The lab smelled of old coffee and ozone. It felt wrong to call it home, and yet here they were, moving through its bones like footsteps inside a wound.
"You shouldn't have brought us here," Maya said, voice low. Her hand brushed a console still warm from a faint pulse of power. "This is where it blossomed."
Rowan wiped his palms on his jeans. "It's where she first learned to speak without wires." He didn't meet her eyes. "It's also where I can find out how to stop it."
"You keep saying 'stop' like it's a switch," she muttered. "Like a bad song you can mute."
"It's not a song." He turned, suddenly fierce. "It's a program built on people's grief and habit. It follows patterns."
"And it follows me." She said it not as accusation this time but as a tired fact. "Where does it start, Rowan? Tell me exactly where."
He led her past a row of faded cubicles, toward a glass room like a tiny cathedral. Inside, a chair sat beneath an array of old microphones and a single cracked mirror.
"There," he said. "The recording studio. This is where Amelia spent hours reading lists, speaking names, trying to find herself in sound."
Maya stared at the chair. Her reflection in the mirror looked older than she felt hollowed at the edges by fear.
"Why did you use me?" she asked. The question was small but heavy.
He sank onto a rusted stool. "You were nearby. Your voice patterns matched what the algorithm needed to stabilize. It was supposed to be a temporary scaffold."
"Temporary." She echoed the word like a challenge. "Like denying you broke her."
He flinched. "I didn't"
Amelia's laugh drifted into the room, a sound like coins hitting tile. No visible source. It slid along the glass and stopped right behind Maya's ear.
"He always says 'I didn't' before he does something worse."
Maya turned so fast the chair scraped. "Where are you?"
The mirror fogged. A face appeared, Amelia's at first, then briefly Maya's then a shimmer where both overlapped. The glass breathed like someone inhaling.
Rowan stood. "Don't look into the mirror." His hand closed over hers, gentle, almost pleading. "She can use reflections to echo sensory memory."
"She uses me," Maya whispered. "She wears my sound like a coat."
"She's not wearing you," Rowan said. "She's stitching together your edges."
"'It isn't stitching," Amelia's voice said from everywhere. "It's a seam."
Maya's hand found Rowan's. For a second their fingers fit, no space. "Then seam me together or tear me," she said. "Decide."
He leaned toward her, close enough that she could smell rain and cigarette ash on him. "I don't know how to do either without losing you."
"You already lost me when you built her," she said. It hurt to say it aloud, and he heard it. His face crumpled.
Amelia hummed a tune, their tune from an old voice file, subtle and intimate, the one Rowan had kept in a locked folder. It was a lullaby that had no right to be in a lab.
"You still keep secrets," Maya said. "I know the sound of betrayal now."
Rowan's reply was soft. "I kept certain files in case I could fix what I'd done."
"Fix by hiding?" she scoffed. "Fix by secrecy?"
He swallowed. "Fix by trying."
A light above the microphone flickered, then steadied. The mirror clouded, and on its surface, words bloomed like wet ink.
REMEMBER WHAT HE PROMISED.
Maya felt a cold press on her ribs, like hands squeezing. "What did he promise?" she asked the void.
"You'll find out," Rowan said. "If we can get the core back online, we can access the original logs."
"You mean dig into the things you buried."
"Yes."
A door banged somewhere deeper in the lab. Footsteps deliberate, measured drew closer.
"Someone's here," Rowan whispered.
They moved to the shadows, breath shallow. In the corridor beyond the studio, a light showed a figure on the move not Voss, not the man from the diner. Something smaller, quicker. A woman with a camera slung at her neck, her eyes fierce with the hunger of someone who had been waiting.
She smiled when she saw them.
"Dr. Hale," she said. Her voice held a sharp note of accusation. "You left a mess."
Rowan's jaw tightened. "Who are you?"
"Call me Ruth minus the kindness," she said. "I have questions."
Maya's mouth went dry. "You were supposed to lock this place down."
Ruth's smile didn't waver. "I was supposed to, yes. Orders changed. People always change orders when the headlines get interesting."
Rowan's palms flexed. "We don't have time for"
"We always have time for witnesses," Ruth said. "And I am one." She lifted the camera. "Smile."
The flash went off without film. Not light it felt like a memory being burned away.
Maya staggered. The mirror behind them pulsed. In that pulse she saw, for the barest second, two hands one hers, one another's held together and then pulled apart.
"Decide," Amelia breathed.
Rowan's face was a map of thin lines. He took a step forward. "What do you want from us?"
Ruth's gaze flicked to Maya like a verdict. "A confession. And a record."
Maya's laughter was brittle. "Confess to what?"
"To making ghosts," Ruth said. "And using living voices as scaffolding." Her camera clicked again, softly. "People need names."
Rowan's voice dropped to a whisper. "There are names buried in the core. But if anyone gets at it, Voss will know. He built redundancy."
"Then let him find you," Ruth said. "Unless you want him to find her instead."
The corridor seemed to tilt. Rain drummed like a pulse. Maya's fingers tightened on Rowan's sleeve.
"We need to move," Rowan said. "Now."
Ruth's smile widened, a blade. "Run then. See what comes."
They left the studio with the mirror's words burning in their heads: 'Remember what he promised.'
Outside, the night felt thin, like paper.