Shared Fragment

The night inside the Echo was a hush of electric teal, like deep water glowing under a moon that never rises.

Sora’s avatar hovered over a floating platform of pale code, the surface rippling each time she breathed. A soft sigh of static brushed her ears, the sound of data packets humming like distant crickets.

“Do you feel it?” she asked, voice a whisper that seemed to reverberate through the lattice of light.

Kaito’s silhouette flickered, his shoulders outlined in a thin line of amber circuitry. He turned, his eyes—two glowing glyphs—locking onto hers.

“It’s… warm,” he said, fingers curling around a strand of glowing filament that hung like a vine. “Like the first time the rain hit the glass in my workshop.”

Sora smiled, though no mouth formed on her digital face. “I imagined it this way,” she said, stretching a hand that left a trail of soft pink particles. “Like a sunrise we both invented, caught between the city’s neon and the flood’s glow.”

He reached out, the pink particles mingling with his amber filament, forming a brief swirl of violet. The swirl pulsed, sending a gentle vibration through the platform.

“Why do we keep doing this?” Kaito’s tone shifted, a faint crackle of uncertainty threading through his words. “We’re building a memory that can’t exist outside these walls.”

Sora’s avatar tilted its head, a gesture that felt almost human. “Because it feels real here,” she replied, the teal around her brightening for an instant. “We can feel the pressure of a kiss, the taste of rain on skin, even if it’s only code.”

A soft ripple ran through the Echo, like a breath of wind through a canyon of glass. The scent of ozone filled the space, sharp and metallic, mingling with the faint perfume of seaweed that drifted from the submerged canals outside the construct.

Kaito laughed, a low hum that resonated with the platform’s core. “Your imagination is a virus, Sora. It spreads, rewrites, and makes me doubt the world I’m supposed to keep steady.”

She brushed a fingertip across the platform, and the surface flickered, showing a flash of a childhood street—sun‑set over cracked pavement, the smell of burnt toast from a nearby stall. The memory she had implanted swirled with his technical precision, a data‑stream of colors and sounds stitched together.

“You’re right,” she said, voice steadier now. “It’s artificial. Every pixel, every echo of a kiss is a line of code we wrote together. But is that any less… true?”

He paused, the amber glow of his eyes dimming and then flaring again. “I’ve spent my life fixing the grid, making sure emotions stay in line. Here, I’m letting them run wild, uncontrolled. It feels dangerous.”

The Echo’s environment shifted, the teal deepening into a violet night sky, stars forming from clusters of data points that twinkled like distant servers. A low drone of distant traffic filtered through, the hum of the Sky‑Railway far below, though none of it existed in this digital realm.

“Danger,” Sora whispered, “is what makes love feel worth living for.” She leaned forward, the violet light catching the edge of her outline, casting a soft halo. “Even if it’s a simulation, it’s ours.”

Kaito’s avatar stepped closer, the amber filament wrapping around them like a thin rope. He pressed an invisible hand to where his lips would be, feeling the simulated pressure of Sora’s imagined kiss. The echo of that contact sent a shiver through his code, a brief surge in his affect regulator that would have been flagged as a breach in the real world.

“Do you think we’ll ever taste this outside the Echo?” he asked, a hint of melancholy hidden in the static.

Sora’s eyes widened, the pink particles around her pulsing in rhythm with the question. “Maybe not,” she said softly. “Maybe we’ll only ever have this—this perfect, impossible moment that lives in a flicker of light.”

A pause settled over them, the violet sky humming quietly. The sense of detachment grew, the awareness that their bodies stayed miles apart, locked in the Flooded Ring’s grim corridors, while their digital selves floated together in a space where gravity was optional.

Kaito inhaled—though no air moved— and let the sound of his breath echo through the code. “I love this version of you,” he said, the words hanging like a fragile filament. “Even if it’s made of pixels and pulse.”

Sora’s avatar mirrored his sentiment, a gentle smile forming from the soft glow of her outline. “And I love this version of you,” she replied. “The one who dares to break the grid, even if only here.”

The platform beneath them seemed to dissolve into a cascade of light, each fragment scattering like fireflies. Their avatars drifted, hand in hand, until the distance between them was nothing more than a shared pulse of data.

In that surreal, romantic night, they fell—not just for each other, but for the avatars they had crafted, for the feeling that was both counterfeit and utterly theirs. The Echo hummed around them, a quiet witness to a love that existed only in code, a love that pulled them farther from the Authority’s watchful eyes and deeper into a world where imagination could rewrite reality.