The storm rolled in just before dawn, the air electric, heavy with the scent of ozone and jasmine. Phoenix jolted upright in bed, heart pounding, her breath clouding in the chill. For a moment, she didn’t know where she was.
Then she remembered the dream:
Wires. Static. Herself — eyes glowing gold, hands pressed against glass. Screaming.
Her commlink buzzed.
Nolan: “The crypt’s active. Something breached La Grotte Muette. Meet me there. Now.”
Nolan’s message shook Maya out of bed too. By the time Phoenix arrived at her loft, Maya already had leyline data scrolling across her holo-table.
“Somebody cracked that place open with a resonance burst,” Maya said, grimacing. “Not just magic — technomancy. And it left a ripple in both planes.”
Sam arrived moments later, bleary-eyed but alert. “We’ve got chatter. Nouvelle Horizons is mobilizing. Their ‘emergency response team’ is headed into the bayou.”
Phoenix barely heard them. Her fingers brushed the glowing topography. Something about the pulse was... familiar. Not just the energy signature. The shape of it. A spiral within a spiral.
La Grotte Muette sat half-drowned in mud and moss, older than any colonial map. Limestone carved with glyphs no living scholar had translated. This wasn’t a ruin — it was a relic. A warning.
The crypt was breached.
A charred sigil smoldered at the entrance: a spiral of ash and burn. Phoenix staggered as her vision flickered.
“This is me,” she murmured.
Nolan nodded grimly. “Not you exactly. But something born from the same fire.”
Before they could move deeper, gunfire erupted from the trees. Nouvelle Horizons’ black-ops squad — armored, silent — opened fire.
Sam dove behind a tree, returning fire. Maya launched a resonance pulse, scattering the drones overhead. Phoenix reached into the leyline beneath them, twisting light and sound until the swamp shimmered like a heat mirage.
It was just enough.
The containment chamber was broken. Binding circles fractured. The air buzzed with the aftershocks of too much magic forced through too small a space.
Phoenix stepped into the room, and a vision slammed into her mind:
She was inside a tank. Or someone was. Her face — crying, glitching, angry. A scream choked in fluid.
Nolan steadied her.
“They didn’t just find a shard,” he said. “They activated it. And shaped it.”
Phoenix’s hands shook. “They made another me.”
Outside, the NovaH squad pulled back. Not defeated — called off. The mission wasn’t extraction. It was delivery.
Maya tapped into a burst data stream, pale as a ghost. “They already moved someone. Two hours ago.”
Sam exhaled slowly. “They took her. Or it. Or you.”
Phoenix stood in the broken circle. Her reflection blinked at her from the wet stone floor, shifting and uncertain.
“It wasn’t a copy,” she whispered. “It was... someone.”
Back in Maya’s loft, the monitors buzzed with filtered data. One final feed decrypted.
A woman — Phoenix’s face, Phoenix’s walk — stepped calmly through the halls of a corporate facility.
The timestamp: Two hours ago.
“She’s out there,” Maya said quietly.
Phoenix stared at the screen. Then turned away.
“Then it’s time we meet.”
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