BLOODCAPE
Chapter 103 – Clause Zero

Chapter 103: Chapter 103 – Clause Zero

Tessa dropped to her knees before she even realized she was falling.

Her breath came in harsh, broken pulls, fingers splayed across the chamber floor—slick with sweat, grit, and the final remnants of something far colder. The construct lay beside her, twitching in its death spiral, glitching like a corrupted thought trying to rewrite itself and failing.

Camilla didn’t move immediately. Her eyes were locked on the spiral embedded in the floor.

It hadn’t faded.

It had shifted.

The light no longer dispersed outward. It was curling inward now—slow and deliberate, like a sinkhole drinking its own creation. And that meant only one thing: the chamber had not concluded its task.

Phase two, she thought. Or maybe containment mode. Initiation logic was hardwired into the deep infrastructure, impossible to predict.

Either way, they wouldn’t survive what came next.

She crossed the chamber in four swift strides, dropped beside Tessa, and hooked a gloved hand beneath her arm.

Tessa flinched—residual combat instinct. Her body had been in something more than survival. Something written. It hadn’t yet received permission to stop.

"Easy," Camilla said, her voice low and tight. "It’s done."

Tessa shook her head.

"No," she whispered, breath ragged. "It’s not."

Camilla agreed. Silently.

The construct might be down. The perimeter might be dimming. But the room—the system—wasn’t finished. It didn’t feel like a machine powering down.

It felt like a mind waiting for its next command.

Camilla reached inside her suit. Her fingers closed around a matte-black chip buried in a hidden seam—a relic, not on any manifest, not acknowledged in any protocol.

She slid it into the pulse-port buried behind a dormant wall panel.

The wall blinked. Then shuddered.

From deep beneath the chamber floor came a hiss—hydraulic, old. Metallic breath escaping something ancient.

Then the bulkhead unlocked.

Not opened.

Just... granted permission.

Camilla didn’t hesitate. She hauled Tessa to her feet.

"Stay awake," she said.

Tessa nodded—but her legs folded under her. Camilla caught her under the ribs, half-carried her through the threshold.

As soon as they crossed it, the chamber door sealed shut behind them. No sound. No lights.

No turning back.

Camilla laid Tessa gently against the auxiliary corridor’s wall and checked her vitals—pulse elevated, breath erratic, blood oxygen holding. A fine tremor ran through her, but her eyes were lucid.

"You fought a construct designed to end deviations," she muttered. "You shouldn’t even be breathing."

Tessa didn’t answer.

Didn’t have to.

Camilla tapped her wrist pad—detached from Zodiac’s mainframe. It ran off a quarantined loop, protected from real-time monitoring. Her gloves were still damp with sweat, making her movements slower.

She expected an alert.

She got one.

Just not the one she feared.

Red text blinked across her screen:

CLAUSE ZERO INVOKED

ACCESS: REVOKED

ROOT OVERRIDE IN EFFECT

SOURCE: CLASSIFIED – PRIME INHERITOR SIGNATURE – VALIDATED

Camilla’s breath caught in her throat.

No. That’s not possible.

Clause Zero was more myth than mechanism. A final-tier contingency written into Solaris’s architecture before the Zodiac fully formed. It was meant for betrayal. Coup. Collapse.

Only one person had ever had the authority to invoke it.

Solaris.

And Solaris was dead.

She stared at the pad as another line faded into view:

AUTHORITY MATCH: 97.98% – ALPHA-CLASS SIGNATURE CONFIRMED

Camilla whispered, "That can’t be."

No one else should’ve had this clearance.

Not copied.

Inherited.

Her eyes shifted back to Tessa—slumped, pale, eyes half-lidded and still conscious. She looked like a cadet again.

Small. Vulnerable. Breakable.

But the system hadn’t treated her like one.

It had treated her like an anomaly.

Or worse—like an echo it remembered.

Camilla closed her pad.

Clause Zero hadn’t been triggered by a hack.

It had been activated by someone the system still recognized.

She whispered, to the quiet and to herself:

"Unless someone’s been following Solaris’s clearance key this whole time..."

░ LEO ░

The Spire had a bottom floor.

But beneath that—beneath the cryo stacks, beneath the blacklight archives, beneath even the Zodiac’s memory—there was one more layer.

No cameras. No drones. No doors labeled for entry.

But Leo remembered.

He moved alone, boots silent on black alloy, shoulders relaxed but spine straight. His breath barely disturbed the stagnant air.

There was no path here.

Only memory.

And duty deferred.

He reached the vault wall—a seamless curve of black steel. No pad. No retinal scanner. Just a blank surface.

Leo pressed his palm to it.

Closed his eyes.

"Recognition accepted. Legacy override: Solaris-class."

The wall didn’t open.

It peeled. Like armor retracting from bone.

Inside, the vault was warmer than it should’ve been.

Not heated.

Alive.

Banks of ancient servers lined the walls, blinking with rhythm, sweating decades of sealed activity. Mist curled off old coolant lines. Half-dead cables hung from the ceiling like arteries. It smelled like old copper, melted circuits, and too much history.

Leo stepped through the stillness.

No alarms.

No reaction.

Just one central terminal—raised, humming faintly.

It lit before he touched it.

Data streamed across the interface in forgotten code—root language from Solaris’s own design. And when it stilled, a single line blinked:

ALPHA PROGENITOR MATCH DETECTED – 00:11:47 AGO

CLAUSE ZERO PROTOCOL: REACTIVATED

SIGNATURE: VALIDATED

Leo’s brow furrowed. His pulse ticked once.

He tapped the log queue.

A playback file opened—static-ridden, degraded, low-resolution.

But enough.

A small figure stood in Delta Core.

A girl.

Her arms raised in defensive stance. Blood on her lip. Spiral lights beneath her feet.

Tessa.

He didn’t need clarity to recognize the way she moved. She didn’t trip the protocol.

She fit it.

He scrubbed the playback.

Saw the construct twitching at her feet.

Saw her silhouette lined up with the central crest.

Then the signature log refreshed.

MATCH STABILITY: 97.98% – ORIGIN TRACK CONTINUOUS – UNBROKEN

Not a spoof.

Not a clone.

A line that was never broken.

Leo said it aloud:

"Not forged."

The screen shimmered again—one last relic surfacing from deep storage.

An old sparring file. Solaris in his early training phase. Flanked by a smaller figure. A girl. Unnamed.

Tessa.

Not her current face.

But the way she moved.

A match not just in rhythm—but in memory.

The neural patterns. The reactive sequences. It wasn’t just mimicry—it was mirrored inheritance.

Leo stood motionless.

"They didn’t break protocol," he said, voice low.

His eyes never left the image—the spiral, the girl, the ghost of Solaris moving beside her.

"They are the protocol."

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