CHAPTER 4 — GENESIS FRACTURED

  Ship: Sanctum of Echoes — Deep Void, Unknown Coordinates

  Zero walked the inner ring of the Sanctum’s core, arms behind his back, boots never quite touching the ground. The air in the ship wasn’t air—it was a simulation. Everything here was. The Sanctum was built inside a collapsed space-time fold, where the laws of physics bowed to thought.

  In the center of the chamber, a thousand figures kneeled in silence.

  Their bodies were human. Their minds were not.

  “Stand,” Zero commanded.

  They rose in unison, every movement perfect, like frames in a reel played backward.

  One figure stepped forward—an Echo priest, draped in fractal fabric that shimmered with unstable memories.

  “She lives,” the priest said, voice layered with whispers. “The template. The failed one.”

  Zero’s face didn’t change.

  “She was never meant to live. But perhaps…” He stopped, eyes narrowing. “Perhaps the corruption preserved her.”

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  He gestured, and a diagram bloomed in the void—a genetic map. Lys’s sequence. But not as it was now.

  As it was before.

  “Who was she?” the priest asked.

  Zero spoke without hesitation.

  “She is my origin.”

  Flashback: Year 3099 AE — Genetic Vault Theta-4

  A young woman. Bloodied. Half-dead. Clutching a vial.

  Her name unknown, erased from records. Only her genome remained.

  The perfect base. Not for cloning—but for evolution.

  They called her Subject Lys.

  But she died.

  Or so they thought.

  The project was shut down.

  The vault collapsed.

  Only one success made it out.

  Zero.

  Back in the Present

  Zero studied the simulations of Earth’s defense systems. He traced the arc of every satellite, every station, every fleet. Their formations were beautiful. Flawed. Predictable.

  “She’s alive because she was never awakened,” he murmured. “No one told her what she is.”

  The priest kneeled again. “Will you retrieve her?”

  Zero shook his head. “No. Let her remember on her own.”

  He turned, walking toward the Sanctum’s Mind Well—a pool of memory liquid, suspended in anti-time.

  “War is not about weapons. It is about identity. And when she realizes who she is…”

  He smiled softly.

  “She’ll choose.”

  Meanwhile — Valkyrion, Medical Bay

  Lys was sweating on the bed, her body in stasis-mode. Psionic storms raged inside her brain—visions that weren’t hers.

  A boy with silver eyes.

  A lab filled with fire.

  A woman, dying, handing over a sample of her DNA.

  And above it all: a symbol.

  Two mirrored faces, split by a single line.

  She awoke gasping.

  Kael was by her side. “You okay?”

  Lys looked at him, heart pounding.

  “I saw him.”

  Kael frowned. “Who?”

  She stared at the wall like she could burn it down with her mind.

  “My brother.”