The tunnels blurred past him.
Kairo didn't know how long they'd been running — minutes? Hours? The air tasted of old electricity and forgotten code.
Behind them, the Core Reaper still hunted.
Not chasing.
Tracking.
Every time they slowed, it grew closer.
Astra led them into a wider corridor — lined with abandoned maintenance terminals. She skidded to a stop at a dead-end where the wall was sealed by a heavy, corroded hatch.
"We have to drift through," she said, panting.
Kairo frowned.
"Drift? I can barely stand."
She didn't smile.
"It's not your body that needs to move." "It's your memory."
He stared at her.
The spiral sigil she gave him buzzed faintly in his pocket.
"Close your eyes," Astra instructed.
"Find the part of you that isn't... here."
"The part that's already moving."
Kairo hesitated.
The Reaper's distortion signal hummed louder now — glitching the lights above them.
He squeezed the sigil disk tight.
Closed his eyes.
Breathed.
At first, all he felt was pain.
Tired muscles. Adrenaline. Fear.
But underneath it —
something loose.
A pull.
Not forward. Not backward. Sideways.
A feeling like… stepping into a memory you haven't lived yet.
His hand brushed against his jacket zipper.
Accidentally activating something hidden in the lining.
Click.
Something inside the jacket hummed.
A small chip — no bigger than a thumbnail — ejected from the seam, landing in his palm.
It glowed faintly with old courier code.
[COURIER CODE 7: EMERGENCY ANCHOR ACTIVATED]
Astra's eyes widened.
"You still have your anchor key?"
Kairo blinked.
"I didn't even know it was there."
She grabbed his wrist.
"Courier-7s weren't just delivery boys, Kairo."
"They were Layer Binders."
The wall shimmered.
Reality bent — folding around the chip's signal.
For a second, Kairo saw hundreds of possible corridors splintering off this one — different versions of this exact place, collapsed timelines flickering in and out like broken reflections.
Astra pulled him through the nearest fracture.
They stumbled into a maintenance shaft — somewhere new.
Somewhere… cleaner.
Where the Core Reaper's signal didn't reach.
The door behind them sealed automatically.
The hum of the Reaper faded — blocked out by the drift fold.
For now.
Kairo dropped to one knee, breathing hard.
"What… the hell just happened?"
Astra crouched in front of him.
"You jumped."
"Jumped?"
"Between Layer echoes. Just for a second."
He stared at her.
"No one ever told me I could do that."
Astra shrugged.
"Maybe they didn't want you to know."
She tapped the emergency chip still glowing in his hand.
"Courier-7 designation wasn't random. It was a prototype."
"They were experimenting — trying to create messengers that could slip between unstable Layers."
"Why?"
"To keep memory alive."
Kairo looked down at the chip.
So small.
So… normal.
But somehow, it had just saved both their lives.
Astra stood and dusted herself off.
"The Core didn't just fracture the world, Kairo. It fractured the people in it."
"Some of us… were designed to remember the wrong versions of reality."
She offered him a hand.
He took it.
Stood.
Felt something inside himself settle — a click, deep in his spine.
He wasn't just an accident anymore.
He was a courier of broken worlds.
A carrier of lost memories.
Maybe always had been.
The sigil disc buzzed again in his pocket.
A faint voice inside it whispered:
"You have seven deliveries left."
Kairo frowned.
"Seven?"
Astra smiled — the first real smile he'd seen from her.
It was small.
Sad.
But real.
"Then we'd better hurry."
She turned toward the end of the shaft, pulling up a map filled with impossible roads — streets from dead Layers overlapping the real city like ghost veins.
Kairo followed.
For the first time, not because he had to.
But because he wanted to.
Somewhere out there, seven fragments waited.
Seven pieces of him.
Seven impossible deliveries.
And maybe, just maybe —
if he found them all—
He'd finally understand why he had been allowed to survive at all.