The First Memory

Chapter 2 - Trask

The first thing I noticed was the silence.

Not peace. Not stillness. Not the calm of a city at rest. This was the kind of silence that pressed against your eardrums, that made your own heartbeat sound like an intruder in the void. The streets of the upper city were empty or appeared to be but I knew better. The Mnemos towers glittered in the distance, their fractured glass catching the dying light like a warning flare. I could feel the weight of the Vault even here, buried beneath miles of stone and memory, pulsing faintly through the ground like a heartbeat I wasn't supposed to notice.

I adjusted my grip on my rifle, the familiar cold metal grounding me in the present, in the real. Every nerve in my body hummed with the kind of anticipation that didn't come from fear it came from knowledge. I had trained for this, prepared for it, and yet, no protocol could account for what I knew waited below.

"Commander," a voice whispered over comms. Static, barely audible. One of the scouts, no doubt, trying to keep a foothold in the invisible tide of panic I could feel threatening the city. "Vault readings... they're spiking. Golden light... everywhere."

I exhaled through my nose, slow, deliberate. "Stay calm," I said, even though my stomach was coiled tight. "Keep your eyes open. Don't let it find you before I do."

We moved in formation, careful, silent. The upper city was scarred but standing a lattice of twisted streets, fractured towers, and shattered glass that reflected the dying sun in fragmented prisms. Every reflection seemed wrong. A shadow stretched one way while its body leaned another. I shook my head. Memory was leaking here too, or at least its residue. The Vault wasn't content with its own walls; it had begun to bleed into the world above, and nothing would remain unchanged.

I paused atop a crumbling bridge, looking down into the lower city, the place Kai had gone or, I suspected, the place the Vault had claimed. Golden fissures pulsed faintly through the streets below, veins of light threading through the ruins like the arteries of some massive, dreaming creature. My pulse quickened.

The scouts were silent behind me. They didn't breathe. I could feel their hesitation, mirrored in my own chest. We all knew what we were walking into, though none of us had a clear plan for surviving it. The Vault didn't negotiate. It didn't reason. And it didn't forgive.

"Trask," another comm whispered, sharper this time, desperate. "There's... someone down there. Movement. But... not human. Not... nothing we've seen."

I swallowed, letting the words anchor in the pit of my stomach. My instincts were screaming. The Vault had recognized him. Kai. Of course. The name clawed at the back of my mind, fragments of intel I'd buried resurfacing in jagged shards. K-001. The first host. A soldier forged in memory and steel, erased from history, yet somehow alive. And now walking straight into the heart of the Vault.

I crouched low, scanning the streets with binoculars, every shadow a threat, every reflection a lie. The golden light moved, snaking through the broken architecture like liquid, pulsing with a rhythm I could feel but not decipher. And then I saw it: the doors. The Vault's doors, looming impossibly tall, carved with spirals and glyphs that glowed faintly, almost expectantly.

A chill ran down my spine. The reports hadn't done it justice. The Vault didn't just exist here it demanded presence. It was alive in ways that were impossible to measure, to contain, to predict. I could see why they called it a core, a heart. I could feel it beating in time with the city itself, and in my chest, I felt the resonance of something calling out to Kai.

I exhaled slowly, forcing control back into my limbs. "Prepare for contact," I muttered, almost to myself. The comms were silent again. The scouts were frozen, waiting for orders. I hated giving orders. I hated being the voice of control in a world that had lost its boundaries. And yet here I was, the one tethered to the real, tasked with keeping the line between the Vault and chaos from snapping completely.

I climbed down the side of the bridge, boots crunching against rubble. The golden light beneath me pulsed like a heartbeat, each step sending tremors through the soles of my boots, threading through my spine, whispering a language of the old world and the new, one I didn't understand but had to follow.

Somewhere below, I thought I heard a faint voice, carried on the memory wind. Not Kai's. Not Lira's. Something else. Something patient, patient, and infinitely old. It whispered promises, threats, fragments of forgotten names. I shook my head violently. No. Focus. Stick to the mission. Stick to what you know.

The first Echo Unit appeared suddenly, stepping from a shadow. Its skull-like head caught the golden light, and I froze, rifle raised, instincts screaming. It moved unnervingly human, and yet every motion was wrong—too fluid, too precise, too expected. It stopped, cocking its head as if assessing me. And I realized, with a sinking weight, it wasn't assessing me. It was assessing him.

"Kai," I whispered, the name tasting strange on my tongue. So much had happened, so much I didn't know, and yet, all my training, all my strategy, it was about him. Not me. The Vault had chosen.

I activated the scanner on my wrist, feeding live imagery to the comm channel. The numbers spiked immediately energy readings beyond anything we'd catalogued, radiation of pure memory, and a pulse that seemed... sentient. The Vault was alive. And it wanted Kai.

I exhaled through clenched teeth. There would be no negotiation. No controlled insertion. The Vault had woken. And all we could do was follow.

Every instinct in me screamed to move faster, to run, to pull Kai out before the Vault consumed him. But I couldn't. Not yet. Not without understanding it. And understanding it meant watching, waiting, calculating the only way to survive a weapon forged from the past and memory itself.

I adjusted my grip on the rifle and stepped forward. The shadows of the lower city seemed to stretch toward me, bending reality in impossible ways. Golden light pulsed beneath my boots. And for the first time since I'd first heard the Vault's hum, I felt the weight of what was coming.

Kai was walking straight into a storm that had been decades in the making. And I had to follow him, even if it killed me.

The Vault was awake. And we both had no choice but to answer.