The dream came every night.
Kaelen stood in the void. Red light pulsed around him. A voice whispered his name. Not the woman from the ring. Someone else. Something else.
“You freed me. Now I will free you.”
He woke gasping.
Zara was beside him. “Again?”
“Same dream.”
“The echo?”
“No. Something different. Something new.”
He sat up. His left arm tingled. The Harvesters were restless.
“There is a fragment. A remnant of the first post-human. It survived the merge. It's been hiding. In the network. In the crystals. In you.”
Kaelen's blood went cold.
“You said it was gone.”
“We thought it was. But it was clever. It hid in the echo. In the part of the Ascendant that merged with you.”
“How do we find it?”
“We can't. It has to reveal itself.”
---
The next morning, Elara made a disco
