Valkyrion — Medbay Isolation Chamber 3
Lys hadn’t slept.
Not because she couldn’t.
Because every time she closed her eyes, he was there.
Not in dreams. Not in hallucinations.
In her mind.
Like a shadow behind the mirror.
Kael had ordered a scan. Brainwave analysis. Psionic interference tests. All came back clean.
Which was worse.
Because that meant it was real.
She sat alone now, knees to her chest, lights dimmed. The walls were thick, psion-shielded, made to contain Class-V anomalies.
They weren’t containing him.
“Why now?” she whispered.
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A voice answered.
Not aloud.
Inside.
“Because you’re awake.”
She jolted upright.
“Get out of my head.”
“Can’t.”
The voice was calm. Male. Familiar. Not cruel, not kind. Just truth.
“This isn’t communication. It’s resonance. Our blood remembers each other.”
She stood, backing away from the wall like it could save her.
“You’re not just a copy,” he said. “You’re the inheritance. The end of her line.”
“What do you want?” she snapped.
A long pause.
“To see if you’ll become her… or eclipse her.”
Elsewhere — Sanctum of Echoes
Zero stood in the Memory Vault, his body bathed in the echoes of forgotten wars.
His link with Lys flickered behind his eyes like static.
“She’s not rejecting the bond,” the priest noted.
Zero touched the pool.
“She can’t. Our minds were designed from the same root. The tether was embedded when her ancestor encoded the genetic lock.”
“Can she sever it?”
Zero turned slightly.
“If she does, she’ll lose herself.”
Flashback Memory — Lys’s DNA Encoding (Recovered)
The original Lys, broken and burning, clutching the blood-sealed vial.
She looks at the camera. She’s not crying.
She’s furious.
“If he survives, someone needs to stop him. I’m embedding my memory, my essence—everything I was—into the bloodline.”
“Whoever you are… be stronger than me.”
The file ends.
Back in the Isolation Chamber
Lys stared at her hands. They were shaking again.
But not from fear.
From something inside.
A voice—hers, but older—was rising.
Not words.
Instinct.
Outside the door, Kael stood with Nasiri.
“She's... not just hearing him,” the doctor said. “She’s being pulled into alignment with him. Like a binary star system.”
Kael clenched his fists. “Then we break the gravity.”
Dr. Nasiri didn’t respond.
Because there’s one rule with black holes:
You don’t break gravity.
It breaks you.