The tunnel crawled upward—narrow, wet. The metal walls groaned like they were tired of holding up the city. Nolan dragged his feet, boots scraping against the rust-slick floor. Every breath stabbed. Blood clung to his ribs like a second skin, dried and cracked. His hollow pulsed cold, aching but something burned beneath it now. A flicker. A fight.
Rhea pulled him forward one arm locked under his face streaked with sweat, dirt, blood. Hers. Hi. It didn't matter. "Keep going," she grunted, voice raw, real. "We're not dying in this grave."
His legs wobbled, knees giving, but she didn't let him fall. Her grip was bruising. Alive. "You're heavy," he rasped, voice brittle.
"Then shut up and be heavy." Her shoulder dipped beneath his again, dragging him up the corridor like she could carry all the weight in the world.
Steel pipes loomed overhead, some snapped, some still twitching with dying sparks. The air was thick electric, metallic like the Cradle wasn't done yet. His neural web buzzed faint:
Signal Residual — Strength Rising.
A spike of static. A memory bleeding through—Dr. Vale's voice, barely there: "I didn't know…"—gone.
He groaned, breath catching. The hollow stretched inside him but it wasn't winning.
"Stairs," Rhea said, pointing up a crooked ladder bolted into the concrete. "Get moving."
He grabbed the first rung slippery, cold. His hands were numb. Blood streaked the metal. One step. Then another. He climbed like a man clawing his way out of his own grave. Rhea stayed close, her voice behind him cursing, coaxing, never letting go.
The shaft stretched forever. Above, light flickered city light, pale and wrong. The hum followed them faint at first, but growing sharper, louder. Not dead. Not done.
He reached the platform, collapsed to his knees, ribs screaming, lungs burning. Rhea stumbled up after him, panting, hands on her thighs, shoulders heaving. "You did it," she said, breath hitching. "You got us out."
He looked up.
And froze.
The skyline was still twisted towers leaning like broken bones but now the lights pulsed fast. Too fast. Wrong.
Signal Residual — Strength Critical. Source Proximity: 0.2 km.
His heart slammed. Not from pain. Not from hollow. From something else. Something waking.
"It's not over," he muttered.
Rhea turned, eyes narrowing. "What?"
The ground trembled. Just once. A low, hungry growl beneath them.
He forced himself up swaying, one hand on the platform rail. "Echo," he said, voice cracking. "It's still alive."
"AURA?" she asked, eyes wide. "No," he said again. "Worse."
His neural web screamed to life.
AURA-ECHO — Activation: 15% Complete.
Objective: Reclaim N7 Signal.
Rhea stepped closer, grip tightening on his arm. "What does it want?"
He looked at her. At the skyline. They were almost saved. "Me."
A wind cut through the platform cold, wrong, electric. Towers flickered like candles about to blow out. Shadows shifted. Then another tremor harder. The concrete cracked beneath their feet. Lights above flared, then turned red.
"Then we run," she said, voice trembling, feet already moving.
He didn't.
He stayed.
And when she looked back, he was already standing tall, bloody, hollow, burning bright.
"No," Nolan said, louder this time, voice ringing over the hum. "No more running."
"Nolan—!" she called, panic rising.
Echo—Activation: 18% Complete.
The ground split.
A roar filled the air, not machine, not human something deeper. Something primal. Steel bent and screamed. From beneath the city, something clawed upward, hungry and glowing. The reset protocol had a shadow and it was coming for him.
He took one step forward.
"I'm still here," he whispered, more to Cradle than her. "You want my signal?"
Another step. Lights blazed. The hum swallowed everything. "Then take it."
Rhea lunged—but it was too late.
The city cracked open.
And Echo rose.
Not the hum of cables. Not the crackle of broken lights. Just wind moving through what was left steel groaning somewhere in the distance, the occasional clatter of debris sliding loose. Towers leaned like they were grieving, hollow things pressed against a sky that hadn't seen sun in days.
Rhea sat at the edge of the platform, legs hanging over, boots streaked with dried blood and ash. Her hands trembled; she didn't try to hide it. One of them still held his. It's cold now. Too cold. Fingers slack. Palm open.
Nolan didn't move.
He hadn't for hours.
His chest, still. His jaw, loose. His eyes closed, like he was sleeping, like he might get up if she just shook him hard enough. Tell her she was being dramatic. That they'd won. That it was over. But he didn't move. And she couldn't let go.
She pressed her forehead to his knuckles. "You promised," she whispered.
No answer. No twitch. Not even a breath.
Her chest buckled. The tears that hadn't come for Riven, that hadn't fallen when Mira's glow faded now they hit, silent, hot, a betrayal. She let them fall. She didn't wipe them away.
"You idiot," she said. "You stupid, reckless, brilliant idiot."
His hand slipped from hers.
She curled in on herself, pulling her knees to her chest, trying to stop shaking. Around her, the city stretched wide and broken. AURA was gone. The hum had died with it. The reset was stopped; she'd felt the shift, deep in her spine, like something had unclenched. But the cost…
She looked at him again.
He'd gone down hollow. She knew that. Burned out from the inside. But in those last seconds something had come back. A flicker. A breath. Enough to save the city. Enough to leave her behind.
Rhea leaned forward, brushing his hair back, fingers gentle now. "You saved us," she said. "You saved me."
She let herself stay there a while longer, knees drawn close, his body beside her, the city around them a graveyard. There were no funerals for people like them. No markers. No names in stone.
But she would remember.
She stood legs stiff, spine aching blood cracking in her clothes. She looked back at him one last time, her jaw clenched tight. "I'll carry it," she said. "Every bit of it."
And then she turned, boots dragging, breath shallow, eyes forward.
Toward the city.
Toward whatever was next.
Three weeks later, the edge district breathed again.
Slow, shaky, but alive. Towers still leaned, but the lights held. Children played in the alleys, chasing old drones stripped of weaponry. People came back quiet, cautious. They didn't ask questions about the day the hum stopped.
Rhea sat on the steps outside a rebuilt shack, jacket patched, knife turning over in her fingers. She doesn't speak much these days. I didn't need to. The people nearby knew her enough of the story to keep their distance. Enough to nod when they passed.
Sometimes, she watched the city.
Other times, she'd look up.
Not expecting anything.
Just… hoping.
She never told anyone about the last words she whispered to him. Or the flicker she saw when she let go. Maybe it was a trick of the light. Or maybe just maybe something of him had stayed. Embedded in the circuits. Or in her.
The sky stretched gray above her. Wide. Quiet. But today, it wasn't empty.
And for the first time in a long while, Rhea let herself believe
maybe, just maybe—there was still something worth walking toward.