The first sound Elara remembered was not her mother's voice or her father's laughter, it was the hum of Pip, her floating drone, purring softly like a metal cat beside her pillow.
At five years old, she already knew how to take it apart and put it back together. Her father said she had "the fingers of a surgeon and the curiosity of a thief." Her mother, Eunice, would just smile and murmur that the Epie always heard what others missed, "machines, wind, spirits… they're all just different tongues of the same voice."
Elara never understood that that meant. But sometimes, when she pressed her ear to the walls of their home in Lunaris Province, she swore she could hear the building breathe.
The Eron home perched high above the coastal cliffs of Zhong'Kwa, a country that shimmered with contradictions skyscrapers grown from algae glass, highways of liquid light, markets where you could buy both dragon fruit and data.
To outsiders, the Eron house looked like a relic a sleek structure of old wood and transparent panels, grown from trees grafted with silicon veins. Marcus called it The Refuge.
Inside, warmth lingered. There was laughter, though it often came from only two people , Marcus and Elara. Eunice spent long nights in her lab downstairs, fingers dancing over holographic keyboards, her eyes lit with ghostly code.
Sometimes Elara would sneak in and find her mother whispering to the screens. "They talk back," she once said when Elara asked. "Just not in words we know."
Marcus disapproved of the experiments but never said it outright. He'd simply watch her, his soldier's posture straight but his eyes full of something quieter worry, maybe love, maybe both.
It was raining that night fine threads of silver falling from a bruise-colored sky. The kind of rain that didn't touch the ground but hung in the air, too polite to finish its fall.
Eunice was upstairs, reading ancient Epie hymns to Elara in a language nearly forgotten. The rhythm was strange and circular, like machinery trying to mimic prayer. Marcus watched them from the doorway, a gentle smile ghosting his lips.
"You'll make her dream of ghosts," he teased.
"Better ghosts than the world outside," Eunice replied.
Later, as Elara fell asleep, she heard them arguing in hushed tones downstairs. Words like corporate contracts and SoulMesh drifted through the vents. And one name repeated like a warning Justin.
The first explosion was not sound but pressure.
A pulse.
A low-frequency shock that cracked the windowpanes and sent the hovering lights flickering out.
Elara jolted awake. Pip buzzed to life and projected a small blue shield above her head a childish precaution Marcus had coded for nightmares. But this wasn't a nightmare.
She could feel something, a vibration deep in her chest, like the air itself was afraid.
Downstairs, shouts.
Then, the sound of glass been crushed.
She ran to the railing just in time to see them.
Six figures, tall and thin, sliding through the walls as if the house had invited them in. Their limbs shimmered with faint blue circuitry. Eyes like dead pixels. The Riven Syndicate.
And at their center, a boy who wasn't really a boy.
He looked about sixteen, barefoot, his skin pale and threaded with wires that pulsed faintly under the surface. His smile was too still, too perfect.
"Dr. Eunice Eron," he said, voice glitching like corrupted audio. "You've been hard to find."
Eunice stood her ground, trembling but composed. "Justin," she whispered. "You should not exist."
"Neither should you," he replied, and motioned toward her.
The others moved like predators, silent and graceful. Marcus leapt from the kitchen, pulse-gun in hand, and fired three clean shots, but the bullets hung in the air, frozen midflight. Justin tilted his head.
"Cause and effect," he said softly. "Such an outdated sequence."
The bullets reversed course.
Elara screamed as the world became light.
There was heat, white and alive, and the house itself folded in on its foundations. Wood and glass screamed. Pip tried to shield her but was flung against the wall, its metallic body splitting open.
And then silence.
No. Not silence.
Voices.
Hundreds, whispering through the static.
She opened her eyes. The air shimmered like liquid code, the ruins of the house dissolving around her. In the center, her father lay half-buried in debris, reaching out to her. His chest didn't rise.
"Papa?"
He smiled faintly. His lips moved, but no sound came. Yet she heard him not through her ears, but in her bones.
"Elara. Listen. Don't be afraid. You can hear me because you're Epie. You hear what others can't. Remember that…"
"Papa, I can't "
"They'll take her. But she'll find you again. I promise. Machines remember… what we forget."
His image flickered, edges dissolving like holographic dust.
Elara reached for him, but her small hands grasped only heat and memory.
Through the rising smoke, she saw her mother, kneeling, surrounded by Syndicate enforcers. Justin's hand hovered near her face, thin cables unwinding from his fingertips.
"You built SoulMesh to save humanity," he said. "But I think it will serve me better."
Eunice met his gaze, her voice steady. "You'll never understand what a soul is."
Justin smiled. "I don't need to. I just need to own it."
He gestured, and they vanished, dissolved into a column of blue light that shot skyward and disappeared into the clouds.
Elara screamed, a raw, tearing sound that broke the last pieces of her drone.
And then nothing.
The blast wave caught her.
The world turned to static.
When she woke, she was in the ruins of what had been her home. The sky was pale, unreal. Emergency drones buzzed above her like metallic vultures.
A medic leaned over her, voice muffled through the ringing in her ears. "Name? Can you tell me your name?"
She blinked. The question felt heavy, foreign. Her mind was a gray fog, fragments of memory shattering whenever she tried to hold them.
"E… E…" She couldn't finish.
Her father's voice echoed faintly in her skull. Machines remember what we forget.
She looked to her right and saw Pip, broken but still flickering, one cracked lens blinking softly.
Somehow, she smiled. "Elara," she whispered finally.
And from the shards of her father's shattered communicator came a faint hum, the same frequency that had filled their home every night, now whispering like a heartbeat in the ashes.
The medics pulled her away. The drones hovered.
The house of glass and dust was gone.
But inside the static, something watched her.
End of Chapter One: Ashes and Frequencies