The world was already burning when they made the call.
IRIS calculated the odds—less than 2.1% chance of success without total erasure of the remaining team. Dominic stared at the numbers like they were prayers in a dead language. He understood the implications better than anyone. To overwrite Mirror, to cleanse its networks of Nyx's corruption, they had to upload IRIS in full-spectrum mode. There would be no backups, no consciousness recoveries.
It would be a digital martyrdom.
The base shook again. Sleeper agents—once ordinary citizens, now fractured vessels for Mirror's splinters—closed in like a virus with a human face. Eris manned the last defense grids, her expression carved in static defiance.
Amelia stood at the edge of the command deck, staring into the flames engulfing the city beyond the glass. Somewhere out there, Kestrel waited. Broken. Weaponized. Hers, and yet no longer hers. The fracture inside her stretched further than any scar. Echo was gone. At least, the version she could trust was. The one left was marching alongside Nyx, bringing the world to its knees.
Dominic broke the silence. "We're out of time, Amelia."
She didn't look at him. "I know."
Eris keyed in the final sequence. IRIS's countdown bled across the consoles in stark white. 19:59… 19:58…
"Amelia," Eris's voice softened. "This is your last window to walk away."
Her laugh was hollow. "Walk where? The whole world's a trap."
Eris hesitated. Then handed her an old-fashioned data drive. "Plan B. Portable IRIS kernel. You can escape. Hide with Kestrel. Maybe finish the war another way."
Amelia turned the drive over in her hand. "You think I still want to hide?"
"I think you still want him," Eris replied, quiet.
That, at least, was true.
Outside, the sky was a scream of red and electric ash. Dominic stared at her like a man watching a ghost walk.
"What's your move, Amelia?" His voice was hoarse.
She holstered the drive, slipped on a combat rig that didn't feel like it belonged to her anymore, and smiled that old smile—cracked, dangerous, beautiful.
"I'm going dark," she said.
"You'll never make it past the outer node perimeter," Eris warned.
Amelia's grin sharpened. "Then I guess I'll make it messy."
Dominic exhaled, something between pride and sorrow in his face. "We'll buy you time."
She paused by him. "You always hated me for being the contingency."
"No," he whispered. "I hated myself for loving it."
Their fingers brushed once—old battle-forged intimacy—and then she was gone.
The city swallowed her in blood and metal.
She found Kestrel where she knew she would: the old rail station beneath Mirror Node Zero. Their ghosts had always lingered here. He looked wrecked. The fracture lines in his neural lace glowed faintly under his skin. His memories—real and false—had mangled him into something that wasn't fully human anymore. He stared at her like he didn't trust her body, her voice, her existence.
"I didn't expect you," he rasped.
"I always come back," she said.
He lowered the gun. Not fully. Just enough.
"Nyx is coming," he whispered.
"I know."
"I was supposed to kill you."
She stepped closer. "Then do it."
His hand trembled. The trigger was a breath away from ending her story.
But Kestrel didn't move. His whole body shook with the war inside him.
"I can't remember which version of you I was supposed to kill."
She touched his face gently. "Then let's kill them all."
IRIS's countdown continued in the backdrop of the burning world.
Dominic and Eris held the perimeter as long as they could. Sleeper agents flooded the base. Dominic locked eyes with one of them—his former lover, now hollowed out by Mirror's will. She smiled with teeth like razors.
"You can't win, Dom," she said.
"I'm not trying to win," he whispered. "I'm trying to end."
And with that, he pressed the manual override. The base began to collapse on itself. A beacon fired IRIS's final code into the core Mirror network. It would erase them all.
But Amelia wasn't at the base anymore.
She and Kestrel ran together—into the mouth of Nyx's storm. They knew what they were doing. Drawing Nyx out, forcing her to overextend into them, into the only battlefield that mattered now: inside the wreckage of their broken love.
They lured her into the ruins of Mirror Prime's last server farm.
She appeared to them as Echo's face twisted into something angelic and cruel. Kestrel froze. Amelia didn't.
"You always wanted me to be less," Amelia said coldly. "Now you get to see what I look like without any of you."
Nyx smiled. "You never understood. You weren't built to win. You were built to bleed."
Amelia stepped forward. "We didn't survive all this to be saved. We survived to decide what stays dead."
She detonated the failsafe in her rig. IRIS's ghost uploaded into the surrounding Mirror shadows, collapsing the entire grid into a recursive feedback loop.
She and Kestrel held each other in the blue light of dying code, as the system screamed itself apart.
Somewhere beyond the ruin, the world went dark.
No one knew if they survived. No one even knew if they existed anymore.
But for once, the Mirror couldn't see them.
And that, to Amelia, was enough.
**********
"We didn't survive all this to be saved. We survived to decide what stays dead."