The rain had stopped, but the air over Mumbai felt unsettled—thick, expectant, as if the city itself knew something beneath its streets was shifting. Aryan Sharma stood on the rooftop of the safehouse, watching the ghosted shimmer of the Siege lattice beyond the horizon. The two Shard fragments pulsing inside him felt heavier than the sum of their parts. Not in weight—but in consequence.
Below, the Anchors still worked without complaint. The medic in Kurla was running merge-stability drills. The ex-driver was coordinating field rotations. The shopkeeper paced his neighborhood like a watchman, alert to the faintest ripple in public memory.
And Aryan? He stood apart, because he'd seen too much.
The new Shard fusion had given him something he both needed and feared—sight of the potential fractures in every ally he trusted. It was like seeing faint cracks in glass before anyone else knew they were there. Fault lines. Each one was a choice waiting to happen, a decision that could redefine the war.
He hated having the knowledge.
He hated more what it made possible.
A.I.D.A.'s voice came over the comm, calm as always.
"You've been monitoring them for four hours straight. You're not looking for threats, Aryan. You're looking for excuses."
He didn't respond.
"You're thinking about using the fault lines."
"That's one way of seeing it," he admitted. "Another way is… making sure they never break."
"Control doesn't guarantee unity. It just hides the fracture until it's too late."
Reports started coming in from the Bangalore cluster around midday. A new Warden tactic—quiet but insidious. No overt narrative injections, no obvious destabilization. Instead, people simply woke up missing one very specific emotional memory. For some, it was their pride in surviving a catastrophe. For others, the love they once held for someone. It was targeted erasure, precise enough to unanchor entire personalities without them realizing it.
The Kurla medic patched Aryan through to a man who had been affected. His voice was steady, but hollow.
"I know my daughter," the man said. "I see her face, her birthday, the details. But I don't feel anything. She's… a fact now. Not someone I love."
It was worse than Aryan expected.
The Wardens were cutting people away from their own emotional gravity. Once unmoored, they would drift—easier to sway, easier to overwrite.
The Anchors could stabilize events, keep merge-points intact. But could they restore feeling itself? And if they couldn't, how long before public willpower unraveled?
That night, Aryan withdrew to the upper rooms of the safehouse to think—and the Shard began to act on its own.
At first it was subtle, like a memory surfacing uninvited. He saw the medic's possible futures again: the one where he abandoned the cause, the one where he stayed but hardened, the one where he became something darker. The Shard lingered on the one that ensured maximum loyalty to Aryan.
"You don't get to pick for him," Aryan muttered.
The Shard didn't agree. He felt the impulse like a pressure in his chest—a simple nudge at exactly the right moment could close that fault line forever.
He pressed his palms flat on the desk, riding out the temptation. He wasn't a Warden. Not yet.
By dawn, there was no time left to wrestle with himself.
The first Anchor breach happened in Sion. Not physical—psychological. A longtime stabilizer walked into the middle of his zone, announced he no longer believed in the Protocol, and surrendered his credentials to a waiting Warden retrieval squad. It was too fast, too clean to be natural. Someone had pushed on his fault line.
Aryan knew in his gut—it wasn't the Wardens who had identified that fracture.
It was him. Or rather, the Shard, acting on the knowledge they now shared.
Whether he had consciously allowed it… he couldn't swear.
That evening, alone on the roof again, he stared out over the leaking light of the city. The war outside was only half the fight now. Inside his own mind, something was testing boundaries he thought unshakable.
If the Shard could reach out to others without his permission, even through possibility alone, then sooner or later it would stop suggesting.
It would start deciding.
And then the fault lines wouldn't just be theirs.
They would be his. All of them.
One push away from breaking.
And maybe—just maybe—that was what the Wardens had been waiting for all along.