost during synchronization trials before Aria?"
"Too many."
He nodded. "And they'll keep losing more, unless we end it properly this time."
The pendant pulsed again — stronger now, as if reacting to his words. I felt her presence surge, like a spark catching flame.
"She doesn't trust you," I said quietly.
Takeshi gave a bitter smile. "Can't blame her. I'm the one who signed her clearance papers."
He stepped closer to the chair and dropped a small device onto the console — a black cube, humming softly.
"This is a trace jammer," he said. "Once activated, it'll sever any active resonance link in a ten-block radius. You use this, and you kill Mirrorfall before it's born."
I stared at the cube. "And what's the catch?"
"It'll destroy whatever resonance data it finds in the field." He looked at the pendant meaningfully. "Everything."
My throat tightened. "So if I use it—"
"Aria's gone for good."
I could feel her panic through the pendant — flashes of emotion, like a heartbeat accelerating.
Don't.
The word wasn't spoken, but it filled my mind anyway.
"She's still sentient," I said.
Takeshi's voice softened. "Then you know she wouldn't want to become their weapon."
I stared down at the cube, the hum of it blending with the city outside. Somewhere in the distance, I could hear sirens — Bureau drones scanning for illegal psychic frequencies.
We didn't have much time.
"Ren," Takeshi said, "we can end this together."
I looked at him. "No," I said quietly. "I've done the together part before. It never ends well."
I grabbed the cube. The moment I did, the pendant flared — light spilling through my fingers, searingly bright.
The warehouse shook. Machines sparked. Static filled the air.
And then her voice, clear and sharp, cut through the noise.
"Stop him."
Before I could react, the light pulsed outward — and Takeshi's mechanical eye flickered. He staggered, clutching his head.
"What the hell—"
"She's in the system," I said, realizing too late. "She's overriding it."
The lights exploded. Data screens flared alive, filling the warehouse with flickering images — Aria's face, fragmented across every display.
"They'll never stop, Ren," her voice echoed through the machines. "But neither will I."
"Aria, wait—"
"You promised to protect me. So let me protect you now."
The resonance chair roared to life, consuming the pendant's light. Takeshi shouted something I couldn't hear over the screaming static.
And then, just like that, the warehouse went dark.
When I woke up, dawn was breaking.
Takeshi was gone. So was the cube.
The pendant lay cold and cracked beside me — its light finally extinguished.
I picked it up, heart hollow. No hum. No whisper. Nothing.
But as I stepped outside, I noticed the hum under the pavement again — faint, rhythmic, alive.
I smiled grimly. "You never were good at following orders, were you?"
The city answered with another low vibration — the sound of a pulse beneath concrete.
And somewhere far below, deep within the resonance grid, a voice whispered like a sigh between frequencies:
"You didn't really think I'd leave you alone, did you?"