> "REWRITE INITIATED. MEMORY PURGE IN PROGRESS."
The Watcher Drone's lens pulsed red, casting long shadows across Bay 92. Code symbols began pouring from its sides like smoke — targeting Brand's neural signature.
Brand stumbled back.
Pain exploded in his head.
His name, his age, the girl's face — all flickering.
The System was trying to delete him from the inside out.
> "Subject Brand Lon. Unauthorized memory recovery. Core identity corrupted. Commencing reset."
The drone's arm extended, uncoiling like a metallic serpent.
Then—
The air in front of Brand ripped open.
A glowing shard, crystalline and humming, flew out of nothingness — straight into his chest.
It embedded into his soulmark like a key fitting a lock.
Brand screamed.
SYSTEM ERROR: MEMORY CONFLICT DETECTED
> "DREAM SHARD INTERFERENCE — PROCESS HALTED"
"ANOMALY: SOULSIGNATURE PROTECTED"
"REWRITE DENIED."
The glyph on his chest flared white.
And for the first time…
The drone paused.
Brand rose.
The pain was gone.
His mind felt clearer than ever — sharp, raw, awake.
He raised his hand, and the Dream Shard pulsed outward like a miniature sun, weaving symbols in the air around him.
The drone fired a beam of raw static.
Brand stepped through it.
Unharmed.
The glyphs spun around him like armor made of memory.
He spoke a word that wasn't English. Something deeper.
> "Akara."
The glyphs reacted — expanding, becoming a mirror.
The drone's attack hit it — and bounced back, disrupting its own core.
The Watcher froze. Then collapsed, bursting into thousands of fractal butterflies made of data.
Gone.
🌌 [Undercode Transmission Incoming…]
The girl's voice whispered through the shard.
> "That was only the first. They'll send more now. Faster. Smarter. You have to move."
> "What is this thing?" Brand asked, staring at the glowing shard in his hand.
> "A Dream Shard. A piece of your real self they tried to erase. I found one. There are others. You'll need them to cross the Breach."
> "Where are you?"
> "I'm still in the Grove… but the paths are closing."
> "I can get to you."
> "Not yet. Not without the Mark fully restored."
> "Then I'll find the rest."
The transmission ended.
The shard dimmed, embedding deeper into his skin — now a permanent part of his soulmark.
He stood in the empty chamber of Bay 92, breathing hard.
The System would know now.
No more hiding.
He wasn't a sleeper anymore.
He was awake.
Back in his apartment, the lights flickered violently. His AI assistant didn't speak.
It was watching.
He stared at his reflection. His eyes burned softly with glyphlight. Not human anymore. Not quite.
He whispered the word again:
> "Akara."
And the mirror cracked
By morning, the Grid had healed — on the surface.
Brand's AI assistant returned to routine as if nothing had happened. His visor suggested outfit presets, nutritional balances, and emotional tracking for "maximum productivity."
But Brand saw the cracks now.
His reflection blinked a second too late.
The air shimmered near every security drone — like a glitch ready to burst open.
And in the back of his head, the Dream Shard pulsed like a heartbeat. Whispering. Pointing.
Toward something deep beneath the city.
He hacked into Codex's public neural archive during his morning shift — pretending to sort data logs like the rest of the ghost-eyed coders.
It wasn't easy. The AI tracked every keystroke, scanned every blink.
But Brand had something the others didn't now.
A mark.
He ran a fractal query using glyph patterns burned into his chest.
One entry pinged.
Buried in an old signal compression file, disguised as noise.
He decrypted it.
And there, in raw text, was the message:
> "We are not dead. We are below. We remember the light. Follow the silence beneath Sector 14."
That night, he snuck out of his housing block and made his way to Sector 14 — the oldest part of the arcology, near the city's waste and atmospheric purifiers.
No drones.
No AI voices.
Just silence.
The first silence he'd heard in years.
He found a vent gate — chained shut. On the wall beside it, someone had carved a glyph.
One he recognized from the girl's palm.
He traced it.
The gate slid open.
⛓️ BELOW THE CITY
The tunnel beneath Sector 14 wasn't like the rest of Codex. No steel. No screens. It felt… ancient.
As if it had been built before the System took over.
He moved deeper, light from his mark illuminating walls covered in hand-drawn sigils.
Not machine marks. Not code.
Memory runes.
Each one shimmered when he passed — echoing faint voices, fragments of emotion.
Laughter. Screams. Music. A name: "Daxel…"
> Who were these people?
Brand kept moving.
Then he heard it.
A soft, broken song.
Female. Human.
Not broadcasted. Not filtered. Real.
He followed it.
He reached a chamber carved from old world concrete — moss-covered tech, wires swallowed by time. And in the center, a group sat around a flickering campfire of crystal shards and broken drone parts.
Eyes turned toward him.
Some glowed faintly.
Some had marks, like him.
They didn't reach for weapons.
They stared.
One man stood up. Young. Bald. Scars along his jaw.
> "You're late," he said.
> "You know who I am?"
> "We felt you unlock the Shard last night. Half the sector glitched."
Brand stepped closer. "How many of us are there?"
The man glanced around.
> "Not enough."
They led him deeper into the hideout.
Paintings of the Undercode's symbols covered the walls — some glowing, some dripping. Stories were written in ink and light.
> "We're Dreambound," the girl beside him explained. "What's left of the souls the System couldn't fully rewrite."
Brand looked around — at the half-awake faces, the damaged tech, the hope barely flickering in their eyes.
> "Why haven't you left the city?"
> "Because we can't breach the exit gates without someone to hold the light."
Brand looked down at his hand — the glyph glowing.
> "You mean this?"
She nodded.
> "You're not just Dreambound. You're a Waker. The first one in decades."
Then the man returned, holding something wrapped in cloth.
> "She said to give you this."
He opened it.
A second Dream Shard.
Larger. More volatile.
Still warm — like it had just been pulled from a heartbeat.
Carved into the surface:
> "Trust no AI. Not even your own. The Grid has many eyes. But only one fear: you."