THE ASCENSION SYSTEM

CHAPTER 37

A Code Written in Blood

The vault smelled like cold metal and something else—something rotten, like data that had spoiled. The walls pulsed with dim red lights, stretching into endless rows of glass cases. At first glance, they looked empty.

They weren’t.

I stepped forward, breath fogging against the glass as I peered inside. A face stared back at me. Eyes wide. Mouth slightly open, like he’d been caught mid-sentence. A man frozen in time.

Not dead. Not alive.

Just gone.

Kane moved beside me, her fingers hovering inches from the glass. “What the hell is this?”

Elias was already moving, his bag slung over his shoulder as he pulled out a tablet. “A graveyard,” he muttered, running his fingers over the control panel. “Or a prison, depending on how you look at it.”

My stomach twisted. “They’re trapped?”

“They’re rewritten.” His voice was grim. “The system didn’t just erase them. It repurposed them.”

I forced myself to look again. The man in the glass had no scars, no wrinkles, nothing that made him unique. He could have been anyone—or no one.

I stepped back, pulse hammering. “This isn’t possible.”

Elias’s fingers danced across the tablet, pulling up old system logs. Lines of data scrolled too fast for me to follow. “It’s worse than I thought,” he said under his breath.

Kane crossed her arms. “Then stop talking to yourself and tell us.”

Elias exhaled sharply. “The Overseers didn’t just build the system to control reality. They built it to rewrite people. To overwrite them like corrupted files and turn them into whatever they need.” He gestured toward the vault. “These were real people once. The system wiped them clean and reshaped them into something else.”

The glass cases stretched into the darkness, thousands—maybe millions—of them. My skin prickled.

“How long has this been happening?” Kane asked.

Elias’s jaw tightened. “Long enough that we might all be running on borrowed time.”

A sick feeling curled in my stomach.

The system wasn’t just erasing me. It was rewriting the entire world.

I turned to Kane, expecting her usual steel, but she looked shaken. Just for a second. Then her mask slipped back into place. “If we don’t shut this down—”

“Then nothing is real anymore,” Elias finished. “Not the people we know, not the memories we have. None of it.”

I swallowed hard. “How do we stop it?”

Elias hesitated.

Kane caught it immediately. “What?”

His fingers tightened around the tablet. “There’s something else.”

I didn’t like his tone. “Spit it out, Elias.”

He hesitated just a second too long. Then, quietly, he said, “The system has a failsafe.”

Silence.

I frowned. “What kind of failsafe?”

Elias hesitated again.

Then, slowly, he turned the tablet toward me. A file blinked on the screen. A name.

Tony.

The room felt smaller, colder.

Kane was already stepping closer, reading over his shoulder. Her body tensed. “That’s not possible.”

Elias’s throat bobbed. “Tony…” He met my eyes, something wary, something almost pitying in his face. “I think The Overseers made you.”

The world lurched sideways.

I let out a short laugh, sharp and humorless. “That’s a joke, right?”

Elias didn’t blink.

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “No, I’ve been fighting them for years. I remember everything. My home. My parents. The way the city felt when I was a kid—”

“That’s the problem,” Elias cut in. “You remember. But how do you know those memories are real?”

A sharp, cold weight pressed against my ribs. “Because I lived them.”

“But what if you didn’t?”

The vault was suddenly too quiet.

Kane was watching me, her expression unreadable.

I couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe.

“No,” I said again, but the word barely had any weight.

Elias turned the screen back to himself, scrolling rapidly. “You were designed to be a failsafe,” he muttered. “The perfect counterweight to their system. Someone who could fight against them but never truly win. A piece they could reset if things got too out of control.”

I forced a breath. “If that were true, I’d be on their side.”

Elias looked up, his eyes sharp. “Would you? Or is this exactly what they want you to do?”

My pulse pounded in my ears.

Kane’s voice cut through the noise. “That doesn’t explain why he’s breaking.”

Elias frowned.

She tilted her head, gaze unreadable. “If he was made to keep the system in check, why is he coming apart at the seams?”

Elias hesitated. Then his eyes darkened. “Because something changed.”

My throat felt dry.

Elias studied me, almost like he was seeing me for the first time. “You weren’t supposed to be aware of it,” he murmured. “You weren’t supposed to fight this hard.”

I sucked in a shaky breath. “And yet, here I am.”

Elias nodded, slow. “Here you are.”

My hands curled into fists. The vault, the rows of rewritten people, the blinking red lights—it all felt distant. Like a scene I was watching from the outside.

But that wasn’t possible.

Because I was real.

I had to be.

I looked at Kane. “You believe this?”

She didn’t answer right away. But then she said, carefully, “I believe what I see.”

Her gaze met mine. And for the first time, I saw doubt in it.

That scared me more than anything.

Elias exhaled. “I know this is a lot, but we don’t have time to sit with it. The longer we stay here, the higher the chance we trigger a failsafe.”

I wasn’t listening anymore. My own pulse was too loud.

Not real.

Not real.

Not real.

The words clanged against my skull like broken glass.

I forced myself to breathe, to push down the rising panic.

Because this wasn’t over.

Maybe The Overseers had rewritten the world. Maybe they’d rewritten me.

But I wasn’t a glitch in their system.

I was a problem they hadn’t accounted for.

And problems could still burn things down.

I turned to Elias, jaw set. “Then tell me, Elias.” My voice was steady, sharp. “If I was never real, why do I remember fighting to survive?”

He didn’t have an answer.

And that, more than anything, told me I was right.