Rhea's pov
I didn't know whether to hug him or kill him.
But when he opened his arms—
I let him pull me in.
Because he smelled like the past. Like broken things stitched back together.
Like home, in some fractured, impossible way.
> "They can't follow us anymore," he whispered in my ear.
> "You made sure of that."
I stepped back.
Looked at Adrian.
He was still watching me like I was the center of the storm.
And maybe I was.
But this time, I wasn't weathering it alone.
---
System Report:
> Core breach complete.
> Final loop unraveled.
> Protocol: Null.
> Subject A-03: Freed.
> Subject V-05: Awake.
> System memory: Offline.
---
Adrian's pov
When we emerged from the lab—
The sun was rising.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
The sky was pink. The grass still wet with dew.
The school behind us—quiet. Smoldering. No sirens. No alarms.
Just silence.
And in that silence—
Rhea reached for my hand again.
> "What now?" I asked.
She looked forward.
Toward the trees. The road.
The world.
> "We rebuild."
> "But this time—"
> "We remember everything."
Rhea's pov
We didn't go back to the city.
We couldn't.
The system may have collapsed, but its influence hadn't. There were still cameras out there. Still watchers. Still those who believed in the resets, even if they'd never seen one happen.
So we disappeared.
Caleb found an old cottage on the outskirts of a place the files only called "Node Thirteen." Hidden. Forgotten.
Safe—for now.
But I wasn't sleeping.
Because someone had sent me something.
Something impossible.
A transmission.
A song.
And I knew it wasn't random.
Because it was my song.
---
The melody was simple.
Barely twenty seconds.
But it looped endlessly, sent through a scrambled frequency only an echo-host would recognize. It came through the rusted radio in the cottage. Late at night. Between static.
A child's voice.
Soft.
Lonely.
> "Once upon a version bright...
we danced beneath the coded night.
If you forget me, close your eyes—
and look for where the silence lies."
Adrian didn't recognize it.
But I did.
Because in one of the erased loops—the third or maybe the fifth—I'd sung that song while sedated.
To myself.
To him.
And someone else had heard it.
Someone still alive.
---
Adrian's pov
The way she froze when the song played?
Terrifying.
Rhea didn't blink. Didn't speak. She just listened. Like her soul was trying to crawl back into something it hadn't been allowed to remember.
"Who is it?" I asked gently.
She didn't answer.
Her fingers moved—automatically—reaching for the notebook she always kept beside her bed.
She scribbled the words down. Every line. Then paused. Underlined one.
> "Look for where the silence lies."
I stared.
"It's a code."
She nodded.
> "A message from another loop."
> "Or another survivor."
---
We worked in silence.
That was always the way it was with us. No need to speak every thought aloud. Our minds moved in parallel.
She traced the phrase across a map.
Found an anomaly.
A section of the lab's server grid that never responded to the fire.
A location tied to Project THRESHOLD—a file Caleb had once flagged as "scrubbed but still humming."
Adrian grabbed the keys.
"Let's find your ghost."
---
Rhea's pov
We found the outpost buried beneath the old observatory.
It took six hours to get in.
Two to bypass the fail-locks.
But when we did—the scent of coolant and forgotten metal hit us like a wave.
Inside:
Nothing moved.
Not at first.
Then the speakers crackled.
> "If you're hearing this, it means she remembered the song."
> "Which means I'm not alone."
I felt my knees give out.
Because that voice—
It wasn't a stranger.
It was Nia.
---
Nia was the only other subject I remembered from the original sequence.
Not in files.
In dreams.
In half-memories of someone with pale braids and a missing tooth who held my hand when the doctors wouldn't.
I thought she was erased.
But she'd survived.
And she had built this.
> "They never reset me the same way they did you," her voice said.
"They used me to clean the memories. But I kept one thing: your lullaby."
"I broadcasted it every year. Hoping you'd remember. Hoping you'd find me."
"If you're hearing this—Rhea, Lyrah, whatever name they gave you—follow the coordinates. I'm waiting."
The screen blinked.
A map loaded.
It wasn't far.
---
Adrian's pov
She didn't wait.
Rhea was already packing by the time the transmission ended.
"We're going," she said.
I didn't argue.
Because there was something in her face I hadn't seen before.
Hope.
Not defiance.
Not rage.
Hope.
We drove through dusk.
Through silence.
Through memories that began to rise again—hers, mine, ours.
By the time we reached the forest clearing marked on Nia's map, the stars had come out.
And there she was.
Nia.
Older. Wounded. But alive.
She stepped from the trees like a ghost turned real.
And when Rhea saw her—
She ran.
No hesitation.
No defenses.
She threw her arms around her, and for the first time since the loops began, I saw Rhea cry without restraint.
---
Nia's pov
"Sorry it took so long," she whispered.
Rhea was trembling in her arms.
"You were always the one meant to escape."
"I didn't."
"You did. You survived them. You chose."
Adrian stepped forward.
Nia looked him up and down.
"So," she said. "This is the boy they couldn't break."
I didn't flinch.
"I broke. Just not the way they wanted."
She smiled.
Then handed us something:
A sealed drive marked:
> "CODE: RECURSION HEART."
Inside it: everything.
The backups.
The maps.
The final override codes.
> "This is the last piece," she said.
> "You want to kill the system for good?"
> "You'll need to go back in."
Rhea's pov
The first time I saw the loop core, I was strapped into it.
I was thirteen. Mute. Bleeding.
And still—I remembered.
The second time, I walked into it with a handler's hand on the back of my neck.
I was sixteen. Quiet. Smiling like a perfect subject.
I remembered that too.
But this time…
This time, I walked in alone.
And Adrian followed me.
Not because they told him to.
Because he chose to.
---
The hatch opened under my palm.
Not because I had a key. Not because I had clearance.
Because it recognized me. Like the system itself wasn't dead—but waiting. Remembering.
The tunnel beneath the forest felt like it had been carved out of something older than metal.
The air buzzed. Not from electricity.
From memory.
Each breath I took vibrated.
Like the past had teeth.
Adrian's hand brushed mine once.
And I pulled away.
Not because I didn't want him near.
But because I wasn't sure who I was when he looked at me like I was real.
---
The recursion chamber didn't have walls. It had screens. Layers of them. Columns of looping footage, grainy and glitched. Versions of us.
Dying. Kissing. Forgetting. Killing.
He flinched at them. I didn't.
Because I'd already seen worse.
"Are these all loops?" he asked, voice tight.
"No," I said. "These are the backups. The echoes."
The parts they couldn't delete.
---
And then we reached the center.
The pod.
Pulsing like a slow, sleeping heart.
I already knew who was inside. I'd known since the first time I felt that sick static under my teeth. Since Nia whispered the words recursion heart like a curse.
I was prepared.
Or I thought I was.
Until the girl opened her eyes.
And she looked exactly like me.
Like every version of me I'd tried to bury.
Like the kind of girl Adrian could've loved… if they hadn't broken me first.
"Hello, Adrian," she said sweetly.
Then:
"Hello, Rhea."
And I wanted to disappear.
---
"She's not real," Adrian said.
But I knew better.
She was.
Not in the way they taught us to define real.
But in the way that made your soul flinch.
> "She's every emotional thread they couldn't delete," I said quietly.
"They grew her from what they pulled out of us."
"Why?" he asked.
And I knew he meant why her—not me.
> "Because I stopped being useful."
"Because I remembered too much."
> "Because you were never supposed to love me."
Only then did he turn to me.
Not her.
And the ache in my chest broke open.
Because I wasn't her.
But I was still standing.
---
She reached for him.
I wanted to look away.
I didn't.
Because I needed to know if he'd take it.
If he'd choose the girl without the scars. The bruises. The defiance.
But he didn't.
He turned back to me.
His voice cracked.
> "I don't want the version they gave me."
I didn't mean to step forward.
But I did.
Took her hand.
And the world exploded.
---
Flashes of memory tore through me.
Not mine.
Theirs.
A version of me—dead.
A version of him—begging them to rebuild me.
And they had.
> "You're not the original," the recursion girl said softly.
> "You're the ghost he kept loving in every loop."
And it shattered me.
Because I always thought I was the first. The one who resisted.
But I wasn't.
I was the result of someone else's grief.
His.
---
Adrian didn't say anything.
He just looked at me.
With fury. With grief. With something that wasn't programmed.
> "Then I want this version," he said.
"I want the one who chose not to forget."
And when the alarms screamed and the recursion chamber began to fall apart, he didn't run.
He pulled the override.
He watched her—the ghost of me—smile.
Not bitter.
Not sad.
Just free.
And then she was gone.
Not erased.
Not deleted.
Just… gone.
---
Outside, the forest was on fire with silence.
Ash drifted like snowflakes across Adrian's shoulders.
He reached for my hand.
I let him.
And for the first time in all the loops and lies and versions of ourselves we had broken or betrayed—
I felt real.
Rhea's pov
The recursion chamber was still burning when I found the final file.
Not in the central database. Not in the tank.
But inside a small black drive, embedded beneath the heart of the machine—hidden where no one would've thought to look.
Not in a server.
In me.
---
It pulsed faintly when I touched it. Almost warm.
Adrian watched me from across the room, his face streaked with ash and blood, eyes full of something heavy.
He didn't ask what it was.
He didn't have to.
Because he already knew it belonged to me.
"Are you sure?" he asked quietly.
> I wasn't.
But I said yes anyway.
Because I had spent too long letting other people tell me who I was. Letting memory happen to me instead of through me.
Not this time.
---
The file took thirteen seconds to load.
Long enough for my hands to start shaking.
Not from fear.
From knowing.
Because as soon as the footage began to flicker across the cracked glass of the panel, I recognized the voice.
My voice.
But not the way it sounded now.
This one was clearer. Younger. Still soft around the edges.
> "Log entry 000. If you're hearing this, I've already chosen to forget."
I froze.
Adrian took a single step closer.
> "That's you."
> "No," I whispered. "That's the version before me."
---
The recording played.
> "They told me I'd be erased. That if I didn't follow the protocol, if I kept resisting, they'd bury me under cleaner versions. Better ones."
> "But I couldn't let go of him. No matter how many times they reset me, I kept finding him. Kept choosing him."
> "So I made a decision."
> "I let them rewrite me."
I flinched.
The girl on the screen—me—was smiling.
But it was a smile wrapped in surrender.
> "I told them I'd be obedient. That I'd forget."
> "But I left this file, in case a future version of me ever wanted the truth back."
> "Because love isn't the weakness they think it is."
> "It's the part of me they'll never fully control."
---
The screen went dark.
Adrian was silent.
I felt like my entire body had been hollowed out.
Because it was true.
I hadn't been stolen.
I'd agreed to be rewritten.