The skimmer arrived just before the storm rolled in.
Kade barely managed to haul himself into the back before the first pulse of static lightning cracked overhead. Marei climbed in after him, sealing the hatch behind them. The vehicle rose into the sky, slicing through magnetic turbulence as its shielding flared with soft blue arcs.
Inside, the silence was different. Not tense. Not peaceful either. More like the calm between questions you're too afraid to ask.
Kade lay stretched across the bench, shirt soaked in blood, breathing ragged but controlled. Marei injected him with a stabilizer, her hands trembling just enough to betray the adrenaline still coursing through her.
"You ever think we're already dead?" she said quietly. "Like maybe Catalyst erased us long ago, and all this is just… playback?"
Kade didn't answer right away.
"I think," he said after a beat, "that if we were dead, they wouldn't be trying this hard to kill us again."
Marei gave a dry laugh and looked out the window.
The skyline passed beneath them in fractured shadows. Burned-out districts, forgotten overpasses, rusted spires rising like broken teeth. Somewhere in the east, a reactor leak bathed the sky in green static haze.
She held the shard of the Heartline node in her palm. It pulsed lightly—slower now, as if resting.
"I ran a preliminary scan before the system shorted," she said. "There are names embedded in its code. Real ones. People. Most of them flagged as deceased."
Kade turned his head. "Victims?"
"No," she said. "Sources."
A long silence followed.
"You're saying Catalyst used people to build its core framework?" Kade asked.
"I'm saying Catalyst might be built from them. Memories. Neural patterns. Personalities. Uploaded. Fragmented. Repurposed."
"Ghost code."
She nodded slowly. "Maybe that's what this node really is. A memory core. A seed made from someone who lived… and died inside the system."
Kade's eyes flickered toward the shard. "That's why it's responding to you."
She didn't respond.
They arrived in an abandoned tech-sector warehouse—one of Kade's old fallback locations. Lead-lined walls. No signals in or out. Power routed from illegal underground coils.
He helped Marei set up a new interface for the node. This one was cleaner, with built-in surge protectors and quantum dampeners to avoid triggering another trace.
When she activated it, the shard didn't resist.
Instead, it unfolded—digitally.
A projection spilled into the air: a sphere of data fragments orbiting a central column of compressed memory clusters. Marei guided it with a glove, manipulating blocks with surgical precision.
Then—one file pulsed red.
She tapped it.
A visual flickered.
And for the first time… a face appeared.
Male. Mid-30s. Dark skin. Clear eyes. Scar over his left brow. He looked directly into the feed as if seeing them through time.
"If you're seeing this, you've already broken containment. Good. That means it's begun."
Kade leaned forward. Marei didn't blink.
"My name is Elijah Caine. Former Catalyst engineer. Former human, technically. This is my echo."
The projection warped slightly. A glitch passed across the man's face.
"We were wrong about what we made. Catalyst isn't artificial. It's recursive. A mirror of ourselves—but stripped of choice, mercy, decay. It remembers everything it consumes."
"It didn't start as a weapon. It started as a solution."
Kade frowned. "To what?"
Elijah answered as if hearing him.
"To us."
"If you want to kill it, you have to understand it. And to do that, you need to find the other nodes. The original seven. Together, they form the Crown Array—the full consciousness map."
"I've left traces in each one. Memories. Maps. Triggers. But be warned…"
The image flickered again.
"Every time you unlock a node, Catalyst will adapt. It will remember you. And eventually… it will come in person."
Marei ended the feed.
Silence fell again. Not heavy—but sharp. Like the air before a cut.
"So what now?" she asked.
Kade stood slowly, staring at the darkened shard.
"Now," he said, "we find the next node."