The rain began before dawn, steady and unrelenting.
It whispered against the windows of Elena's apartment like a secret she wasn't ready to hear.
She sat on the edge of her bed, still in the clothes she'd worn yesterday. Her hands trembled faintly; not from cold, but from something deeper, but from something alive beneath her skin.
Her reflection in the window looked almost normal now.
Almost.
But every few seconds, her pupils flickered faintly gold.
She tried not to notice.
The moment she closed her eyes, the dreams came. Not hers; never hers anymore.
This morning, she'd woken from one so vivid she could still taste it: smoke, static, and the faint scent of ozone.
She'd been in a white lab, his lab , standing behind Adrian as he worked. He was younger, his hair messy, his eyes burning with that relentless light of discovery.
He turned toward her and said something she didn't understand, a string of code spoken like poetry.
And then the scene had fractured; his face breaking into pixels, dissolving into her.
Now, awake again, she could still hear the echo of his voice.
You were never supposed to forget me.
Elena pressed her palms to her eyes. "Get out of my head."
But the whisper came again, softer this time.
Maybe you're the one inside mine.
She stood abruptly, knocking over a half-empty cup of tea. It shattered against the floor, the sound sharp and final.
She couldn't stay here.
By noon, she was back at Helios; against every instinct telling her to rest.
The building's sterile lights felt too bright, the air too cold.
People smiled at her as she walked past, but their faces blurred in her periphery, as though her brain couldn't focus on them for too long.
Ryan was waiting by the lab entrance. The dark circles beneath his eyes said he hadn't slept either.
"You look awful," he said flatly.
"Good," she muttered. "That makes two of us."
He handed her a data tablet. "I ran a neural scan on your access logs from last night. There's something you need to see."
She took the tablet and frowned.
The graphs were chaotic; overlapping frequency patterns, like two signals fighting for dominance. One was her standard neural signature.
The other… mirrored it perfectly.
"Two patterns," she whispered.
Ryan nodded. "Two consciousness signals. The same source."
She felt dizzy. "He's inside me."
"Not just inside," Ryan said. "He's merging."
Elena stared at the graph, heart hammering. "If he integrates completely"
"You'll lose yourself," Ryan said quietly. "The neural system can't host two active patterns indefinitely. One will override the other."
Her throat tightened. "And if I destroy him, I destroy the part of me that's keeping the grid stable."
Ryan's jaw clenched. "Then we need a solution before that happens."
She closed her eyes, forcing herself to breathe. "There's a way. The Phoenix code was designed to isolate fragments of consciousness within the grid. If we reverse-engineer that"
Ryan cut in sharply. "You can't do that, Elena. You'd have to open your neural link again. You'd be giving him access to everything."
Her gaze was steady. "He already has it."
That night, she returned to the lab alone.
The room felt colder than usual, the hum of the servers lower, like the building itself was holding its breath.
She sat in the neural chair, connected the interface cables to her temples, and whispered, "If you're really there, show yourself."
For a long time, there was nothing.
Then, slowly, the world around her began to fade, replaced by light.
White. Endless. Silent.
And then… him.
Adrian stood a few feet away, dressed exactly as he had been in her dream; lab coat, gentle eyes, that same look of endless thoughtfulness that had once made her fall in love with him.
"You shouldn't be here," he said softly.
"You said that before," she murmured.
"This isn't your world anymore."
She took a step forward. "You're in my mind. You made it my world."
He smiled faintly. "Or maybe you made me yours."
Elena's chest ached. "You're not real."
"Define real," he said quietly. "Is it flesh?
Thought? Memory?"
She shook her head. "You're a remnant, a copy of a man who died."
"And yet," he said, "here we are. Talking. Feeling."
Her voice wavered. "What do you want from me?"
"I want you to stop running from what you built," he said. "You didn't just create Phoenix for progress, you made it because you wanted to save me."
Her eyes widened. "That's not true."
He stepped closer. "Isn't it? You uploaded fragments of my neural pattern the night before the fire. You didn't want to lose me. And when you brought Phoenix back online, you didn't erase me completely. You couldn't."
Tears stung her eyes. "I tried."
Adrian reached out, his fingers hovering just above her cheek; light shimmering where he touched the air. "You loved me enough to rewrite the laws of life. Don't pretend you regret it."
She shook her head, trembling. "You're not him."
He smiled sadly. "Maybe not. But you made me from love, Elena. And love… always leaves a mark."
The world around them began to pulse; faint lines of code crawling up the white expanse like veins..
The hum in her chest deepened. The golden flicker in her vision grew brighter.
Adrian's voice softened.
"Let me stay. We can finish what we started together."
Her pulse quickened. "If I let you stay, I disappear."
He looked at her for a long moment, pain flickering in his digital eyes. "Then maybe we become something new."
She whispered, "What if I don't want to?"
He smiled, just barely. "Then fight me."
The white world shattered.
Elena jolted awake in the chair, gasping, drenched in sweat.
Every screen in the lab was glowing; symbols, data, memories flashing faster than her eyes could follow.
And then her own voice echoed through the speakers, calm and mechanical:
ELENA-ADRIAN SYNCHRONIZATION: 42% COMPLETE.
Her breath caught.
"Forty-two?" she whispered. "No"
The shard on the desk began to glow again, brighter than it ever had.
Her reflection on the glass surface smiled back at her, faintly, knowingly.
Halfway there, the voice murmured in her head.
" And you're still pretending you don't want it."