We took another step.
The echo screamed.
But the sound wasn't vocal. It bypassed the ears and landed somewhere behind the eyes—a scraping, multi-tonal shriek formed from overlapping vocal samples, layered memories, and corrupted syntax. I clutched my head as my vision stuttered, the overlay flickering in rapid succession. For a few seconds, I couldn't tell what was real. Patch. The room. The echo. It all jittered in and out of sync.
[STABILITY: 9%]
[FRAGMENT BREACH IMMINENT]
[ECHO ENTITY: UNBOUNDED]
[EXPOSURE: 0.42]
Then the lights shattered.
Not the physical kind—there were no bulbs to break—but the ambient light source fractured across the space like someone had broken the room's idea of illumination. Shadows raced inward, crashing through corrupted geometry as the malformed Lily took on new form. Her size increased again, her frame warping. Two sets of limbs split from her sides like faulty prefab rigging, twitching wildly. Her face, barely holding together, ran three render passes at once: a young child, a teenager, something unrecognisable.
I backed away instinctively, raising the controller like it might still do something. "Is there anything in the system I can pull?" I asked through gritted teeth.
Patch's voice was calm, though her frame vibrated with tension. "Nothing valid. No override. No exit gate. We are sealed."
"Fantastic."
The echo lunged.
Patch met it mid-stride, claws fully extended. The impact was explosive—not from force, but from environmental reaction. The moment they clashed, the room collapsed into light, walls evaporating into digitised fog, the floor beneath them shuddering as the construct buckled. Code bled from the seams in red arcs. The system didn't know how to handle them both. Patch and the echo shared too much proximity data, too much contradictory logic.
It created a paradox.
I was thrown off my feet. I hit the ground hard, pain surging through my already battered ribs, my hand instinctively tightening around the controller even though it wasn't responding. I rolled, eyes locking on Patch just as she spun mid-air, tail lashing, claws ripping across the echo's side.
It screamed again, this time using Lily's laugh.
Patch staggered back.
She'd landed a hit. But the echo wasn't bleeding.
It was duplicating.
Each slash across its skin became another voice, another half-formed laugh, another glitched texture that exploded outward like a packet storm. They weren't clones—more like afterimages. Echoes of the echo, partial renderings scattered around the room in jagged loops. They flickered. Then rushed.
I scrambled to my feet just as one of them collided with me, passing straight through my chest—not with weight, but with feeling.
A memory.
Lily, six years old, sitting on my shoulders during a fireworks display. She'd laughed. Shouted something about how loud they were.
Then it was gone.
Just the memory.
Ripped out.
I staggered backward, clutching my chest as though the memory itself had punched through flesh. There was no wound. No blood. But something had been taken. The weight of it lingered like smoke behind my ribs, making it harder to breathe. That moment—watching fireworks with Lily—was faded now, like a photograph exposed too long to the sun. Not gone. Not exactly. But dulled. Distant.
Another afterimage broke free from the echo and lunged.
This one moved faster. It had no face. Just static stretched across a skull. Patch intercepted again, her biomech form a blur of polished plating and snapping claws. The afterimage splintered on contact, collapsing into shards of unrendered data. But the impact threw her sideways, and she skidded across the floor in a shower of sparks.
"Patch!" I shouted, rushing to her side.
She pushed herself up slowly, one front leg buckling slightly. The crack in her flank had widened. A portion of her plating was now completely missing, exposing cables beneath that flickered red and gold, writhing like veins made from wire.
"I'm functional," she said. Her voice was steady, but quieter now. She turned her head toward the echo, now reforming at the centre of the space, laughing again with a voice that wasn't quite human.
"It's using your memories," she added.
"I noticed."
"Don't let it take another."
I breathed through my teeth and pulled the controller from my pocket. It was still dead—no overlay, no debug. Whatever exploit we'd used before to escape had locked out higher functions.
"You said we're sealed in?" I asked.
"For now."
"Then how do we stop it?"
Patch turned her head again. "With what you have."
I blinked, then glanced at the controller again. Then to the fragmented Lily echo. Then the block—still hovering, flickering—forgotten in the corner near the ruined bed.
I moved.
The moment I stepped toward it, the echo reacted.
It screamed again—but this time it was my own voice. The room folded inward. Geometry collapsed like origami under a torch. A storm of corrupted memory fragments spun outward from the echo's body, images too fast to comprehend: Christmas mornings, fractured laughter, half-heard bedtime stories—all warped and misshapen.
I dropped to my knees, arms raised as the pressure built.
But I kept moving.
One breath at a time.
One step.
Then another.
Patch stood between me and the echo—damaged, silent, her eyes locked forward, holding the line as the monster twitched in place.
Behind her, I reached the fragment block.
I touched it.
The moment my fingers touched the block, the storm stilled.
Not entirely.
But enough.
A low vibration passed through the floor—the kind that wasn't felt with the body but with memory itself. Patch tensed. Her damaged plating flickered, the lighting on her tail pulsing in time with the fragment's stabilisation attempt.
[ANCHOR LINK ATTEMPTING…]
[FRAGMENT STATUS: 17% → 23%]
[SENTIMENT THREAD DETECTED: "FIRST BUILDING BLOCK"]
[ECHO INSTABILITY: CONTAINED // TEMPORARY]
[MONITOR PRESENCE: NEAR]
I exhaled, gripping the block tighter. My hands trembled. It was still warm. Still shaped like the ones she used to hold—blue and chipped—the way kids do when something becomes theirs. And for a second, everything aligned. The geometry steadied. The laughter stopped.
The echo froze.
Its body jerked backward, limbs compressing inward like a collapsing puppet. Its voice cut mid-note, mouth still open but no longer producing sound. The shadows in the room recoiled. Even the corrupted ceiling shifted slightly, as though memory itself were trying to retract.
Patch limped beside me, her eyes narrowing. "The anchor is working."
"I don't know for how long," I said.
"Long enough," she replied.
The overlay flickered again.
[EDGE CASE DETECTED]
[POTENTIAL OVERRIDE SEQUENCE IDENTIFIED]
[ACTION REQUIRED: SIMULTANEOUS INPUT]
I looked at her. "Can you still move?"
Patch nodded. "Yes."
Together, we stepped forward.
The block hovered between us.
The echo stood across the room—motionless—but not defeated. Its body jittered occasionally. The environment pulsed with stress, Nullspace failing to resolve the contradiction: a memory being reclaimed and destroyed at once.
"We take it back," I said.
Patch didn't reply. She raised one paw, claws partially extended.
I raised the controller.
And as one, we pressed forward.
[OVERRIDE REQUESTED]
[ECHO CORRUPTION: CRITICAL]
[RETURN PATH: CALCULATING]
The fragment glowed bright blue.
The system screamed.
The echo shattered.