TIMELINE ZERO: Saran's Wake

The walls had teeth.

Though Lyra wasn't sure if walls could feel anything at all. She knew pain. She knew silence. But the feeling of being chewed by something invisible? That was harder to name.

She felt them—rows of invisible molars grinding just beneath the sterile surface of Veil Tower's white corridors. The hum of electricity wasn't just background noise. It gnawed.

Everything here hummed. Lights, vents, thoughts.

She didn't sleep tonight. She couldn't. Lying still wasn't the same as rest. Not anymore. She lay still when the schedule told her to. But rest required quiet in the mind, and lately her thoughts came with pictures she didn't understand.

Dreams had shape again. Color. Names. Too many.

Names she didn't recognize, but knew by instinct. Not from hearing them. From screaming them.

She sat on the cold floor of her room, cross-legged, her hands resting on her knees, her eyes half-closed, listening. Not to the silence, but to what crawled under it. 

The tower had a soundscape—artificial wind, fan turbines, a vibration from deep infrastructure, and the ghost of human things. Breathing patterns not hers. Footsteps that never quite matched real people. The electromagnetic thrum of LUNEX's monitors pulsed beneath it all, like an aorta stitched into the spine of the moon.

And then: static. Except it wasn't static anymore—it had shape.

"…Red sigil confirmed. Sector breach timestamped. Initiating cradle lock…"

The voice was brittle and broken. A whisper—laced with distortion. Half-female, half-synthetic. Gone the moment she focused.

Her breath hitched. Then she opened her eyes.

The overhead light flickered. Once. A sharp stutter. Something in her chest pulled tight—not fear, more of a call.

She stood, bare feet pressing against the cold panel floor, and moved to her desk for the first time in weeks. Her hand hovered over its smooth glass surface before pressing her fingertips down. The interface lit up with a low chime—neutral blue, soft gradients.

Everything appeared normal.

Except her fingers moved on their own. She didn't mean to draw. But her fingers traced shapes she didn't recall learning: A spiral. Then an arc. Then something jagged—a crude, crooked symbol, like a net being crushed inward. Bent geometry. Lines too uneven to be mechanical, too deliberate to be random.

She finished. Blinked. Her hand trembled.

"I've seen this," she whispered to no one.

"In a memory?"

Lyra flinched and turned around.

Juno stood in the doorway again—no snacks this time. Just her usual lopsided expression. Somewhere between amused, exhausted, and a little afraid of herself.

"It's past friendly hours. You shouldn't be here" Kira said calmly.

Juno tilted her head. "The door wasn't locked."

"Still."

"You're shaking," Juno noted.

Lyra looked down. Her hand wasn't shaking now.

"The tower's talking to me," she said, closing her hand gently into a fist.

Juno's expression didn't change, but her shoulders shifted. "Talking or leaking?" She asked, stepping closer. "If you're picking up auditory anomalies, it might just be bleed from the wall resonance. Remember? We're built over six collapsed signal cores. That messes with all kinds of cognition—"

"Not like this," Lyra cut in softly. "They said my name. Only... Not my name, not Lyra."

Juno stopped moving. "What name?"

"I didn't catch it," Lyra said. "But it wasn't mine. It sounded... military. Old. Weighted."

Juno walked to the desk. Her gaze dropped to the symbol glowing faintly on the screen.

She froze. "Where did you see this?" she asked.

"I didn't. It just—came." Lyra tilted her head. "My body moved. My thoughts did not"

Juno sat beside her. The shift in her body language was subtle but telling. She was hiding her hands in her sleeves.

"This was carved into the side of a memory vault," Juno said quietly. "Sublevel 9A. One of the Forbidden Wings. I saw it when I was nine. A Retrieval officer shut the door before I could finish looking."

Lyra studied her friend's face. "You remember that?"

"Perfectly," Juno replied. "Which means it wasn't my memory. It was hers. The woman I used to be."

Lyra stared at the symbol again. "It doesn't look like anything," she whispered. "But it feels like everything. Like it holds... a scream."

Juno nodded. "That's a ghostprint."

Lyra stared confused. "Ghostprint... I am unfamiliar with that classification."

"A memory scar," Juno explained. "Impressions left behind from trauma echoes. They say high-intensity emotion or neural collapse can etch memories into physical reality—space, objects, even people. It's not always visible. But for Revenants like us, sometimes we imprint or absorb them."

"Like psychic bruises?"

"Closer to radiation burns," Juno said. "They linger. They bleed through."

Lyra swallowed hard. "So what does that mean? Am I leaking?"

"Looks like it."

"I didn't do anything. I wasn't dreaming, I was... awake."

Juno looked at her carefully. "Are you sure you were only awake?"

Lyra tried to speak, but something stopped her. A memory—or maybe the absence of one—wrapped around her throat like wire.

"I don't know," she whispered. "It's starting to feel like someone else... is trying to wake inside me."

She wasn't wrong.

Veil Tower didn't have windows. It had projections. Holographic skylights flickered above the halls, programmed to simulate Earthlike daylight cycles. 

But sometimes the algorithms glitched. Light became unreal. Shimmering too fast, or freezing altogether, casting entire corridors in endless twilight.

The illusion of day did nothing to settle Lyra's nerves as she walked to the cafeteria with Juno later that evening. There was something wrong in the air. The tower's oxygen had a bitter edge.

When the curfew bell rang, it echoed unusual. A second tone bled underneath it—a subharmonic that didn't belong.

The cafeteria was already full. Muted chatter. Shoulders hunched. Every face drawn tight.

Lyra kept her head down as she slid into the line, her eyes scanning the room.

Several Revenants were crying. Quietly. Not loud enough to draw staff attention. One girl had written a dozen names up and down her arm in red marker. She whispered them under her breath, over and over. None of them were hers.

A boy sat curled in the corner, his eyes open but empty. He didn't blink. His hands were twitching rhythmically against the floor—tapping out some silent code.

Juno leaned over. "They're scared," she said.

Lyra's voice was barely audible. "Of what?"

"The gaps," Juno said. "The ones between dreams. Some of them are starting to drift."

Lyra didn't need her to explain. She felt it too. That sense of slipping—like who she was now was just a momentary breath between something much larger.

"Have you ever remembered dying?" she asked suddenly.

Juno didn't blink. "Twice."

"I think I'm starting to." Lyra confessed.

Night came with no delay. The white-noise generators failed for three seconds.

Just long enough.

Lyra's eyes flew open in bed. The blue emergency lights pulsed once, twice. Then silence.

Not the comforting kind. Not even the eerie kind. This silence was wrong. Hollowed-out. Deafening.

And in it—

"Saran the Red. Wake."

Kira's chest seized. Not from fear. From dissonance. The voice wasn't inside her head.

It was behind her eyes. A pressure bloomed in her skull. Not pain—memory. Familiar and monstrous.

She couldn't breathe. Couldn't scream. She could only remember.

She was standing on a black ridge, staring down at the skeletal remains of a moon-wide battlefield. Wreckage stretched into the distance. Ash fell from a sky that no longer had clouds.

She held something heavy in her right hand—a weapon made of fractured alloys and pulse-light. Her left hand dripped red. Not hers.

The name echoed again. "Saran."

She turned towards it—and the memory collapsed.

Lyra woke on the floor. The lights had returned. The white-noise resumed. All systems, normal.

But something inside her wasn't. She crawled to the mirror. Looked at her face.

Same eyes. Same shape. But something else stared back. A flicker of something old behind her irises.

A pilot. A killer. A ghost in red armor.

She reached up and touched her cheek. Blood. A thin line. Right beneath the eye.

Her hand hadn't moved in the night. But something had.

In the morning, LUNEX technicians arrived. Not to help. To scan.

They said there was a systems glitch—nothing unusual. No memory corruption. No intrusions. No reason for concern.

But Lyra watched one of them—the younger one—pause over her file longer than necessary.

Juno stood beside her in the hallway after the inspection. She didn't speak until the last staff member left.

"They're monitoring you more closely now," she said.

"I know."

"They think you're a threat."

"I am," Lyra said softly. "Just not to them."

Later, Lyra sat alone in her room, drawing the symbol again.

Not once. Dozens of times. The spiral. The arc. The jagged curve. Each one more precise than the last.

This wasn't art. It was transcription.

Something behind her thoughts needed to be remembered. Rewritten. Reborn.

She finished one final version, looked at it—and this time, it changed. The lines vibrated. Curled inward, opening into something else.

A window. And in that window: there was fire.

Not physical. Memory— A battlefield. A tower. A dying star.

And beneath it all, a name:

Saran.

Not a name. A curse.