BLOODCAPE
Chapter 136: The First Echo

Chapter 136: Chapter 136: The First Echo

The stairwell room had once been a janitorial checkpoint — or maybe a guard post, long since forgotten. Now it was just four cracked walls, a half-dead ceiling lamp buzzing like a tired insect, and a warped window looking out across Sector Nine. A place where dust gathered on purpose. The kind of place the city had long since given up trying to clean.

Rain tapped at the cracked glass — not pounding, just scraping. The kind of rain that smeared rather than soaked. A thick cable snaked through the ceiling, humming faintly with borrowed power, making the whole room feel like it was breathing wrong.

Aya sat on an overturned crate by the window, gloves off, fingers curled as though they’d been holding something and forgot what. Her hair hung damp around her face. She looked like someone who’d stopped shivering a while ago, not because the cold left — but because she’d decided it didn’t matter.

Across from her, Hernan stood at the wall, his back to everything. The kind of posture reserved for people who had nowhere left to aim. His coat still dripped, the blade at his side long since sheathed. His hands were clean. But his breathing — clipped, shallow — still hadn’t come back to human.

Aya spoke, voice barely enough to break static.

"You didn’t blink."

He didn’t turn. "You’ll have to be more specific."

"When you killed the courier. You didn’t flinch. Not even at the end."

Hernan didn’t move, but something in his shoulders twitched — like the words hit deeper than he’d let show.

Aya stood. Walked to the window. Their reflections met, two ghosts suspended in flickering neon. Her voice stayed soft, even as it cut.

"It wasn’t like watching you. It felt like... something wearing your skin. Like if I called your name, whatever was in your body wouldn’t turn around."

"That’s what Echo is," Hernan said. "It’s the point."

"But it doesn’t stop when the fight ends, does it?"

He turned this time. Slowly. Tiredly.

"Why are you here?" he asked.

Aya’s stare didn’t waver. "Because I think you still are."

Silence. A subway thrummed somewhere below, shaking the window just enough to sound like breath.

She stepped closer. Folded her arms.

"I saw the shift. Not during the kill — after. You were still breathing like him. Standing like him. Iro said it wasn’t mimicry. It was syncing."

"It’s tactical."

"No, Hernan." Her voice was sharper now, almost pleading. "It’s psychological. You can’t keep pretending this doesn’t chew through you."

He exhaled through his nose — not anger. Just weight.

"You think I like it?"

"No. I think you didn’t feel anything. And that’s worse."

He looked away.

Outside, Sector Nine blinked with the artificial rhythm of a city that no longer remembered how to sleep.

"I want to understand you," Aya said, quiet again. "But you’re making that harder every day."

She paused. Watched him staring at his reflection — pale, distorted, and cracked right through both eyes.

"When do you know," she asked, "that you’re no longer pretending to be someone else?"

He didn’t answer.

Aya nodded once — to herself, maybe. She stepped away, her voice just a trace now.

"I’m going downstairs."

She left the door open behind her.

Hernan stayed.

The rain returned.

His palm touched the cracked glass. Not against the city. Not against the storm.

Just the version of himself staring back, motionless.

And that reflection didn’t blink either.

The descent beneath the Zodiac post felt longer than it should’ve. The elevator, sealed behind a rusted kill-code glyph, rattled down old rails with a predator’s hum. Somewhere between forgotten blueprints and buried sins, the shaft shuddered to a halt.

Hernan stepped out first. Iro followed. The corridor was alive in the wrong ways — walls made of composite that twitched faintly, like muscle tissue that remembered too much. Above them, old security machines clung to the ceiling — dormant, insect-shaped, waiting for orders no one would ever give again.

"This isn’t a vault," Iro murmured. "It’s a womb."

Dekra smiled as she stepped barefoot onto the grated floor ahead. "Very good. You’re starting to speak like them."

Her cloak shimmered like wet code. Hernan said nothing.

The room at the end was spherical — part lab, part chapel, part mausoleum. Screens drifted in the air around a pulsing central core, all orbiting dead data: organ maps, muscle memory overlays, defunct AI skeletal scans. Beneath the floor, buried mechanical arms sorted data spines with surgical twitching.

"Welcome to the archive," Dekra said. "Zodiac’s memory crypt."

Aya hadn’t come. Dekra hadn’t invited her.

Hernan scanned a gene spline spiraling on the nearest screen. The figure’s silhouette was human — but segmented, branded with memory pattern markers.

"Echo candidates," he said.

Dekra nodded. "The ones that didn’t behave."

She touched a control node. A topographical map bloomed into the air — layered with collapsed tunnels, false vaults, and then... one real vault. Buried beneath the old cloning labs.

"That’s where Scorpio is," she said. "He’s repurposed the purge site. Rebuilding from Zodiac’s blueprint."

Hernan frowned. "Those labs were destroyed."

"Destroyed if you didn’t have clearance. He does."

She tapped again. Audio loaded.

"Phase three confirmed. Deploy Echo-types 6B through 8Z. Sequence under code ’Ash Theory.’ Ensure behavioral blending protocols are hard-baked. No rehearsal."

The voice was flat. Authoritative.

Scorpio.

"They’re not clones," Dekra said. "Not synths. Not AI. They’re memory vessels. They don’t think. They remember. And they kill with ghosts in their blood."

Iro’s voice dropped. "Weaponized memory loops."

"No," she said. "Phantoms with fingerprints."

The air thinned. Hernan stepped closer.

"Why show us this?"

Dekra tilted her head, coils on her scalp catching the cold light.

"Because I want to see what breaks you first. Him... or you."

"You could’ve sold this to Scorpio."

"And he wouldn’t appreciate it. But you? You still want meaning. That makes you fascinating."

She turned. A steel slab embedded with Zodiac chain-glyphs stood at the far wall.

Her palm pressed the scanner.

It pulsed green.

"Your clearance still works," Hernan said.

She didn’t look back. "It never stopped."

The slab hissed open.

Warm amber light seeped through.

Before she vanished into it, Dekra turned slightly — voice cool, amused.

"You always wondered what you were, Vale."

Hernan didn’t speak.

She smiled.

"You were the first echo. You just didn’t know it."

The vault opened wide.

And the light inside didn’t warm anything at all.