Refraction Point

They followed the shard.

Or rather, it led them—its embedded signal pulsing like a living thread, guiding them deeper into the outskirts of what used to be the Data-Arc belt. The map embedded in Vela's anchor pointed to a place once erased from all charts: Gilt Root Station.

"What is this place?" Althea asked, poring over the memory-map from her Karnyx. "It's not even archived in deprecated system logs."

"It's deliberately absent," Fry murmured. "Which means someone made it disappear on purpose."

Patch popped open a ration bar, chewed, and added, "Love a good cursed destination. Did we pack holy water? Sage? Personal therapists?"

They crossed a field of collapsed logic pylons—structures that once governed local recursion boundaries, now reduced to brittle spires that hummed broken lullabies.

"Don't step on the red moss," Fry warned, as one patch flickered and emitted an electromagnetic wail.

"Wasn't planning on it," Patch replied, hopping over a cluster of twitching spores.

Zayn barely heard them. His eyes were fixed ahead. The shard pulsed brighter with every step. Its signal wasn't just a beacon—it was pulling something. Drawing forgotten memory threads out from the earth itself.

"I think it's waking something," he whispered.

They reached Gilt Root Station by nightfall.

Or what remained of it.

The facility was buried—its upper structure long since collapsed, overgrown with recursion-scorched vines that moved unnaturally in the dark. But the entrance was still intact: a narrow staircase etched into the underside of a ravine wall, pulsing with dim golden glyphs.

Patch peered down the stairs and whistled. "Anyone else feel like we're about to get eaten by poetic metaphors?"

Zayn nodded once. "Light it up."

Althea activated her Karnyx. The glyphs responded, brightening and unlocking with a mechanical hiss. The stairs unfolded further downward.

They descended into silence.

No ambient hum. No echo.

Just stillness—like the Real itself was holding its breath.

At the bottom of the stairwell lay a massive vault door, half open. Symbols carved around it shifted in ways the eye couldn't quite follow.

Fry stared at them. "These aren't recursion sigils. They're older. Pre-system. Possibly from the Proto-Thread Era."

Patch blinked. "We had a Proto-Thread Era?"

Fry answered grimly, "We weren't supposed to know that we did."

Zayn approached the vault door and touched it.

Images flashed through his mind.

Machines building themselves.

Memories with no origin.

Names he didn't know—but felt.

And then—a scream.

A child's voice. Then silence.

He staggered back.

Althea caught him. "What did you see?"

Zayn's face was pale. "Something's still inside."

They stepped through the vault.

Inside was a memory containment chamber. Rows of suspended threads floated in stasis—fragments of people, places, even feelings. None of them had timestamps. None were labeled.

Fry stepped toward one. "These are raw consciousness remnants. Unanchored. There's no metadata at all."

Zayn stood at the center of the room.

The shard in his hand vibrated wildly.

A single containment thread ignited in front of them.

It shimmered into shape—a blurred form of a girl. Twelve? Thirteen? Her face was hidden behind static.

Zayn froze. His voice dropped to a whisper.

"...I know her."

Patch tilted his head. "That's... new."

Althea frowned. "Who is she?"

"I don't know," Zayn said. "But she's the one I heard screaming."

The girl stepped closer. Her form began to stabilize. Her eyes—still flickering—locked onto Zayn.

She raised her hand and pointed at him.

Then, her voice, clear and cutting:

"You left me behind."