Chapter Ten: The Memory War
"The mind remembers what the soul can't forget. But what if those memories aren't yours?"
The room was full of people, but Nyah felt completely alone.
The rebel council meeting buzzed with tension — hushed whispers, urgent movements, blueprints strewn across a metal table. Sora leaned against the wall, exhausted. Kael stood silent, arms crossed. Dez, pale and shaken, sat at the edge of the room, hands trembling.
But Nyah… she couldn't move.
Her head throbbed like a cracked drum.
Someone else's memories were bleeding into her vision — again.
A fire. Screams. Metal cuffs.
A mother dragging her child by the arm — no, not her mother.
A hallway full of mirrors. She was eight. She was seventeen. She was forty.
"Nyah," Kael said sharply. "You're bleeding."
She looked down. Blood trickled from her nose, red against the pale gray of her sleeves.
"I'm fine," she lied.
"No, you're not," Sora said gently. "You're slipping. Every day it gets worse."
Nyah didn't answer. How could she explain what it felt like? To walk around with hundreds of lives inside her skull — lives not her own, voices that whispered in her sleep, eyes that weren't hers staring back in reflections?
She could remember dying twelve times — and none of them were her deaths.
Hours Later — Alone
Nyah stood in front of the mirror, hands on the cold sink, breath fogging the glass. She gripped the edge of the counter, watching herself flicker.
For a moment, her reflection changed — dark curls turned blonde, green eyes instead of gray. The face of a woman she had never met.
She slammed her fist into the glass. It cracked. Not enough.
"Get out," she whispered. "GET OUT OF ME!"
Her scream echoed, bounced through her skull like a ricochet.
Behind her, Dez appeared, voice soft. "You're not alone, Nyah."
She turned on him, eyes wild. "Yes, I am. You think I'm still me? I don't know who that is anymore. I don't even know what I feel unless it's someone else's grief!"
He stepped forward anyway.
"You anchored me," he said. "Now let me anchor you."
She shook her head, tears welling. "You don't get it. I see people before they speak. I know things about them they haven't even remembered yet."
"That's not a curse."
"Then why does it feel like one?"
Flashback: First Memory Overload
She had been ten. In the Authority's lab. They had forced her into a full consciousness merge — a procedure where thirty minds were injected into her brain through a neural stream.
She convulsed for three days.
By the time she woke up, she was no longer a child. She knew the names of every Authority commander. She remembered how it felt to kill a man with her bare hands. She remembered holding a dying daughter.
Except she had never had a daughter.
She wasn't a girl anymore — she was a living network of trauma.
Present — The Collapse
Back at the council, a code red alarm blared.
The screens lit up with a shocking message: The Authority is inside the Perimeter. Less than ten kilometers away.
"How?" Sora asked, pale.
"No one betrayed us," Dez said. "No one said anything. They just… found us."
But Nyah knew. She gasped, stepping back.
"It's me," she whispered. "I'm the breach."
Everyone turned.
"They left something inside me. A mental trigger. One of the minds they injected — it wasn't human."
Kael stepped forward. "Say that again?"
"It was a Hollow consciousness. A smart one. It's been sleeping inside me… watching."
Sora cursed. "You're saying we have a Hollow AI inside your head?"
"Not just an AI. A tactician. It's been collecting data every time I connect to someone."
Silence.
Terror.
"It's not your fault," Dez said.
"Then why do I feel like I just killed all of you?"
The lights flickered. A distant boom shook the room.
They didn't have hours. They had minutes.
The Choice
"What do we do?" Kael asked.
Nyah wiped her tears.
"You leave me."
"No," Sora said instantly.
"You have to," Nyah said firmly. "If I stay, the Hollow inside me gives them a path straight to our door. But if I go underground — isolate myself — I can confuse the signal."
Dez shook his head. "We won't let you walk into that alone."
"It's the only chance we have."
A long silence.
Then Sora pulled Nyah into a tight hug. "You're still one of us."
Kael, usually stone-faced, placed a hand on Nyah's shoulder. "Come back."
"I'll try."
She turned, heading into the tunnel that would take her deeper than any rebel had ever gone — into the Earth's crust, into the ancient Hollow caverns where even Authority scanners failed.
As she disappeared into the dark, her final thought wasn't of fear.
It was of peace.
The voices inside her head were still screaming.
But for the first time,