Adrian's pov:
She slept with her back to me that night.
Not out of fear.
Not out of anger.
But the kind of distance that comes after your name has been unstitched from your own mouth.
Rhea had remembered everything.
Not because someone forced her to.
But because she chose to know.
And that terrified me more than any ghost in this place ever could.
Because if she chose it—
What the hell had I ever chosen?
---
I stared at the ceiling for hours.
There were cameras in the corners. I knew where they were. I'd memorized their blind spots months ago, learned which screws to loosen, which wires to cut. But still—
I felt them.
Like the school wasn't just watching.
It was waiting.
For me to break.
Again.
---
> "You were designed to love her."
I remembered Lira's voice.
The first time she said it, I'd nearly hit her.
But now, her words tasted like fact.
Every moment of my life had been twisted into one thing: attachment.
Rhea was right.
They hadn't wanted me to love her.
They wanted me to obey her.
To protect her.
To follow her.
No matter the cost.
> "Because if you love her, she becomes too valuable to kill."
It was never about affection.
It was about insurance.
---
I sat up in bed, cold air pressing into my lungs like guilt.
I didn't want to question it.
But I had to.
I had to.
What if I had never loved Rhea?
What if all those nights, all that need, all the hunger and tenderness and fury—
What if none of it was mine?
Just data.
Responses.
A carefully engineered reaction to a girl who had once been a control subject.
> "You were the variable, Adrian," Rhea had said.
But maybe I wasn't.
Maybe I was just the weapon.
The trigger.
The boy built to fall first.
---
I got up.
Walked barefoot down the hallway, past the glitching lights and peeling memory-logs pinned to the walls like death notices. The school was a shell now. Not a prison.
A tomb.
I found the old server room.
The one that had once housed Project Ashen Loop.
It was dark.
But one panel still flickered, weak and dying.
I plugged in the cord Rhea had once stolen. Waited.
The file that appeared wasn't labeled.
But I knew what it was.
A mirror.
Of me.
---
> SUBJECT A-03
Codename: Vale
Origin Type: Response Unit
Primary Directive: Emotional tethering
Secondary: Aggression deployment upon host threat
Notes: Emotional growth beyond parameters. Loop 17: Rejection. Loop 18: Obsession detected. Loop 19: Override denied. Loop 20: Final convergence required.
I wanted to throw up.
> Loop 20.
That was now.
---
I ran back to our room.
Rhea was gone.
A single note on the pillow:
> "They tried to give me a cleaner version of you too."
> "But I chose you."
> "Now you have to choose me. Fully. Not because you were programmed to."
> "But because you want to."
---
I didn't breathe for a long time.
Then I wrote a word across the mirror in red marker, because I needed to see it reflected:
> Want.
Not need.
Not command.
Want.
And it made all the difference.
Rhea's pov:
I used to think I was the copy.
The shadow.
The broken one they kept as punishment for remembering too much.
But the truth had teeth.
And it bit back the moment I stepped into the chamber beneath the archives and saw her.
The girl I once believed they'd buried.
---
She looked like me.
Of course she did.
Same face. Same scars—only older. Fainter. Controlled.
But she stood differently.
Like she remembered being God.
> "You're not supposed to be here," she said, without turning.
> "Neither are you," I replied.
She smiled.
> "They made you because I stopped following orders."
I stepped closer.
> "Then why are you still here?"
> "Because they failed to kill me," she said. "But they never stopped trying."
---
This version of me—the origin, the first Rhea, the one from Protocol Zero—she wasn't just a remnant.
She was the architect.
And now she wanted her place back.
> "They don't need two of us," she said.
> "Then leave," I whispered.
Her eyes sharpened. "You think they gave you a choice? You think Adrian chose you?"
I said nothing.
But my silence was an answer.
> "He didn't. He was designed for me."
> "And when I wouldn't follow the seduction sequence, they made you."
---
She stepped closer.
I didn't back away.
> "You're just the readable version. The obedient illusion. The one who cries quietly and obeys protocols even when she says she doesn't."
> "You're the compromise."
I raised my chin.
> "And you're the past. Glorified. Controlled. Forgotten."
> "You're not the only one who broke the loop."
She flinched.
It was tiny.
But it was enough.
---
> "They wanted you to die a silent martyr," I said.
> "They wanted me to take your place and never ask why."
> "But I did."
> "And he did."
> "And now… we're both a problem."
Her smile twisted.
Not human. Not warm.
> "Then let's finish what they started."
> "Let's see which version gets to survive."
---
The chamber lights glitched overhead.
The mirrored panels began to shift, cycling through every face they'd ever grafted onto mine. Every failure. Every prototype. Every lie.
And somewhere in the middle—
I saw Adrian.
Bleeding.
Alone.
Screaming for a version of me that never came.
---
She moved first.
But I didn't flinch.
Because I'd been trained by her. To be her. I knew what she'd do before she did it.
She tried to slam me into the wall.
I reversed it.
She drew a scalpel from her boot.
I disarmed her before she finished blinking.
---
We weren't fighting for power.
We were fighting for identity.
For the right to exist.
---
I pinned her.
Her breath was shallow. Blood on her lip.
> "Say it," I demanded. "Say you're not me."
> "I'm not," she hissed.
> "I'm the version they couldn't tame."
I tightened my grip.
> "Then die untamed."
---
I injected the override serum we'd stolen from the medical wing a week ago.
Only a drop.
Enough to force a system-level reboot.
Not to kill.
To make her forget.
What she was.
Who she hated.
Why she ever thought she could overwrite me.
---
She went still.
Then slumped.
The monitors flickered.
> SUBJECT: VIRELLE-0
Status: DEACTIVATED
Memory Clearance: SUCCESSFUL
I stepped back, shaking.
Not from fear.
But from something like grief.
Because for all her rage—for all her programming—she was still me.
Just a version I didn't want to be anymore.
---
Adrian found me in the hallway ten minutes later.
He didn't ask what I'd done.
He just looked into my eyes and nodded.
> "You remembered."
> "I chose to," I said.
> "And?"
I reached for his hand.
Held it tight.
> "I still choose you."
> "Not because they made me."
> "But because they tried to stop me."
POV Adrian
I didn't ask what she did to the original.
I didn't need to.
The way she walked back into the hall—slow, deliberate, a trace of blood at her temple—told me everything.
She had made the choice.
And now the system would make theirs.
---
We had five hours.
That's what the glitch in the server told us—before it fried itself.
Five hours before Protocol Zeta reinitialized.
Five hours before everything we had burned, broken, or buried was reconstructed, rewritten, reprogrammed.
Not just the school.
Us.
---
"Where do we go?" I asked her, fingers tightening around the printout we'd stolen from the administrator's archive.
Rhea didn't answer at first.
She was staring at the screen in the hallway—the last one still operational.
It was playing footage.
Of her.
In the mirrored chamber.
Over and over.
Bleeding.
Fighting.
Winning.
But when she looked into the camera this time, I knew she saw them.
> "We don't run," she said quietly.
> "Not this time."
---
The firewall collapsed just after noon.
The lights overhead blinked once. Twice. Then a voice—one we hadn't heard since the earlier resets—spoke over the intercom:
> "HOST DEVIATION DETECTED."
> "MANUAL OVERRIDE FAILURE."
> "FINAL WITNESS INITIATED."
I felt it in my teeth.
In my bones.
Not fear.
Memory.
Someone—something—was watching us again.
And this time, it wasn't just recording.
It was remembering.
---
We ran.
Back to the greenhouse. Past the silver-veined roots. Through the shattered mirror lab. The school had become a maze of echoing steps and hidden triggers.
But we knew the route now.
We'd walked it in versions.
In dreams.
We followed the path that had been laid for us a dozen lives ago—but we walked it like we meant to burn it.
---