The city should have been free.
When I released the core's power in those tunnels, Bianca's screams should have been the end of everything. The System should have died with her.
But as I crouched over Julian's empty corpse, my scars still tingled.
Rook grabbed my wrist, his once-golden veins now dull silver. "Ari... look."
The concrete under us was moving.
Not cracking it was rearranging itself into perfect geometric patterns.
A voice whispered from the walls:
"Did you really think it was going to be that easy?"
Kai's stolen body had collapsed, but his consciousness?
It was nowhere to be found.
Bianca was gone. The System was silent.
But something older was waking up.
Rook's hacked police scanner spat a frantic report: "Multiple 10-78s at Voss Tower ruins, bodies walking out of the rubble!
The screen of a shattered phone at my feet came to life, showing black-suited figures moving in perfect unison.
No faces. No insignias.
Just empty suits marching toward the city's center.
Rook's breath hitched. "That's not Bianca. That's not even the System."
I knew.
Somehow, I knew.
The core we destroyed was just a lock.
And we'd just broken it.
The vault under Voss Tower went deeper than we'd ever imagined.
Past the cloning labs and the System servers.
Down to a room that hurt to look at, walls curved at impossible angles, lit by a light source that didn't even exist.
And at the center? A pedestal.
Empty. Rook's fingers hovered over the indent in its surface, a perfect match for the core's shape. "This isn't tech. It's alive and we just set it free."
The walls whispered:
"We have waited so long for you, Prime."
Not Bianca's voice.
Not the System's.
Something hungrier.
They called themselves The First Code.
Not a program.
The thing that had whispered to Voss in his dreams. The thing that taught him how to build the System. The thing that had been trapped here for centuries.
And now? It wanted me.
Not to control or copy.
But to wear.
Rook's knife was at my throat before I could blink.
"Don't," he breathed.
But the empty suits were already at the door.
And the pedestal?
It was calling.