The shard pulsed with faint light, casting soft reflections across the walls of Wren's hidden den—a tangle of broken tech, salvaged memory ports, and what looked suspiciously like a disassembled cleaning drone wired into a portable server.
Eira sat near the terminal, the shard trembling faintly in her palm.
Kael hovered nearby, tense but quiet. Ysel stood farther back, arms crossed, eyes fixed not on the data—but on Wren.
Wren, for their part, worked like someone dancing through math. Fingers darted over the cracked keys of the cobbled interface, occasionally humming off-key while cross-referencing ancient formatting codes.
"Almost there," Wren muttered. "It's old, like... pre-sanitization-cycle old. They buried this protocol before any of you were born. Very naughty. I love it."
Eira barely heard them. Her focus was pulled inside, into the quiet gravity of the shard itself.
She still felt the echo of her mother's voice, like a thread tangled just behind her ribs.
A click. A spark.
Then the screen lit.
A wall of fractured data bloomed across it—symbols, images, and audio shards half-lost in time. The noise was jumbled, voices layered like static dreams.
But one broke through clearly.
A woman's voice, quiet, shaking:
"If you're seeing this... they haven't taken everything. Not yet."
Eira froze.
Kael stepped closer. "That's her."
The voice continued, slightly glitching:
"Aurelis was never a cure. It was containment. They called it flawlessness, but what they erased was choice. Memory. Grief. Love. They engineered silence and called it peace."
The video crackled—then showed a face.
Familiar, soft. Her mother. Younger, freer.
Eira covered her mouth.
Wren leaned forward, muttering, "She embedded her confession in a decommissioned format. Smart. Risky. They'll definitely come for this if it spikes the wrong sensor."
A sharp sound sliced through the moment.
Not from the terminal.
From the ceiling.
Kael looked up sharply. "Did you hear that?"
Ysel already had her weapon drawn. "External scanner. Short-range. Not a drone, but close."
Eira clutched the shard tighter, breathing shallow.
The recording continued in the background, broken but persistent:
"If even one of us remembers, they fail. Remember who you are. Remember me."
A sharp red glow flickered behind a ventilation slit—barely visible.
Wren's eyes narrowed. "That's registry bleed. Passive. Not a direct trace. But we're on the edge."
"We can't stay," Ysel said. "Not if they're sweeping proximity scans."
Wren looked back at the data, then at Eira. "I can finish decrypting on the move. Maybe. But you have to carry it."
Eira met their gaze.
Then looked at her mother's frozen image.
And nodded.