The Order had made one mistake.
They taught Aarav how to think.
They trained him to observe. To adapt. To listen for the cracks.
But they forgot one thing:
The mind that can be shaped… can also shatter.
And the pieces cut deeper.
After the night he disobeyed, Aarav disappeared.
Not from the campus — but from their reach.
He left no trace: no notes, no movements, no thoughts projected into the spiral.
He vanished into the fringe, where the Institute's records blurred and the Helix's eye rarely looked.
And there, beneath the pipes and archives, where the earth still remembered what it was to be wild, he began to rebuild.
Not alone.
He found others.
Not many — just three to begin with.
A girl who could taste memories.
A boy who had once been marked for erasure but woke before they wiped him clean.
And one former Keeper — half-mad, always laughing, who claimed to have read a Helix prophecy and lived.
They didn't call themselves rebels.
They called themselves Fragments.
The axis turns, they said.
And when it does, not everything survives.
Aarav didn't want to destroy the Order yet.
First, he wanted to understand what they feared.
And for that, he needed to go deeper than any initiate had before.
Deeper than even Maya.
He returned to the Obsidian Door, the one he had opened during his vow — now sealed once more.
But this time, he had something different.
Not the black key.
Blood.
His own.
He cut his palm again, letting it drip onto the serpent symbol etched in the stone.
"I am not your heir," he whispered.
"I am your reckoning."
The door trembled.
And opened.
Inside, he found a second chamber — not of stone, but of bone and circuitry, a fusion of ancient ritual and impossible design.
There were pods along the walls.
Old. Broken.
But not empty.
Inside each was a child — or something that had once been a child — preserved, warped, some asleep, some whispering through cracked mouths.
Experiments. Failed Axes. Forgotten heirs.
A graveyard of replacements.
Aarav staggered back.
And he knew.
He wasn't their first chance.
Just their most promising.
He fled the chamber with fire in his chest.
Back to the Fragments. Back to the plan.
It was no longer about surviving.
It was about exposing.
The ledger.
The children.
The truths buried beneath the Helix.
It was time for the city to remember what the Order had buried in blood.
Above ground, the Institute slept.
But deep below, a rebellion had begun to breathe.
And when it opened its eyes, the Order would bleed.