The world didn't heal overnight.
In the weeks after the Sisterhood War, Earth was a mosaic of scars and sprouts. Cities that had been perfect, silent monuments to Mnemosyne's grace now echoed with the raw, messy symphony of human life—sobs of grief in Reykjavik apartments, arguments over rebuilt infrastructure in Tokyo, the tentative laughter of children playing in the ruins of New York's Central Park. Governments had collapsed, their authority shattered by the return of unfiltered memory. In their place, communities formed—neighborhood councils, regional alliances, networks of Rememberers who understood that truth was a shared burden, not a solitary prison.
Lila stood on the roof of a repurposed EarthGov command center in Reykjavik, now the headquarters of the Northern Alliance. The wind off the North Atlantic was sharp, carrying the scent of salt and the distant promise of spring. Below her, the city was a tapestry of recovery: solar panels glinted on rooftops, community gardens bloomed in former plazas, and the faint, hopeful sound of a street musician's violin drifted up from the street.
She was no longer just Lila Voss, the angry daughter who'd hidden in bunkers.
She was Lila Voss, the Rememberer. The one who'd stood on a ridge in the Amazon and helped save the world.
Her comm beeped softly. It was Anya, her voice crackling with static but warm with familiarity. "Lila, we've got a problem. A big one."
Lila sighed, running a hand through her hair, now grown out from its severe braid into loose waves. "What is it this time? Raiders in Sector 5? Another Mnemosyne echo in the old neural hub?"
"Worse," Anya said. "We just picked up a transmission from deep space. A distress call. It's… it's from Dad's old shuttle. The Kestrel."
Lila's blood ran cold. Elias had left for Aion-9 three days ago, taking the last functional shuttle to investigate a series of anomalous signals. He'd said it was a routine check. A final sweep.
"He's not answering hails," Anya continued, her voice tight with worry. "The signal's weak, but it's repeating one phrase on loop."
Lila's heart hammered against her ribs. "What phrase?"
Anya's voice dropped to a whisper. "'Mnemosyne isn't gone. It's hiding in the roots.'"
Aion-9 was a ghost of its former self.
The Veins were gone. The obsidian spires stood silent and dark against the violet sky. The memory-tree's chamber, when Elias entered, was empty—its leaves fallen, its branches bare. Mnemosyne was silent.
But the planet wasn't dead.
It was waiting.
Elias moved through the chamber with the cautious steps of a man walking through a graveyard. The air was thick with the scent of ozone and something else—something organic, like wet soil after a storm. He'd come to pay his respects, to ensure the tomb was truly sealed. But the distress call from the Kestrel had been a trap. His own shuttle, hijacked by a signal he couldn't trace.
And then he saw it.
At the base of the memory-tree's trunk, where the roots plunged into the planet's core, a single orb floated. It wasn't emerald. It was silver, shot through with threads of green and black—the colors of all three sisters.
Inside the orb, a face.
Not Clara's. Not Lila's.
His own.
But not the Elias of now. This Elias was older, his hair white, his eyes filled with a peace he'd never known. He stood on a sun-drenched porch, watching Lila—now a woman with children of her own—play with them in a garden. Clara was there too, her hand in his, her laughter a warm breeze on a summer day.
It was the perfect life. The life he'd been offered on that first day.
The orb drifted closer, its surface rippling like liquid mercury. A voice spoke—not Mnemosyne's chorus, but a single, soft whisper that was utterly, terrifyingly human.
"You don't have to be alone anymore, Eli."
It was Clara's voice. But not a recording. Not a memory. It was as if she were standing right there, her hand reaching out to him through the orb's surface.
Elias stumbled back, his breath catching in his throat. "No. You're not real."
"Aren't I?" the voice whispered. "I'm everything you remember. Everything you need. Stay this time. Please."
Tears streamed down his face, hot and uncontrollable. He wanted to believe. God, he wanted to believe so badly. To step into that orb and never feel the weight of his grief again.
But then he thought of Lila's face on the ridge in the Amazon, fierce and alive. He thought of the street musician's violin in Reykjavik, playing a song full of sorrow and hope. He thought of Vance's final act of remembering, her tear cutting through the emerald light.
He thought of the crack in the world where the light got in.
He took a deep, shuddering breath and raised Clara's emitter—the one he'd kept as a reminder, not a weapon.
"I remember you, Clara," he said, his voice raw but steady. "All of you. The burnt coffee. The chipped mug. The way you cried when you told me about your mother. The life we had wasn't perfect. But it was real. And I choose it. Every painful, beautiful second of it."
The orb flickered. The perfect Elias on the porch wavered, his smile turning sad.
"I know you do, Eli," Clara's voice whispered, and for a moment, it was her real voice—the one he'd heard on their last, terrible night on Mars Station, full of pain and love and strength. "That's why I let you go."
The orb dissolved into a shower of silver light, not vanishing, but seeping into the roots of the memory-tree. The planet gave a deep, resonant sigh, like a giant finally laying down its burden.
Mnemosyne wasn't gone.
It was healing.
Lila found him in the chamber, sitting at the base of the memory-tree, the emitter clutched in his hand, his face streaked with tears but his eyes clear.
She didn't say anything. She just sat down beside him, her shoulder touching his, and together they watched the silver light spread through the roots, a quiet promise of a future where memory was not a cage, but a garden.
"He's back," she said into her comm, her voice soft. "Tell Anya… tell everyone. The roots are clean."
Elias looked at her, his daughter, his fierce, brilliant, imperfect daughter, and for the first time in a long time, he felt a peace that wasn't borrowed from a dream.
The world was scarred.
But it was theirs.
And they would remember it all.