The Helix contract system granted me limited blackbox access, just enough to do what they thought a good hunter should. Review archives. Cross-check signals. Track anomalies. Everything sanitized, of course. Nothing personal.
But the deeper I crawled into their network, the more familiar the shadows became.
Under Specter's liaison credentials, I embedded a ghost query, an algorithm designed to scrape for any residual mentions of "Aaron," "Subject Alpha," or "Echo Root." Most entries were flagged Level 0 or redacted entirely. But one slipped through.
A file buried beneath a batch of corrupted logs.
Title: "Aaron-1B: Anchor Instability / Subject Beta Adjacent."
My heart stuttered.
It wasn't just text. There was a video fragment attached. Flickering. Damaged. Still partially playable.
I launched it.
The feed opened on a grainy room, white walls, metallic chairs, and a diagnostic ring suspended from the ceiling like a surgical halo. A child sat strapped beneath it. Bare arms. Shaved head. Twitching against restraints.
He was screaming.
Not in fear.
In overload.
I didn't need to guess who he was.
Even distorted, even pixel-blurred, I recognized my own face at nine years old.
A technician's voice crackled across the feed.
> "Subject Alpha breach. Emotional cascade peaking. Containment protocols failing."
The child convulsed, and the frame glitched just for a second.
And there on the edge of the screen was another child.
Smaller. Still. Watching.
Not Lyra.
A boy.
Eyes dark. Blank. Not afraid.
Just… waiting.
Then static swallowed the feed.
I replayed it three more times.
Each time, the same anomaly: the other child.
But his tag didn't register. No ID. No voice cue. No file stamp.
I scanned the metadata embedded in the feed.
A line of buried code flickered into view:
**Echo Protocol 3B — Trinary Sync Attempt — Status: Divergence**
Not binary.
Trinary.
My blood ran cold.
Echo Root wasn't built for two. It was built for three.
Me. Lyra. And someone else.
Subject C.
Failed.
Or so they said.
I opened a local system diagnostic on my implant. I needed to confirm the timestamp of the memory, verify that what I'd just seen wasn't another bleed.
But the chip resisted.
Each time I tried to trace the memory pathway, a jamming signal flooded my cortex, sharp, precise, and automated. Not pain. Just silence.
A firewall.
There was a mirror block coded into the chip itself. A deliberate barrier preventing me from accessing anything before age nine.
Not a gap.
A wall.
Someone didn't just erase my memories.
They locked them.
And set the key on fire.
I sat back, staring at the blank feed.
Then did something reckless.
I rerouted the memory stream through an old war-time feedback loop, a protocol I used to bypass trauma inhibitors during black ops recon. It wasn't designed for this. But it would force the stream open. Even if only for a second.
The moment I activated it, heat surged up the back of my spine. My hands trembled. My vision blurred.
And then…
Flash.
The same child. Me. Screaming.
But this time, more.
I turned in the memory. Looked at the boy.
He looked back.
Not with hate. Not with sympathy.
Just recognition.
And then I said something.
But the audio clipped.
Only two syllables came through.
> "Re…vek."
And then; pain.
Real pain.
My chip flared. A searing overload that knocked me flat onto the cold lab floor. My neural interface blew out. The screen blinked white, then black. Smoke curled from the edge of the console.
System fried.
Memory lost.
Whatever I saw, whatever name I said, it wasn't supposed to surface.
And now it was gone.
I dragged myself upright, ears ringing, head swimming.
One word.
That's all I had.
"Revek"
Not a name I recognized.
But one my body did.
My hand was shaking as I typed it into a blank file.
Then I whispered it aloud.
"Revek…"
There was no answer.
Just silence.
But not the clean kind.
The kind that waits.
And remembers.