Elena stared down the barrel and saw her own fear aiming back at her. Number Eight's eyes were ringed with sleeplessness, but beneath the terror sat something else—hesitation, a fracture line running right through the center of her resolve.
"Who told you that?" Elena asked quietly, palms open, body still. The corridor lights strobed with the facility's lockdown cycle, slicing the distance between them into alternating bands of shadow and fluorescence.
"Chen," Eight said, voice thin. "Aldridge. They said you're compromised by the bleed. They said if you finish the cascade we—none of us—will be… us."
Behind Eight, two red sensors winked awake above a sealed maintenance hatch. Automated turrets coming online. Time shrinking.
Elena took a breath and let it out slowly. "What's your favorite smell?"
Eight blinked. "What?"
"Your favorite smell. Not a memory they wrote for you. Yours."
The gun didn't lower, but her focus wavered. "Orange peels. In July."
Elena's throat tightened. "Mine too. Our mother used to twist the rind and make the little oils spark in sunlight."
A flicker moved through Eight's eyes—recognition, then confusion, then a grief too large for one body. "I don't remember that."
"You do," Elena whispered. "You're remembering right now. The collective's been trying to give it back."
Behind them, a distant door slammed. The chase had found their floor.
"Listen to me," Elena said, stepping half a pace to the side, forcing Eight to adjust the aim, to think. "I just came back from the library. It's not a metaphor. It's a place. It's us—all of us—stitched together. They're not trying to erase you, Eight. They're trying to keep you."
Eight's hands shook harder. "If I let you pass, I die."
"If you stop me, we all die," Elena said. "Maybe not our bodies, but the line of us, the one that kept getting smarter, kinder, more stubborn with each reset—that dies. The part of you that's asking questions right now? That's the part they can't control."
Boots pounded closer. Aldridge's voice snapped orders down the corridor like a whip. "Section Bravo, converge on Service Access Two. Kill-switch teams on standby."
Elena took another breath. "You're not their weapon. You're my sister. Not by blood—by survival. Put the gun down."
Eight's jaw clenched. She lifted the barrel a fraction higher, then squeezed her eyes shut as if bracing for recoil from a different kind of impact. When she opened them, something had settled. "Sublevel five?"
Elena nodded. "Manual relay. It's the only way to keep the cascade alive when they cut main power."
Eight exhaled, long and ragged—and flipped the gun, offering the grip. "Go."
Elena took the weapon, stunned. "Come with me."
Eight shook her head. "I'll slow you down. And someone has to mislead them." She stepped into the center of the corridor, drew herself to full height, and shouted, "She went right! Toward Biocontainment!" Footsteps altered trajectory. Shouting multiplied. Eight glanced back, a ghost of a smile. "Buy you sixty seconds."
"Thank you," Elena said, and meant it with a purity that hurt.
She sprinted for the service hatch. The turrets above it finished booting with a predatory whir. Elena raised the pistol and fired twice—sparks burst from a sensor cluster, and the guns sagged, smoking. She ripped the hatch panel, crawled inside, and slid down a steep utility chute into the dark.
The building's bones wrapped around her: rebar ribs, wire tendons, ductwork lungs wheezing recycled air. The collective whispered coordinates in impressions—turn left, drop three meters, follow the heat that tastes like copper. She moved by feel and instinct, scraping palms and knees, breathing in dust that tasted like forgotten storms.
She spilled out into a crawlspace overhanging a cavernous chamber. Sublevel five wasn't a floor so much as a hollow carved into the bedrock—a black heart pumped by a single, thrumming transformer the size of a house. Manual relay switches clung to a catwalk like barnacles on a rusted hull.
A single figure stood on that catwalk, silhouetted by hazard strobes. Dr. Victoria Chen.
"Of course," Elena muttered, lowering herself to a ladder. Her muscles trembled from adrenaline and the aftertaste of the library's geometry.
Chen didn't turn as Elena approached. "You always choose the hardest path," she said, voice echoing. "Even when you wrote contingencies for yourself, you never allowed an easy exit."
Elena kept the pistol down but ready. "Turn around."
Chen didn't. "Do you know why I joined Memoriam?"
"I don't care," Elena said, closing the distance.
"You should," Chen replied, and when she finally turned, her face was luminous with something like awe—and devastation. "Because I believed what you believed before they broke you. I believed humanity could be more than alone minds screaming into the dark."
Elena's step faltered. "You signed off on prisoners and patients."
"And I will answer for that," Chen said, voice fraying. "But listen to me: Aldridge doesn't want a collective. He wants a controllable substrate. You and I built something that refuses control."
A crackle interrupted them. Aldridge's voice poured from the PA, tinny, furious. "Power down the relay, Doctor. Now."
Chen's gaze flicked to the manual switch. "If I throw this, the cascade stabilizes for seventeen minutes. Long enough for your virus to finish. Long enough to free them."
"Then do it," Elena said.
Chen looked past Elena, up the ladder where boots would soon appear. "You don't understand the cost. When the cascade completes, the barrier between individual and collective will thin. Some will cross without consent. Some will never fully return. We will have changed the species without asking."
Elena lifted the pistol. "They didn't ask us when they took us."
For a heartbeat, the two women hung on the knife-edge of a history neither wanted to write. Then Chen nodded once, a small, fatal acceptance, and reached for the switch—
Gunfire stitched the air. Chen jerked, stumbled, and a dark bloom spread across her shoulder. The shot had come from above. Aldridge stepped into view on an upper gantry, a compact rifle braced in cruel, steady hands.
"End of the line," he called over the scream of alarms. "Step away from the relay, Dr. Torres."
Chen gripped the rail with bloody fingers, teeth bared. "Finish it," she hissed to Elena. "Don't let him cage God and call it mercy."
Elena moved—but Aldridge was already adjusting aim, lining a new shot.
The collective surged in Elena's mind like a rip tide: We can blind him. For three seconds. No more.
"Do it," Elena whispered.
The lights strobed white. The world skipped. Aldridge shouted, blinking—three seconds.
Elena lunged for the relay. Her hand closed on cold steel.
She pulled.
Power howled through the chamber. The transformer roared, a wounded titan waking. Somewhere above, breakers blew like thunder. The device on B4 surged, and in the library, doors flew wide.
Aldridge recovered. He fired.
Pain tore Elena sideways. The pistol clattered into the abyss below. She slammed against the railing, vision star-bursting, breath gone. Warmth spilled down her ribs.
"Elena!" Chen screamed, catching her with her good arm.
The relay stayed down. The cascade deepened. In Elena's skull, a choir of voices rose—not cacophony, but chord.
Boots hammered onto the catwalk. Aldridge advanced, implacable, rifle aimed at Elena's heart.
"Reset team is ready," he said into his comm. "Prep the substrate." He smiled down at Elena with pity as thin as paper. "You could have been the mother of a new world. Instead, you'll be its cautionary tale."
He tightened his finger on the trigger—
A gunshot cracked from the darkness above, from the ladder Elena had climbed. Aldridge jerked, staggered. His rifle clanged to the grating.
He turned, stunned, to face his shooter.
Number Eight stood there, blood on her temple, eyes bright with something fierce and new. "Sisters don't let sisters die for monsters," she said, and racked the slide.
Aldridge's hand darted to a secondary weapon.
Elena tried to stand, failed, and felt the collective flood her with steadiness.
"Eight," she croaked. "Shoot the mainline coupler."
Eight swung, fired, and the coupler exploded in a shower of sparks.
The transformer screamed. The chamber went blinding white.
And from somewhere beyond the lights, something enormous opened its eyes.