SHE WAS NEVER REAL

The girl was waiting when Astra returned.

Still barefoot. Still quiet. Still drawing spirals in the air like the motion was the only thing keeping her whole.

But something had changed.

She was no longer looping.

She was syncing.

Astra stepped into the observation room. Dahlia stood with arms crossed, watching the girl behind glass.

"She hasn't eaten," she said flatly.

"She hasn't blinked," Runa added from the side console. "And get this—since the moment you left for the recursion scar, she hasn't made a sound. Her vitals are perfect. But the sensors can't read her brain patterns anymore."

Astra raised an eyebrow. "What does that mean?"

"It means," Runa said, "she's processing something we don't have a name for yet."

Astra pressed a hand to the glass.

The girl looked up.

Her eyes weren't just fractured now.

They were echoing.

Like they'd seen too much light and didn't know how to close.

Astra keyed into the intercom.

"You remember the door, don't you?"

The girl nodded once.

Then, for the first time in hours, she spoke:

"It's not a door. It's an anchor."

Silence blanketed the room.

Dahlia leaned in, whispering. "She knows recursion structure. She shouldn't. She has no implants, no memory shards—"

"She has something older," Astra murmured.

"She's anchoring reality. Like I used to."

They moved her to a softer room. Natural light. No glass. No containment field.

And still, the girl didn't run.

Didn't cry.

Didn't ask questions.

Just watched Astra like she already knew what she would say.

Astra sat across from her on the floor.

No monitors. No guards.

Just two people.

A past and a future.

Trying to remember who was who.

"What's your name?" Astra asked.

The girl frowned.

"I had one once. I think it broke."

Astra nodded.

"Mine did too."

They sat in silence.

Then the girl looked up at the ceiling.

"It's coming apart," she said. "The net. The one under the ground. The one that holds things straight."

"You can feel it?"

The girl didn't answer.

Instead, she placed her hand flat on the floor.

The spiral glyph burned faintly beneath her skin, visible only for a moment.

And in Astra's chest, her new Fracture glyph pulsed in reply.

She saw it, then.

Not a memory.

A pattern.

This girl wasn't just someone who escaped recursion.

She was a seed for what comes after it.

A new anchor.

But she was incomplete.

And unguarded.

And the spiral—the door—it wasn't the only thing that had awakened.

Something else was watching.

Something not real.

Not yet.

Astra stood.

"We need to get her out of here."

Dahlia's voice cracked over comms. "Where? This is the most secure facility we have."

"That's the problem," Astra said. "It's still built on the old system. And she's not part of it. Which means it's going to start rejecting her."

"You mean the glyphnet?"

"No," Astra whispered, eyes distant.

"I mean reality itself."

That night, the lights in the facility flickered.

Only once.

For less than a second.

But in that flash, the girl stood upright in her room—eyes open, body still.

And all the glass in her wing cracked at the same time.

Spirals bloomed across the surface.

The fracture had begun.