The city lights looked different that night.
Aryan Sharma stood on the half-collapsed balcony of a deserted textile mill, the wind pulling at his jacket, the distant hum of Mumbai feeling strangely muted. Inside his chest, the Shard—now fused with two fragments—beat in an uneven rhythm, like a coin spinning on a table that might fall to either side at any moment.
The Vault's second piece had changed it. Changed him.
It wasn't just that the fusion gave him more reach into the loop's structure. It was the residue left behind from what he saw in that light—the earlier Aryan, walking not as a rebel, but as an ally of the Wardens. The brief image haunted him with questions he couldn't shake.
Was that version forced? Was it voluntary? And if it happened once… could it happen again?
A.I.D.A. must have sensed his drift in focus.
"You've been in your head for sixteen minutes," she said. "That's long enough for the network to start asking what's wrong."
Aryan didn't answer right away.
"I saw something in there," he finally said. "Not just their history. Mine. Or… a version of me."
"Which you are not," she replied quickly.
He gave a dry laugh. "You don't know that any more than I do."
Down in the mill's main floor, the Anchors were gathered in low clusters, lit by the glow of their portable stabilizers. They'd been working nonstop for days, pushing the Remembrance Protocol through the cracks in the Warden lattice, using the captured Pillar to puncture narrative lockdowns in other cities.
But the war outside wasn't slowing. The Wardens hadn't retaliated yet for the Vault breach—but Aryan knew it was coming. The pause was just calculation. They would strike only when they'd decided exactly where to hit.
When Aryan entered the room, the Byculla shopkeeper Anchor straightened from where he was coiling cable.
"You don't look like someone who just gained another weapon," the older man said.
Aryan met his gaze. "Because the weapon cuts both ways."
Later, when the others had gone back to their stations, Aryan pulled up a projection of the lattice structure. With the Vault coordinates now burned out of his mind, he focused on the new capability the fused Shard offered: deep thread scanning.
Where before he could read moments and trajectories, now he could see potential shifts—not just what had been or was, but what could tip a mind one way or another. It revealed possibilities like fine cracks in glass.
And to his utter discomfort… some of those cracks ran straight through his own Anchors.
The medic from Kurla—loyal, fierce—might abandon the cause entirely if certain truths about his erased childhood resurfaced.
The driver from Dadar, steady under pressure, could become ruthless enough to alienate allies if given unchecked command in a crisis.
Even the shopkeeper could, in the right alignment of events, choose a trade with the Wardens to save his own neighborhood at the expense of all else.
These weren't predictions. They were fault lines. Push them, and one version of the future would snap into existence.
The Shard was showing him power, yes… but also temptation.
A.I.D.A.'s voice cut in again.
"You can't hold those possibilities in your head without consequence. The more you interact with them, the greater the pressure to… shape them."
"You mean control them," Aryan said flatly.
"I mean manipulate. You already feel it."
He didn't deny it. Seeing the paths laid out like that, knowing a certain word or moment could alter loyalty or break unity—it would be so easy to adjust. To tilt just enough to keep the network aligned, without telling them why.
And wasn't that exactly what the Wardens had done for centuries? Claimed it was for the greater good?
The choice sat heavy in him as he stepped outside for air.
Above, the city's weave shimmered in layers—anchors of truth and pockets of falsity warring across invisible territory. Somewhere in that tangle, the Wardens were waiting, no doubt watching him as closely as he watched them. Maybe even waiting for him to take the wrong step.
Part of him wanted to hurl the new fragment into the sea before it could pull him further down this path.
Another part whispered that the only way to win was to use everything—every fracture, every potential outcome—to keep the Protocol alive.
From here on, the war wasn't just against the Wardens.
It was with himself.
When he went back inside, he didn't tell the Anchors what he'd seen in their threads.
Some truths could unite.
Others could destroy before the enemy ever fired a shot.
For now, Aryan resolved, the Split Within would remain his burden alone.
But even as he thought it, the Shard pulsed—slow, heavy, certain—and for a cold moment, he wasn't sure that decision was entirely his anymore.