POV: Nivaan
I've been punched.Shot at.Gaslit by at least three people who once claimed to love me.
But nothing — absolutely nothing — hits as hard as remembering.
Not fully.Not clearly.Just enough to feel like my brain is eating itself alive.
The Red Corridor shakes, panels flickering like dying stars. Kiyan's dragging Avni toward the emergency hatch. Meher's got a fist in the collar of my shirt because apparently I went into "emotional Windows reboot mode."
I force my eyes open.
Static still crawls under my skin where Asset-01's hand almost touched me.A perfect copy of me.Except confident.Cold.Obedient.
Everything I'm not.
Meher crouches in front of me, eyes sharp enough to cut through my panic.
"Talk," she demands. "What did you remember?"
My voice comes out shredded.
"I saw… the lab."
Avni freezes.
Kiyan's "oh no" face activates instantly.
I swallow hard.The memory keeps skipping like corrupted video.
"The room was white. Too white. Bright enough to burn. I was strapped down. They kept saying the same thing over and over."
Meher leans in.
"What thing?"
I laugh. Bitter. Ugly.
"That my emotions were the glitch."
Silence slices the air.
Avni whispers, "They were prepping you for the split."
I look up at her.Her face is pale, jaw clenched like she's chewing on guilt.
"What split?" I ask.
She hesitates too long.
Way too long.
"Avni," Meher snaps. "Spit it out before I rip it out."
Avni folds.
"They used you as a baseline to train Asset-01. You weren't just the target… you were the template. They extracted your emotional blueprint and tried to purge it from the clone. But the purge didn't fully delete."
I blink.
"So… Asset-01 has my emotions?"
Avni shakes her head.
"No. It has your OLD emotions. The version of you that trusted the system. The version we couldn't afford to let live."
Meher turns slowly.
Her eyes say: We're going to fight later but right now answer the damn question.
I feel sick.
"So what am I? The broken copy?"
Kiyan kneels beside me.
"No, bro. You're the unsupervised update."
Not helpful, but… comforting?Kiyan is basically emotional bubble wrap.
The ground shudders again.Emergency klaxons wail.
ALERT: BREACH IN SUBLEVEL 2.CONTAINMENT FAILURE.ALL UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL WILL BE TERMINATED.
Great. Love that for us.
Meher grips my chin, forcing my gaze back to her.
"You said you saw something else," she says. "What else was in the memory?"
I squeeze my eyes shut.
And it comes back like a punch.
A voice.Cold.Precise.Familiar.
"If he resists the split, erase the original before the clone is corrupted."
I look up sharply.
"That voice… Avni. It was you."
The guilt on her face isn't subtle anymore. It's screaming.
She opens her mouth — but Meher stands up first.
"Oh hell no," she mutters. "You were going to erase him?"
Avni straightens, corporate spine snapping back into place.
"It was protocol. He was unstable. The project was collapsing—"
"AND YOU TRIED TO KILL HIM?"
The walls vibrate.But Meher vibrates harder.
Avni's voice finally cracks.
"I didn't go through with it."
"You DID," I say quietly."I remember the needle. The cold. The way you apologized."
Meher's face turns feral.
Avni looks at me helplessly.Defenselessly.
"I pulled out at the last second. I sabotaged the kill sequence. I tried to save you—"
Kiyan sighs. "Okay but like… saving people isn't supposed to involve needles and murder contracts."
The world tilts around me.
All three of them were there the night I vanished.All three played a part.
But the memory keeps going.
A screen.A heartbeat monitor.A phrase in red text.
PROJECT MIRROR: ORIGINAL LOCKEDKEY TRANSFER IN PROGRESS
And then—
My own hand gripping something metallic.A flash drive.A key.Slipping it into someone's jacket pocket.
Not Avni's.Not Kiyan's.
Meher's.
I inhale sharply.
She notices instantly.
"What?" she asks. "What did you just see?"
I touch her jacket.
Right over the spot from the memory.
"I gave you the key," I whisper."Six months ago. I put it on you before they took me."
The silence that follows is so sharp it could slit throats.
Her expression goes blank.But not empty.
Overclocked.Processing.Shutting down and rebooting all at once.
Because this isn't news to her.
This is confirmation.
Avni steps back.Kiyan whispers "bruh."I can hear my pulse thudding like a countdown.
Meher finally speaks.
And her voice isn't shocked.
It's resigned.
"Nivaan…" she says softly."I think I knew."
She reaches into her jacket.Deep inside the inner lining.
And pulls out—
A metal shard.Cold.Black.Etched with a symbol that makes my vision blur.
The key.
The thing everyone is hunting.
The thing Asset-01 was built to find.
The thing I hid from myself.
The thing Meher has been carrying the whole time.
She holds it up between two fingers.
Her eyes meet mine.
And she says the one sentence that destroys whatever was left of my sanity:
"You told me to keep it safe…even from you."
Cut to black.Because of course it does.