The echo shattered.
But it didn't vanish.
It came apart slowly—painfully—in pieces, like the system wasn't sure if it was allowed to let go. Limbs folded inward. Textures peeled back in layers. The face, already unstable, disassembled in a swirl of light, each expression lingering half a second longer than it should have, as if even now the system was trying to decide which memory to keep.
I stood frozen, one hand still on the fragment, chest heaving. The glow pulsing through the block had started to fade, but it didn't feel like a loss.
It felt like a completion.
Something had been rescued. Not Lily. But something of her. A thread. A heartbeat. A piece the system hadn't fully corrupted.
Patch stumbled to my side. Her plating hissed with stress, the crack across her hind leg now deep enough to show flickering kernel text beneath the outer shell. The damage was spreading. But she didn't complain. She leaned slightly against me—more to anchor herself than for protection.
[FRAGMENT STABILITY: 41%]
[ANCHOR: NULLPOINTER – ACTIVE]
[RETURN PATH: INCOMPLETE]
[EXPOSURE: 0.46]
[MONITOR INTEREST: HIGH]
The overlay pulsed red once.
Then dimmed.
The silence that followed was wrong.
Too clean.
Like the system had taken a breath it couldn't release.
I stepped back from the block, my legs shaking beneath me. Every nerve felt misaligned. Every thought a few seconds behind my body. My hand throbbed again, blood sticky against the edge of my sleeve. I looked at it—split anew from impact, pulsing steadily. And for a moment, I wondered how much of myself was still organic. The blood was real.
But the way the world reacted to it?
That felt anything but.
Patch nudged my leg. She didn't speak. Her voice system was still flickering at the edges, occasionally spitting out null tones that didn't resolve.
The room we stood in was no longer a replica of Lily's. The illusion had been discarded. The floor tiles were exposed mesh. The walls showed broken render scaffolding. Even the ceiling had collapsed into blackness, revealing the unfinished space beyond.
And in that darkness, something moved.
Not a form.
Not yet.
But a presence.
My legs buckled, and I dropped to one knee, breathing hard. I wanted to close my eyes, to rest even for a moment, but Nullspace didn't offer peace. Not ever. The pressure in the air increased, as though every exposed edge of the environment had turned its attention toward me. The flickering mesh under my feet rippled slightly in response to my weight—reacting not to my physical presence, but my emotional state. My raw, human distress.
"I can't keep doing this," I muttered, more to the room than to Patch. "Not like this."
Patch limped forward and sat beside me. Her tail twitched once, involuntarily. The subtle pulse of warning indicators along her side were growing dimmer now—not because the danger had passed, but because her systems were beginning to fail at reporting it.
"You shouldn't have to," she said. Her voice was hollow. Slightly corrupted. Her vocal stabiliser had cracked during the fight. She sounded tired. "But Nullspace does not care."
I gave a dry, humourless laugh. "Yeah. I got that part."
Then the ground shifted.
Not in a sudden quake—but in a long, dragging pull, as though the entire floor was being peeled backward one pixel at a time. Geometry stretched. Polygons groaned. My stomach twisted as the horizon inside the room elongated, revealing a corridor that hadn't been there before. The world was rearranging itself again.
[LOCATION FLAGGED: UNSTABLE]
[ANCHOR RETENTION: POSSIBLE]
[REINTEGRATION PATH: UNCLEAR]
[SYSTEM RESPONSE: UNKNOWN]
Patch stood—albeit slowly. Her back leg trembled once, then locked.
"That's our way out," she said.
"It's a trap."
"Likely."
I stood anyway.
We moved slowly toward the corridor—past the disassembled shell of the echo. Its final fragments were still twitching, the light bleeding upward in streams like broken fireflies escaping gravity. I avoided looking directly at what remained of its face.
We crossed the threshold into the new hall.
The temperature dropped—not physically, but perceptually. Like something watching had leaned in closer. My heartbeat pounded behind my ears. The walls of the corridor were lined with scrolling system logs now—not decoration, actual dev strings spooling past at unreadable speed. Memory access violations. Thread crashes. Permission loops. Dozens of errors layered over each other in real-time.
Nullspace was breaking.
Or I was.
Maybe both.
The corridor ahead didn't invite us—it tolerated our presence. Its walls exhaled faint clouds of dev fog with each step we took. I limped alongside Patch, trying to ignore the throb in my hand and the strain in my ribs—the pulse in my temples syncing with the overlay's quiet hum. The logs running across the surface of the walls had grown increasingly unstable, stuttering in and out of alignment, sometimes flashing lines of half-familiar names or timestamps that didn't belong. There were file headers I recognised from before the collapse, paired with thread IDs that didn't match any memory I wanted to relive.
This wasn't a corridor.
It was a crash log.
Patch moved with a determination I admired, even as I saw the damage accumulating in her gait. The way her back leg didn't quite touch the ground unless she forgot to compensate. The way her eyes flickered off sync with her voice modulation. She hadn't said anything for minutes—perhaps worried her systems would betray more than her words could hide. I reached down once, hand shaking, and scratched lightly behind her ear. She leaned into it. Just for a moment. A flicker of comfort. A simulated purr vibrating beneath her plating.
Not needed.
But wanted.
That mattered.
I didn't know how long we walked. Nullspace was merciless with time. It didn't measure hours or minutes. It measured instability. The further we went, the more the hall felt like an artery, pulsing gently with data that hadn't been used in a long time. Rusted packets moved slowly across the ceiling conduits like blood that had forgotten where it was going. Occasionally, the corridor would shudder with the ghost of an old event—the memory of something loading in nearby but never quite reaching full materialisation. There were shadows without sources. Motion without sound.
The world around us had grown quieter.
Not silent.
Not safe.
Just quieter, in that way danger sometimes retreats to observe rather than strike.
I found myself thinking about the last few fragments. About Lily. About Lou. About the way Patch had placed herself between me and a threat without hesitation. These weren't just losses. They were echoes now. Echoes that hurt because they mattered. I didn't even know if saving pieces of them was truly possible, or if I was chasing a fading signal out of desperation.
But every time Patch blinked at me—every time she leaned in for a moment of warmth she hadn't been programmed to seek—I knew I couldn't stop.
Not yet.
The corridor eventually ended in a wide chamber that hadn't fully loaded. Parts of the floor remained transparent. The ceiling flickered between models—cathedral, subway tunnel, maintenance shaft—like the system couldn't commit to the memory. Patch stopped just before entering. Her HUD blinked in my vision, a small warning tag that said simply:
[STABILITY MARGINAL // REST CYCLE RECOMMENDED]
I almost laughed.
The idea that the system was suggesting rest after trauma like this was almost comedic.
But I understood.
The system—broken as it was—still recognised biological limits.
And I was nearing mine.