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Chapter 26 - Out Of Sync

They were still in the corridor.

Kael's hands rested gently on her arms, his eyes searching her face for meaning—an answer she wasn't ready to give.

Eira nodded once, the motion tight, practiced. "It passed," she said. "Just... residual memory stress."

Not a lie.

But not the truth either.

Kael studied her, uncertainty flickering in his gaze. But he didn't press. He just exhaled softly and stepped back, offering her space.

Behind them, Wren's voice crackled over the comm: "Loop's taking it. Like feeding sugar to a sleeping monster. I'm almost done."

Ysel responded from the far end of the hall, clipped and alert. "Hurry. There's movement near Sector Lens 9. Could be nothing. Could be too much nothing."

Eira barely heard them.

Her ears rang. Or maybe it was the shard again—dormant in her pocket, but humming faintly in her mind, like a fragment of thought repeating over and over:

Recall Signature: Active.

She had been part of it. The system. Not just raised in its walls, but built into its bones.

And somehow, it hadn't flagged her.

Not because she was careful.

But because somewhere in its vast, twisted architecture—it still saw her as part of itself.

Her pulse ticked unnaturally even now, synched with a rhythm that wasn't hers. Every blink felt slightly off-beat. Her breath staggered once in every four cycles.

She ran diagnostics on herself without thinking. Micro-movements, posture analysis. All still within behavioral norm.

That was worse than being exposed.

The system didn't suspect her.

It was waiting for her to self-correct.

She swallowed it down. Not the panic—panic was too loud.

The grief.

Kael shifted beside her. "You sure you're alright?"

"Yes." She said it sharper than intended.

He blinked, taken aback.

Eira forced her shoulders down, her voice softer. "Just tired. And overwhelmed. You were right earlier—I wasn't ready to see that."

He nodded slowly. "You don't have to carry it alone, you know."

The guilt prickled beneath her skin like static.

"I know," she lied.

Behind them, the relay signal pinged twice.

Wren's voice: "It's in. The upload's live. And no alarms yet, which either means we're brilliant—or they're waiting to eat us in our sleep."

Eira's lips quirked, almost a smile, but it faded fast.

Ysel joined them in silence, sharp eyes scanning their faces. "We move now. If this loop held, we may have bought time. But that won't last."

They filed out, silent again.

As they climbed back through the shaft, Eira felt her fingers twitch against the metal. A nervous tic she hadn't had since she was seven—when her mother forgot her birthday for the first time.

Or maybe that memory was planted too.

She didn't know anymore.

What she did know was this:

She couldn't tell them. Not yet.

If she told them she was part of the system's origin code—designed as the empathy model for Project Recall—they wouldn't just be afraid of the city finding her.

They'd wonder if it already had.

Eventually, they returned in pieces.

Not physically. Their bodies were intact, their steps smooth. But something in their rhythm had cracked.

Wren stayed behind to reroute the relay's trace pulse—just in case. Kael offered to watch the entrance corridor again, pacing in the way he always did when he couldn't sit with his thoughts.

That left Eira and Ysel alone in the lower chamber.

The room was dark except for the soft glow of a cracked display console flickering in the corner, casting faint shadows across the old floor tiles. Dust floated in the air like suspended moments.

Eira sat with her knees pulled up, arms folded on top of them. She didn't look at Ysel, who stood by the console with her back turned.

Silence stretched. Heavy. Purposeful.

Then—

"You flinched," Ysel said.

Eira blinked. "What?"

"Earlier. During the upload. Something happened to you." Ysel's voice was even, matter-of-fact. "You didn't say what."

Eira's spine straightened, the instinctual defense sliding in like armor. "I said it passed."

"And I said you flinched."

They let the words hang between them, brittle and bare.

Eira finally asked, "Are you trying to accuse me of something?"

Ysel turned, slowly. Her expression wasn't hostile. If anything, it was sharper than that—focused. Not suspicion. Something deeper.

"I don't know," she said. "Maybe I'm trying to understand something before it becomes a threat."

Eira's throat tightened.

"I'm not a threat."

"I believe you." Ysel sat across from her, folding her legs with the same fluid grace she moved in combat. "But belief doesn't mean blindness. And you've been...different. Since we pulled you out of the archive."

Eira turned her face slightly away. The shadows swallowed the side of her cheek, the shine in her eyes.

"I remembered something," she said softly. "But I don't know if it's real."

"Try me."

She hesitated. Her breath came thin, shallow. She thought about telling Ysel. About the chamber, the voice in her mind, the calibration whispers.

But the words stuck. She couldn't risk it. Not yet.

So instead, she offered something smaller. Still true.

"There's a part of me the system doesn't flag. It lets me through checkpoints. It doesn't scan me the way it should."

Ysel didn't blink. "That sounds less like luck and more like design."

Eira didn't answer.

Ysel leaned back slightly, eyes narrowing—not cruelly, but calculating. "You've been watching yourself closely. Not to hide. To confirm something."

Still, Eira said nothing.

"Listen." Ysel's voice dropped to a low tone, one that felt strangely maternal in its precision. "I'm not asking you to give me answers you don't have yet. But if you do know something the rest of us don't... it matters that you tell me when it's time."

"I know."

"No," Ysel said quietly. "You need to know. Because if you're connected to the thing we're trying to take down, and we don't see the whole shape of it—" her voice lowered further—"we won't survive it."

Eira stared at the floor. "I won't let that happen."

Ysel watched her for a long moment. Then nodded once.

"You'd better not."

And with that, she stood and walked to the chamber door, pausing only once before disappearing into the darkened hall.

"You're not alone, Eira," she said, almost gently. "But if you start acting like you are, we'll all become ghosts."

Then she was gone.

And Eira sat there, eyes stinging, pulse still syncing to a rhythm she didn't choose.

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