The pod cut through the sky like a ghost bullet, sleek and silent above the rust-choked ruins of Old Quarter 7. Inside, Kara clutched her brother’s hand, her other gripping the pod’s control panel as though the machine could sense fear and might fall apart if she let go.

Dalen was trembling beside her.

Not from cold — the pod was climate-sealed. Not from pain — though his body was weak, only hours free from the cloning fluid. No, he trembled from something worse: recognition without belonging.

He remembered everything.

And yet none of it felt real.

“I saw him,” Dalen whispered. “He was me. And I was… watching myself move, talk, kill—”

“Stop,” Kara said, voice like steel. “He was not you.”

He looked at her, searching. “Then who am I?”

“You’re the one who got out,” she said.

The pod rattled as it neared their landing coordinates: deep in the overgrown husks of the Undercity, where surveillance didn’t reach and the Eternal Families rarely bothered to look.

Kara tapped into a local beacon on a scrambler relay left behind by old revolutionaries. Static washed over the pod’s comms, followed by a broken voice: “—Sanctuary code accepted. Proceed to Grid Zero.”

They landed in what used to be a parking garage — now swallowed in moss, neon vines, and graffiti from a generation of the forgotten. It wasn’t paradise. But it wasn’t death.

That counted for something.

Dalen struggled with the weight of his new body.

Even weeks after the escape, he moved like his limbs belonged to someone else — which, in a sense, they did. His memories returned in flashes: riding a bike with Kara down a flooded street; sneaking into a VR parlor to fake retinal scans; bleeding from the mouth after a cop bot slammed him into a wall for “walking unauthorized.”

But none of it felt anchored. Not until he saw Kara laughing — real, ragged, human laughter — as she helped a kid fix a hacked drone wing near their underground hideout.

That laugh pulled him back from the edge.

“You think we’ll ever stop running?” he asked her one night, sitting around a heat coil powered by scavenged battery cells.

Kara stared into the blue fire. “We’re not running,” she said. “We’re building.”

“A rebellion?”

She shook her head. “A proof. That you can be born, live, and die once — and still matter.”

But the towers weren’t dead.

Not fully.

Genesis Tower had burned. But the Eternal Families were not centralized. Redundancies, backups, blacksite labs — all remained, like cancerous nodes buried deep in the bones of Neon City.

One of them — Caelis, the Preservant who had stolen Dalen’s body — had survived the EMP blast.

Fragments of his consciousness had been preserved in satellite memory caches. His resurrection came at the cost of a hundred other cloned minds sacrificed to stabilize his core identity.

He emerged from the shadows of the burned tower, weaker, fractured… angry.

“The body was taken,” he hissed to his remaining followers. “The imprint severed.”

One of the engineers flinched. “The transfer was incomplete—”

“You let the flesh escape,” Caelis growled. “But it will return.”

He raised a trembling hand and activated the Resonance Index, a tracking system embedded in the organic neural stem of every advanced vessel — including Dalen’s.

“Find him.”

In the Undercity, Kara and Dalen weren’t alone.

A growing group of refugees — former workers, failed vessels, escaped synthetics, even aging former scientists with guilty pasts — began to trickle in, drawn by rumors of the “siblings who fled the tower.” Word spread of a girl who broke the glass. Of a boy who escaped his own clone.

Kara called their collective The Rust Choir.

They weren’t soldiers. Not yet.

But they remembered what it was to be forgotten. That was power.

They used scrap tech, illegal AI fragments, stolen Preservant blueprints. They modified drones into patrol scouts, turned heat coils into fusion accelerators, and transformed crumbling subway tunnels into labs. All underground. All quiet.

Until the signal came.

A pulse — sharp, clean, inhuman — cut across every comm line they had.

Dalen collapsed.

Screaming.

Caelis’s signal was a summons — a violent call to overwrite.

He didn’t want Dalen’s body back. He wanted it destroyed. Erased. He couldn’t tolerate the existence of a self he no longer controlled.

Kara held Dalen down as his body convulsed, veins glowing faintly beneath the skin with residual biocode.

“Stay with me,” she whispered.

“I see… him… in my head,” Dalen choked. “He’s inside, Kara.”

They raced to isolate the signal and traced it back — not to a tower, but a mobile imprint drone skimming the outskirts of the Undercity.

Caelis was hunting them personally.

Kara made a decision.

They wouldn’t run again.

They would fight.

With help from a rogue scientist named Miren — a former neuro-mapper from Sector 3 who defected after her daughter was harvested for a vessel — they created a trap.

The plan was reckless: allow the signal to draw Caelis’s drone into the heart of the Undercity, then use a neural mirror protocol to bounce the imprint signal back into its source — infecting Caelis with his own overwritten memories, corrupted and destabilized by Dalen’s growing humanity.

The bait was Dalen himself.

“I want to do it,” he said. “I want him to feel what I feel — confusion, pain, love.”

Kara kissed his forehead.

“He won’t survive it.”

“I know.”

When the drone arrived, it came not as a weapon but as a mirror — a floating orb of pure light and data, whispering promises.

“Return,” it said in Caelis’s voice. “You are me. You belong to me.”

Dalen stood in front of it, shirtless, eyes glowing faintly with neural circuitry.

“I’m not yours,” he said.

Then he triggered the loop.

The pulse struck. The mirror flared.

And Caelis screamed — not in the drone, but everywhere.

The feedback loop broadcast his agony across the towers. Preservant servers crashed. Clones seized. Entire AI command chains unraveled as one of their gods broke from within.

The mirror cracked.

So did Caelis.

Weeks later, the towers were silent.

Preservants had gone dark. Some died from the feedback. Others fled to orbitals. The city no longer obeyed their control.

The streets flickered with something new: absence. And into that vacuum stepped the Rust Choir.

Not as rulers — but as humans.

Dalen still bore scars.

Some physical. Some invisible.

He sometimes twitched at night, dreaming in stolen memories. Kara never left his side.

They walked together to the edge of a bridge over the neon rivers where clone waste used to flow.

Dalen stared at his reflection.

It smiled.

And for once — he smiled back.