The red-coated woman across the memory seam smiled like someone remembering a private joke.
She looked exactly like Mira—same scar above the brow, same haunted eyes—but her energy was different. Taller posture. Sharper movements. Polished where Mira was raw. Manipulated. Not rewritten, but deliberately constructed.
"You," Mira said, tightening the grip on her broken coin fragment. "You're one of the reflections."
"I'm the one who made it through," said the other. "When you fell apart, they picked up the pieces—and I became the version that worked."
She stepped through the fissure without resistance. The false city around them shimmered slightly, as if wincing at her presence.
"You're not real," Mira said.
"Neither are you," the duplicate replied. "Not in the way that matters. You're a contradiction. A survivor of a design that wasn't supposed to sustain conscious memory across resets."
"She's lying," Ava whispered, still kneeling beside her. "That version was created by the Archivists to overwrite your core identity. She's your deletion failsafe. Armed with charm. Laced with control."
The duplicate turned to Ava, smirking. "You always were a little too sentimental for temporal integrity."
Then her gaze locked once more with Mira's. "You're standing in the root layer now. That's as deep as memory goes. You're about to snap the thread—and shatter everything that was built around you."
She extended her hand.
"Let me relieve you of the burden. Just one touch, and I'll take the fragments you can't carry. I'll make it simple again. And you'll wake up beside Ava—no codes, no memory warfare, no ghosts."
Mira felt it then—temptation. Not because she believed her. But because part of her was tired. All versions of her were tired.
But something stirred in her other hand.
The memory coin—broken but still warm.
She closed her eyes and reached inward—not forward, not backward, but inward.
The storm was there. The rooftop. Ava's voice entwined with the infinitesimal moments shared between lives—glances, laughter, scars, silences.
And for the first time, Mira saw the truth:
She was not a single thread.
She was the weave.
The coin pulsed so hot, it cracked again across her palm.
And then—
the cracked coin dissolved, folding light around her fingers.
New glyphs surged up her skin. Blinking. Breathing.
Ava gasped.
Because Mira was rewriting now—from the inside.
The false Mira recoiled, voice sharp. "What are you doing?"
"I'm reclaiming myself," Mira said, stepping forward.
"You can't—"
"I already have. You weren't my elimination protocol." Her voice shook with something new—clarity. "You were my shadow."
Mira reached out—not to destroy the copy, but to accept her.
Because even fragments deserved to be acknowledged.
That was the final memory:
On the rooftop, holding Ava's hand… and whispering not a farewell, but a vow.
"No more versions. Only the truth."
The false Mira screamed as her construct began to dissolve—not erased, but disassembled, rendered into light, then code, then silence.
And in the moment she vanished, three things happened:
Ava stood tall again, as if a weight had been lifted from the simulation field.
The sky above the memory city fractured—its falseness dissolving like mist at dawn.
Mira finally remembered the event that started it all:
She wasn't the thief.
She was the one they stole time from.
And now, she had the map to the original reality—timeline seed 0.
And one last chance to reclaim it.
To be continue...