Chapter 3 Something Inside Us

Chapter 3 - Something Inside Us

The four teens stood breathless in the glow of the Core, surrounded by the husks of deactivated drones. Around them, the room felt like a heart that had just skipped a beat-alive, ancient, and suddenly watching.

Lena stepped back from the crystalline power source, her pulse racing in sync with the fading pulses of violet light. Her hand trembled slightly, but not out of fear-something else had stirred inside her when the Core spoke. A thrum beneath her skin, like electricity waiting to ignite.

"What did it mean by 'synchronization'?" she asked, voice barely above a whisper.

"It scanned us," Jett said. He was hunched over a cracked drone, already dissecting its internal components. "Measured us. Synced us... maybe with itself, or maybe with each other."

Aya moved toward the outer rim of the room, her fingers trailing along the wall's smooth metal. "This place knows us. It knew our names, our DNA. This isn't just where our powers came from. It's where we came from."

A silence fell over them, heavy with implication.

Noah clenched his fists. "But we've lived normal lives. School. Families. Memories. They couldn't have been... fake, right?"

Lena turned toward him, something sharp in her gaze. "You don't remember anything before age eight, do you?"

Noah's face shifted. "No. But that's not unusual. Lots of people don't."

"But all of us?" Aya said softly. "I don't remember my parents' faces clearly. Just shapes and sounds. Like my memories were copied from a blurry photo."

Jett looked up from the drone. "What if we were made here? Like prototypes. Grown. Enhanced. Then released into the world to blend in-test the results."

Noah stepped away from the group, pacing. "This is insane."

"So is glowing like a human lightning rod," Lena shot back. "Face it, Noah-we're not normal."

His eyes flared suddenly, light leaking from the edges of his pupils. "I never asked for this."

None of them did. But they couldn't deny it anymore.

Each of them had begun to change.

That night, back at their respective homes, the world pressed in.

In her bedroom, Lena stared at her reflection. She turned off the lights, waited until her eyes adjusted to the dark-and then held out her palm. A soft, golden shimmer flickered to life in her hand, like tiny threads of energy knitting together.

She closed her fist. It vanished.

Downstairs, her adoptive mother hummed a lullaby in the kitchen. The smell of stew filled the house. A perfectly normal night. But Lena couldn't shake the feeling that she was living someone else's life. Like her skin didn't fit quite right anymore.

Noah stood on the roof of his apartment complex, watching the stars. The city lights blurred the sky, but he could make out the constellations he'd memorized from an old science book. Orion. Cassiopeia. The same stars that had watched over him as a child.

Except now, when he stared long enough, his eyes adjusted beyond human limits. He saw the satellites. The faint gleam of drifting metal. A storm in low orbit.

He blinked. The vision faded.

Inside him, something burned-a light that didn't want to stay buried.

In her room, Aya sat on the floor with her headphones on. The music was low, ambient, almost a whisper. But beneath it, she heard something else. A murmur that weaved through the notes. Words that weren't in the song.

"...Echo... awaken... find the path..."

She tore the headphones off, heart pounding. But the whisper remained. It wasn't coming from the music.

It was coming from inside her own mind.

Jett had sealed his bedroom door and was surrounded by wires, processors, and screens. He had connected the drone's core to his custom interface, trying to decrypt its memory. Blue code scrolled rapidly across one monitor, revealing fragments of video feeds, voice commands, and corrupted logs.

One line repeated in several files:

ECHO SUBJECTS: OBSERVE – REPORT – PRESERVE

He frowned. "Preserve?"

Then another log decrypted, this one marked AUDIO ONLY.

He played it.

"...Progress accelerating. Memory bleed increasing. Subjects must not remember too quickly. Neural blocks degrading. If they remember everything too soon..."

The file ended in static.

Jett leaned back, heart thudding.

"We're not supposed to remember."

The next morning, Lena called an emergency meetup. They gathered at their old clubhouse in the woods-a wooden shed half-collapsed from years of disuse. It was a place from their childhood, one of the few they still trusted.

"I think it's changing us," Lena said as soon as they were all inside.

"You too?" Aya asked.

Lena nodded. "I can control light. Not just emit it-bend it, shape it."

Noah crossed his arms. "I blew out every bulb in my apartment building when I sneezed."

Jett lifted a tiny device. "I built a micro-sensor last night that can scan a human body in real time. I've never been able to do that before. Not even close."

Aya hesitated, then said, "I hear things. Words, phrases, from nowhere. It's like... like the Core put something in my head."

They all exchanged looks.

"Echo Cradle didn't just create us," Lena said. "It made sure we'd evolve. And now that we're back, it's speeding that up."

"What do we do?" Jett asked.

"We keep digging," Lena said. "We learn everything we can. Before whoever-or whatever-is still running that lab decides we're a threat."

A sharp sound made them freeze-a distant whirr, mechanical and too familiar.

Drones.

They looked out through a crack in the wood.

Two black spheres hovered just beyond the tree line, scanning. A red light blinked on their undersides.

"They found us," Noah said.

"Back entrance," Jett hissed. "Now!"

They slipped out through the shed's back hatch and sprinted into the woods.

Behind them, the drones hummed louder, activating pursuit mode.

As they ran, Lena felt her blood rush with light. Noah's eyes gleamed silver. Aya's breath became a chant under her breath. Jett already had a plan forming.

They weren't just teens anymore.

They were waking up.

And the world was about to feel it.

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