The tunnels whispered his name like a curse.
Maya moved fast, her footsteps silent across the old Institute sublevels — corridors no one had walked in decades, except ghosts and those who refused to stay erased.
The serpent symbol flickered on the wall ahead — painted in ash. A sign. A message.
Aarav had passed through here.
Good.
Still moving.
But so was something else.
Something faster.
Elder IX had entered the city.
Not through the gates.
Not through the spiral's sanctioned paths.
But through the mirror corridors — the old transport system, known only to the Elders and those who had forgotten how to blink.
And now, he was moving toward the last known coordinates of the Axis.
Maya emerged into the Coil's upper passage — her shoulder still bandaged, the blade hidden under her coat humming with dread.
She turned a corner—
And stopped.
There he was.
Aarav.
Back to her, hunched over a table, tracing something into the stone with a piece of sharpened charcoal.
The others — the Fragments — were nowhere in sight.
Just the two of them. Again.
"Aarav," she said.
He didn't flinch. "I thought you'd come."
"I had to."
She stepped forward.
"I saw the signal. The broadcast. The fire."
He looked over his shoulder, eyes tired but lit with something stronger than hope.
Conviction.
"I meant it," he said. "All of it."
"I know."
A pause. A breath.
"Then why do you look like you're about to break?"
Maya pulled something from her coat — a small fragment of mirrorglass, the kind only Elders use to project tracking echoes.
She placed it on the table.
The image rippled to life: Elder IX, walking through the lower levels, too fast to be human, too precise to be stopped.
"He's here," she said.
"They sent him."
Aarav's jaw tightened.
"Then I guess they're done pretending."
The light from the projection flickered across both their faces — old allies, half-lovers, almost enemies.
Aarav reached down, drew a spiral into the dust, then crossed a single line through it.
"He doesn't get to take me."
"Not whole."
They moved together after that.
Old rhythm. Old scars.
But something between them had changed — a thread of understanding neither could name, only feel.
Maya led him to a side tunnel — narrow, sharp-angled, cut through the rock like a wound.
"This leads out through the old faculty ruins," she whispered.
"We can vanish for a while."
"No," Aarav said.
"We don't vanish anymore."
"Then we run?"
"We burn."
Behind them, a mirror cracked.
Elder IX stepped into the tunnel.
No footsteps.
No sound.
Just the pressure — like gravity folding in on itself.
The chase had begun.
And before it was over, one of them wouldn't leave the spiral intact.