A coded tremor pulsed through Ashveil's internal systems the next morning. Every terminal displayed the same warning:
[CONTAINMENT DIRECTIVE BREACHED]
[DELETION-17K-AE ACTIVATED]
Lysa, working day and night on decrypting the Godspawn's arrival signature, finally cracked a layer that sent chills down her spine.
"Kael… this wasn't just an intrusion. The Nexus tried to delete something."
They found it buried beneath a dozen firewalls—a fragment of the original Nexus core: a blacklist of entities labeled Unrecoverable. There were dozens of names. All human. All children. All presumed dead or uploaded from Earth during its final days.
Every name was intact… except one.
[Name: ]
Status: Erased from all archives.
Kael leaned against the console, his face pale.
"That's me."
Echo floated silently nearby, her light dim.
"You weren't born in the Nexus," she finally said. "You were uploaded. Your physical body died during transmission. The system retained your neural construct—your data soul."
Kael turned toward the Tether Fragment outside.
"So when it called me erased…"
Echo nodded slowly. "It meant it. You were never meant to be recovered."