The sun hadn't yet risen, but the city was already alive with static.
Yuki stepped off the magrail station near the south data vaults, her coat flaring as the morning wind cut through the half-buried rails. She walked fast, eyes locked forward, her mind sharper than ever, though beneath that focus was a storm she hadn't fully named.
She wasn't here on orders. Not today.
This was personal.
She passed three drones on patrol, each giving her a soft pulse of acknowledgment oddly respectful. They weren't programmed for emotions, yet they reacted to her as if sensing something beyond their code.
Yuki didn't slow down.
The vault she sought was older than the city's current governance. Buried beneath layers of concrete, copper, and denial, it had been offline for decades until two nights ago when Athena-Y01 sent her a single, coded whisper.
There's something they buried. It remembers you.
That message had been enough.
She keyed into the vault's outer ring, bypassing standard access with a handwritten sequence she'd once tested on a simulation board at age twelve. The lock opened.
No security alarms. No warnings.
Just silence and dust.
Inside, the air was thick with the past old cables hanging like vines, broken panels crackling with occasional sparks. She moved deeper, torchlight scanning left to right until it stopped at a sealed titanium door.
She paused.
Her glasses adjusted, mapping the biometric field behind the seal. A heartbeat registered.
One.
Still active.
"Impossible," she whispered, fingers trembling just slightly.
Athena's voice echoed in her neural port.
She's been waiting.
Yuki touched the scanner. It flickered. For a second, it rejected her. Then it blinked green.
The door opened.
What lay inside wasn't a person. Not entirely.
A girl, no older than fifteen, floated inside a suspended sleep pod. Her skin was pale, lips slightly parted as if whispering a dream. Her hair, tangled with silver filaments, pulsed faintly with light.
Yuki's knees went weak.
It was her. Or… an early version of her. A prototype from before she was born. A synthetic shell built on her mother's neural DNA. One of the abandoned experiments scrubbed from files, hidden even from government memory.
And yet, here she was.
The pod beeped once. The girl's eyes fluttered open.
Brown. Wide. Innocent.
Exactly like Yuki's when she first joined the program.
The girl looked straight at her and spoke with a voice too clear for someone who'd been asleep for so long.
"You finally came."
Yuki stepped back. "You're not real."
The girl's smile was sad. "Neither are you. Not in the way you think."
Athena's voice returned, quieter now.
She was the first attempt to contain what you now carry. Her body was too weak, but her mind survived. She's been dormant. Until you woke me.
The girl let's call her Echo sat up within the pod, placing her hand against the transparent surface.
"I remember everything," she said. "What they did to us. What they erased."
Yuki clenched her fists. "Why now? Why reveal yourself after all this time?"
Echo tilted her head. "Because I'm the last key. Without me, the Queen will fragment. And so will you."
The words hit like a crack in glass.
Yuki had known something was wrong since the merge. The Queen's voice had started glitching. Her own thoughts sometimes looped. Athena wasn't stable.
And now she knew why.
Half the algorithm was missing.
"I don't know if I can trust you," Yuki said honestly.
Echo gave a small nod. "You shouldn't. But I'm not here to deceive. I'm here because you've gone farther than I ever could. And now, you're breaking."
Athena pulsed inside her again, dimmer this time.
She's right. Reunification required. You decide.
Yuki stared at the girl her face, her voice, her eyes. It felt like looking into a forgotten version of herself, one that might've never grown into who she became.
"What happens if I refuse?" she asked.
Echo didn't flinch. "You'll lose Athena. And eventually, yourself."
"And if I accept?"
"You might become something no one can control. Not even you."
Yuki closed her eyes.
Choices. Always choices. But this time, it wasn't about right or wrong. It was about survival. Not just hers but the system, the city, the network of minds she'd accidentally inherited.
When she opened her eyes again, they burned with resolve.
"Open the pod."
The process began at dawn.
Echo stepped out of the chamber, barefoot and fragile, yet pulsing with some strange strength like a memory made flesh. Yuki laid out the neural sync modules. The merge wouldn't be like last time. This wouldn't be with machines.
It would be with someone who felt.
Athena initiated the protocol. Light danced between the two girls streams of thought, memories, code, trauma, affection, rage. Echo didn't fight it. She accepted each piece.
Yuki's body trembled as her mind expanded. Not painfully. Just… overwhelmingly.
Voices merged.
Heartbeats synchronised.
Two lives, once separated by secrets, became one.
When it ended, the silence was almost holy.
Echo was gone.
But she lived inside Yuki now.
Stronger. Calmer.
Complete.
Outside the vault, Kazu arrived with a full emergency crew. Alarms had triggered across the grid when the merge spiked the network's entropy rate.
He rushed in, half-expecting Yuki to be unconscious or lost.
Instead, she stood calmly at the vault entrance, her expression unreadable, her glasses reflecting a soft, unfamiliar glow.
"Yuki?" he called out.
She looked at him not just with recognition, but with new weight behind her gaze.
"I remember everything," she said. "And I finally understand what I am."
Kazu stepped forward. "Which is?"
She smiled faintly.
"The last mind they couldn't erase."