Skye ran.
Not just through the Mirror Room—but through space, thought, and time itself.
Every step shattered something behind her. Glass. Identity. Safety.
The hall warped with each stride—now a cathedral of mirrors, now a burning library, now a frozen subway platform flashing with visions of people she never met—but somehow knew.
Her lungs screamed. Her feet bled.
But the ring dragged her forward like a magnet set to truth.
Then—silence.
Everything snapped still.
She stood in front of a door unlike the others—round, metallic, engraved with a spiraling glyph. A sign above read:
MEMORY VAULT: LEVEL 0 – CORE ACCESS ONLY
Skye didn't hesitate.
The door hissed open.
Inside was a single object: a chair. Old, rusted, with leather restraints. Next to it—a headset pulsing faint blue light.
A voice echoed through the room. Mechanical. Familiar.
"Do not attempt memory retrieval without clearance. Unauthorized access will void identity layers."
Skye climbed into the chair.
The ring glowed. The restraints clicked shut.
The headset dropped onto her skull.
---
Darkness.
Then… light.
A field. Wind in her hair. A child's laughter. Her mother's voice—except… she never had a mother. Not in any memory she remembered.
A man with green eyes whispering, "Don't trust what you forget."
A machine exploding.
A woman screaming.
Her own voice ordering: "Erase everything. Lock the Vault. Let the world forget me."
---
She gasped.
The vault chair was gone. So was the room.
She stood now in a replica of her childhood bedroom—only it was wrong. Off. Plastic-looking. As if someone recreated it from her descriptions.
Skye turned—and standing there, hands behind her back like a schoolteacher, was the Memory Merchant.
Smiling gently.
"Well done," he said. "You found it."
"Found what?" Skye growled.
"The Origin Memory," he said. "The truth you buried even from yourself."
He stepped aside—and behind him, on the bed, was a journal. Her name on the cover. Inside, pages scrawled in her handwriting.
The first page read:
"My name is Skye Ashwin. I used to be Maevra."
Her knees buckled.
No. No way.
She flipped through.
It detailed every experiment. Every version of herself. The creation of the Echo Protocol. The invention of Maevra—as a copy of herself, a failsafe to carry on when her real self broke down.
She hadn't built Maevra.
She had been Maevra.
The villain.
The runaway.
The monster who erased herself to escape her crimes.
"You asked to forget," the Merchant said gently. "Because remembering hurt too much. But memory is like gravity. Always pulling."
She looked down at her hands. They were glitching. Flashing between two skin tones, two sets of scars, two people.
"I don't know who I am anymore," she whispered.
"That's the cost of truth," the Merchant said. "But now you have a choice: become Skye again… or reclaim Maevra."
He held out a coin. On one side: a key. On the other: an eye.
"One will reset it all," he said. "The other will end the Protocol forever."
She reached out.
And the world went white.