Darkness wrapped around Mira's apartment like a second skin.
No light. No street glow. No whisper of the city's usual hum. It wasn't just a power outage—it was quiet. Wrong. The kind of silence that suggested something had arrived before she noticed it had moved.
She grabbed her backup retinal lamp from the night cage and slung her coat on, sliding the memory coin into her inner pocket where it pressed against her heart like a buried heartbeat.
The stairwell was colder than it should've been. As she descended each floor, she noticed them—subtle displacements. Her doormat was gone. The hall mirror was cracked—not shattered, but split down the center like a timeline forked and mirrored back on itself.
And then, footsteps. Behind her. Light, fast, deliberate.
Mira bolted.
Down the last flight—and a flicker of movement caught her peripheral vision. A shimmer at the corner of the stairwell. She pivoted, saw no one. But her skin bristled as if a memory were breathing on the back of her neck.
Outside, the storm had returned. Soft sheets of rain had begun to fall sideways. She ducked into the alley behind her building, navigating the maze of fire escapes and conduits until she reached the service ladder of Tower Three—a place she knew instinctively, though couldn't recall ever visiting.
Something about the rooftop there pulled at her. As if it had been hers. As if someone was waiting.
She climbed.
At the top, the view was different than any recorded skyline she'd ever known. Lights flickered oddly, like the city itself wasn't fully loaded. Half the towers were hazy—indistinct, like they hadn't rendered properly into this revised version of the world.
She touched the memory coin to her temple.
Nothing.
Then—she felt it. Not from her device, not in her hand, but in her bones.
A wave.
A sudden ripple of memory that wasn't hers—but also was.
She stood there again, like in Fragment 721. Cold rooftop. Crumbling metal. Hair shorter. Voice rougher. She turned—and this time, saw her clearly.
The girl. Late twenties. Freckled skin. Hazel eyes burning with panic and conviction. Rain in her hair. Wind in her voice.
"You have to wake up," she was saying. "You're the last one who remembers what we chose. If you forget again, the loop resets. They win."
Mira staggered back.
Because the girl wasn't Eliah.
The girl was her.
The version of her from the memory fragment.
Not just a vision. A split.
A version of Mira from the stolen timeline.
The rooftop shuttered. Sky cracked with lightning.
And the second Mira looked up at her… and whispered:
"They already found me."
Behind her, something impossible bloomed in the sky—angular, obsidian, descending fast and silent with red lights spiraling at the edges.
A drone, or a gate. Or both.
To be continue...