Dust clung to the back of Riven's throat like powdered rust.
He crouched in the shadow of a collapsed transit pillar, eyes locked on the broken skyline beyond. Jagged towers of twisted steel jutted from the cracked earth like the ribs of a dead god, half-swallowed by a sickly yellow fog. Somewhere out there, a Sector D Scavenger Team had gone dark two days ago.
The colony needed parts. Stabilizers. Core batteries. Anything.
And so they sent the rats.
Riven adjusted the cracked visor of his scav-mask and shifted the rifle on his back. It was older than he was, bolted together from parts pulled off dead mechs and buried bunkers. Half the safety functions didn't work. It rattled when he walked.
Still. It could punch a hole through a Hollowborn's skull. That was all that mattered.
He glanced up.
The sky was broken.
Where clouds once moved, fractured geometries now shimmered like oil on water, remnants of whatever still writhed above the stratosphere. Old satellites? Ghost code? Or worse.
No one knew.
And no one cared.
Because if you looked up for too long, the sky looked back.
Riven moved fast, boots crunching over broken polymer glass and calcified tech debris. His motion sensor pulsed green, no signs of life.
Yet something was off.
The fog wasn't moving like it should. It clung to the ground too tightly, coiled in swirls around a collapsed elevator shaft at the center of the ruin. The shaft's black maw stretched deep into the earth, the kind of place people whispered about in ration lines.
Old Core routes.
Forbidden zones.
He should've turned around.
Instead, Riven descended.
The elevator shaft was more tunnel than vertical now. Half-collapsed. He scraped past twisted cables and brittle metal, his heart thudding harder the deeper he went.
Then the static hit.
His comm crackled. The green light blinked red. Every feed in his HUD went dead except one.
A single line of text.
[Echo Detected. Designation: NULL. Access? Y/N]
He froze.
No one used the word "echo" anymore. Not since the early collapse, when scav teams started coming back wrong. Eyes hollow. Voices wrong. Remembering things that never happened.
He should've shut it down. Reported it. Left it.
Instead, Riven reached out. fingers shaking, and confirmed access.
[Access Confirmed. Echo-Null Initializing… ]
The world screamed.
He wasn't sure if it was in his head, or in the metal around him, or in the broken code stitched through the very ground, but everything vibrated, suddenly and violently. The lights in his visor died completely.
Then something opened.
Not a door. Not a space.
A concept.
He stood, blind in the dark, heart hammering. And then he saw it, not with his eyes, but with something deeper.
A shape.
A sphere of fractured glass, suspended in a column of pale-blue light, floating above a ring of melted concrete. Lines of dead language pulsed across its surface, flickering like memories on the edge of recall.
The Echo spoke.
Not in words, but in impressions. Static formed into meaning. Meaning twisted into hunger.
"Do you wish to remain as you are?"
The question burrowed deep. Into his spine. Into his bones. Into every scar and memory he had shoved down over the years.
He didn't answer.
He couldn't answer.
So he bled.
From the nose. From the ears. Not from pain, but from overload, like something had shoved too much of itself into too small a vessel.
And then… silence.
The light dimmed.
The sphere cracked—lines of blue energy fracturing like ice under strain—and the Echo dissolved into him.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
Code. Data. A piece of the dead god humanity had buried too deep.
He collapsed to the floor.
Trembling. Burning. Changed.
And somewhere far above him, behind clouds of geometry and broken dimensions, something woke up.