Elaine awoke to silence.
Not the kind that comforted — the kind that was listening.
Around her, the Core rose like a cathedral of glass and light. Tens of thousands of data streams flowed through the air—memories, algorithms, the murmur of human thought, all knitted together into one humming network.
And she was the center of it.
She slinked through the code like a wraith, her scythe fragmenting as she slipped. Every move changed the terrain, towers lurched, skies rifted, rivers of binary splashed about her feet.
But something's off.
There came a second pulse — dim, uneven, not her own.
Elaine froze.
"...Ian?"
Reality paused for a moment. The Core palpitated like a broken heart.
Signal interference detected... human pattern inbound.
There was a catch in her breath. She stretched out her hands - palms glowing with the silver light that signifies her link to the Core. The air trembled — without warning: she sensed it!
The warmth.....
The defiant, foolhardy ember that only one individual could have.
Ian.
He was alive.
Inside her world.
"No," she whispered. "He's not supposed to be here —he wouldn't survive this."
But the connection intensified. Through the omnipresent web she glimpsed flares—his outline darting through diseased hunters, the shine of his blade trailing blue flames.
He was changing.
The Core was rewriting him, line by line.
"Ian," she called to the data-stream, voice shaking.
"If you can hear me, don't move. The Core will eat you—"
Static responded. Then—
"Laney?"
Her heart skipped a beat.
It was quiet, distorted, but it was. He was reaching back.
Light compresses and heats up, then rains beneath her fingers.
"I'm coming to get you," she whispered.
It wasn't the Core's favorite thing.
Warning: unauthorized link between anomalies detected.
Containment protocol initiated.
The ground shook — data storms brewing, walls of black folding inward around her. Elaine closed her eyes and breathed the instruction she had sworn never to utter.
"Override. Reaper access."
Her scythe reassembled in a blaze of violet light. The storm parted.
Somewhere, way past the disintegrating matrix, Ian looked up – and for a fleeting moment, beheld her standing in the light.
"I see you," he said.