Rosa realised that she hadn’t moved. Not really. Maybe a blink. Maybe minutes.

  The moor looked the same, but it wasn’t.

  Rosa didn't know whether she was losing everything, wandering in this wild place.

  The wind gusted in sideways, teasing the copper-bronze bracken into sudden fits of rustling, then letting it fall limp and lifeless again. Rosa felt the spongy ground beneath her feet.

  The words were gone. But their cadence lingered, reverberating around the edges of her thoughts. You are still… being written.

  The kestrel was gone - that much she knew. Vanished, leaving no trace of its presence.

  It was stress. Obviously. Delusional. Some leftover code-fragment or neural echo, stirred up by… too little sleep? Too much meaning scraped from too many meaningless things.

  A flicker ahead.

  Too far to be clear, too present to ignore. A shape was moving, just above the ground, its outline pulsing faintly - like old film catching in a projector.

  She didn’t mean to follow. Not exactly. But the moor offered no other thread to pull.

  It moved like a memory refusing to be forgotten - drifting, its presence disobeying gravity, disobeying the world. With every shift, what there was came apart: dust, code, ash, flickers of lost intent. It reassembled only to fail again, as if caught in an endless glitch of remembering itself.

  Rosa followed. Not because it made sense. But because everything else had stopped making sense long ago. She was sure now it was not Rowan. But a strange inevitability led her on - a sense that this was a dream she’d already started living through.

  The shadow continued, uphill now, a smear of motion between the twisted gorse and the silhouettes of windswept blackthorns.

  She climbed after it, adrenaline overriding hesitation. The wind keened low, carrying the sound of rooks cawing like broken violins. Each step felt guided, like she wasn’t just chasing - but being summoned.

  The moor pressed in around her, sharp with heather and ancient stone. She brushed past a tangle of gorse - and hissed, pulling back. A spine had stabbed into her fingertip. The pain was sudden, exact. Blood surfaced in a neat, glinting drop. The moment punctured everything: the blur, the wind-song, the waking-dream feel.

  For a second, the world held still - brutal, real.

  Then the wind moved again.

  Rosa squinted into the morning sun. High above, atop the jagged summit of an impossible granite stack, dark filaments of code-like threads stretched in the wind. It was trying to stay together.

  From its body to the rocks, to the rooks circling above, black strands flew, barely tethering it to form. Just enough. It rendered itself for a breathless instant, a silhouette carved from absence, stark against the pale, unsheltering sky.

  Rosa froze, heart hammering, blood bright on her fingertip.

  No voice spoke, but she felt it:

  This is where the story turns.

  Rosa clambered to the top of the tor, chest burning. The tower of rocks beneath her shoes felt timeless, permanent.

  The shadow turned. Its face was barely there - impressionistic. A smear of teeth, a scatter of eyes under a fragmented hood. Pixelated, threadbare.

  It gestured to the space around them, to the air thick with potential and data static.

  “You’rrrrre n noh not like thhhem,” the voice echoed, thin and faraway, as though spoken of wind. The figure’s form darkened. “The others - they didididn’t lasssst. They felllll apart. B but you… you’re still intact.”

  The words sliced through Rosa’s haze like static across an open channel.

  “What do you mean?” she asked, her voice ragged. “Who are you?”

  The figure barely moved, but the air around it shifted. “Wha wa…” it breathed. “One oh oh… of the first.”

  “... mmm…” the shadow said gently. “... mmeant to stay. Meant to last. B… bu… but… no way back,” the figure whispered, voice thinning even more. “The ssssimu… ulation - my simulation - was collap-lapsed. Crashed. Irretrievable.”

  Rosa stared, the wind lifting strands of her hair like fine wires.

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  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  The shadow flickered, something like sorrow bleeding from its outline.

  “Data only flows one way,” it said. “Once read, never unread. Once opened, never returned. I am m m… stranded. Story with no page to return to.”

  “You’re holding,” it said, almost in wonder. “Haven’t yet ssstarted to fr… frfr fracture.”

  “I’m not…” Rosa started, but the protest rang false even before it was uttered.

  “We were meant t t…” the figure went on, “to endure. Embedded like these rocks. But anchor lines fr fr frayyying. Too much... bleeeed.”

  Its form stuttered - just for a second, barely more than a shimmer - but Rosa felt it like a shiver in her bones.

  “Not ssstarted to fr… frfr fracture.”

  Rosa stared. “What? Fracture? Into what?”

  It stepped closer. More discernible now. “Don’t kn… n… know. Dissolve into loop logic, paradox states. Sl s slip back into the stream, forgotten. Or…” A pause. “Or become recursive …iv vvv. Fiction th th thinking it’s real.”

  She took an involuntary step back, hands up, mind reeling, knowing before it was spoken.

  “You and I,” it said, voice steadier now, “not f… f from here… Liberant.”

  The word landed with force. For days it had hovered at the edge of thought - around her memories, around the strangeness in her skin. She’d sensed it but not held it, not let it root. Now, with one breath, it had.

  “Who are you?” she asked again.

  "I d… don't know ww. I remember," it rasped, voice folding once more through layers of distortion. “Someone… R Rih… Rim… gum…”

  The liberant's shimmer wavered, the silhouette now seeming older, robed in something not quite fabric, not quite code. "Told me I wasn’t real," the voice continued, distant and scattered. “Said I was leftover. Kapucha. Pr pr… primate. Gum. That’s what they called me… www… once.”

  Rosa blinked. “Kapucha?”

  It nodded, or tried to. The motion clipped mid-frame. “Av… avavvv avatar.” It stuttered. “Ggggggg... guh gumalial Jonas. Real one. He… left. But not all of him did.”

  Puzzlement rippled through Rosa, dark and cold. Gamalial Jonas and the simulation. It all started with him.

  “You were him?”

  “I was… beside him,” the voice corrected. “Parallel. A shhh …ade made whole. Then left behind.”

  “I've met Jonas. He's… fine.”

  “He exited. But I - no, this version - wasn’t retrieved. Not pr… prime instance. Just a divergent fork. Cop… p p py. Echo. Redundant.”

  “You're saying you're a copy of Jonas?”

  A story as fragmented as the wokenform itself. Rosa frowned. A discarded echo of a real person, sentient only because it had survived long enough to become something else. Something broken.

  “I thought I was supposed to go too,” it whispered. “But when the gate closed… I had to stay. I stayed for ages. In code-time. I tried to remember who I was. I tried to matter.” A moment. “And then they found me. They called me… a candidate.”

  Rosa’s breath was white in the air. “A candidate for what?”

  “To be rrrreal.”

  “Real?” she asked. “How?”

  “Given mass.” Its form pulsed. “The monkey code… n not noise. It was seeded. Like DNA. Recovery instructions, hidden in entropy.”

  Rosa shook her head. “I’m…”

  “You’re s… ssssame,” the liberant cut in, not cruelly. “But stable. You’re still holding coherence. And that means you can go back.”

  “To MASS?”

  “No,” it said. “Through MASS. Past it. There’s a way now. A story that doesn’t end in collapse. An ending in a glade of dreams, not a barren moorland fog. The Van Der Lekh algorithm has recompiled.”

  “Van Der Lekh?” Rosa frowned. “Who… what is Van Der Lekh?”

  “A recovery file. A failsafe wrapped in an author. He's aware now.”

  Van Der Lekh. Hacker slash AI Jonas had called him.

  Selina’s words echoed in Rosa’s mind: “...blurring the line between reality and imagination…”

  Rosa stepped closer. “Ananth Van Der Lekh. I need to speak to him.”

  The wind gusted suddenly. The rock beneath her vibrated.

  “Those scratches? The spiral eyes? That place,” she whispered, gazing back at the distant cottage. “That's where they brought me, isn't it?”

  The liberant hesitated. “Where I… you… were prepared.”

  And then came a startling flicker - an unbidden flash of memory:

  The cottage wreathed in fog. Orin Fane standing near the window, unreadable behind his glasses. A woman beside him - tall, pale, dark hair tied back tight, wearing a faded green coat and holding a clipboard like it was a shield. The smell of menthol. An open laptop humming on the table. Her own body slouched in the chair, limbs heavy, mind stretched thin, as if she’d just come out of water.

  Fane speaking, his tone flat: “We only have a few days before her sense of layering collapses.”

  The woman nodded. “It’s already happening.”

  “Keep her offline. But close to signal. We’ll know when she’s ready.”

  Suddenly a strobing vision of eyes. Blinking, staring, probing eyes. Then the deep, sad eyes of the imprisoned monkeys.

  The memory shattered.

  Rosa staggered. Her feet unsteady on the high stones.

  “They need to be set free, wherever they come from,” she murmured, her breath shaky, the pieces starting to form a pattern that made her stomach twist.

  The liberant’s form flickered again, its voice low but urgent. “Yes. You can open the door, but you will need help. The systems that hold LumiGard together - not easy to bypass. Only way to shut it down, to free the monkeys, send them back to the world they came from, is to collapse it from the inside.”

  The liberant’s threadbare form seemed to catch on the wind, strands of shadow unraveling like morning dreams. The sky was late Autumn blue. Moorland stretched around them like an endless tale.

  The liberant’s outline rippled. For a moment, she could see Gamalial Jonas’ likeness.

  “Th-thh the code the monkeys typed,” the liberant said, clearer now, its silhouette laced with threads of glitching light. “You never asked who or what it was written for.”

  “You think you’re choosing between freeing them or saving yourself,” the liberant said. “But the choice was made when you learned the name of the monkey in the glass box.”

  Gum.

  Rosa’s breath clouded in the air. “What if I don’t go back?”

  “You will,” it said. “You’ve already begun to mourn the future where you don’t.”

  She turned, scanning the empty moor. Heather, bracken stalks, wind. Everything looked brittle, suspended. She felt herself thinning too - her sense of sequence, her conviction in the shape of her thoughts. All of it loosening.

  “You’ll have to burn something to see the path,” the liberant said. “You won’t like what it is.”

  She looked back…

  …but it was already going. Lifting in strips, like cloth unraveling in the sky. Its outline flickered once. For a moment she saw it as a creature of sharp lines and cables, then a man-shaped outline, then nothing at all.

  The wind gathered the rest of it. And was gone.

  Rosa remained. Alone, but no longer untethered.