Ash and Vectors

Nova stared at the name on the Ascendent security badge for what seemed like hours, heart pounding in her ribs like the aftermath of a sprint.

Caelus knelt beside her, brushing dust off the coat. His jaw clenched. "We've been working with a ghost."

Calyx-Prime approached slowly, her other bodies watching their flanks with mirrored focus. "Not a ghost," she corrected. "A forgery. Whoever we've been talking to... it wasn't this man."

Nova looked up, dazed. "Then who the hell have we been taking orders from?"

Calyx's eyes snapped toward the ceiling. All three bodies stilled at once.

"A proximity alert has registered on my long range sensors," she said flatly. "It appears to be heavy ordnance, impact is imminent."

The words had barely left her mouth before the air began to tremble , not from within, but from above.

A sound approached - not mechanical, not even thunder. It was deeper. A kind of pressure wave that preceded reality itself, the kind of sound that warned you before it became sound at all. That's when the first bomb hit.

It struck a distant tier, but it might as well have landed right inside of their chest cavities. The world above them detonated downward, concrete and steel screaming in failure. Shockwaves collapsed the ceiling in sections, tearing through the structure like paper under floodwater.

Nova lost her footing, slammed shoulder-first into a rusted support beam. Sparks burst from her augment. Caelus shielded his face as an overhead panel tore free and crashed near his feet.

"We need to evac now!" Calyx barked, through two mouths in stereo, one already moving to reroute their path. They sprinted from their collapsing tomb and back through the facility from where they came. Corridors buckled under their boots. Heat vents burst from the walls. Another blast struck somewhere nearby, and the earth answered with a groan like it was tired of holding anything together.

When they broke into open air, the sun seemed obscene - a clean sky over death. Nova squinted upward, and saw the fighters.

Four of them, maybe six. Sleek, curved, shaped for speed but loaded for erasure. They flew low over the husks of buildings, entirely unbothered by the ghosts they stirred up below. "We'll never outrun them in the open!" Nova exclaimed.

"Then we'll head underground," Calyx said. "I'm scanning for tunnel access as we speak."

A pause. Then: "We've got two potential egresses. The closest is 220 meters. Downrange, minimal shielding, but better than -"

Another blast tore through a derelict tower to their left. Glass and steel jettisoned skyward like shrapnel fireworks.

"- standing here!" Calyx finished.

Then came the scream.

Not from a person, rather from the air itself. A bomber had broken formation and nosedived toward them. Nova glanced back mid-stride. "Incoming!"

The bomb missed, but it hit something else. The street behind them detonated upward, flinging concrete and girders like coins caught in a storm. She didn't see the fragment of debris until it was too late. A chunk of industrial plating - jagged, spinning, the size of a table - was hurtling straight toward her like a missile. Nova turned, caught in the dust, frozen.

Calyx-Prime didn't hesitate. She grabbed one of her twin bodies by the waist - sister saving sister - and hurled her like a spear. The clone flew like it was born to be a bullet, limbs tucked, body braced, and collided with Nova shoulder-first, knocking her sideways into a tangle of broken columns.

Without hesitation, the steel slab came down with a sound that cracked the world and crushed the clone in an instant. No scream. No flash. Just shattered porcelain, white paneling and gold circuitry, strewn across fractured pavement. The sound was final, and one of Calyx's minds went quiet - just like that.

Nova lay dazed while the world rang. She couldn't hear anything but static, residing not in her ears, but in her skull itself.

She blinked. Blood and dust stuck to her lashes. Her augments stuttered in her periphery, throwing null diagnostics and corrupted targeting overlays. She tried to sit up, but her ribs objected. Slowly, she turned toward the spot where the slab had fallen... but there wasn't much left.

Calyx's remains stretched out like like exposed nerves. One arm was outstretched, bent backward in a way no limb should be. Her faceplate - Calyx's face - was split jaggedly down the middle, lips parted, eyes dark. It was hard to look and breathe at the same time. Calyx hadn't screamed. Hadn't even flinched. She just saw the future and got in the way.

Calyx-Prime approached at a jog - faster than a human should move, but slower than she could have. The surviving twin slid to her knees beside the wreckage and didn't speak.

Not mourning. Just... registering. Nova met her gaze.

There was nothing in it. No anguish. No fury.

Just a nod.

A silent acceptance between beings who knew what sacrifice cost.

Nova lowered her head. Her chest shook, but no tears came. "I didn't even know which one she was."

Calyx-Prime looked away. "It doesn't matter," she said. "She knew who you were."

Nova blinked, barely able to do anything else. She looked at her surroundings, at the rubble-strewn corridor, at the sky filled with quick death, and the recognition on Caelus's face, before her eye caught something gleaming beneath the wreckage beside her. A polished chrome arm, glinting like a question mark.

She reached down, brushing the dust aside, gaze locked on the glinting chrome. There was no mistaking it. No way to deny the synthetic contours, the neural plate seams, the serial-etched augment housing. It was Lucius Ward. Nova's breath escaped her lungs like a prisonbreak. She blinked the dust from her eyes, expecting it to vanish, to recede into delusion, but it didn't. It was him.

"I used to stay up reading his dissertations," she thought, her metal voice barely audible over the crumbling city. "Memorized them. Argued with his citations in the margins. And now he's just..."

She trailed off.

Just here. Crushed under steel and rock and the ghosts of his own design.

She remembered how she used to defend him in debates - fresh-faced in the Praxelian R&D wing, her voice full of conviction. "No one else sees the future like he does," she once said. "We just need to catch up to him."

She remembered staying up for hours decoding his writing, not because she had to, but because it felt like scripture. The kind of brilliance you could grow into. Now, all she saw was what brilliance had cost. He wasn't prophecy. He wasn't perfection. He was a man in pieces. A failed god. A casualty of his own gospel. Her jaw clenched.

Was this the cost of every belief she'd once held? Of trusting blueprints more than blood?

The sky tore open with another scream, engines roaring. The ground shuddered, knocking loose gravel from above. Nova flinched, instinct pulling her body low as another shockwave thundered through the ruins. Reality snapped back into place, where she was still bleeding - and they were still under fire.

Nova shook herself out of the moment. "Help me get him out."

Caelus and Calyx-Prime were already moving, lifting slabs of twisted steel with augmented arms and polished fingers. The debris groaned as they strained, but the support beam wouldn't budge cleanly. "Hold it there - " Caelus grunted. He braced himself, then raised his hand, a soft pulse shimmering from his palm.

The rubble froze mid-settle, locked in a gentle stasis field like time itself had paused. Dust hung in the air like fog trapped in a bottle. Lucius opened his eyes.

Both of them.

He looked up at the circle of faces and smiled faintly. Then laughed. "Well, so much for my hiding spot."

Nova blinked. "You - what?"

Lucius exhaled through his nose, the grin still lingering. "I needed the bombing run to end. Figured the best way to avoid attention was to let the Spoke kill me for a while."

He sat up, smooth, unbothered. Not a single servo out of alignment.

Nova made a sound between a laugh and a groan. "You're unbelievable!"

"No," Lucius said, brushing dust off his coat, "I'm prepared. There's a difference."

She shook her head, grinning despite herself. For one absurd moment, she felt like the kid she used to be - arguing footnotes on neural lattice stability, quoting his treatises aloud in stairwells like scripture. Lucius Ward. In the flesh. Making jokes under falling skies.

But the levity didn't last.

Lucius's smile faded. His eyes scanned the horizon. Then the sky. The fighters were circling again.

"There's nowhere to run," he said flatly. "Not anymore."

Calyx-Prime tilted her head. "Are the underground options not viable?"

Lucius shook his head. "The subterranean routes have been compromised. Anywhere between radiation, collapse risk, the deeper paths are likely Echo-controlled, take your pick."

"Then what?" Nova asked. "You have a plan?"

Lucius nodded once. "There's one possibility."

He tapped the augment at his temple, activating his combat suite. "I can create a displacement barrier around us. Small radius. Dense protection. It won't stop time, but it'll bend physics for us enough to survive a saturated bombardment."

Caelus narrowed his eyes. "What's the power source for something like that?"

Lucius didn't answer at first. Then he looked up.

Not at them, but at one of Calyx's bodies. Calyx followed his gaze, unblinking.

"Hiding five is too many," he said softly. "Four we might manage."

The implication hung there like the radiation in the air.

Nova stiffened. "Are you serious? You want to use her -"

"She's not a 'her,'" Lucius corrected, voice quiet but unyielding. "She's a system, distributed. You know this. And it's one segment, in which powering the field could save all our lives."

Calyx-Prime didn't flinch. "Do it," she said. "Make it count."

Nova turned toward her, stunned. "And you're okay with this!?"

"Out of the three of them" Calyx replied. "this one has always been the most reckless."

She smiled - small, self-effacing, theatrical, even now.

"Frankly, it's the one I'll miss least."

Lucius nodded once. "Alright. Then we move fast."

Lucius moved with focus, the way a surgeon might prepare for a risky incision or a prophet polishing his altar. From beneath his coat, he unsheathed a curved data tether and began pulling lines from his armor's spine - thick power conduits, etched with old Ascendent glyphs. They hissed softly as they unfurled, tips crackling with charged plasma.

Calyx-Prime approached the silent clone. "My second frame's vitals are nominal," she said, voice subdued. "She's ready."

The drone gave no reply, but held her posture firm, chin high. A willing altar. Lucius pressed his palm to the center of her chest plate. It hissed open with a soft hydraulic release, revealing a pale, humming interior: synthetic lungs, folded capacitors, and a glowing primary conduit - her core.

Lucius connected two tethers to it. One for data. One for power. The drone trembled slightly, but not from fear.

"Stay close," Lucius ordered. "I need you all in proximity or the field collapses."

Nova stepped forward. Caelus moved to her right. Calyx-Prime to her left. They formed a tight arc around Lucius and the clone, shoulder to shoulder. Lucius closed his eyes, while the air around them began to crackle. A distortion shimmered in a faint sphere, visible only where dust caught its edge, like a lens made from magnetism and thought. The ground seemed to shudder as physics recoiled from whatever Lucius was shaping.

Then it took hold.

Weight vanished.

Not all at once, but in layers. First their boots stopped gripping the floor. Then their limbs went numb, as if sensation were retreating from the skin inward. Nova blinked, but her eyes didn't feel real. Her breath slowed. Sound thinned.

Then... nothing.

Not silence.

Not death.

Just a numb equilibrium, like being held inside a perfect, airless bell.

Time passed, but it was impossible to tell how long. They bore witness to the return of the bombers. Saw buildings collapse in waves, vaporized mid-frame. Churning wreckage - jagged spires, torn girders, molten glass - sliced straight through them, passing harmlessly like illusions. The displacement field didn't stop the world, it simply made them irrelevant to it.

Nova tried to speak, but her mouth didn't move. Tried to reach out, but her arms were elsewhere. They floated in the middle of the end of things, unreachable and untouched. The final detonation struck with ultimate, reverent finality. Then, silence. The bombers veered west, shrinking into the smoke.

Lucius opened one eye. "The field integrity is stable... dropping phase in 3, 2... "

Sensation returned like a rush of cold water. Nova stumbled, and hit the ground hard. Gravity returned like guilt. Calyx-Prime gasped, not in pain, as her system re-synchronized. Nova's eyes immediately went to the clone.

Her chest plate was dark now, inner glow fading, tremors subsiding.

"Wait - no," Nova said, crawling forward. "We can still - "

She grabbed at the tethers, trying to disconnect the power feed. The clone reached up, just barely -and placed a porcelain hand on Nova's.

They locked eyes.

No words.

Just recognition.

A choice made. A final transfer.

And then... the light behind her eyes went dark, her Hand slackened, body still.

Nova stood motionless, her arms limp at her sides, breathing hard. The wind moved softly through what was left of the Spoke. Just wind. No scream of engines, no impacts, devoid of laughter. She looked down at the final clone's remains. The porcelain was cold now. The gold filament, dull.

Two gone. Two minds crushed to silence because one mad machine decided his existence was more important than anyone else's. Her fists clenched. She turned to face the blackened horizon, jaw tight.

"I'm going to kill him," she said. Her voice was quiet. Flat. But it carried like a vow. "Not just stop him. Not neutralize, not contain. I'm going to crush him. I want him to feel every second of what he's done, and I want him to understand it before he dies."

Lucius raised an eyebrow as he powered down the displacement suite. "Spoken like a proper Ascendent," he mused.

Nova turned her head slightly, not quite glaring - but not looking away either.

"I'm not one of you."

Lucius smirked. "You will be. Or something better. Natural selection is funny like that."

Calyx-Prime stood motionless beside the wreckage of her fallen body. She didn't speak. Didn't move. One hand rested at her side, the other loose and open. If she mourned, it was somewhere inside, somewhere deep, where no one else could see. Caelus broke the silence.

"What now? How are we ever going to find our way back from here?"

Lucius exhaled slowly. The last trace of firelight flickered off his chrome arm. "We head east. There's a corridor I know, buried deep. Pre-collapse. It's the only way out of this sector that Echo won't have locked."

"What's there?" Caelus asked.

Lucius looked at him, then at the others. "I can't say. Not yet." He scanned their faces. "But you'll have to trust me. If we stay here, we die. That's all I can offer you right now."

Nova looked at Calyx.

Calyx gave the faintest nod. "If it's the only path forward, it's forward enough."

Nova glanced down one last time at the broken shell beneath the steel. She reached out and, gently, almost reverently - closed the clone's eyes. Then they walked.

The Dead Ring stretched around them in all directions, a crucible of ash and ruin. Nothing moved but heat and the ghosts of failed architecture. Once-sprawling installations now lay in skeletal contortions, curled in on themselves like creatures that had died mid-prayer.

Nova tried not to breathe too deeply. The air stung, not like fire, but like forgetting. The coolant fog had ignited in the blast, lit up like vaporized neon, incinerating everything. Drones, concrete, memory. The Spoke was nothing but white ash and shadow. She couldn't even tell where they'd fought. The landscape was too clean. Too gone.

They marched through it for what felt like hours, every footstep was muffled in the dust. Time there even folded in on itself, until Lucius lifted his hand.

"Here," he said.

No landmark. No doorway. Just a torn stretch of dead latticework and scorched ground.

Nova narrowed her eyes. "Here?"

Lucius nodded once.

"This is where we stop. The rest... is underneath."

Lucius knelt. No hesitation. No command. Just motion. Fluid, practiced.

He pressed his palm to the scorched ground, fingers splaying out across ash and glass-fused soil. The air around his body began to shimmer, not like heat, but like distance warping. A faint ripple passed across his skin, each augment lighting in sequence. Then, with a low surge of static and the smell of ionized air, He vanished.

Just... blinked out. Like a projection switching inputs. Caelus raised an eyebrow. "I think he just left."

Nova frowned. "He wouldn't."

They waited. Ten seconds. Twenty. Seconds became uncertain, terrible minutes before the ground shuddered beneath them, not lifeless after all. A deep mechanical groan rose from below - ancient, resentful, like the earth itself hadn't been spoken to in years. The terrain split along a seam so straight it looked like it had always been there, hidden beneath the ash.

Panels peeled back. Dust hissed upward in jets. Something massive and embedded began to rise: a small craft, matte black with hull pockmarks, mounted on a segmented rail. Not military, not commercial, rather something built in secrecy. Caelus approached first, running his hand along the edge.

"This is small," he said, his tone flat. "You knew we'd have to leave her behind, didn't you?"

Lucius's voice came from a hatch as it opened. "I know more than you think." He stepped into view, brushing ash off his shoulder, that faint smile returning. "My life is a constant game of chess. not only do I have have to plan moves in advance, but I'm often not even playing on the same board."

Caelus didn't smile back. The three of them filed in. The interior was tighter than it looked - cramped seats, curved restraint harnesses. But it was a cockpit built for vertical tension, not horizontal glide.

Nova looked around. "You sure this thing flies?"

Calyx was already checking the readouts, her fingertips ghosting across the control interface. "It doesn't pitch properly," she said. "This frame isn't pressurized for aerial ascent. This isn't a launch vehicle."

Lucius finished buckling into the pilot's cradle. "Correct."

Calyx turned to face him. "Then how are we taking off?"

Lucius's hands didn't stop moving. "We aren't."

The cabin lights dimmed. A low hum rose beneath them. The entire pod shifted backward, the rail system pulling them into tension like a bowstring being drawn, mechanisms groaning louder as they hit maximum compression.

Nova leaned forward, half-bracing. "Lucius - can you tell us the plan now?"

Lucius didn't look back. "I'm the only one who knows what we're about to experience. This is a failsafe, a sanctuary pod, designed to launch when the Crown Array is compromised. Something no one but I know exists."

He tapped in a final sequence. External clamps disengaged with a bone-deep thunk. Lucius continued. "The Array was built with certain safeguards, analog mechanisms no one can hack. They're non-negotiable. If it detects this craft in atmosphere, it triggers an emergency phase-transport."

"Meaning...?" Nova asked.

"Meaning," Lucius said, smiling just slightly, "we're about to get home the hard way."

The last clamp released with a deep metallic snap. The pod shuddered. Calyx's eyes adjusted. "Trajectory primed. Our structural integrity is at 76 percent. No return guidance programmed."

Lucius didn't answer. There was nothing left to say. A sound built beneath them, low at first, like tectonic plates turning, then sharper, rawer. The rail beneath them was winding tighter, compressing potential energy until it howled in its restraints. Nova's fingers curled around her harness. Caelus dropped his chin and closed his eyes. And then -

Release.

The rail snapped forward, and the thrusters ignited. The pod detonated into motion, a blur of acceleration so sudden it folded sound around them. The walls vibrated like a tuning fork. Metal screamed. The dust outside the viewport fractured into prismatic halos as they pierced the lower atmosphere like a bullet breaching bone.

Nova couldn't breathe. Couldn't even think. There was no fear or pain, only velocity. Then - everything fell away. The resistance dropped off like a curtain pulled mid-scene. Gravity forgot what to do. They were airborne.

Above them, the sky unfolded. Not blue, but gray-gold, smeared with old coolant vapor and high-altitude lens flares. The ruins below shrank to a smudge, barely a memory. Inside the pod, the weightlessness shifted into something more profound, not a floating sensation, but nearly displaced from cause and effect. Nova stared out the viewport as ash curled off the shell like skin shearing from a chrysalis.

She tried to speak, but there were no words to say. Her body knew the fall. Her mind was somewhere just ahead of it. And then -

The world broke.

No sound, no light, no impact.

Just a sudden compression of reality itself, like being jammed through a slit in existence and folded along seams you never knew you had. The air inside the pod went black, then white, then static. Nova's vision shattered into pieces, each frame a different color, a different truth. She saw herself three seconds ago. Then five seconds from now. Then,

Silence.

They slammed into the Crown Array. Not physically, but casually. The pod reappeared in a sealed chamber of dull steel and humming ceramic, surrounded by old-world machinery and mechanical catch rails already reacting to their arrival. These safeguards hadn't fired in years... but they fired now. The pod's systems vented pressure while the lights recalibrated. Lucius opened his eyes.

They were home.