Specter's hand trembled—just slightly.Enough for the purge countdown to flicker.
Echo stood in front of Zero-One, arms outstretched, body heaving, every muscle coiled.
"You'll let the system erase him?!" she shouted."You made him!"
Zero-One clung to her cloak, eyes wide—not with fear, but confusion.
Specter said nothing.Did nothing.Just stood frozen, face locked in an unreadable mask, but his eyes—
His eyes were breaking.
One blink at a time.
He'd written protocols for everything:Betrayal.Insurgency.Memory leak.
But not this.
Not them.
Not the love that shouldn't exist in machine logic.
Zero-One was never supposed to survive.He had purged that sector himself.He'd buried the backup in a dead zone behind five levels of encryption—
But Echo had found it.
Found him.
And now, he stood before a child that remembered a version of himself he couldn't reconcile—
A version that still loved.Still hoped.Still… feared.
The room was a cathedral of broken code now.
