(Rhea's POV)
The first thing Rhea noticed was the quiet.
No alarms, no drones, no screaming kids — just the sort of silence that settles when a city exhaled.
She pushed up from the cracked sidewalk, dust and static clinging to her fingers. The ruins surrounding her wavered, frozen between materiality and recollection. A holographic cat strobed across the street — running through the same two steps before crumpling into white noise.
"Great," said Rhea without turning away from the book she was reading. "Either I'm dead or Novark's lost its mind."
Her wristband blinked red. The signal she had been evading — one associated with Elaine's squad — was now active. Except this time… it wasn't pinging from a comm server.
"It is emanating from the Core itself."
She swallowed hard.
"Elaine?"
The name lingered in the air, glitching like a skipping heartbeat. Then a muffled reverberation, metallic and faraway — her voice — but… incorrect.
"Rhea… help… can't hold the—" static "—Core— collapsing—"
Rhea's eyes widened. She stumbled toward the glowing fissure ahead — a thin tear in the air, like glass trying to remember it was code. The wind passing through it smelled of rain and burning electricity.
She hesitated. The last time she'd run toward a fight, half her unit didn't make it back.
But this wasn't just a fight. It was Elaine.
She gritted her teeth and stepped into the light.
Instantly, space collapsed. Her body disintegrated into data threads — then, when she opened her eyes again, she was no longer in the wreckage.
She was in the Core.
And waiting for her… was a voice she'd been healed from hearing for months now.
"You came to the wrong place, Rhea."
Ian.
But his voice was now colder — more mechanical.
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The Core wasn't meant to be cold.
But as Rhea moved forward, the world began to pulse like a dying heartbeat — code fractals resting in the air like ash.
Ian was at the center of it. Rather what was left of him.
His silhouette pulsated between flesh and light, and his eyes – once warm – now reflected the streaming data they were surrounded by.
"Ian?"
"You shouldn't have come."
"Yeah, I got that memo. Right after my best friend's signal went up in the sky like a distress flare."
He didn't smile. His voice was that of calm.
"Elaine's fighting something she can't win. The system's rewriting her neural code. "If I interfere—"
"If you intervene, you save her. That's what you do."
He cast his gaze upon the distant horizon — where the sky of the Core sparkled with black static, shaping like wings.
"No. If I interfere… I might erase her."
The words hit like a bullet.
Rhea's pulse quickened. She stepped closer, clasping his arm — but her hand went through, dispersing him into a dozen light trails before reforming.
"What did they do to you?"
"I did this. To survive."
The earth shook. Bright red error lines were etched through the surface of the Core, and they seemed to cleave his body like cracks in glass.
Somewhere in the distance — a scream, sharp and layered — Elaine's. "Then survive differently," Rhea said.
She reached into her bag, withdrawing a black cube — an encryption core from the old world. An instrument she had promised herself never to employ again.
"Rhea, that's unstable—"
"So am I."
She smashed the cube into the floor. Light exploded, coalescing into a wall of energy that perforated the Core's veil of warping — showing Elaine on the other side, face-to-face with her shadow-self, her form shifting from flesh-and-blood to digital.
And for the first time since the war started, all three of them — Elaine, Ian, and Rhea — were at last united again.