No one said a word for a while.
Kenton had resumed fiddling with his perimeter tools—thin, metallic wires that shimmered when touched, like spider silk dipped in oil. Dani crouched beside the far wall, eyes flitting between shadow and glyph, never resting too long in one spot. Dario lay curled at Lance's feet, breathing steadily, rhythmically, like the only metronome in a town that had long abandoned time.
Lance didn't move.
He sat beneath the fractured mural, back pressed to the cold, warped bone of the chamber wall. The saint painted above him seemed to shift when he blinked—its sewn mouth straining subtly against the thread, its branch-like arms twitching just enough to notice but not enough to trust.
The words whispered earlier still lingered in the air, like smoke caught in the lungs.
"You can't walk deeper than your guilt."
Lance stared at the saint's halo—receipts, all of them. Faded, curling. Grocery receipts. Pharmacy scripts. Dates printed in soft pink thermal ink. One of them... he thought... maybe he recognized. That deli on 43rd he'd always meant to try. The place he passed twice a week but never stepped into. A receipt for a sandwich he never bought.
He stood slowly. His knees didn't want to. Dario's head lifted but didn't protest.
"You see something?" Dani asked from across the room.
Lance didn't answer. He raised a hand and touched the mural.
The paint was dry.
But his fingers came away damp.
He stepped back.
The saint's face flickered. No, not flickered—peeled. The paint pulled away, slow and silent, curling back like the corner of an old sticker.
Behind it was bone.
No, not bone—a seam.
"I think this wall opens," Lance said.
Kenton looked up sharply. "Why do you think that?"
"Because it just blinked at me."
That got Dani's attention.
She stood, weapon held low but ready. "Elaborate."
"I touched it," Lance said, heartbeat rising, "and it felt wrong. Like the paint was wet. And then... it moved."
Kenton stood slowly, approaching with caution. "Seams aren't supposed to be reachable this deep."
"Well, congratulations," Dani muttered. "Your map's now useless."
Lance touched the wall again. This time, he pushed gently.
The bone behind the mural yielded.
A soft creak. A sigh, like breath escaping something long buried.
A section of the wall folded inward, curling like an eyelid opening.
Behind it—stairs.
Narrow. Spiral.
Again.
But these were different.
They were smoother. And they pulsed. Very slightly. Like something sleeping was using them as lungs.
Kenton swore under his breath.
Dani stared.
Then smiled, just a little. "Of course there's a second spiral staircase."
"Should we—?" Lance started.
But Dani was already walking.
Kenton hesitated, fingers trembling near the edge of his notebook, then followed.
Lance looked down at Dario.
The dog stood without command.
They descended.
The second spiral was shorter, tighter. The walls were ribbed. They didn't shine—they absorbed light, drinking it like something thirsty. The air thickened the further down they went, like walking through a soup of dust and grief.
At the bottom was a doorway.
Not a door—just a jagged arch carved out of material that didn't feel like stone. It pulsed with a slow, biological rhythm. Almost cardiac.
Beyond it was a room.
And in that room: mirrors.
Dozens. Maybe hundreds. Arranged in a tight circle.
Each mirror reflected the room.
But not the same version of it.
In some, Lance saw Dani standing beside him. In others, she wasn't there. In one, Kenton was gone—and instead, there was a woman with his eyes, wearing a lab coat soaked in ink.
In one mirror—only one—Lance stood alone.
No Dario.
No Dani.
No Kenton.
Just him. Pale-eyed. Still. With something crawling just beneath the skin of his forehead, twitching every few seconds, like it was trying to learn what a face looked like.
He turned away.
"What is this place?" Dani murmured.
"A memory fracture site," Kenton whispered, pulling out a small scanner that immediately shorted out in his hand. "They used to trap pieces of identity here. Test what stuck."
Lance backed away from the mirrors.
His reflection didn't follow him.
It stayed.
Staring.
"Okay," he said softly. "That's enough. I don't want to—"
The ground shuddered.
A low groan, like pressure equalizing in something wet and cavernous.
One of the mirrors flickered. Cracked.
And something behind it leaned forward.
A face, wrong in subtle ways. The teeth didn't line up. The hair moved like it was breathing. The eyes were his, but they blinked out of sync.
Then the mirror shattered.
And the thing inside stepped through.
It was him.
But it was built wrong. Too long in the legs, too calm in the smile. Its voice came before its lips moved:
"Lance."
Dario growled low, fur on end.
Dani raised her weapon, finger twitching over the trigger.
Kenton stumbled back, jaw clenched.
Lance didn't move.
The thing tilted its head. "You're not real enough yet. But you will be. I'm just here to see what I'll fix when you become HIM."
Then it took a step.
And Lance felt something in his own spine unlock.
A phantom nerve.
An echo of pain that hadn't happened yet.
Dani fired.
The grenade didn't explode—it unraveled. Threads of energy whipped around the doppelgänger and shredded the nearest mirror instead.
Glass burst. Screamed.
The thing hissed. Turned.
And walked back into another reflection.
Gone.
But not far.
They stood in silence.
Lance was shaking again.
Not from fear this time.
From the ache in his back.
Kenton wiped sweat from his brow. "We need to leave this room. Now."
Dani didn't argue.
As they climbed back up, the mirrors didn't break again.
But every few steps, Lance could feel something watching through the glass.
One version of himself.
Waiting for him to catch up.
Or fall behind.
---
The entrance beneath the Hollow Reach library wasn't marked.
Dani found it first—her fingers tracing a false spine in the back row of theological indexes until a latch gave way with a hollow click. A heavy grate slid aside to reveal stairs that spiraled not downward, but inward, coiling like a fossilized shell beneath the town.
They moved silently, each step echoing into something that felt older than memory. Lance followed, one hand gripping Dario's leash like a lifeline, the other trailing along the wall. The stone was damp and veined with silver-like threads that pulsed softly when he touched them.
No one said a word for the first hundred steps.
Then, Kenton broke the silence. "This is it. This is where he kept the fragments."
Dani glanced over her shoulder. "Who's he?"
Kenton hesitated. "The first Archivist."
"Name?"
Another pause. "Doesn't have one anymore."
Dani rolled her eyes. "Cool. Definitely not a cult."
But Kenton didn't smile.
When they reached the base, the stairwell bloomed into a low-ceilinged chamber filled with monolithic shelves—stacks of hexagonal drawers, each sealed with glyphs and cracked wax seals. A strange luminescence emanated from nowhere and everywhere, like the air itself was carrying a memory.
Lance blinked. The floor seemed to sway slightly, like he was standing on the edge of a breath that hadn't exhaled yet.
"Welcome to the Archive Below," Kenton murmured. "Where the memories don't belong to anyone anymore."
Dani kicked a drawer with her boot. "Which one of these has the juicy stuff?"
"I don't know," Kenton admitted. "But he would."
And then they saw him.
Sitting on a throne of rusted metal and index cards, wearing a robe stitched from old ID lanyards and lab coats, sat an old man. His face was stitched with light scars—places where data, real or not, had tried to leave a mark.
The man didn't move.
But his voice boomed out, dry and cracking like paper soaked and dried again.
"Back, Kenton? Against my advice?"
Kenton froze.
"I told you not to come back here," the man continued. "You weren't ready then. You're not ready now."
Lance flinched. Dario growled low.
"You know this guy?" Dani asked, already bored.
Kenton stood straighter, but his fingers twitched—his nerves betraying him. "This was my predecessor. I studied everything he left behind. He disappeared years ago. People thought he was—"
"Dead?" the old man rasped. "I am. In all the ways that matter. But you're still here. Still clinging to validation."
Dani's eyes narrowed. "And you're still clinging to your senior discount, so let's not posture."
The Archivist ignored her, eyes only on Kenton. "You wanted to be me, didn't you? Thought if you memorized enough sigils, if you studied enough timelines, the world would open for you."
Kenton's voice was faint. "I wanted to be useful...sir."
Silence.
Then the Archivist laughed—a dry, terrible sound.
"You thought this knowledge would make you needed. That's what scares you most, doesn't it? Being left out of the room. Being the one no one calls when it's real."
Lance stepped closer, brows drawn.
The Archivist's head tilted sharply, gaze snapping to him.
"And you—Subject Zero. Tell me. Would you trust Kenton with your life?"
Lance didn't speak right away. His eyes were distant, pale and full of flickering shapes that no one else could see. But he reached down and gently scratched Dario behind the ear.
"He got us this far," he said softly. "That counts for something."
The Archivist's expression didn't change, but something in the air tensed. Then relaxed.
Dani grinned faintly. "Huh. Not the worst review I've seen."
Kenton stayed quiet.
But his hands had clenched into fists, and his eyes didn't blink. Somewhere inside, the accusation had hit deep.
Dani caught it.
"Hey, Kenton," she said casually, already turning to the shelves. "Don't be boring about it. Everyone's got a mentor who ends up being a crusty jackass."
"Boring?" Kenton asked, brittle.
She shrugged. "You obsess. You monologue. You walk like someone who's afraid they'll forget how."
That should've been a joke.
But Kenton just nodded once, eyes low.
Lance looked at him, and for the first time in hours, felt… less alone.
The Archivist rose slowly. "Take what you need. But remember, knowledge is always too much or too late."
As they moved into the Archive, the walls hummed around them. Drawers shifted. Memories whispered. One of them showed a child drawing with sigil-ink on a floor they didn't own. Another showed someone who looked like Lance—but older, distant—whispering to an empty chair.
And in a drawer Dani cracked open—
A torn schematic. Not of a weapon.
Of a face.
Her own.
Drawn in overlapping lines, shifting from profile to profile as if someone had never quite decided who she really was.
She slammed it shut.
Kenton reached a glyph-marked drawer, fingers hovering.
He whispered, "I was never meant to be here."
Lance, standing beside him, just said, "Me neither."
The Archive didn't laugh.
It remembered.
And it waited.
Dani hadn't meant to linger.
She'd popped the latch on the hexagonal drawer because it looked older than the others, its seal melted smooth like it had been opened many times before. Curiosity, she told herself. Tactical curiosity.
The drawer slid open with a sigh that sounded almost like breath, warm and damp.
Inside: not weapons, not coordinates, not a name.
But paper. Thin, translucent, covered in jagged lines that shimmered just wrong.
Her own face stared up at her.
Not a photo. Not a sketch.
A schematic.
Her cheekbone rendered in overlapping dimensions—three angles of the same feature shifting on top of one another, like whoever had drawn it couldn't decide if her jaw was sharp, soft, or broken. Her eyes were marked with tiny numeric notations. One had a dotted line bisecting it diagonally with the label "probable lie boundary."
At the bottom:
"DANI. V. ITERATION 6B (UNCONFIRMED)."
[ALIGNMENT UNSTABLE]
[MOTIVE: ??]
She stared for longer than she should have.
Her pulse thudded quietly. Her breath slowed. Even Dario, snuffling near Lance, paused and tilted his head toward her like he felt something shift.
Dani's fingers curled into fists at her sides. She did not reach for the schematic again.
"Everything okay over there?" Kenton called, voice echoing distantly from between the shelves.
"Peachy," she snapped, far too quickly.
Lance turned, catching just a flicker of her expression—one he hadn't seen before. Not irritation. Not calculation.
Recognition.
Like she'd seen something she thought was gone.
Kenton's footsteps clicked closer, uneven. "What did you find?"
"Nothing useful," Dani said, voice flat as dead code. "Just another drawer full of bad guesses."
She shut the drawer—harder than necessary. The glyph on the front flashed red for a second, like it disagreed.
Lance didn't say anything. But he didn't look away, either.
Dani looked back at him, and for a moment, she dropped the sardonic front—not all the way, just enough for him to see the tired edge beneath it. The crack.
"You ever get the feeling," she said, tone too light to be casual, "that people remember things about you that you don't?"
Lance, still kneeling beside Dario, gave a small nod. "Every time I blink."
Kenton, oblivious to the tension, ran a hand over a massive index wheel etched with old, burnt data. "Some of these drawers shouldn't even exist anymore. They're from places that collapsed. Memories of memories. False timelines."
"Yeah?" Dani muttered. "Then why do they still know my face?"
Kenton didn't catch that.
But Lance did. He stood, slowly, like the movement took more effort than it should have. His eyes—opaque and wavering faintly like milk-stained glass—locked on hers.
He didn't ask.
But he didn't need to.
Dani rubbed the back of her neck and turned away.
"We got what we came for," she said. "Let's move before the Archive changes its mind."
Kenton mumbled agreement, already distracted by some shimmering sigil that had begun pulsing in morse-like rhythm.
But Lance? He watched Dani walk ahead into the shadows of the Archive, shoulders stiff.
Even Dario, snuffling near Lance, paused and tilted his head toward her like he felt something shift.
And he started to wonder:
Was she even sure who she was?
Or had someone written it for her, one schematic at a time?