Mira didn't go home.
She wandered the city instead, tracing old corridors through downtown's overgrown edges—past the husks of abandoned tech-shelters and buried electric monorails. The rain kept falling, soft and continuous, like the world was always starting over but never quite cleansing itself.
Eliah… no, Ava?
The moment Dray showed the facial match result, something deep inside Mira fractured. Her girlfriend—her anchor, her constant—looked back at her from someone else's erased identity.
The Underground's central comm tower blinked in the distance, a faint pulse in the sky. The coin felt heavier in her pocket, almost reactive to her doubt. Questions rattled in her mind, unfinished:
What if Eliah didn't remember?
What if she did?
By the time Mira circled back to her own building, it was nearly dawn. She stepped inside the apartment, cautiously, cold with anxiety. Eliah was perched cross-legged on the couch, scribbling music notes into her aging notebook—just like always. No new memories. No friction.
"You okay?" Eliah looked up, her voice soft, the edges of sleep clinging to her words. "You didn't come home."
"I met someone," Mira said carefully. "He had a picture of me. Of us, but not… here. Another version of here, maybe. What would you do if someone said they knew you from another timeline?"
Eliah stilled, pen hovering above the page like a suspended question mark.
"I'd ask if they were dreaming," she said slowly. "Or drugged. Maybe both."
Her laugh sounded genuine. A little too genuine.
"You ever heard of someone named Ava Leone?" Mira asked, synapses sparking.
Eliah blinked. "That... doesn't ring a bell."
Liar. Mira felt it—not in what she said, but in what she didn't. The slight drop of her shoulders. The pause before her heartbeat steadied. Almost imperceptible.
That night, as Mira lay in bed pretending to sleep, she hacked the building's security node and rewatched the footage from the day she found the coin.
The camera showed her mailbox at 3:12 a.m.—and a figure in a hooded coat carefully inserting the memory coin.
Frame by frame, Mira enhanced the face beneath the hood.
It wasn't the stranger from the café.
It was Eliah.
Or Ava.
Or someone using her face.
To be continue...