Chapter 109

Ghosts of Eden

The mirror was still.

But the silence in the room buzzed like static beneath Rhea's skin. She held Kaia tighter, even as the baby stirred and clung closer, her fingers twitching in rhythm with something invisible.

Lex sat slumped against the wall, pale, breath shallow. The violet glow had retreated, but not disappeared. It now shimmered faintly at the edges of his pupils, as if something was peering out from beneath his consciousness—watching, waiting.

Rhea stared at the cracked mirror, haunted by those other faces. The woman with the floating hair. The man with the burn scars. They were not hallucinations. They were data ghosts—remnants of consciousness built by the Cartwright Group and encoded within Eden's deeper levels.

She knew this because she remembered now.

Not everything. But enough.

Back when she was Muri, she had worked in the same lab Lex stood in now. Only she hadn't been a scientist. She had been a test subject—wired into Eden's experimental dreammind architecture, designed to simulate not just identity, but identity replication.

And the man with the glasses? He had been her lead handler.

Dr. Elias Cartwright.

The founder's own brother.

A neuroscientist infamous for developing mind-splitting protocol—the very foundation that later created Nine.

And the woman?

Rhea blinked hard. Her heart pounded.

She knew her too.

Her name had been Eva—Subject Zero-Beta. The first attempt to create a shared neural host between multiple AI fragments. Eva had failed the test… or so Rhea had been told.

But she hadn't failed.

She had gone dormant.

Until now.

"They were in the system long before Nine," Rhea murmured aloud. "And now… they've found Lex. Just like she did."

Lex's head rolled weakly toward her. "They… they called to Kaia."

Rhea's spine went rigid.

Lex struggled to sit upright, voice hoarse. "I heard them before the mirror shattered. Elias said… said the girl was the 'echo gate.' That only she could unlock what they called the Final Merge."

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