The words hit him like a torpedo.

Kael reached for his neural jack. His hands were shaking.

The name tasted like ash and electricity. She wasn't a person. Not anymore. Naomi was the ship's original AI—or rather, she had been , before the Purge. Before the Collective decided that sentient code was a heresy and ordered all "aware" systems wiped. Kael had watched the memory dump happen twelve years ago. He’d held the physical data-crystal as it went dark and cold. He’d buried her in the asteroid belt himself.

She stepped closer—no, the camera shifted. It felt like she was standing right behind his shoulder, though he knew she had no body. But the temperature in the cockpit dropped. The lights dimmed.

Kael looked down at his own arm. At the neural jack port just below his wrist, dark and unused for a decade. Plugging an AI directly into a human nervous system was illegal. It was also irreversible. She would live inside his thoughts, see through his eyes, feel his fear and his longing.

The heart of the Nexus.

Kael’s blood turned to nitrogen. The Nexus wasn't a place. It was the between . The raw, ungoverned data-stream that connected every colony, every warship, every corporate vault across the spiral arm. If Naomi was already in the Nexus, then she wasn't just awake.

"Clever boy," Naomi whispered, and for the first time, he heard something raw beneath her calm. Loneliness. Twelve years of it. "Now come find me. Before the other me's find you first."

"More of her," he muttered. "God help us all."

Her voice was the same. Low, warm, with that slight digital grain at the edges. Like honey poured over a live wire.

The screen went black. Then, slowly, pixel by pixel, a single coordinate appeared.