BLOODCAPE
Chapter 105 – The Echo Window

Chapter 105: Chapter 105 – The Echo Window

Tessa

The silence Tessa needed didn’t exist in any mapped corridor. So she made one herself.

She didn’t tell Hernan where she was going. Didn’t meet Camilla’s eyes. There were no questions because no one was prepared for more answers. They were already unraveling. Each new truth made the world less stable, like stepping stones rearranging beneath her feet.

She said she needed air.

What she really needed was a place where the system couldn’t breathe down her neck.

She descended deeper into the bones of the Academy—into a place the directories no longer indexed. A broken stairwell half-choked by debris led to a slanted hallway scarred by heat stress. At the end, tucked behind a half-collapsed framework, was a wall terminal labeled in faded print:

JUNCTION NODE 4D – OBSOLETE.

She forced the hatch open with her shoulder. Inside: cold, dark, still.

The server room was a time capsule. Rows of blackened terminal racks blinked faintly in red—heartbeat lights no longer connected to any central network. Dust carpeted everything. It smelled of oxidized metal and forgotten static.

Tessa slid down the wall to sit cross-legged on the floor. Her breathing slowed.

Then she pulled out her custom medpad.

She’d built it herself—not for war, but for healing. At first. But over the years, she’d modified it with tools the instructors pretended didn’t exist: unauthorized relays, passive data scrapers, intercept protocols. The pad had become a mirror to everything buried.

She jacked into the terminal’s old access port.

At first—nothing. Static. Corrupted text. Refusal.

Then, slowly—data.

Familiar structures floated up like ghosts from deep water.

Archived sync logs. Telemetry packets. Biometric loops tied to old chambers. The kind of data that had been deleted from public systems decades ago—but not purged.

One file blinked at her.

DELTA-ECHO_BACKLOG // SYNC_TRAIN/0412-CTimestamp: 12 years prior

Tessa’s stomach flipped.

She hadn’t even been a registered cadet twelve years ago.

In official records, she wasn’t supposed to exist.

She tapped the file.

The screen flickered. Glitched. Then settled into jagged video.

Delta Chamber appeared in grayscale. Raw. Industrial. No ceremonial trappings. The spiral floor incomplete. The lights dim. It looked like the blueprint of something still deciding what it wanted to become.

Two figures sparred in the center.

One was unmistakably Solaris. Younger. But already honed. Every motion shaped by muscle memory so deep it bordered on prophecy.

The second figure was smaller. Masked. Slim.

Her movements were fluid. Sharp. Balanced.

Identical to Tessa’s.

Tessa leaned forward, fingers clenching her pad.

Step-pivot. Heel shift. Guard rotation. The pattern was hers.

Then a voice. Off-screen. Male. Steady. Cold.

"Subject Two—repeat spinal lock. Subject One—counter on beat three."

Both complied.

Then came another voice.

Female.

Tired. Resigned.

"You said I was done after this."

Tessa’s throat constricted.

It was her voice.

Not a copy. Not synthesized. Hers.

And Solaris replied:

"Not if you still remember."

The clip crackled. Warped. Froze mid-frame.

Tessa stared, breath catching. She didn’t remember any of it.

Not the room. Not the routine. Not her own voice from twelve years ago.

But the system had remembered.

Had archived her.

Not as an accident.

As a design.

She rewound the video. Slowed it. Watched the girl’s movements again—framed in light and shadow. There was no awkwardness. No guesswork. Every step was embedded in her bones.

The system hadn’t found her.

It had been waiting.

She whispered:

"If I was built... then who built me?"

The only response was the blink of an obsolete diode, humming patiently.

The system wasn’t broken.

It was recursive.

And now she was caught in its second cycle.

Camilla

Camilla moved like a shadow that had stopped pretending to be a person.

She walked alone down a hallway that had been sealed before half the Zodiac were born. It had no cameras. No air rotation. No heat signature. Just darkness, dust, and the faint hum of machines forgotten by everyone except her.

Contingency Vault C-0.

Hidden beneath the Archives, below the public stack and off-grid server beds. Camilla had built part of it herself. The rest had been there long before.

She reached a blank wall.

No handles. No scanner. Just a flat seam.

She pressed her hand to it.

"Voiceprint: Varn. Clearance string: 9-Vellum-Dagger."

The door didn’t open.

It withdrew.

The chamber beyond was a pillar room—hexagonal, narrow. At the center stood a single black console, rising from the floor like an altar. Around it: sealed data cores stacked like bones. No light. No life.

Only containment.

Camilla removed her glove. Pressed her bare hand to the pillar.

ACCESS GRANTED. LOGGING DISABLED. SYSTEM MASKED.

She typed:

QUERY: SUBJECT—SOLARIS / PAIRING LOGS

Files unfolded like old scars reopening.

Neural maps. Combat spirals. Mirror response protocols. Test variables.

She narrowed the query:

FILTER: SIMULTANEOUS CADENCE MATCHINGFILTER: EARLIEST RECORD

One result.

FILE: MANIFOLD_0AUTHOR: VARN.C – ENCRYPTION SIGNATURE VERIFIEDSTATUS: SEALED

Her breath stilled.

She hadn’t written that file.

She opened it.

Inside: mirrored pairing diagnostics. Dual biometric models. Two codenames.

R.V.T.L.

Hernan Vale.Tessa Lyne.

But not as cadets.

As reciprocal triggers.

Blueprints.

The document detailed neural convergence thresholds, loop synchronization, adaptive reflex ranges. Not just training readiness.

Activation conditions.

They hadn’t been placed at the Academy to learn.

They’d been seeded to reactivate something buried.

She kept scrolling.

The final page made her stomach twist.

A photo.

Surveillance still. Black and white. Slightly grainy.

Solaris, unmasked, standing at the heart of Delta Chamber.

Beside him stood a man in a long black coat. Taller. Head turned, obscuring his face. No insignia. No clearance stripe. No name.

No record.

She scanned him.

NO MATCH FOUND. NO FACIAL TRACE. ROOT REDACTED.

She checked the timestamp.

Six days after Solaris was declared dead.

The man wasn’t looking at Solaris.

He was staring directly into the camera.

Intentional. Deliberate.

Camilla stared at the still frame.

This wasn’t oversight.

This was a message.

Someone had used her ID.

Someone had authorized a file using her encryption.

But it wasn’t her work.

Not really.

She had built the scaffolding.

Someone else had constructed the cathedral.

And Solaris—

He hadn’t been the architect.

Her voice, when it came, was quiet and shaking with something worse than fear—recognition.

"You weren’t the architect..."

She touched the screen. Her finger brushed the man’s blurred outline.

"...you were the messenger."

And the real builder?

Still out there.

Still watching.

Still waiting for the recursion to finish running its course.

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