The symbol glowed faintly in the stone.
Perfectly round.
Etched with precision no human hand could've made.
Pulsing like a heartbeat.
Jonas knelt beside it, tracing the edges with cautious fingers. It was warm.
Mara stood behind him, rubbing her arms to keep off the cold. "What do you think it means?"
"It's a tether point," Jonas said. "A relay. Whatever the shimmer is… it didn't die. It retreated. And this is where it touched ground."
"Can it come back?"
Jonas hesitated. "Not without something to anchor to."
He looked at his hand. The faint mark still pulsing in sync with the stone.
She noticed.
"How long have you known?"
"Since the moment it took the drive," he admitted. "It didn't erase me. It marked me. Like it needs me to finish something."
Mara crouched beside him. "Then we don't run. We follow it."
Jonas nodded.
They scouted the surrounding area, moving through the fog-choked plaza. And that's when Mara spotted it a drainage hatch half-buried in overgrowth and cracked stone.
"It's old," she said. "Pre-collapse. Might be tied to the original Eris observation network."
Jonas pulled it open.
A blast of cold, stale air hit their faces.
And below a ladder. Descending into blackness.
They exchanged a look.
Then climbed down.
The tunnel stretched deep and narrow, lit only by the dying glow of the mark on Jonas's hand. The symbol on the floor had been no isolated signal every fifty meters, another glyph pulsed on the wall, drawing them deeper.
After what felt like hours, the tunnel opened.
A blast door, half-ajar.
Jonas pushed it aside with effort.
And stepped into a chamber.
Soft lights. Rows of equipment.
Old tech humming with unfamiliar updates.
And people.
Six of them.
All watching him from behind reinforced glass.
A voice crackled from a speaker above.
"Jonas Hale. You've been expected."
Jonas stepped forward slowly. "Who are you?"
The lights adjusted. And from the far room stepped a woman in a weathered uniform a faded logo across her chest: MNEMOS.
The Mnemosyne Network: Memory Surveillance Division.
"I'm Director Sadira Quinn," she said. "We've been monitoring the residual echoes since the collapse."
Mara stepped up beside him. "How are you still alive down here?"
Quinn smiled faintly. "We went dark the day the Gate failed. We knew it wasn't over."
Jonas narrowed his eyes. "Why now?"
Quinn's expression hardened.
"Because when you threw that drive into the shimmer… you didn't just feed it.
You gave it a seed."
A screen flickered to life behind her.
Data streams.
Pulse maps.
And a live-feed: above-ground satellite imaging.
At the center of it all…
A growing radius of static.
Jonas stared.
It was spreading.
Slowly. Silently.
Alive.
"Your echo," Quinn said, "is rewriting the world."
Mara's voice cracked. "What do we do?"
Quinn looked at Jonas.
Straight into him.
"You help us finish what you started. Or there won't be anything left to save."