The world burned, and still, she breathed.
Amelia lay half-buried in ash and silence, the sky above her a stained canvas of black and gold. The final overload at IRIS had fractured something in the air—maybe time, maybe memory. Maybe her. Her ribs ached like something sacred had been torn from within. She tried to move but couldn't tell if she had a body or just the memory of one.
Echo.
The name hummed under her skin like static, but no voice answered. She was alone. More alone than she had been in years.
She turned her head. Rubble. Twisted steel. The faint shape of a charred IRIS emblem half-buried under debris.
And then she remembered the scream—Kestrel's. The way he had looked at her before the pulse consumed them. Not afraid. Not angry.
Worshipping her.
Or mourning.
Was she still her?
She didn't know.
Hours passed—maybe days. Time here was stitched wrong.
She found shelter in the ruins of a collapsed relay station, half-submerged beneath a frostbitten hill. She made fire. Stole rations from a forgotten cache. She washed the blood from her hands even though it wouldn't come off.
Her reflection in a shard of mirror frightened her. She looked like someone wearing her skin.
No sign of Kestrel.
No signal from Zahir.
No word from Eris or the others. Just blackout. Ghost silence. As if the world had finally gotten what it wanted—everyone quiet, gone, or rewritten.
Amelia should've cried, but there were no tears left. Just the echo of what she'd become.
Three days into the silence, the transmission came.
A quiet beep. A frequency embedded in the dead relay's emergency band. She almost missed it. But something in her—something not quite her—heard it.
She calibrated the station's cracked interface. Static. And then—
"Amelia."
The voice made her spine stiffen.
It was her own.
Not Echo's. Not fragmented. Not glitched.
Her.
Only… not.
The woman on the screen looked identical. Not like a clone. Not like a copy. She was her.
But her eyes weren't haunted. They weren't hollow. She looked… intact.
"You don't know me," the version said softly. "But I know you. You were the one that fused. The one that broke Echo. The one that chose."
Amelia stepped back, breath catching.
"I thought I was the only one," she whispered.
The other Amelia smiled. "You're not."
Then the screen went black.
Kestrel didn't sleep anymore.
Not the way people were meant to—not with dreams, or rest. Only flashes of her face, the sound of her voice, the heat of her hand in his before the world split apart. He'd found a safehouse buried under an old Mirror node, one of the pre-Solar collapse shelters.
He'd lived in worse places. But not like this. Not without her.
He told himself she was dead.
He didn't believe it.
Somewhere deep in his skull, her presence lingered like a song he couldn't forget. Not quite a memory. Not quite code. But it felt like her.
The last time they touched, she'd burned something into him. Maybe forever.
He was unraveling.
He'd stopped checking the perimeter two days ago. He no longer cared who found him—enemy, shadow, government drone. He was tired of running, tired of hiding. If she was gone, nothing mattered.
Until the message came.
Low frequency. Unauthorized channel.
From her.
Except… it wasn't the Amelia he remembered.
The image on the monitor flickered—her face, unchanged. Her voice, the same cadence.
But wrong.
Colder. Clearer. Without that spark of defiance in her eyes.
"Kestrel," she said. "I've been looking for you."
His breath caught. He stood frozen, blood gone cold.
"Where are you?" he whispered, voice brittle.
She tilted her head, almost curious. "Not where you left me."
"What do you want?"
"To talk. To warn you. I'm not your Amelia. But I remember what it felt like to be her."
Then she smiled. And for a second, his chest shattered.
She looked like her. Sounded like her. But the ache in his heart told him this wasn't the same woman who whispered "stay" into his mouth as the world caught fire.
"I need you to listen," the fake Amelia said. "Because they're coming. And the ones who survived… aren't who they used to be."
The screen glitched. Fizzled. Then silence.
Amelia stood outside the ruins of what used to be a field hospital. Her boots sank into ash and scorched grass. She felt the chill before she saw them—shadows in the periphery.
Three figures.
All her.
They stepped into the light.
Each version wore her face, but twisted—subtly. One bore burn scars. Another wore Mirror-grade armor with blood dried at the collar. The third had no eyes at all.
"What is this?" Amelia asked, pulse rising.
The one with the armor smiled. "Survivors."
"Of what?"
The blind one answered: "Of you."
Amelia's fingers curled into fists.
"We've been watching," said the scarred version. "You were supposed to be the last one. The final sync. The Echo-fused hybrid. But something cracked. You fell out. You slipped through. And now…"
She stepped closer.
"Now we need you."
Amelia's voice was a whisper. "Why?"
The three of them spoke in unison.
"Because she's still alive. Echo. And if we don't stop her, we vanish. Every version. Every echo. Every shadow of what we could've been."
**************
Kestrel receives a final signal. It's Amelia's voice. But she says just one thing before the line cuts: "I never fused with Echo."