TIMELINE ZERO: Saran's Wake

The biometric door hissed open with a tired sigh.

Lyra stepped into the dome as though trespassing into a dead world. Which, in a way, she was.

The Glass Garden had once been a place of beauty, one of Veil Tower's pride spaces—a sealed biome simulation crafted to resemble natural ecosystems. Therapy, they had called it. Controlled restoration through imitation. The kind of lie they offered to Revenants instead of truth.

Now, it was a graveyard of plastic.

The trees were molded from thermoplastic composites. The soil beneath her boots gave underfoot not with moisture, but with synthetic crunch. What had once been flowers were now nothing more than faded holograms glitching in and out of visibility. The artificial sun overhead had frozen mid-cycle, locked in a perpetual dusk that turned the room dim and unreal.

"I thought they shut this wing down two cycles ago," Lyra said quietly.

"They did," Juno replied, stepping in behind her. "But the door still responds to my blood. Guess someone forgot to update the security logs."

Lyra frowned, stepping further in. "Or they left it open on purpose."

Juno didn't respond. Her eyes were distant, scanning the broken scenery like she was searching for something she had once lost here. Maybe she was.

They walked in silence. The grass came up to Kira's knees, not because it had grown, but because it had been designed to appear wild—part of the simulation's authenticity. Now it only served to hide the decay. Dust clung to every surface. Faint bootprints marked the floor, barely visible. Most of them were too small to belong to an adult.

"I think children used to come here" Lyra said.

"They did" Juno murmured. "In early cycles. The youngest Revenants—when they were still experimenting with first-stage memory erasure."

Lyra didn't ask what happened to them.

They passed through a low archway of molded synthetic branches and entered the central atrium. A fountain sat in the middle, long dry. It was flanked by benches carved from false stone. Here, too, the illusion of nature was designed with care—vines trailing over walls, the scent of damp earth infused into air processors. But time had unmasked it all.

The air smelled of chemicals. The vines cracked when brushed. The fountain's base was smeared with ancient handprints, as if someone had tried to climb it while bleeding.

"This place was supposed to make us feel human," Lyra whispered.

"Did it?" Juno asked staring at her.

"I don't remember." Lyra kept moving, no more words followed.

Juno walked toward a wall console half-hidden beneath a thick curtain of leaves. She brushed them aside with a grimace. They crackled like old paper. Her hand hovered above a cracked wall-mounted console, her fingers brushing dust from the shattered screen.

"I came here once," she said, her voice low. "Before my second collapse."

"You mean your awakening?" Lyra asked.

"No," Juno said. "I mean collapse. That's what it was. My body didn't know who it was supposed to be. My brain was decoding information it had no permission to access. I lost speech for three days. I stopped responding to my name."

Lyra knelt beside her. She didn't touch her—didn't know if that would help or hurt.

"I remember... when they brought you back," she said. "You didn't speak for a week. I thought you hated me."

Juno almost smiled. "No. I just couldn't remember how to be someone."

Lyra said nothing. The silence stretched, heavy and gentle.

Juno tapped the console once. Static. Then again. A low hum responded.

[Project File: Hollowborn/Observation-Log-1472] PLAYBACK ENGAGED

The wall shimmered.

A projection flickered to life, grainy and cracked. It was old, maybe older than the current cycle of Veil Tower. The recording showed a sterile observation chamber. Clean white walls. A line of researchers in white coats and neural visors around a glass platform.

At the center stood a tall figure wrapped in deep crimson armor, her back turned to the camera. Her helmet hung loosely at her side, and her hair—long, blood-red, spilled down her back like fluid— weightless, almost alive. It shimmered faintly, catching the sterile light like a curtain of fire.

Kira's breath caught. She didn't see the woman's face. But she knew her. Somehow, impossibly—she knew who it was.

The lady tilted her head to the camera. Kira's eyes widened.

It was her.

Older. Hardened. Eyes of burning amber that didn't blink, lips that didn't smile. The face was almost the same—but not in spirit.

A voice played over the recording, cold and mechanical.

"Subject Saran: memory separation unsuccessful. Emotional imprint remains too strong. Personality core resists segmentation. Suggest termination or permanent burial."

Saran twitched slowly, raising her gaze toward the projection's viewer.

"You can't sever me from what I am." 

She smiled. A cold, dangerous smile. The room around her blurred. A shadow passed across the camera. Then static swallowed whole.

The feed warped—noise overtaking the screen before it shut off with a harsh buzz.

Lyra pulled away, dizzy. Her pulse raced. She gripped the bench to keep herself upright.

"That was real," she whispered. "That was a real memory"

Juno nodded, pale. "That wasn't hallucination. That was a memory-capture. Archival footage. Your predecessor—whoever she was—resisted deletion."

"She didn't want to be erased. She wasn't overwritten," Lyra said. "She was buried. And now she's trying to climb back out."

Juno looked down at her palms. "Do you think she was the first?"

Lyra shook her head slowly. "Just the first who remembered."

They left the dome without speaking.

The air outside the Glass Garden felt colder, though the temperature was controlled. The halls of Veil Tower buzzed with their usual static lull, but something beneath it had shifted.

A wrongness threaded through the silence.

The tower lights seemed dimmer. The white-noise hum sharper, edged with something beneath it—like a whisper she couldn't quite make out.

Lyra walked with her hands in her sleeves, her head down, but her ears tuned sharply.

"Echo confirmed. Host viable. Initiating bleed."

She paused. Just for a second. The voice had come from the ventilation duct above. Faint. Hollow.

She didn't tell Juno. Some truths were too dangerous to say aloud.

That night, Lyra sat in the corner of her room with her knees drawn up. The white-noise hum had returned, but it felt too even—too consistent, like it was trying to lull her into sleep she didn't trust.

She stared at the blank wall where the recording had once projected. She remembered the sigil. The shape it tool.

Then she stood.

She reached beneath her mattress and pulled out a fragment of alloy she had scavenged from the broken bench in the Garden. She held it like a pen.

Then she began to scratch.

A spiral. An arc. A wound that did not heal.

She carved the sigil into the wall over and over until her hand cramped and her fingernails split.

Red welled from beneath her fingers, but she did not stop.

When she finally let the shard fall, her breathing was slow and even.

She stared at the mark. And it stared back.

The next morning, her hand was bandaged. Not by her own doing.

Juno had found her asleep at the wall, hand streaked in blood, eyes half-open but unseeing.

"You were talking," Juno said quietly. "But it wasn't in any language I know."

Kira said nothing.

"You said her name again" Juno added. "Saran"

Lyra finally spoke. "She isn't a dream. She's a fracture."

"She's a ghostprint."

"Maybe," Lyra said. "But I feel her waking."

They didn't send the medical team. Only LUNEX observer. They scanned the room, spoke in clipped, rehearsed phrases and approached her after. A woman with mirrored eyes and a clipboard that didn't have any paper.

She asked questions Lyra hesitated to answer—whether she was eating regularly, whether she slept during designated cycles, whether she dreamed of things that didn't feel like her own.

Lyra answered softly, "No."

There was a pause. The woman watched her in silence, then smiled—too still, too precise.

"We'll be monitoring you more closely," she said, as if offering reassurance.

But it wasn't a comfort. It was a warning wrapped in glass.

Kira didn't blink. "I understand," she said.

That afternoon, Lyra went back to the wall. This time she traced the sigil with her fingertip.

It no longer felt foreign. It felt... inevitable.

In the mirror, her reflection stood perfectly still. But behind her eyes, something moved.

A battlefield. A city burning under two moons. The sound of commands issued through radio static.

The echo of a weapon's name.

Saran.

It did not frighten her this time. It simply felt true.

Like breath. Like blood. Like remembering the shape of a body you used to wear.

She turned away from the mirror. And began to draw again.

This time, not to remember. But to prepare.

She didn't know what was coming. Only that she wouldn't be Lyra for much longer.

And part of her didn't mind.