Somewhere above the ice, the sky was lying.
Snow fell, but it didn't melt on the children's skin. It just hovered—like the bullets had. Like the laws still hadn't caught up.
They stood at the edge of a ruined satellite outpost, half-buried in a crater of burned trees and silent machines. Whatever had once monitored this tundra had been erased.
102 said nothing. He didn't breathe. He didn't need to. His red eyes scanned the horizon like a sonar—mapping heat signatures, trajectories, potential vectors of approach.
His skin was clean, white, perfect. Unnatural.
315, on the other hand, shivered beneath a torn coat he'd taken from a dead technician. His hand was stained with blood and ash. He hadn't slept. Couldn't. Not since the door opened.
"Do you hear it?" 315 asked quietly, voice hoarse. "The humming?"
102 didn't answer. Instead, he knelt by a fallen antenna dish. His fingers traced the bent metal—not to fix it, but to calculate why it bent that way. Reconstruct the moment of impact. A recursive map played silently in his head.
315 looked up. The sky above was vast and empty, but wrong.
No sun. No moon. Just a swirling gray static, like a dying screen.
"The world's cracked," 315 muttered. "Like... we're not fully out yet."
A pause.
Then, 102 finally spoke.
"Correction: surface projection incomplete. Topography exists, but variables unstable."
315 groaned. "You sound like the Archive again."
"I am not the Archive."
"Could've fooled me."
He coughed into his sleeve. Flecks of red. The ritual had taken more from him than he realized. His memories were fuzzy—half his childhood felt like a bad dream. Maybe that was the cost.
To give your name...
He touched the torn ID tag still tied around his wrist.
"Do you think anyone's still alive?" he asked. "From the others."
102 didn't move.
"Possibility: 0.00021%"
315 laughed once. Bitter.
They stood in silence.
Then came the sound.
Not footsteps. Not vehicles. Remembering.
A soft chime, distant at first, like wind brushing broken glass.
Then a voice—not spoken, but layered into space.
"[Recontainment Protocol Initialized. Memory Surge Detected.]"
The trees to their left shimmered. Reality... folded. A ripple of logic bloomed outward—glyphs flashing midair in Archive script.
315's nose bled. 102's fingers twitched.
A portal opened.
Not a smooth door like 315 had used—this one cracked open violently, bursting like glass hit by a tuning fork.
Out of it stepped three humanoids.
Not men. Not machines. Archive Echoes.
Ghosts of past containments. Protocols given form.
They didn't speak.
They moved.
Fast.
102 moved faster...
----
Thirty Seconds Earlier
315's breathing came faster. The bleeding from his nose didn't stop this time. Each pulse of pain in his skull came with flickers—images not from now.
A circle. A child screaming. His name, stitched in the air, unraveling like thread.
He stumbled backward from the ripple forming in the trees. 102 was already analyzing trajectories—but Ren wasn't a weapon. He didn't calculate danger. He felt it. In bone and blood.
And in blood, the memory returned.
---
[FLASHBACK – Six Weeks Ago | Blacksite Ritual Room 3-C]
There were twelve of them, seated in chalk circles.
They had names, once. Most had forgotten.
Ren sat in the last ring, whispering to a cracked stone hidden in his palm.
"One gives to gain."
That was the rule. The only one he could hold onto. The rest had been burned out by the Archive's memory edits.
He looked up as a researcher passed, clipboard in hand, marking symbols on each child's tag.
"Successful loss. 35% retention."
"Failed transfer. 78% destabilization."
"Zhukov Ren. Retains dream trace. Archive-resistant. Flagged."
They called it dream trace. But Ren knew what it really meant.
He remembered things that weren't supposed to exist anymore.
---
[Back to Present]
Ren blinked. The bleeding blurred his vision. The Echoes stepped from the rip.
One carried a spear made of intersecting triangles—a recursion weapon. The kind that didn't just pierce flesh—it looped impact, fracturing identity. One stab felt like hundreds.
> "Vector!" Ren shouted. "They'll unmake us!"
102 didn't respond.
He had already vanished.
In his place: five projectiles. Random debris accelerated into vectors. One piece of bent satellite shrapnel slammed into an Echo's shoulder, spinning it off balance.
Ren reached into his coat and pulled out a cracked glass disk—his last ritual lens. It shook in his fingers.
"To alter fate… Give up memory," he muttered. "Just one. Just one."
He held the lens to his eye.
> "I give you… my birthday."
The lens ignited with cyan light. A ripple passed through space.
One of the Echoes hesitated, twitching. The recursion weapon glitched—loop disrupted.
Ren collapsed, dizzy.
What was my birthday? What day was I born?
He didn't remember.
---
[Elsewhere – Observation Room Theta-9 | Orbiting Above Siberia]
Commander Hadrian Kessler stared at the projected feed—although feed was too generous a word. The surface layer near Krasnohrad looked like static vomit. No time. No shape. The anomaly had grown.
He tapped a screen.
"Vector Node 102 has exited recursion chamber. Khemic Node 315 breached Axis barrier at Layer -2. Command, are we greenlit for Temporal Lock?"
A voice came through the comms—flat, synthetic, filtered through seven memory firewalls.
"Negative. Lock denied. Protocol Theta-Exile in effect. Let them climb."
Kessler's jaw tensed.
"They're children. What kind of protocol lets children climb out of recursion?"
"They are not children. They are divergent hypotheses. Watch the equation unfold."
Kessler exhaled slowly. He had seen anomalies before—Entity 42, Spiral Bloom, even the Mirrorlung Collapse—but this was different.
This was the Archive itself responding. Not passively. Not coldly.
Actively.
With interest.
Two signals rising through recursion layers... One of force. One of offering.
He whispered to himself.
> "God help us if they meet at the peak."
---