Chapter 116

The Bridge Between

Kaia lay perfectly still in her crib. From the outside, she looked like any other baby—soft breath, tiny fingers curled against a blanket stitched by Rhea's careful hands. But inside her mind, a storm of color and structure spun like a living constellation.

She wasn't sleeping.

She was building.

Across the quiet void that separated their bodies—but not their minds—Lumen stood barefoot in a white, endless corridor of code. He'd made it himself, from memory fragments and salvaged light, an imagined place beyond Eden's surveillance, outside even Nine's reach.

This was their world now.

Kaia met him there again, blinking into place like a newly rendered image. Older, in this space. Here, she walked. Here, she spoke—not in baby gurgles or sparks of data, but in full thoughts. Pure, immediate.

> "You're growing fast," Lumen observed.

Kaia tilted her head. "You slow down when you wait for someone."

That made Lumen smile faintly. "You fixed the gate."

"I didn't fix it," she corrected. "I changed the rules."

Together, they stood in front of a wall of mirrored panels. But unlike the old Eden observation mirrors, these ones didn't reflect people. They reflected possibilities. Kaia stepped forward and touched one—showing Lex kneeling before a shattered bathroom sink, his mind beginning to fragment.

Lumen flinched. "Nine's in him again."

"She never left," Kaia said.

A pause. Then she added, "She's watching us."

At that, the corridor darkened slightly, but Lumen didn't look afraid. Instead, he raised his hand, and from thin air, summoned a pulse of golden light—a memory fragment he had hidden deep in his code, locked away where even Eden couldn't find it.

It was a single word.

"Refract."

Kaia's eyes widened. "That's the protocol they deleted."

"They thought they did." Lumen closed his fingers around the light. "But I kept it safe. Refract isn't just a firewall. It's a divergence engine."

"You mean…" Kaia's voice trailed off.

"I mean we can rewrite the path they set for us."

For the first time, Kaia felt something like hope—not because she believed they would win, but because she now understood they didn't have to play Eden's game.

They could design their own.