EPISODE 15: False Awakening
1359 Words
Subject Delta-09 sat in silence.
Not restrained. Not afraid. Just… waiting.
The surrounding chamber hissed softly, releasing the last of the cooling fog. Frost clung to her lashes. Electrodes fell away. No one had expected her to wake so early, so easily.
But she has always been different.
She touched the glass with her palm. A faint red spiral glowed beneath the skin, flickering like fire trapped under flesh.
“Subject is stable,” a technician whispered from behind the viewing panel.
“Stable?” the woman in white snapped. She had just woken up from an untriggered cryo-state with a live sigil in her hand. That’s not stable. That’s volatile.”
“She’s watching us,” another voice said.
Delta-09 tilted her head.
She was watching.
Not just the people behind the glass.
But beyond them.
Through walls. Through wires. Through light.
A humming in her bones.
She had no name, no past.
But she remembered a girl in a field.
A girl made of gold.
And she hated her.
Across the valley, Seviah stood before the bloom she'd planted. Four flowers now grew from the spiral in the earth, each with a different color — white, violet, silver, and gold.
She felt… lighter.
The weight of forgetting was gone. What replaced it wasn’t peace. It was purpose.
Renn crouched near the spiral, studying the pattern. “It’s spreading fast.”
Karo nodded. “The seed taps into old veins. Forgotten leylines, under the facility’s core structures. The Gift was built on stolen ground. This returns it.”
“To what?” Renn asked.
“To balance,” Nali whispered.
Seviah didn’t speak.
She could feel the shift in the air.
Something was rising to meet her.
Not in awe.
In opposition.
Delta-09’s chamber opened with a soft hiss. She stepped onto cold metal.
Dozens of guards watched. Not one dared move.
The woman in white held out a robe.
“Put this on.”
Delta didn’t.
She walked past her, barefoot, eyes fixed on the far door.
The facility buzzed around her, a maze of chrome and silence. Every hallway she passed dimmed slightly, lights flickering. Machines twitched. Monitors are distorted.
The red spiral on her hand glowed brighter.
“She’s syncing to the grid,” someone murmured. “She’s rewriting protocol without input.”
“Not possible.”
“Tell that to the servers,” came the reply.
In the operations room, a single word began repeating on every screen:
SEED-02 DETECTED
Back in the clearing, the air cracked.
Seviah’s vision blurred. Her knees gave out. Nali caught her.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. Something just… linked.”
Karo stepped back, his face paling.
“She’s not alone anymore,” he said. “Something was awakened at the other end.”
Seviah gritted her teeth.
“I can feel it. She’s… like me.”
The Threadbreaker’s smile faded. “Or the opposite of you.”
Renn stood, reaching for her blade. “Is this the war?”
“No,” Karo whispered. “This is the mirror.”
Delta-09 sat before a screen. A figure appeared on it — a girl with wild hair, golden eyes, standing in a spiral of blooming light.
Seviah.
Delta’s fingers twitched.
“Her name is Seviah,” the woman in white said. She was activated ahead of schedule. She’s destabilizing the network.”
Delta’s voice was sharp, quiet. “Is she the Source?”
“She thinks she is.”
“Then I’ll show her the truth.”
That night, Seviah couldn’t sleep.
Even with the flowers blooming behind her, even with Nali’s steady presence nearby, her body pulsed with static.
She closed her eyes.
And in her dream, she saw red.
A room. A mirror. A girl that looked like her — but colder. Eyes like dying stars. Skin etched in a spiral of fire.
The girl smiled.
“Hello, sister.”
Seviah woke with a scream, sweat coating her skin.
“She saw me,” she gasped. “She knows I’m here.”
Karo was already moving.
“We leave tonight. If she’s real, she’s tracking your resonance. She’ll find this place.”
Nali grabbed her jacket. “We head for the Core?”
“The Core’s dead,” Renn said.
“Not anymore,” said the Threadbreaker. “It’s waking too.”
Seviah stood, her heartbeat echoing.
If this girl was like her — same mark, same gift — then she wasn’t just another subject.
She was the second seed.
And she’d just sprouted.
Delta-09’s breath fogged the mirror’s surface.
Cracks splintered outward from where her knuckles had struck, but the reflection held for a heartbeat longer than it should have, as if the glass was reluctant to release the image of the girl who wasn’t her.
Seviah.
The name tasted sour in her mouth.
“I’ve seen her,” Delta whispered. In my head. In the dark.”
Behind her, the woman in white typed rapidly on a tablet.
“Echo signatures confirm partial memory entanglement. Subject Delta-09 is experiencing cross-seed resonance.”
The man in red looked up from his screen, his expression grave.
“We’ll need to fast-track containment. If they meet before the Network completes realignment—”
“They’re not meant to meet,” the woman cut in. “They’re meant to cancel each other.”
Delta turned slowly.
Her voice was steady.
“No. We won’t cancel. We’ll collide.”
She stepped toward the door.
“Where are you going?” the man demanded.
“To finish what she started.”
Meanwhile, Seviah stood by the fire Karo had built, her fingers absently tracing the mark on her hand. The spiral pulsed gently beneath her skin. It is warm now. Steady. Not like before.
Nali brought her a steaming cup of root tea, sitting close enough for their shoulders to touch.
“You haven’t spoken since the dream.”
Seviah nodded slowly. “I saw her again." She’s like me, Nali. But… cracked.”
“Are you scared?”
“I should be. But it’s not fear. It’s something else. Like I'd been waiting for this my whole life and didn’t know it.”
“You think you’re going to fight her?”
Seviah didn’t answer right away.
“I don’t think we’ll have a choice.”
Karo joined them, the lines on his face sharper in the firelight.
“She’s not a copy,” he said quietly. “She’s a branch.”
“A branch?” Nali asked.
“The Gift wasn’t meant to divide. But something went wrong during the original Awakening. It split the line into two. "You’re the seed… she’s the root rot.”
“That’s comforting,” Seviah muttered.
“Don’t underestimate her,” Karo warned. You opened a door when you planted the seed. But she was always waiting behind it.”
The Threadbreaker emerged from the trees then, his expression unreadable.
“She’s already moving,” he said. “The soil around the north leylines is burning. She’s claiming ground.”
“She’s trying to reach me first,” Seviah whispered.
Renn stepped into the circle. “Then we went to where she was going. We cut her off before she plants her own Gift.”
Seviah nodded, setting the cup aside.
“No,” she said. “We let her plant it.”
Renn blinked. “Are you crazy?”
“She’ll think it’s a victory,” Seviah explained. “But if I’m right… the ground she’s heading for isn’t as dead as it looks.”
Karo frowned. “You’re going to trap her?”
Seviah stood, brushing ash from her palms.
“No. I’m going to test her.”
Far away, in the facility’s sealed transit bay, Delta-09 stepped onto a transport shuttle. The guards assigned to her didn’t follow. They just watched as the doors closed behind her, locking the Gift inside a cage of her own choosing.
The shuttle lifted.
Outside, the skies glowed red with distant light. A spiral formed in the clouds.
She smiled.
The field was waiting.
And so was her other half.
- Writer
