The emergency stairwell was a vertical tunnel of reinforced concrete and flickering red LEDs. The air was thin, tasting of ozone and the cold, metallic tang of the mountain. Above them, the heavy thud of tactical boots echoed—a rhythmic, predatory sound that Lia knew all too well.
"They're using thermal imaging," Lia hissed, pressing her back against the cold wall. She checked the weight of the handgun Sebastian had given her. A SIG Sauer P320. "If we stay in the stairwell, we're fish in a barrel. We need to get to the server sub-level. I can loop the feed from there and give us a 'cold' corridor to the hangar."
Sebastian looked at her, his grey eyes narrowed. In the crimson light, he looked like a devil carved from shadow. "You speak like a soldier, Liora. My 'memory consultant' is remarkably comfortable with a semi-automatic and tactical maneuvers."
"I told you," she said, her voice a low, dangerous purr. "I grew up in the foster system. You either learn to fight, or you get deleted. Right now, I'm the only thing standing between you and a bullet in the brain. Do you want to audit my resume, or do you want to live?"
Sebastian's hand shot out, not to grab her gun, but to pin her against the wall. He was close—close enough that she could feel the frantic, heavy thrum of his heart against her chest. Despite the sirens, despite the men coming to kill them, the proximity hit her like a physical blow.
"I remember this," he whispered, his face inches from hers. "Not the words. But the feeling. Standing in a dark space, the world ending around us, and you looking at me with that look in your eyes."
"What look, Sebastian?"
"Like you want to save me and destroy me at the same time."
Lia's grip on the gun tightened. "We don't have time for your 'echoes.' Move."
She shoved past him, leading the way down the stairs. At the landing for Level B-2, she kicked the door open, keeping low. A burst of gunfire chewed into the concrete doorframe. Lia didn't flinch. She leaned out, fired two suppressed shots, and heard the wet thud of a body hitting the floor.
Sebastian followed, his own weapon raised. He moved with a brutal, efficient grace that suggested his body remembered his combat training even if his mind didn't.
"Clear," he called out.
The hallway was a high-tech nightmare. Julian had successfully overridden Hera; the glass walls that usually displayed peaceful Alpine vistas were now pulsing with a strobe-like red light, and the overhead sprinklers were hissing—not with water, but with a mild sedative gas.
"Hold your breath," Lia commanded. She ripped a strip of silk from the hem of her blue gown and tied it over her nose and mouth. Sebastian did the same with his silk tie, the dark fabric making him look even more like the villain the world believed him to be.
They reached the heavy vault door of the sub-server room.
"It's biometric," Sebastian said, his voice muffled. "But Julian will have wiped my signature from the system by now."
"He wiped your signature," Lia said, already dropping to her knees and pulling a small, translucent device from her clutch. "But he didn't wipe mine. He doesn't know I'm here."
She pressed the device against the keypad. Lines of code began to scroll across her phone—her personal "Nemesis" script.
"You're hacking a Voss Dynamics vault with a localized brute-force bypass?" Sebastian asked, standing over her, guarding the hallway. "That should take hours."
"If you wrote the code, maybe," Lia shot back, her fingers blurring. "But I wrote the back-door to this specific door eighteen months ago. I was planning for a rainy day. This is a monsoon."
The vault hissed and retracted.
"In," she ordered.
They scrambled inside, and Lia slammed the manual override. The room was a cathedral of blinking lights and humming cooling fans. This was the heart of the beast—the physical location of the Lethe Project's data.
Sebastian leaned against a server rack, his breath coming in ragged gasps. He suddenly clutched his head, his gun clattering to the floor.
"Sebastian?"
"It's... it's coming back," he groaned. A memory spike. Adrenaline was the ultimate catalyst for the neural-interface's lingering effects. "I see... a blue dress. Not this one. Lighter. Silk. We were... we were in a library. You were laughing. I was... I was happy."
Lia froze. She remembered that night. A rainy Tuesday in London, four months into her undercover assignment. They had spent the night drinking vintage scotch and arguing over the ethics of AI. For one hour, she had forgotten he was her mark. For one hour, they had just been two lonely people who had finally found someone who spoke their language.
"It wasn't real, Sebastian," she said, her voice trembling. "It was a game."
"It felt real," he rasped. He looked up at her, his eyes bloodshot. "Why did you do it, Lia? Why did you wipe me? Was I really that much of a monster?"
The question hung in the air, heavier than the sedative gas outside.
"You were building a world where no one had a choice," she said. "You were going to use the Lethe tech to 'optimize' the population. To erase dissent. My brother died trying to stop you."
"I don't remember ordering a hit on anyone," he shouted, the sound echoing off the metal racks. "I don't remember wanting to be a dictator! I remember wanting to solve the problem of human suffering! If memories are the source of trauma, why not remove the trauma?"
"Because the trauma is what makes us human!" Lia screamed back.
She stepped toward him, her anger flaring. "You don't get to play God and then complain when you lose your throne. You took everything from me. You took Leo. And now, you're trying to take my agency by making me feel for you again."
She grabbed him by the lapels, her face inches from his. "I am here to finish the job, Sebastian. I am here to find the evidence and burn this place down."
Sebastian's hand moved with lightning speed. He didn't strike her; he cupped the back of her head and pulled her into a kiss that tasted of salt, desperation, and fire.
It wasn't a romantic kiss. It was a collision. A battle for dominance between two people who were drowning in a sea of lies. Lia tried to push him away, but the "body memory" he had spoken of betrayed her. Her lips parted, her hands sliding from his chest to his hair, pulling him closer.
For a moment, the servers, the tactical teams, and the dead brothers vanished. There was only the heat of him—the terrifying, addictive heat of the man who had been her greatest mistake.
He pulled back, his forehead resting against hers. "There," he whispered. "Tell me that was part of your 'plan.' Tell me that was a lie."
Before she could answer, a massive explosion rocked the room. The reinforced door groaned as a thermal charge ate through the hinges.
"They're through," Lia said, her voice cold once more, though her lips were still bruised from his.
She turned to the main console, her fingers flying. "I'm initiating a total system purge. If they want the Lethe data, they're going to have to catch it while it's burning."
"And us?" Sebastian asked, picking up his gun.
Lia looked at the small, high-altitude extraction hatch in the ceiling. "We go up. To the roof. There's a prototype VTOL (Vertical Take-Off and Landing) craft in the upper hangar. Can you fly it?"
Sebastian looked at the hatch, a dark, determined look crossing his face. "I don't know. But I suspect my hands will remember what to do."
As the door blew inward and the first flash-bang grenade bounced across the floor, Lia didn't look back. She grabbed Sebastian's hand—not out of love, but out of a shared, desperate need to survive long enough to see the truth.
"Run," she said.
And as they climbed toward the light, the servers behind them began to melt, the digital echoes of Sebastian's lost life turning into nothing but smoke and ash.