Diverging Paths
Lysa stood beneath a crumbling overpass, watching the Sanctuary glyph flicker on a nearby wall.
She had traced it back to this place—Sector Twelve.
A dead zone.
No surveillance.
No memory taps.
Exactly where someone like Elior would plant his roots.
"He's spreading like mold," she muttered into her earpiece.
A voice replied:
"Permission to extract targets?"
She hesitated.
"No. Let them grow. I want to see what type of minds follow him."
"You're delaying protocol."
"I'm upgrading it."
Echoes in the Mindscape
Meanwhile, Elior sat in trance.
Around him, five Sanctuary members linked in memory resonance—an unstable technique that could fuse moments of truth into shared vision.
The mindscape trembled.
Memories overlapped.
They saw a dying mother whispering in a language no one taught her.
A burning library.
The face of a boy who wasn't supposed to exist.
And… a corridor of eyes.
Always watching.
Always forgetting.
"They've installed fear directly into the architecture," Elior said, voice cold.
"Then let's tear it down," Kesh whispered.
A Test of Belief
Later that night, Elior met with a small cluster of new recruits in the sewer sanctuary.
They had doubts.
Fear. Trauma.
Even guilt.
"What if this is another trap?" one girl asked. "Another system pretending to offer freedom?"
Elior didn't respond with comfort.
He responded with silence.
Then he stood and pressed his palm to the wall—triggering a burst of raw glyph-light, flooding the space with shifting echoes.
Fragments of every memory they had buried.
"I don't offer safety," he said.
"I offer a mirror."
He stepped back.
"Only when you see what they stole… can you decide who you are."
Lysa's Move
High above, Lysa watched from a drone feed.
Expression unreadable.
"He's not radicalizing them," she said.
"Then what is he doing?" her handler asked.
She paused.
"He's un-making them. Erasing their programming. Letting them rewrite from scratch."
"And you think that's worse?"
"I think that's unstoppable."
She disconnected and walked into the shadows.
But not before leaving a message etched in the memory field of one sleeper agent.
One word, glowing in red:
"Soon."