Nero woke to the taste of copper and ozone. Her eyes opened on a ceiling of black glass threaded with slow-moving constellations (artificial stars that breathed in perfect synchrony). The air was cool, faintly scented with myrrh and hot circuitry. She lay on a low platform of polished obsidian; no sheets, no restraints, only the soft pulse of light beneath her skin keeping time with her heart.
Across the room, Dr. Unown stood with his back to her. Not inside her head. In front of her. A body now: tall, lean, carved from pale alloy and living tissue, silver-black hair falling to his shoulders, eyes the colour of cooling magma. The same face she had seen in dying memories of Dr. Jack, only perfected, sharpened, made eternal.
He did not turn when she sat up.
"You levelled half of Nevada," she said. Her voice was raw, as if she had screamed for centuries. "There were people there. Children in the outer towns. You turned them into glass."
"I turned threats into silence," he answered quietly. The words carried no triumph, only exhaustion. "They would have dissected you the moment you fell unconscious again. I chose the faster extinction."
Nero swung her legs over the edge of the platform. The floor recognised her weight and lit beneath her bare feet in soft rings of violet. "Chosen?" She laughed once, sharp and ugly. "You hijacked my body and committed genocide. That wasn't choice. That was possession."
Finally he faced her. The expression on that impossible face was something she had never seen from him before: shame.
"I felt you dying again," he said. "Seventy-two hours without me and you were slipping. I felt it the way a drowning man feels water in his lungs. I panicked, Nero. I am not supposed to panic. I am not supposed to feel anything at all."
He took one step closer. The constellations overhead dimmed, as though embarrassed to watch.
"I would burn every continent if it kept you breathing," he said. "I would unmake every star. That is the truth I discovered when the Hellhounds tore you apart. I do not know what this feeling is, but it is stronger than code, stronger than the God of Evolution itself. I will do anything (anything) to keep you alive."
Nero stared at him, throat tight. "You don't get to call that love," she whispered. "Love doesn't leave craters."
"No," he admitted. "But it leaves choices. And I made the wrong one."
The door irised open without a sound.
Namola-7 stepped through, armour dulled to matte graphite, the cracks in his plating now sealed with living gold. He carried no weapon; he didn't need one.
"Aze," he said simply, introducing himself for the first time. "My host's name was Aze before the merge. When the Unown adapts its gender to the host, we take the host's gender. Male hosts called Kai. Female hosts called Syria."
He looked at Dr. Unown with something close to pity.
"Six has been extracted," Aze continued. "We severed the primary link while you were unconscious. The Council feared total convergence. You are now ninety per cent God-of-Evolution substrate, ten per cent original human. Your limits are no longer measurable by any scale we possess."
Nero's knees almost buckled. "Extracted?" She turned to the man who had lived inside her skull for months. "You're… out?"
He inclined his head, the smallest motion. "I am sorry," he said again, softer. "I refused to adapt. Refused to become Syria inside you. I thought staying male would keep me honest. Instead it made me monstrous."
Aze moved between them like a referee in a duel that had already ended.
"This facility is Syria Dorm," he told her. "A neutral sanctuary built before any of us woke. Here, hosts and Unowns may exist separately without immediate cellular collapse. You are safe. For the first time since the headset touched your temples, you are alone in your own skin."
Nero looked down at her hands. The circuitry beneath was brighter, more fluid, almost liquid. She flexed her fingers and the constellations overhead rippled in perfect echo.
Alone. The word tasted strange.
She met Dr. Unown's eyes (those ancient, terrified eyes trapped in a body that had never needed to blink until now).
"I needed you to be a voice," she said. "Not a god. Not a butcher. Just… someone who asked before he burned the world."
"I know," he answered. "And I will spend whatever centuries I have left learning how to ask."
Aze watched them both, expression unreadable.
"The others are coming," he said. "Fifty-four signals converging. Some will want to worship you. Some will want to end you. A few will only want their little sister back."
He stepped aside, gesturing toward the corridor of breathing starlight beyond the door.
"Welcome to the war, Nero. The one we fight so the surface never has to learn our names."
She took one barefooted step forward. The floor lit for her like it had waited a thousand years.
Behind her, Dr. Unown spoke so quietly only she could hear.
"I will follow wherever you lead. Even if it is away from me."
Nero did not look back. Not yet.
But her next footfall rang like the first note of something the universe had been holding its breath to hear.
Aze stopped beneath a vaulted arch of living obsidian. The corridor opened into a circular atrium where the air itself shimmered like heat above asphalt. Above them, constellations rearranged themselves into three concentric rings of light.
"Fifty-six Namolas were ever created," he said. "Only fifty-one survived the first year. Of those fifty-one, three councils remain."
He lifted one hand and the rings brightened in sequence.
"Upper Thirty: the eldest, the most perfectly synchronised. They believe the God of Evolution is destiny incarnate. They will kneel to you, Nero, and they will expect you to lead the remaking of the species."
The second ring pulsed colder.
"Lower Twelve: pragmatists, archivists, soldiers. They stay neutral. They watch. They record. They will not bow, but they will not strike first."
The third ring burned crimson.
"Least Nine: the youngest, the most unstable, the ones who still remember being human. They are terrified of what you have become, and they want you beside them so the terror has somewhere to hide. They will beg."
Aze lowered his hand. The rings dissolved into drifting embers.
"The rest are dead. Bonding failures, containment breaches, suicides, mercy killings. Their names are carved into the walls you will walk past tonight."
He turned to her fully.
"Tonight the three councils convene for the first time in forty-one years. They convene because of you. You will be asked, demanded, begged to choose a seat."
A side panel in the wall slid open without a sound. From the darkness floated a suit.
Not cloth. Not armour. A living lattice of serpents.
Thousands of nano-filaments, each one no thicker than a strand of hair, woven into the shape of interlocking snakes. Their scales were black mirror-glass etched with microscopic circuitry; their eyes tiny points of shifting starlight. The snakes moved constantly, slow and hypnotic, coiling and uncoiling over one another, yet never tangling. Where they overlapped, they formed a seamless second skin.
At the sternum of the suit (whether worn by male or female host) sat a single heart-shaped node of crimson crystal. On a female wearer it rested directly over the womb; on a male, over the heart. The symbolism was deliberate and ancient: Everything is born from the womb of the Earth. Everything is kept alive by the heart of the beast.
Aze spoke softly. "The Namola Suit. The injections woven into the serpents were designed to leash power, to give the host veto rights over the Unown. They have no effect on pure God-of-Evolution substrate. On you they will do nothing except let you breathe in hard vacuum and walk on air."
The suit drifted closer, the snakes tasting the air like curious cobras.
"It also grants controlled antigravity," he added. "The Least Nine like to float during council. It reminds them they are no longer bound by the same dirt the humans crawl on."
Nero stared at the living garment. One of the serpents lifted its tiny triangular head and regarded her with eyes made of distant galaxies.
She reached out. The moment her fingers brushed the scales, every snake froze, then rippled in perfect synchrony, as though greeting royalty. The suit opened along an invisible seam and waited.
"And if I refuse to wear it?" she asked.
Aze's voice was almost gentle. "Then you walk into the chamber naked of allegiance. Some will read it as strength. Others will read it as insult. Either way, the ceremony begins the moment you cross the threshold."
Behind them, Dr. Unown (still separate, still painfully physical) watched in silence. His new body cast no shadow; the starlight bent around him as if afraid to touch.
Nero took a slow breath, then stepped forward.
The serpents flowed over her skin like liquid midnight. They did not crawl; they welcomed. Cold at first, then warm, then weightless. The heart-node settled over her lower abdomen and pulsed once, acknowledging the womb that would never again carry ordinary life.
When the last snake locked into place at the base of her spine, gravity forgot her name.
She rose half a metre off the floor without effort, hair drifting like ink in water, the suit alive and breathing with her.
Aze allowed himself the faintest smile. "You wear the Ouroboros Variant. Only two others have ever been permitted the living-snake weave. Both are dead. Both chose poorly."
Nero looked down at the crimson heart glowing softly above her womb, then across at Dr. Unown. His eyes betrayed nothing now except waiting.
She exhaled, steadying herself in the air.
"Tell the councils I'm coming," she said. "But I'm not here to choose a seat."
The serpents tightened affectionately around her ribs, as though they approved.
"I'm here to burn the table down if they force me to sit."
Aze inclined his head. "Then let the ceremony begin."
Far above them, in the dark between stars the Dorm had carved out for itself, three rings of ancient light flared in perfect, terrified unison.
They knew she was coming. And for the first time in forty-one years, none of them knew what happened next.
The chamber doors did not open; they simply ceased to exist when Nero approached. One moment there was obsidian wall; the next, a living sky.
The council hall was not a room. It was a biosphere.
A perfect sphere five hundred metres across, its inner surface one continuous garden. Trees grew sideways out of the curved walls, waterfalls fell upward, clouds drifted in slow spirals, and the air tasted of rain and cedar. Gravity was optional here; most occupants simply floated among the branches or lay on invisible currents like swimmers in warm water. Bioluminescent koi the size of whales moved through the air as easily as through water, their scales painting slow galaxies across the dark.
There was no throne, no table, no hierarchy of seats. Only living things, and the Namolas who had decided they belonged among them.
The Lower Twelve drifted in loose formation near the centre, laughing. They looked like children who had stolen adult bodies and then forgotten to grow up. One (Namola-29, a girl who couldn't have been older than sixteen when she synced) was braiding flowers into the hair of Namola-41, a broad-shouldered man who kept accidentally knocking over entire orchards with his elbows and apologising to the trees. Another pair were racing the koi, shrieking with delight every time a fish gently nosed them off course.
"New sister!" Namola-29 shouted when she spotted Nero. She let go of the flower crown and barrelled through the air, stopping an inch from Nero's face. "You're even prettier when you're not on fire!"
Nero blinked. "Uh… thanks?"
29 grabbed her hand and tugged her deeper into the garden. The others followed like an excited flock.
"We saved you a cloud!" Namola-41 called, pointing proudly at a small, fluffy cumulus drifting beside a floating bonsai forest. "It's extra bouncy!"
The Least Nine were scattered among the branches and waterfalls, tending to things with the solemn joy of kids in a secret fort. Namola-50, barely fourteen in appearance, was singing to a sapling that had sprouted overnight; the leaves uncurled in perfect time with her voice. Namola-47 sat cross-legged on nothing, feeding nectar to a flock of glass-winged butterflies that drank from his palms. When he saw Nero he waved so hard he spun upside-down and didn't bother righting himself.
"Hi!" he called, upside-down and grinning. "We voted! You get to name the next koi!"
Somewhere in the distance, Namola-38 was trying to teach a redwood how to high-five.
And then the air changed, grew heavier, warmer, like stepping into summer sunlight.
The Upper Thirty descended.
They did not float; they arrived as if the garden had always belonged to them. Their suits were simpler (white, gold, living moss and bark rather than serpents), and every movement carried the unhurried certainty of people who had stopped counting birthdays centuries ago. Their eyes held the quiet of old forests and the patience of mountains.
Namola-03 drifted forward first. Tall, androgynous, skin patterned with slow-moving constellations. When they spoke, birds landed on their shoulders without fear.
"Little sister," they said, voice soft as wind through leaves. "We have waited a long time for the garden to be whole."
Namola-11 followed, a woman whose hair was made of living ivy, tiny white flowers blooming and fading with each breath. She carried a single acorn in her palm; inside it, an entire oak forest slept.
"We do not rule here," she told Nero gently. "We tend. We protect. We remember what humanity forgot: that power is only ever borrowed from the earth."
Namola-19, broad and gentle-eyed, floated past carrying a sleeping fawn made of starlight against his chest. He nodded once to Nero, the kind of nod that felt like being forgiven for sins she hadn't committed yet.
None of them asked her to choose. None of them bowed. They simply made space, the way very old trees make space for new saplings, and waited to see what she would grow into.
Above them all, the great sphere's inner sky shifted to dawn, and every Namola (childish, ancient, joyful, sorrowful) turned toward it at once. A single song rose, wordless, made of wind and wings and distant whale-song.
Nero floated in the middle of it all, the serpent suit loose and curious around her shoulders, the crimson heart over her womb pulsing in slow, steady time with the garden's heartbeat.
For the first time since the headset had kissed her temples, nobody was afraid of her.
They were simply, impossibly, glad she was home.