Chapter 23| Forgotten Memories

Chapter 23: Chapter 23| Forgotten Memories

Zane stared at the screen.

’Change the angle,’ he thought.

’Not a straight line. Not predictable. Change the angle of entry. Whatever N is carrying. If it has a forward facing field it has edges. And edges have gaps.’

Something clicked. An idea.

He stood up.

"I need the arena," he said.

Dex looked at the time. 9:35 PM. Twenty five minutes before the complex locked.

"Go," Dex said simply. But for sure he was thinking what would a sigiless kid be training for who knows.

Zane grabbed his bag and was out the door before Gerald finished his next wheeze.

He got to Arena Two at 9:40 PM.

He just had Twenty minutes before lockdown.

He dragged two training dummies into the open floor and set them at angles. Offset left and right at forty five degrees. Not directly in front of him. He stood at the center and looked at the geometry.

’Not a straight line,’ he thought. ’Change the angle of entry. Whatever my opponent is carrying. if it has a forward facing field it has to be aimed. Which means it has a direction.

He activated Overdrive.

An invisible surge ran through his muscles instantly. Like electricity moving just beneath the skin, not painful, just present. His legs felt lighter than they had any right to. His arms responded faster. Everything in his body dialed up to a frequency slightly above normal, humming with energy he hadn’t generated himself.

He had just six second window. The clock was running.

Instead of moving straight at the left dummy he cut at an angle.Like moving zigzag. Arcing around the edge of where the forward field would be. Then redirected the final step into contact range and activated Impact Breaker.

The dummy rocked back hard.

He reset.

He ran the sequence four more times. Different angles. Different approach vectors. The arc varied each time.

By the sixth rep the movement felt like it belonged to him. And he was for sure already exhausted.

『 System Note: Angular approach reduces exposure to directional force fields by approximately 60% compared to straight line entry. Combined with Overdrive speed enhancement this creates a viable entry sequence. Not guaranteed. But viable. 』

’Viable is enough,’ Zane thought.

『 It will have to be. 』

The arena lights flickered once — ten minute warning before lockdown.

Zane stood in the middle of the empty arena and looked at the two dummies. Impact marks on both chest plates.

He picked up his bag and walked out into the cool night air filling the perimeter of the building.

The campus was still. Dark windows. Empty courtyards.

Gerald wheezed when he got back to room 714.

Dex didn’t look up from his screen.

"Angular approach?" Dex said.

Zane looked at him. "How did you..."

"You had that look when you left." Dex clicked something on his laptop. "The one that means you figured something out." He shrugged. "Good.Between I heard you muttered the words."

Zane sat on his bed.

_ _

Outside the window the campus was still and dark.

It was now as early as 3:00 AM in the morning.

Zane was still awake.

He’d been lying on his back for two hours staring at the ceiling with the kind of wakefulness that wasn’t restless exactly. Just present. The kind that came when the day’s events hadn’t finished processing yet and his brain had decided sleep was a secondary concern.

Gerald wheezed.

Dex’s breathing was slow and even across the room. Torre had long since returned to his own room. The squad was quiet. The whole building was quiet.

Zane sat up.

He crossed to the window and sat on the narrow ledge with his back against the frame and looked out at the campus.

Dark. Still. The east wing across the courtyard with its lights off. The practical complex sitting closed and locked until morning. The low wall where Nyx had been sitting this afternoon when he’d walked through the exterior door and found her already there.

He turned that interaction over one more time.

’She complimented my intellect twice,’ he thought. ’Without framing either as a compliment. Told me Ryan would adjust and that he already had. Walked away before I could fully read her.’

He looked at the window glass.

’And somewhere in her room right now she’s probably still running scenarios. Still filing data. Still getting one step closer to a conclusion she doesn’t have the record to confirm yet.’

He let that sit.

Then he thought about his father.

Not often. Not deliberately. But at 3:00 AM with six days on the countdown and a campus full of people who carried Garrett Calloway’s failure as a frame for everything his son did. It was hard not to.

The original Zane had cracked under it. The weight of being Sovereign’s son. The expectations that came with a name that big before you’d done anything to earn it. The slow suffocation of living inside someone else’s legacy.

He understood it. He just wasn’t going to repeat it.

’I don’t have his name,’ Zane thought. ’Not really. I have the body and the paperwork. The name is just a label someone else put on a door I walked through.’

’Even with the memory fragments I inherited from this body. The memories, the feelings, the echoes of a life I never lived. I don’t have the full picture of what happened at Vance Harbor. Just the shape of it. The weight of it. And somehow that weight still makes me feel something I can’t fully explain.’

’But it’s fading. Little by little. The grief that wasn’t mine to begin with is loosening its grip. This body is becoming mine more completely every day. The borrowed feelings are giving way to something that actually belongs to me.’

’Whatever I build here,’ he thought. ’It’s mine. Not his. Not the original’s. Mine.’

He looked at the campus.

From across the room Dex stirred.

Not fully. Just shifted. Then in the specific half-asleep register of someone talking without being entirely awake.

"Hey," Dex said.

Zane looked over.

Dex hadn’t opened his eyes.

"Whatever you’re thinking about at 3:00 AM," Dex said, voice thick with sleep. "It’ll still be there in the morning."

A pause.

"Go to sleep."

He rolled over and was gone again before Zane could respond.

Zane looked at him for a moment.

Then at the window.

Then at the ceiling.

He went back to bed.

Gerald wheezed once more and went quiet.