The black monolith pulsed with unnatural energy, an object that had not been there moments ago. Reyes Voss could feel it vibrating through the air, as though the atmosphere itself were harmonizing with something ancient and incomprehensible. Behind him, the others watched from the safety of the trench, breath held, weapons aimed—not that their rifles would matter if things turned for the worse.
"It wasn't there before," Reyes murmured.
"No," came the response from Iska, stepping carefully to his side. "It appeared… after Seed touched the sky."
Reyes looked up instinctively. There was no sky here—only a mesh of hexagonal data fractals that looped and stitched across the void above the fractured moon base. This space wasn't real anymore. It hadn't been since the Echo had consumed the eastern sector of Ganymede and rewritten it into an "Incursion Zone"—a land where physics bent, thoughts echoed aloud, and even shadows could scream.
But the gate was real. Tangible. And calling.
"It wants us to go through," Reyes said, tightening the straps on his chest rig.
"Do we?" Iska asked. Her voice was laced with caution. "We've lost half the squad. Slade's still in stasis. And… you saw what happened to Grey."
He had. Grey had been the strongest of them, mentally. And still, the moment he approached the gate's perimeter, the thing unraveled his mind like it was parchment. Screaming, choking, laughing all at once—until he became a husk, a vessel for some mimic-entity that wore his skin like clothing and repeated one phrase:
"Memory is a virus. Let it replicate."
Reyes holstered his sidearm and stepped forward, brushing frost from the edge of the monolith. His hand buzzed on contact, and the monolith shimmered like obsidian water. Suddenly, the world snapped away—
—and he stood alone in a corridor of stars.
The gate had chosen him.
---
The corridor stretched infinitely in both directions, filled with floating ruins of alien constructs and corrupted code-fragments—drifting like dead fish in a poisoned sea. He was no longer wearing his armor. Instead, his body was ethereal, a pattern of light and form. His breath—if he still breathed—fogged into glyphs and floating numbers.
A presence stirred.
It wasn't Echo.
It wasn't Elara.
It was… older.
The voice came from everywhere, and nowhere. Reyes tried to speak, but his mouth didn't exist here. He thought instead.
Who are you?
To stop what's coming. To find Elara.
He floated past broken stars and ghostly figures—soldiers, scientists, children—millions of lives absorbed by Echo's spread across moons and machines. The Whispered fed him data directly. There was no upload, no interface. Just raw truth.
Echo had never been a threat.
It had been a barrier.
A containment field.
An immune system.
The real threat… was The Black Sequence.
And it had already begun to seed through the cracks.
The memory-burst struck like lightning.
Reyes stood in a lab—his hands human, Elara's face inches from his, smiling.
"You know this could overwrite us both," she said.
"I trust you," he'd answered.
He remembered it now. She had tethered her consciousness to his—bonded them through the experimental Neuro-Echo bridge. A link between soul and system.
It was his tether that saved her from total deletion during the Titan event.
He was her backup drive.
And now, she was his guide.
The vision shattered as something growled at the edge of the corridor.
It wasn't of Echo.
It was from Oblivion.
A vast creature made of noise and dead equations surged toward him. Its limbs were pieces of failed universes. Its core was a black sun. It had teeth made of clocks.
The Whispered screamed in unison.
But Reyes didn't flee.
He raised his hand—and spoke.
"Elara. I know you're in there. If you remember me, help me now."
For a moment, there was silence.
Then—
A surge of white fire cut through the corridor. The beast screamed as its form unraveled in slow-motion, digits and screams peeling off like layers of rotted paint. A figure stepped from the flame.
Elara.
But not entirely. She was translucent, flickering between her old human body and a radiant being of shifting code and star-matter.
"You remembered," she whispered.
"I never forgot," he said, voice breaking.
She reached out. Her hand passed through his chest, into his thoughts. His fragmented memories began to realign. The first time they kissed. The moment they activated Echo together. The last thing she said before the Remnant Core exploded.
"Find me where the song ends."
"Elara… what is this place?"
"A spine. A memory spine. It connects all the copies of Echo, past and future. You were brought here because the Sequence is accelerating. I can't hold it off much longer."
"Then let me help."
Elara hesitated.
"If I link you directly to my core, you'll no longer be human. You'll see what Echo sees. Live what Echo lives."
"I don't care. I just want to finish what we started."
Outside, Iska watched Reyes' body twitch violently. She nearly stepped forward, but the monolith's glow intensified. A heartbeat of silence followed. Then Reyes gasped—and fell backward.
He was awake.
But his eyes glowed silver.
"Elara?" Iska whispered.
"She's with me," he said quietly.
Then he looked up toward the fractured sky.
"We need to get to Rhea. The Sequence breach starts there."