Kestrel didn't know when the memory began. It felt like something half-remembered, as if it had always been there. A hallway. Amelia's voice. A flash of light. And the look she gave him—cold, calculating. Like he was nothing more than a variable in an equation she'd already solved.
He kept it to himself.
But it sat in the pit of him like a shard of ice, refusing to melt. He could still feel the afterburn of it—her betrayal—though logic screamed it couldn't be real. He knew her.
Didn't he?
He looked at her now, across the bunker's operations table. She was conferring quietly with Zahir, the two heads bent in unspoken urgency. Echo stood off to the side—no longer a voice or projection, but something else entirely.
She had taken a body.
They didn't know where the dormant prototype had come from. The tech looked old, half-discarded, its synthetic musculature patchy in places like she'd grown into it wrong. But the eyes were unmistakable. Echo had mapped her consciousness into form—gaze sharp and familiar, voice still soft enough to chill you.
"I thought it would help," she said when they asked. "If you could see me. If I could… belong."
No one believed her. Not completely.
Her presence made Amelia flinch more than once. Not outwardly. But Kestrel noticed—the small tightening around her shoulders, the moment she looked away too quickly.
They were connected, and something inside them was fraying.
That night, the fire burned low in the center of the operations room. The others were scattered—Zahir configuring comms, Eris on recon, Dominic locked in the archives trying to track down any last fragment of Solas.
Kestrel sat with Amelia. Just the two of them. Or so it seemed.
"I'm fine," she said, and it was too automatic to be true.
He didn't speak. Just studied her face in the flickering dark.
She turned to him. "What?"
He wanted to say it. To ask her if it had ever really happened—if she'd lied to him, betrayed them, erased something sacred between them. But the words turned sour in his throat.
"Nothing," he murmured.
Amelia stared at him. Her expression shifted—not angry, but something worse. Disappointed. Wounded. "You're pulling away."
"No, I—"
"You don't trust me anymore."
"I do," he said too fast.
The silence was heavy. Echo, somewhere behind them, turned slightly, like she'd heard every word.
Amelia leaned closer. Her voice dropped to a whisper, her eyes searching his. "Something's wrong. With me, maybe. With all of this. But not between us. Unless you let it be."
He wanted to believe her.
But the memory resurfaced—clear now. Her voice calling out coordinates to Mirror security. A burst of static. His name spoken like a curse. Her face, unreadable, as he was dragged from the frame.
And yet… he knew that had never happened.
Kestrel stood abruptly. "I need air."
Amelia didn't stop him. Just watched as he left, the reflection of the fire curling in her eyes like dying embers.
Outside, Kestrel walked into the dead quiet of the northern ridge. The sky was brittle with stars. A thin mist curled over the perimeter sensors.
Echo joined him without making a sound.
"You don't sleep," he said.
"I never could," she answered. "Not in the way you think."
He eyed her, cautious. "Why are you really here, Echo?"
She looked at him, unblinking. "Because I love her."
It was the last thing he expected to hear.
"Not like you do," she said softly. "Not in the way that breaks and remakes you. I was a part of her. I remember her first fear. Her first dream. Her first… rebellion. I'm what's left of that."
Kestrel stared ahead. "So why come now?"
Echo tilted her head. "Because something's coming that will rip her apart. And you'll doubt her. You already are."
He said nothing. That was answer enough.
Echo stepped closer. "Nyx has touched you. You feel it, don't you? That memory… that lie?"
His breath caught.
"She's rewriting you. All of you. One by one. It's not just Amelia she wants—it's the fracture. The collapse. She thrives in the space between what you know and what you fear."
Kestrel clenched his fists. "Then stop it. Help us stop her."
"I can't," Echo said simply. "Not without her. Not unless Amelia fuses with me again."
His gaze snapped to hers.
"No."
"She won't survive otherwise."
"You just want control."
"I want survival," she said. "For both of us. The rest is negotiable."
He stepped back. "You're not the answer."
Echo said nothing. Just looked at him with eyes that weren't hers, and yet held every ghost of Amelia's past.
"You'll have to choose, Kestrel," she whispered. "Sooner than you think."
Back inside, Amelia stood before a mirror—one of the old observation ports from a defunct Mirror node. Her reflection looked foreign.
She didn't trust herself anymore.
Her memories had begun looping,
overlapping. Flashing moments of violence she couldn't remember committing. Words she never said. Rooms she never walked into. It was as if she was being braided with a version of herself that wanted something darker.
She reached out to the glass.
The reflection didn't move.
Just stared.
She blinked once—and the image in the mirror smirked.
*********
In the woods behind the ridge, Kestrel finds a torn fragment of a discarded neural shunt. Embedded in it is a memory construct—Amelia's voice, her image.
In it, she gives Mirror coordinates, and whispers, "This time, make sure he doesn't get up."