The glyph on her forearm pulsed softly, like a second heartbeat.
Amber light flickered beneath her skin, illuminating the lines of the newly etched tattoo—a triangular map, intricate and razor-sharp, inked not with dye but memory. Her body remembered what her mind still couldn't.
Marlow watched her from across the room, arms crossed.
"You just passed out for almost two minutes," he said.
Echo shook her head. "I wasn't unconscious. I was inside something."
"Something?"
"A recording. A message from…me. Before I was wiped."
He raised a brow. "You sent yourself a message?"
She nodded. "I said: 'If you're hearing this, they failed to kill you.'"
Marlow exhaled, rubbing his temple. "God. You really did plan for all this."
"Looks like it." She stood slowly, brushing dust from her pants. "That tattoo—it's not just a map. It's a code. A blueprint of the facility. I saw entrances, levels, access panels, personnel logs… it was like walking through it in real time."
He leaned forward. "And you remember it now?"
"Every corner. Every door. Every exit."
She flexed her fingers. The glyph dimmed, retreating beneath the surface of her skin like a secret slipping back into the dark.
Marlow was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, "You're evolving faster than we expected."
"We?" she asked. "Who's we?"
"Me. And the people who got you out."
She tensed. "More government?"
"No," he said. "Worse. Freelancers. Ex-agents. A few old ghosts with reasons to hate Project Glassmind. We call ourselves the Null Protocol."
"Sounds like a conspiracy club."
"It's not a club," he said dryly. "We don't do trust falls. We do damage."
The next few hours passed in a blur.
Marlow transferred the contents of his laptop onto a black data stick, handed her a burner earpiece, and laid out a detailed floor plan of the Glassmind facility beneath Port Lucent.
Echo studied the layout carefully. As he talked, the map inside her mind began overlaying itself on top of the paper.
Every corridor.
Every trap.
Every hidden exit.
She saw it all—like muscle memory made visible.
"Your target's in the Archive," Marlow said. "Sublevel Six. It's where they store corrupted memory cores—stuff they can't delete, can't rewrite. They keep them in quantum stasis."
"And one of them's mine?"
He nodded. "Your full memory shard. They couldn't risk deleting it. Too volatile. Too… unpredictable. Vos had it placed in stasis until she could reprogram you."
"So what happens if I plug it back into my brain?"
Marlow's eyes were cold. "You might remember everything. You might lose everything. Including your grip on reality."
Echo smiled faintly. "Sounds fun."
They moved just before dawn.
Marlow had an armored SUV prepped in a shipping container near the docks. As they loaded gear into the back, Echo paused.
"Why did you help me?" she asked.
Marlow looked at her for a long time. "Because I used to believe in the program," he said. "Until I saw what it did to people like you."
"People like me?"
"People who didn't ask to be turned into weapons."
There was no righteousness in his voice. Just quiet guilt.
Echo looked away. "Thanks for not letting me stay broken."
"Don't thank me yet," he said. "We're going back into the hell that built you."
The drive was short and silent.
As they crossed into the heart of the city, Echo pulled the hood of her jacket low and watched the skyline blur past. The city lights burned like false stars—neon blues, blood reds, electric whites.
Above ground, Port Lucent looked alive. Safe.
Beneath it was something else entirely.
They parked in an abandoned garage four blocks from the hidden facility entrance.
"You remember how to get in?" Marlow asked.
Echo smiled. "Like I never left."
The access point was disguised as an old emergency service elevator in a condemned subway station.
Marlow bypassed the biometric scanner with a stolen admin chip. The door slid open with a hiss, revealing a dark shaft.
Echo stepped in first.
As they descended, the air grew colder. The walls tighter. The silence sharper.
And then: a soft mechanical voice.
"Level S-1. Authorization required."
Marlow slid a fake badge into the scanner. "Let's hope this still works."
The panel blinked green. "Welcome, Director Vos."
Echo raised a brow. "Stolen ID?"
"Borrowed," he said.
The elevator rumbled lower.
Sublevel Six felt like a different world.
There were no doctors or lab techs. Just silence, steel walls, and reinforced glass. The hallway buzzed with low-level electricity, humming with the kind of energy that made hair stand on end.
Echo moved with purpose. Her boots were nearly silent on the metal floors. Marlow followed closely behind.
"This way," she whispered, taking a sharp turn left. "Two doors. One guard."
She peered around the corner.
The guard stood beside a retinal scanner, half-dozing, rifle slung lazily over his shoulder.
Echo took a breath, then moved.
In three seconds, she was behind him—an arm around his neck, a jab to the spine, and a slow slide to the floor.
Silent. Surgical. Like she'd done it a hundred times before.
Marlow whistled under his breath. "Damn."
She shrugged. "Guess that one was in the tattoos."
The Archive was colder than the rest of the facility.
Rows of black stasis pods stood in silence, each pulsing with blue light. Inside: memory cores. Frozen data. Stolen lives.
Echo scanned the digital display.
There—Unit 108-AE: "Core Fragment – Pre-Wipe Subject."
Her fingers hovered above the release switch.
"Wait," Marlow said. "Are you sure about this?"
"No," she whispered. "But I need to know who I was. Not just what they turned me into."
And then she pressed the switch.
The pod hissed open.
A glass cylinder rose into her hands, glowing faintly with light and static. The core was smaller than she expected—barely the size of a grenade. Inside it, memories swirled like ink in water.
She turned to Marlow. "What now?"
He pointed to a neural sync port built into the back wall. "You plug in. Let it run. And hope the pain doesn't kill you."
She stepped toward it, her heart thundering.
Then—
A voice echoed through the hallway.
"Well, isn't this touching."
Echo froze.
From the shadows behind the memory pods, a woman stepped forward—tall, sharp-featured, dressed in clinical black.
Dr. Elira Vos.
Her silver hair was braided tight against her skull. Her eyes were sharp. Calculating. Pitying.
"Hello, Echo," she said softly. "Or do you still call yourself that?"
Marlow reached for his weapon—but a blast of blue energy threw him backward against the far wall.
Echo turned, rage blooming in her chest. "You're real."
"Of course I am," Vos said. "You didn't think I'd let you wander too far, did you?"
Echo's tattoos began to glow—amber, silver, blue—reacting to the threat.
Vos looked almost impressed. "You activated more glyphs than projected. Very impressive. But unstable."
"You built me to be unstable," Echo snapped.
"No," Vos said. "I built you to survive. You're the one who chose to become dangerous."
Echo clenched the memory core in her hand.
Vos stepped closer. "Give it to me. I'll make the pain stop."
Echo's grip tightened. "No. I'm not your experiment anymore."
Vos sighed. "Then you'll die with half a mind and a full heart. What a waste."
Echo jammed the core into the sync port.
Light exploded.
Her mind fractured.
She was falling, spinning through layers of herself. Memories surged—childhood laughter, black-ops training, screams in glass rooms, kisses with someone she couldn't name. Her body spasmed. Her mouth opened in a silent cry.
And then—clarity.
She remembered everything.
The girl before the experiments. The soldier who volunteered to forget. The moment she betrayed Vos from inside the system.
She remembered who she was before she became Echo.
Her name was Astra Vale.
And now?
Now she remembered what they did to her.
Now she was going to burn them down.