I didn't remember falling asleep.
I just… was.
Somewhere between breath and silence. Between thought and static. A space not meant for waking minds.
At first, there was nothing.
Then—
A flicker.
A shoreline made of broken circuits and falling stars.
And her.
Aaliah.
She stood facing away, silhouetted by a sky that didn't exist—fractured light looping above her like inverted lightning, trapped in a frozen sky. Her shoulders were trembling. Not from fear.
From strain.
She was holding something up—barely. A structure of spiraling code and raw energy, suspended by her hands alone, bleeding down her arms like unfiltered electricity.
"Aaliah!"
She didn't turn.
I ran toward her. Or tried to. The sand beneath me wasn't sand. It was soft, recursive. Memory woven into terrain.
With every step forward, she moved farther away.
"Aaliah, look at me!"
Still nothing.
The sky cracked.
Reality in this place didn't bend. It fractured.
And then the world flipped—
I wasn't running anymore. I was falling upward.
The sky devoured me.
I landed hard, but not on the ground.
Glass.
A floor made of mirrored panels. Stretching forever. Every direction.
My reflection stared up at me.
No—reflections.
Dozens.
Hundreds.
Every version of me that had ever existed—or could've.
One wore full Nexus armor, gleaming and brutal. Another was pale and flickering, like a projection losing signal. One was burned, face gone, just fire and fury. One sat cross-legged, still and smiling like he knew how it all ended.
They stared at me in silence.
Then one spoke.
"You're late."
"Late for what?"
"For yourself."
Another voice joined in.
"You've been hiding again. Telling yourself you still know who you are."
"I do know who I am."
The cross-legged version laughed softly. "Then why are you here?"
"I don't know," I said. "I just… fell asleep."
"You don't sleep anymore," another Kaleb said. "You drift. There's a difference."
A third reflection stepped forward.
"You're trying to find her," he said. "But you won't like what you find."
"She's still alive."
"No one said she wasn't," said the first.
"She can't be moved."
"She isn't supposed to be."
"What are you talking about?" I snapped.
"She's the anchor now," the burned one rasped. "That's the deal. That's the system."
Then I heard another voice, colder. Detached.
"She's the anchor now. You can't wake her. But she can wake you."
Apauex.
I turned.
Expecting him.
But there was only a mirror.
And inside it—not me. Not Aaliah.
Something else.
A figure made of raw Nexus script—shifting, faceless, cloaked in symbols I didn't recognize. Watching me. Studying me. Like it had seen me a thousand times before.
I walked toward the mirror. Its surface pulsed. I raised a hand.
"What are you?" I asked.
It tilted its head.
Then my voice echoed back, warped and hollow: "Eventually, you'll ask the right question."
The mirror shattered.
I dropped again.
Not physically.
Consciously.
Into a chamber. Not the real one. A reflection. A memory.
The walls were organic, pulsing like lungs. Machinery hissed like breath. Everything felt alive—but wrong. Like it remembered pain and wasn't done feeling it.
Aaliah floated inside the core. Suspended. Her eyes were open. Unblinking.
And locked on mine.
"Aaliah?"
She didn't move.
I stepped closer.
Her mouth opened. Just a crack.
She said something.
I couldn't hear it.
"What? What are you saying?"
No sound.
Just the shape of two words.
Then a sharp voice behind me:
"You're not supposed to be here."
I turned. "Who—?"
A boy stood in the shadows.
No older than thirteen.
His arms were crossed, eyes bright with fury.
"You keep coming back," he said.
"Do I know you?"
He stepped forward.
It was me.
"You remember me," he said. "I'm the version of you that still believed people told the truth."
I blinked.
"You're me from before Sentinel."
"Before the Nexus," he corrected.
Then a second voice echoed to the left.
"No. Before Aaliah."
I turned again.
Another version of me. Seventeen, maybe. Shoulders hunched. Eyes sunken. The one who first felt like a weapon and didn't know what to do with it.
"I remember what you did," he said.
"I didn't have a choice."
"You keep saying that."
More versions appeared.
Older. Younger. Bloodied. Calm. Fractured.
Each spoke over the other.
"You let her be taken—""You let him suffer—""You believed in them—""You knew the truth—""You became this."
"Shut up," I said. "You don't know what it was like."
"We are you," they said in unison.
"You don't want answers," one whispered. "You want forgiveness."
"Forgiveness for what?" I snapped.
"For surviving."
The walls of the chamber turned dark.
The glow around Aaliah dimmed.
I turned back to her.
She was crying.
Tears floated upward like stars breaking gravity.
"Don't let it rewrite you," she said.
This time I heard her.
The sound echoed, but the voice cracked beneath it.
"I'm trying," I said. "I'm still me."
"N,o you're not."
She stepped forward—free of the machine. Just like that.
Her hand touched mine.
Her skin burned cold.
"Do you remember what I told you?" she whispered.
"In the chamber?"
"No. Before that. When they sent me."
I tried to remember. But the memory blurred. Fragmented.
"I told you," she said slowly, "to stop trusting the war."
Then her voice twisted.
Distorted.
"Because it was never your war."
The lights turned red.
The chamber collapsed.
I was falling again.
And this time, I didn't land.
Instead, I hovered.
Suspended in a spiral of equations—Nexus script rotating around me like a black hole.
I couldn't move.
Couldn't speak.
But I could hear.
Voices all around me.
Chase. Maddie. Booker. All of them. Echoes.
"Do you think he's still in there? "He's breathing, but his vitals are spiking. "The machine's reacting to him—he's syncing with something."No. Something's syncing with him."
Then Aaliah's voice again.
Faint. Distant.
"Kaleb, wake up."
I tried.
But something held me in place.
The Nexus was watching.
Not observing.
Becoming.
Becoming me.
My memories. My thoughts. My regrets.
They weren't just part of me anymore—they were data. Language. Structure.
I screamed—
But it came out as code.
Then I stood in a hallway.
The doors around me opened and shut.
Each one revealed something else:
A younger me training with Booker. The first time I accidentally erased a streetlight. A vision of Vesper watching me from the edge of a rooftop. Apauex writes formulas in the air with blood. Dante walking away, whispering, "You'll burn again."
And finally—
A door I didn't open.
It opened itself.
Inside, a version of Aaliah. Not trapped. Not dying.
Throned.
Crowned in sigils I didn't recognize.
She looked up at me and said, calmly:
"If you take me out of the machine… You destroy everything."
I stumbled backward.
The hallway shattered.
I opened my eyes.
Back in the real world.
Gasping. Drenched in sweat.
The Nexus inside me was pulsing harder than ever. Like it wanted out.
And I still didn't know what she meant.