CHAPTER 122: PERSISTENT ECHOES OF THE PAST

The silence didn’t feel pure or calm.

It was heavy, as if all the sounds from before had been shoved down and buried, yet still clung to the air, refusing to leave. It pressed against the space around him, wrapping itself over the ruins of what had just happened.

Above, the strings of The Fork—once alive, pulled tight like veins of light—now hung slack and faded, disappearing into the hidden sky.

Somewhere far off, something was still burning. Kaito couldn’t tell if it was the world’s code unraveling or just the echo of fire smoldering inside his own chest.

Nyra stood a short distance away, her arms wrapped loosely around herself. She didn’t actually shake, but the way she held her body made it seem as though she might. Her eyes weren’t on him—they were staring past his shoulder, fixed on something he couldn’t see.

When Kaito turned to look, there was nothing there. Only the warped lines of the Threadscape slowly settling, twisting and folding until they returned to their usual shapes.

They had made it through. At least, that’s what the system would probably say. The Fork was steady again, the invasion pushed back, and both of them were still standing. It was supposed to mean victory.

But Kaito had long since abandoned the idea of survival as triumph.

He took a step toward Nyra, his boots dragging through the ash-like residue that coated the floor. It clung to the seams of his gloves, marking him with gray smears. He thought about brushing it away, but the act felt too small—too much like pretending he could erase what had happened.

"You’re hurt," he said quietly.

She didn’t answer. Not right away. Her head tilted, just slightly, like she’d heard him from far away and was only now walking back toward the sound. "I’m fine."

The lie was soft but it stuck like glass in his ears.

He took her arm, his fingers wrapping around the white warmth of her flesh. The contact made her flinch back—not in pain, but in something else, as if the contact reminded her that she was still tied here, to this era.

Kaito released his hand.

The Fork around them was reconstructing itself. The broken, splintered paths were sewing themselves back together, threads spanning space, trying to hide the fact that something had been torn wide asunder.

Light far away flared over a horizon that did not exist in the world. It was beautiful in a way that unsettled him. Beauty here was apt to be the cover for something dangerous.

They should have been moving. Procedure had said they were to take the node, sweep it, ensure there was no lingering Dominion code.

But they did not budge.

The retinal picture of what they had just seen—what they had done—was weighing in their bodies.

Kaito recalled the voices that had seeped out during the battle, the half-formed shapes of things that couldn’t possibly speak. He had heard one of them shout out his name, not his handle. His real name.

That was something you couldn’t get out of your head.

He broke the silence himself. "We can’t stay here."

Nyra nodded, but did not shift her position. Her eyes eventually dropped from that make-believe point above his shoulder to the gray mud at their feet. "You know what it felt like, don’t you?"

He didn’t ask her what she meant.

"Yes," he replied. "It’s the same."

It was happening again. The same feeling, the same weight. Nyra didn’t need to say anything—Kaito already knew. He had felt it before.

Back at the Fork. Back when they had clawed their way out of the Abyss. Back when neither of them yet understood what the price of moving forward would truly be.

That memory clung to him—the heavy dampness that filled the chest after a battle you should never have survived.

It wasn’t the kind of heaviness that came from exhaustion, but the kind that left a mark deep inside, like water soaking into stone. Surviving hadn’t felt like victory then, and it didn’t now.

It was more like carrying fragments of the enemy with you, lodged where you couldn’t remove them. You didn’t choose it, and you didn’t want it, but it stayed anyway.

"You should rest," he said. It was a futile gesture.

"So should you." She said.

He almost smiled. Almost.

The strings beneath their feet transformed, re-writing themselves into a thimbleful.

The Fork was irritated. It wished to rid itself of them.

Kaito wondered if the system had discovered to detest human silence, or if it simply recognized when a battlefield had become obsolete.

Nyra did move forward at last. Cautiously, as though she was feeling each strand to ensure that it would not break. She reached his elbow without looking at him—simply stared straight ahead, into where the road fell away into white fog.

"Do you ever think about it?" She asked.

He waited.

"About what we were. before all this." He said.

It wasn’t a wistful one. There was no softness to it. If anything, it was colored with something like accusation—not directed at him, but at the fact that they had ever had a "before" to lose.

"I try not to," he admitted.

Nyra’s mouth curled into something that was not a smile. "You’re better at that than me."

They started walking. Their footprints vanished at once, the Fork pulling it in like it wouldn’t bother to leave a trace of them remaining.

Kaito kept his eyes ahead, but his mind betrayed him, spilling pieces of memory he had isolated. Sunlight on his face, from a life that no longer wanted him. Nyra’s laughter—different then, wilder, unshaped by the rough edges of living.

And then, for the first time, she’d seen him here, in this place, and recognized not her brother, but the Eclipse Reaver.

The path wound difficult to one side, leading them down into a lower thread-layer. The air was thicker here, filled with that faint metallic tingle of static that told them they were approaching a secure boundary.

"You think they’ll come again," Nyra said. It wasn’t a question.

"Yes." He answered.

Her fingers curled at her waist, flexing into and out of fists. "Then we must be prepared."

Kaito glanced at her. She wasn’t talking about bringing guns or reinforcing code. She was talking about them. About their brains. About their ability to withstand the weight of another breach.

"Prepared," he said. The word felt alien on his lips.

They made their way to the edge. The Fork’s filaments separated like curtains, revealing the soft light of the safe node beyond.

It was nothing—nothing but a clump of tethered routes, an airy shelf suspended over nothing. But stable. And stability was just what they required right now.

Nyra led the way, the boots clicking softly against the platform. Kaito followed, and the threads drew over him, sealing the last stroke of the battlefield.

The quiet here was not the same. Still thick, but less acrid.

Nyra bent to sit on the edge, her legs over the precipice. She laid her elbows on her knees, and her hair fell in black strings down about her face. "I keep thinking of the voices."

He had figured that someday she would say something about them.

"They weren’t echoes," she continued. "Some of them... they knew things about us. Things they shouldn’t."

Kaito sat opposite her, far enough away to see her face but near enough to reach out and touch her if she slipped. "Then it means the Dominion’s been eavesdropping longer than we thought."

Nyra’s teeth went white. "Or they’ve been longer here than we thought."

That potential hung between them, cold and unwelcome.

He remembered one voice in particular. Low. Relaxed. Praise-calling his name with a facility that sounded rehearsed.

If the Dominion was able to strike them like that, it meant the dividing line between what was theirs and what was the enemy’s was finer than they’d imagined.

Kaito scowled over his hand. "We’ll take care of it when it occurs again."

Nyra looked at him with a keen eye. "That’s not a strategy."

"It’s the one we can afford to come up with now." He said.

She didn’t argue about it. But she didn’t avert her eyes, either.

They sat so long, not a word, until the Fork extinguished the light around them. Rest cycle. An offer to stay still, briefly, at least.

Kaito lay back upon the platform, looking up into the endless weave above them. He did not know if Nyra would sleep. He did not think he would.

The mass in his chest hadn’t diminished. If anything, it only rested heavier, as if it had found a place to stay.

And somewhere down the hidden node, in a portion of the Fork he couldn’t perceive, he could have sworn he heard the faintest whisper of a voice—his name, once more, on a filament that shouldn’t be.

He shut his eyes. Not to exclude it, but to recall it.

Because if the past had been able to catch up with them here, it would never release them.