The voice inside her head didn't feel like a hallucination. It vibrated through her nerves, curling inside the folds of her brain like it had always been there—just muted, waiting to speak.
"You're not Mira. You're one of the overwritten."
Mira staggered back into the tunnel below the clinic, breath shallow. Flashlights flickered behind the crumbling wall panels—the Archivists were breaching. Riven was gone, vanished into one of his fall-tunnels before she could ask what he'd meant about the "loop."
She gripped the raw memory key chip tighter, as if it might anchor her to something real.
Her boots splashed through knee-high runoff as she ran through the under-passage beneath Theta. She followed old hazard markings, deeper into the maintenance ducts where memory black-market smugglers once digitized expired identities. Somewhere in Sector Delta, an access gate still remained—one linked to the city's internal memory vaults.
If the looping was real…
If she wasn't Mira…
Then who had she been originally before this overwritten world settled into her skin?
As she reached a rusted checkpoint, her temple spiked with heat. The memory coin flared, the glyphs shifting like they were reacting to a frequency in the air.
Then something shifted around her.
Tangible light bent inward, reshaping the walls of the corridor.
And an Archivist stepped into the space—alone, robed in a mirrored cloak, face obscured by a prismed mask that fractured light into spirals.
But this one didn't attack.
"Mira 721," the voice filtered through the mask, layered and calm. "You're not our enemy. You're our design."
Mira aimed her pulse-blade, hands trembling. "What are you talking about? Who was overwritten—me or her?"
"No one was overwritten. They were all real," the Archivist replied. "You're a composite. Multiple Mira variants intersecting at fragmented thresholds. We didn't erase you. We had to separate you."
"Why?"
"Because you remembered everything."
Mira's head throbbed.
"If your full thread reactivates," the Archivist continued, stepping forward, "the spliced timelines collapse inward. The barrier holding back the origin sequence—breaks. And with it… so does this version of the world."
Mira dropped her hand slowly. "Who was the girl on the rooftop?"
"One of you. The one who disobeyed the extraction order and tried to splice in the Ava-Leone tether manually… out of love." The Archivist's voice lowered. "Love has a way of resisting even a hard reset."
Mira looked down at the blinking chip in her palm—the raw key—the access to her full self.
"If I use this," she asked, "what happens?"
The Archivist tilted their head.
"You'll become the origin again."
"And everyone else? Eliah? The life I've lived?"
"Memory constructs. Shadow lives born from the interference," the Archivist answered. "They can't come with you."
Silence pressed against Mira's ribs.
"But if you don't use it," the Archivist said slowly, the lights dimming behind them, "the corrupted versions keep bleeding through—and eventually, reality buckles. You all get erased…"
Mira's heart pounded.
Then the Archivist handed her something unexpected:
A second memory coin.
Older. Scarred. And engraved with a phrase she instantly recognized.
"To forget is not the same as to heal."
Her own writing.
But not in her current hand.
She looked up, questions flooding—
But the Archivist was gone.
She turned the coin over—
and engraved in the second layer was a new inscription:
"You're not meant to remember alone."
Lightning crackled overhead.
A shadow emerged from the far corridor.
And this time, it wasn't her double.
It was Ava.
And she was holding a coin of her own.
To be continue...