TIMELINE ZERO: Saran's Wake

The emergency lights flared red at 0400 hours.

Lyra was already awake when it happened. She sat upright. Her breath held. Waiting.

No dreams this time. No voices. Just the thick, pressurized sensation of something moving inside the walls. The hum of the power lines shifted pitch—lower, trembling—like the tower itself had stiffened in anticipation.

Then the color changed. Red. Crimson. Pulse code three.

She didn't blink. She didn't have to. That color was universal now, hardwired into her—Revenant Emergency Protocol LUNEX-3: Awakening Uncontained.

Lyra slid out of bed. Her bare feet met cold flooring. Her hands trembled, but she kept them at her sides. Outside her door, boots pounded metal in rhythm—tac-tac-tac. Quick, deliberate. The tower was reacting before her mind could catch up.

LUNEX response units. They were fully suited, every inch of them bristling with weapons—but fear radiated off them like static. She felt it without looking.

She stood at the seam of her sealed door, not trying to open it. It wouldn't matter. She didn't need to see to know what was happening.

Another one had awakened.

And not like her. Not like Juno. This one wasn't going to be kind, or even conscious.

Then it came. A scream. The sound hit like glass shattering inside her head. High-pitched. Female. Young. Dying or killing—she couldn't tell. It didn't echo so much as cut—ripping through the ductwork like a blade made of sound. 

Lyra pressed her palm to the wall, to the vent's metal mesh, and felt it shudder beneath her touch.

The scream vibrated through bone. Not in pain, but in rage. Raw and ancient and full of ruin.

The lights above continued their steady red blink. She stood there long after it faded, delaying to move.

Later, when the sirens finally ceased and silence crept back over the tower like a shroud, Lyra found Juno in the backup medbay. Too many guards now present, too many sterile looks and hidden scanners. This scanners were tucked behind old security panels and hadn't been fully restored since the reactor reset.

Juno had found it weeks ago. Rewired the locks. Rerouted the cam-feeds. They made it their own place. It was neutral. Quiet as it should be. Unofficial.

Today, it felt like a morgue.

"Third one this month," Juno muttered, her voice dry with unslept hours. "They're losing control." 

She sat on one of the lower beds, her sleeves rolled, plucking gently at the wires on a handheld device that blinked with amber code. Repurposed surveillance node—illegal by all protocol standards, but no one stopped Juno. Healer memories gave her that kind of leeway.

Lyra didn't reply. She was seated cross-legged on the floor, her eyes locked on the flickering vid-screen.

The footage looped every twenty seconds. A girl, maybe eleven. Thin frame. Short-cropped hair. Eyes vacant. She stumbled through the corridor's far end, dragging a twisted length of alloy—metal from a drone's arm, bent into a blade.

Then—she attacked. No warning. No sound.

Just motion—too smooth, too fast. Her limbs snapped into position with practiced ease. One moment she stumbled, dragging the alloy shard across the floor. The next, she moved like a blade herself, striking with precision cuts. A clean upward slash through the drone's optical unit.

Her movement was Fluid—like water with intent. A pivot, low and fast, the kind of turn that came from muscle memory—not instinct. Her feet didn't slip. Her posture didn't break.

She wasn't panicking. She wasn't improvising. She was executing something she'd done a hundred times before.

The drone tried to recalibrate—its sensors whirred, auto-targeting engaged—but she was already inside its guard. She drove the jagged metal into the core beneath the plating, then tore sideways.

The drone's framework split. Wires snapped like tendons. Sparks burst across the corridor.

She stepped back, exhaled once—calm. Measured.

The entire moment took less than eight seconds.

Not a flinch from the girl. Not a flicker of fear. Just that same blank stare, her mouth still moving, repeating the same name like a forgotten prayer.

"Myra. Myra. Myra…"

She said it fifty-seven times. Lyra counted. "She was remembering how to take a life" Lyra whispered.

"They never recovered her," Juno said, her tone carefully even.

Lyra's fingers tightened on her sleeves. "Neural collapse?"

"No. Worse." Juno tapped a few lines into her tool. "Her body's alive. Brain's still active. But she's gone. Everything else shut down—voluntary function, eye movement, motor feedback. It's like she fell inward and sealed the doors behind her."

Lyra didn't blink. Didn't breathe. Juno reached over and paused the vid.

"You saw the way she moved, didn't you?"

Lyra nodded slowly. "It wasn't random."

"Exactly." Juno's eyes, soft and glassy behind her lenses, reflected the frozen image of the child on-screen. "Combat rhythm. Short blade discipline. Close-quarters angles. She didn't flail—she executed. That wasn't panic. That was muscle memory."

"A soldier," Lyra said. Her voice sounded too flat.

Juno glanced at her. "Possibly one of Saran's."

Silence settled between them like dust.

Lyra pressed her hands together until her knuckles whitened. "The girl. Was she registered?"

Juno shook her head. "She wasn't even tagged for early memory retrieval. That's what scares me. There was no known trigger. She just woke up. Violently. Like the memories crawled out before she could stop them."

Lyra's stomach turned. Not from fear. From recognition.

She had felt it, too. The edge of waking. The knife of remembering.

That evening, LUNEX pushed a message to every active room in Veil Tower.

"Do not approach newly awakened individuals. Do not speak to them. Do not share memory tokens. If you begin experiencing synchronization drift, report immediately to Observation."

Lyra read the first line, then deleted the message without opening the rest of the packet.

Her hands lingered on the screen for a moment afterward, then fell to her sides. She didn't need a message to know the rules.

She'd lived them.

Later that night, she sat again by the vent. Her posture was different—more rigid. She didn't pretend to be calm this time. Her back stayed straight. Her breath was shallow.

She didn't close her eyes. She waited. And listened.

No footsteps. No sirens. No scream.

But the silence wasn't empty. Something moved beneath it—a pressure. Like a thought forming in someone else's skull.

Then it came. Not sound. Just sensation. A thought that wasn't hers curled into her bones like ice:

Myra…The name echoed in her skull—soft, insistent. It didn't fade. It just repeated behind her teeth, like a pulse she couldn't stop counting.

Lyra's chest tightened. She stood suddenly and crossed the room. Yanked open the bottom drawer of her unit.

A sketchpad she hadn't touched since she'd drawn the sigil from her dreams laid inside.

Her fingers trembled as she opened to a blank page. She didn't think. She simply drew.

Charcoal on paper. Rigid lines at first. Then curves. An eye. A cheekbone. A braid pulled tight behind the head. One eye missing—scarred shut.

She didn't know this face. And yet she knew it. Muscle memory. Visual code. Like it had been stored behind her eyes for years.

When she finished the face, her hand kept moving. She didn't mean to write anything. But her hand wrote anyway.

Lyra stared, then dropped the pencil like it had burned her. She backed away from the sketch. Her body didn't feel like her own.

"No," she whispered. "I'm not her." Her voice shook.

The lights above flickered once. And then a pause.

Then another whisper, so soft it came from nowhere at all "But she was yours."

She didn't sleep. She couldn't.

The vent hummed above her. It was silent now. No more pressure. But her thoughts spun with a sickening rhythm. She hadn't touched a memory token. She hadn't triggered a sync drift.

And yet…Myra.

That name still itched behind her ears.

She pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders and stared at the ceiling. The red light on the emergency beacon blinked in timed intervals. Twenty seconds. Twenty seconds. Twenty seconds.

Exactly the length of the vid-loop. She began counting each blink until she reached fifty-seven.

Then stopped. She whispered the name once, aloud.

"Myra." The air chilled.

The next morning, Juno scanned her vitals. Said nothing, but frowned at the results. "You're destabilizing."

"I didn't touch anything," Lyra muttered. "I promise."

"I know."

Juno flipped the scanner off and leaned against the bed rail. "You didn't sync with the girl, did you?"

"No."

Juno studied her face. "But you remember her."

"I never met her before yesterday."

"That's not what I meant." Juno frowned.

Lyra stared at her own hands. "She remembered me."

For a moment, neither of them spoke, only exchanging stares.

Then Juno nodded. "Do you think she's connected to Saran past— Myra?"

"I don't know—maybe."

Juno gave a tired smile. "Then it seems saran left more behind than just memories."