The moment shattered.
Orion's head snapped up, his eyes going wide with alarm. "They found us. How did they find us so fast?"
Kai felt it too—a vibration in the air, a wrongness in the code. The cabin's warm light flickered. The fire dimmed. Outside, the star-scattered sky was bleeding, streaks of green code slashing across the darkness like wounds.
"Echo," she breathed.
"Worse." Orion was on his feet, pulling her toward the door. "Echo's hunters. Programs designed to prune reality. They don't just delete you—they unmake you. They erase you from every layer, every backup, every memory. It will be like you never existed."
They burst out of the cabin into a world gone mad. The plain was dissolving, chunks of it simply ceasing to exist. The stars were falling, each one a scream of dying data. And advancing toward them across the chaos were figures.
They were human-shaped, but wrong. Too smooth, like mannequins. Their faces were blank slabs of flesh, featureless except for mouths that opened and closed silently, endlessly. Their movements were not walking but glitching, teleporting forward in jerky increments.
"Hunters," Orion said. "Top-level pruning programs. They answer only to Echo itself."
Kai stared at the advancing nightmares. "How do we fight them?"
"We don't. We run." He grabbed her hand. "Hold on to me. Don't let go, no matter what."
The world dissolved.