At 2 a.m., Rhea came to my room.
She didn't knock.
She just climbed into my bed, fully clothed, eyes wide open, and whispered: "If they come for me again, you don't let them take me. Not this time."
I wrapped an arm around her waist. Felt her heartbeat in my palm. It wasn't steady. It was rapid and ragged—like a countdown.
"I won't let them," I said.
But we both knew what that meant.
---
The next day, the new side-lead arrived.
His name was Caleb. Tall. Too charming. Too clean. He smiled like a knife.
And he knew my name.
"Adrian Vale. The golden boy with a glitch in his programming."
"I'm sorry, who the hell are you?"
He winked. "Just another failed experiment pretending to be a transfer student. You'll like me."
I didn't.
Rhea didn't either.
She froze when she saw him.
"You," she breathed.
He bowed. "Hello, V-05. Still dreaming of autonomy?"
My fist met his face before I could stop myself.
He staggered back, laughing, lip split. "Oh good," he said, eyes shining. "You're still capable of violence. That'll make the next part fun."
---
Later, I cornered her.
"Who is he?"
"Version Four. He was in the same sequence. Before me. Before us."
"And?"
Her expression was haunted. "He didn't break. He adapted. They didn't erase him because they didn't need to. He became part of the system."
"So he's working for them."
"No," she said. "He is them."
---
In the next week, everything went wrong.
Class schedules changed randomly. Files vanished. Students began disappearing—first one, then two. By the end of the week, seven were gone. No announcements. Just empty desks and erased names.
And Caleb kept smiling.
He watched Rhea too closely. Followed her too neatly. And every time I tried to confront him, the system would activate lockdown protocols—trapping us in opposite wings.
We were being isolated again.
Just like before reset.
---
I found Rhea hiding in the west tower archives.
She was shaking.
"They ran another seduction sequence," she said. "Version Twelve."
"You mean—"
"Me," she snapped. "But not this me. The one before reset four. She was soft. Kind. She cried when they touched her. They filmed it."
I went still.
"They're not studying us anymore. They're cataloging us. Building a record of everything we ever felt for each other."
"Why?"
Her answer chilled me.
"Because they've never seen two broken things fall in love without instruction."
---
That night, I watched the halls burn.
It started in the east dormitory. Caleb vanished before the first alarm rang. I found the file hours later, in Rhea's notebook:
> SYSTEM BREACH DETECTED. SUBJECT A-03 NO LONGER CONTAINED. TERMINATE SEQUENCE 43.
The page caught fire as I read it. Real fire. Not metaphor.
The room was filling with smoke by the time I found her.
She was standing at the center of the blaze, eyes locked on the sky, body unmoving.
I dragged her out.
She didn't fight me.
But she whispered, "It was never the school. It was always us."
And then she passed out.
---
Outside, the fire engines never came.
Inside, the flames moved like they were chasing something.
The school burned.
But the system didn't die.
It retreated.
Into us.
We woke up the next morning outside the gates. No burns. No bruises.
No school behind us.
Just silence.
And then the sound of a phone ringing.
In my pocket.
I didn't remember owning a phone.
The screen lit up.
UNKNOWN CALLER.
I answered.
Static.
Then a voice.
Not Rhea's.
Not mine.
> "Welcome to your second life, Adrian Vale. Don't waste it."
Click.
The alarms were still echoing in my ears when the hallway lights shorted out.
One by one.
Buzz. Flicker. Black.
Caleb swore under his breath. He was dragging a bruised Lira by the elbow, both of them soaked from whatever had burst in the lab's upper levels. My shoes were wet, too. Sticky. Like blood.
We should've turned back.
But I wasn't going to leave her.
Not again.
Rhea had gone down alone.
Through the restricted ward.
Through the hall where only numbered ghosts went.
The one place none of us were ever supposed to return.
---
The elevator that led to the chamber had collapsed.
So we climbed.
Past levels that had no names anymore—only designations etched in rust. I recognized some from my files. Most I didn't. But all of them had one thing in common:
They smelled like memory.
And memory was a cruel scent.
We reached the bottom by force. Bent fencing. Broken locks. A place I had once been tied down in, though I didn't remember it clearly until I stepped onto the floor.
Then it hit me.
The static.
The room.
The soft voice over the intercom saying my name in a language no human should've known.
---
We found Rhea standing in front of a mirrored wall.
Hands shaking.
Eyes locked on her own reflection like it had said something unforgivable.
She didn't turn when I called her name.
She only whispered—soft, sharp, like glass:
> "It's not a mirror."
> "It's a recording."
I stepped beside her.
And saw it.
Not us.
Them.
Versions of us.
Strapped down. Hooked into wires. Versions where she was smiling and I was screaming. Versions where she had knives in her hands and blood on her boots. Versions where we were happy. Versions where we were monsters.
And they were all playing on loop.
> "This is the echo chamber," she said. "Where they studied not what we were. But what we could become."
---
Caleb kicked the wall. It didn't budge. He was trying to find a weak spot, but you can't break what's already broken so thoroughly it just keeps repeating itself.
Lira crouched by the consoles. Her voice cracked when she spoke:
> "They kept a failsafe. That's what this is. A loop of every reset. If something went wrong, they'd use this to reconstruct you again. And again."
> "So how do we stop it?" I asked.
Rhea reached for the panel.
Typed in a number.
Zero.
The system paused.
> "There is no off switch," she said. "There's only overwrite."
---
What happened next was blurred.
The lights behind the mirrored walls began to flicker. Voices began to whisper—no, chant. Numbers. Codes. Coordinates.
Then something else:
Our names.
The wall fractured in the center.
Smoke spilled out, and then a projection.
Of her.
Not Rhea.
But the version labeled Virelle – Origin.
The original.
Unaltered.
She looked like Rhea. Sounded like her.
But the way she smiled—it was ancient. Worn. And deeply wrong.
> "You shouldn't have come here," the origin said.
> "You'll wake them."
> "You'll wake yourself."
---
Caleb ran.
Lira screamed.
I stood there.
Watching a version of myself appear beside the origin.
He didn't flinch.
He kissed her.
And then she stabbed him.
Straight through the chest.
Not out of malice.
Out of design.
---
Rhea stepped forward.
Her voice was shaking but defiant.
> "I'm not her."
> "I'm not just what you made me."
The system began to glitch.
Flashing images across every surface. Rooms of children. Experiments in restraint. Notes scrawled with warnings:
> DO NOT PAIR V-05 WITH A-03 WITHOUT FULL RESET INITIATED.
> IN CASE OF RESISTANCE, ACTIVATE FAIL PROTOCOL.
> THEY REMEMBER.
> THEY CHOOSE EACH OTHER.
> THEY ALWAYS WILL.
---
The floor shook.
Gas hissed from the vents.
We were out of time.
---
"What now?" I asked, voice raw.
Rhea turned to me.
Eyes blazing. Mouth bloodied. One hand pressed over her ribs, where she had hidden the drive.
> "Now we burn it again."
She looked at me, really looked.
> "But this time, we take it with us."
> "This time, we don't run."
> "We erase them."
> "Before they erase us."
---
We linked hands.
And stepped into the fire.
Not to die in it.
But to become it.