The file opened with a flicker—not a smooth transition, but a stuttering glitch, like the system was hesitating.
Lucian sat completely still, the dim blue interface casting faint light across his features.
Rowan was silent beside him, breath shallow. Their hands remained barely touching.
[INITIATING: VEIL_BACKUP_0.0.1]
[RECONSTRUCTION: 87%...
[WARNING: MEMORY STABILITY COMPROMISED]
[AUDIO FILE DETECTED [FRAGMENTED]
[RUN? (Y/N)]
Lucian pressed "Y."
The screen darkened. And then a voice—his voice, but not. Softer. Uneven. Human in a way he didn't recognize.
"If you're hearing this…"
A pause.
Static, heavy and hollow, filled the space like a heartbeat trying to restart.
"…then it means you've found what I buried. Or maybe what I couldn't bury."
Lucian swallowed hard. Rowan's fingers had gone cold beside him.
"There was one version. One that held. One that didn't break."
The voice cracked—not glitched. Cracked.
"Rowan was safe. He laughed more. Ate too much honey bread. We argued about books and how much coffee he drinks. There were no rifts. No timelines. Just us. And it was enough."
Lucian's hand trembled. The screen glowed brighter for a moment, as if responding to the emotional charge of the moment.
"But I wasn't meant to be there. I destabilized the system just by existing in it. He started to forget me."
Rowan blinked rapidly, swallowing the tightness in his throat. "Lucian—" he whispered, but Lucian couldn't look away.
"I made a choice. I rewrote the root protocol. Anchored the world to a version of Rowan that never knew me. It held. It finally held."
Another pause.
"…I think that's love, right? Wanting someone to live even if they forget you?"
Lucian's chest ached.
"This is the version that worked. And I left it behind."
Click.
The audio stopped.
No fade-out. No system prompt. Just dead silence.
Lucian closed his eyes.
The file had vanished from the screen. Auto-deleted upon completion. No backups. No interface trail.
Rowan sat beside him like stone, expression unreadable. But his fingers were shaking.
"Is that what's coming?" he asked softly. "The system trying to restore that version?"
Lucian didn't answer.
Because deep inside—under the horror, under the pain—was the creeping thought that wouldn't leave him.
What if that version is the only one where I didn't ruin everything?
In the silence, the system's hum changed pitch.
Only slightly.
But enough.
The quiet that followed wasn't peace.
It was the kind of silence that stretched—too still, too loud. Like the air itself had frozen to listen.
Lucian didn't move. Not even when the file vanished. Not when the room returned to normal. His eyes stayed locked on the now-dark screen, as if the words were still burning there, etched into the back of his mind.
Rowan was the first to breathe.
Slow. Measured. A breath pulled from somewhere deep in his chest where it had been trapped since the recording began.
Then, softly—too softly—he said, "You sounded happy."
Lucian flinched like he'd been hit.
"I—" He swallowed. "I don't remember recording that. Not really. But I know it's real."
Rowan nodded, his voice threading thin. "Yeah. It felt real."
He sat back slightly in the chair, eyes glazed as if trying to see that version. The Rowan in the file. The one who laughed more. Ate too much honey bread. The one who never knew this—them.
He spoke again, barely above a whisper. "Do you think I was better off without you?"
Lucian's head snapped toward him, horror flickering across his face. "No. God, no."
"You chose to erase yourself."
"I chose to let you live."
"That's not the same thing."
They stared at each other—Rowan's voice trembled, but there was no anger in it. Just grief. Just loss. Of something he never even had.
"I don't remember any of it," Rowan said, his voice shaking now. "But hearing that… I feel like I've lost something. Like I'm mourning a life I never lived."
Lucian's hands balled into fists in his lap. "You weren't supposed to hear it. I think… I think even that version of me knew it would break you."
Rowan let out a short, bitter laugh. "Too late."
Lucian reached for him then—hesitated—and then gently took Rowan's hand in his, threading their fingers together like a lifeline.
"I don't regret what we've become," Lucian said quietly. "Even if the system thinks we're the anomaly. Even if I'm the mistake."
"You're not a mistake."
"I think every other version of me would disagree."
Rowan's voice cracked. "Then screw them."
That finally drew a faint smile from Lucian—but it didn't reach his eyes. Not fully.
"I don't know what's coming," he said. "But if that version of the world was stable… then this one might be considered the threat."
Rowan squeezed his hand tighter. "Let them try to erase us. I'll fight the whole damn system myself."
Lucian looked at him then—not with fear. Not with sorrow.
But with love.
Terrified, fragile love.
"Rowan," he whispered, voice like a fracture, "if I forget again—if the system pulls me under—you have to let me go."
"No."
"Rowan—"
"No." His voice was sharper now, laced with rawness. "I won't let you go. Not again. I don't care how many versions of you have tried to save me by dying. This one? You stay."
Lucian couldn't speak. Couldn't breathe for a moment. The file may have shown him the version that worked—but this was the version that fought.
And maybe… just maybe, it was worth fighting for.
Command Deck, Zarek HQ
"Resonance spike confirmed," Sharon said, her hands flying across the control console.
"Site R4 just activated. It was dormant two weeks ago. There shouldn't be anything there."
Evelyn leaned forward, arms crossed over the console's edge. "Coordinates?"
"Exact match with the suppressed rift we sealed last cycle. But this isn't standard corruption," Sharon replied, brow furrowed. "The system's reading it as… memory-stabilized resonance."
Ava's voice was calm, but tight. "Memory-based?"
"Not just memory," Sharon responded. "The signature is emotional. It's—" She stopped. Looked up. "It's Rowan's. Almost identical to his current resonance output."
A long pause.
Evelyn straightened slowly. "Get me eyes on that site. Now."
Elia nodded, fingers moving rapidly.
And then: the screen bloomed to life with static… and a flicker of something else.
A handprint.
Pressed into the dirt.
And scrawled beside it, barely visible in the dust:
Try again.
Zarek HQ – Command Deck, Post Site R4 Activation
The image lingered on the command deck's screen: a lone handprint pressed into dirt too old to disturb, the words Try again etched beside it like a challenge.
The silence that followed wasn't technical delay—it was collective stillness. Shock. Interpretation.
And unease.
Mira Kael was the first to break it.
She stood slightly apart from the group, arms folded tight across her chest, posture rigid. Her pale blue-gray eyes flicked toward the screen, then to the signature data belowit.
"There's no life signature," she said flatly. "But someone touched the ground recently. That's not residual. That's interaction."
She stepped forward, her words precise. "It's a memory rift. But it's active. Not collapsed. Meaning it's self-sustaining or anchored to someone."
Her gaze drifted—just for a second—toward the row of data blocks tied to Rowan's resonance file.
"We've never seen that before," she said.
But she didn't sound surprised.
She sounded like she'd been waiting for something like this to happen.
Nolan Voss stood just behind her, his hands clasped in front of him, eyes scanning the emotional resonance graphs as they spiked and glitched irregularly.
His soft voice carried across the room. "It's echoing Rowan's emotional patterns… but also suppressing all external fields. That's not passive mirroring. That's targetedfiltration."
He looked up, eyes calm but uneasy.
"The rift is recreating what he feels. In real time."
Quinn's voice cut in behind him. "That's not mimicry. That's obsession."
Vespera Verrin moved closer to the screen, her dark blue eyes catching faint light as the ambient scan looped another frame of the dirt-filled terrain. Her hands were folded behind her back, spine straight.
"Memory rifts don't just appear like this," she said, her voice soft and composed, as always. "They require emotional anchors. Root signatures. The ones we'veencountered before only activate when someone enters them."
She turned to face the room, her words slow and deliberate.
"This one opened on its own. It's calling."
Ari Winters let out a low whistle as she leaned against the corner console, arms crossed over her chest. Her amber eyes were locked onto the distorted timestamp in the corner of the screen.
"So what you're all saying," she said slowly, "is that we're looking at a rift that's somehow… feeling things for Rowan? Like some kind of broken love letter?"
The room didn't answer.
Ari scoffed. "Yeah, I hate that. A lot."
She reached for her comm earpiece and muttered under her breath, "If we find a weepy version of him in there reading poetry, I'm walking back out."
Quinn Reyes remained quiet at first, standing just a step behind Ari. His expression didn't shift, but his eyesnarrowed as he watched the fluctuation in resonance readings. His hand lightly brushed Ari's arm—a silent tether—and then he spoke.
"If it's echoing his feelings, it'll reflect what he's not saying, not just what he knows. That means the rift could be dangerous without meaning to be."
He turned to Ava and Evelyn.
"We'll need emotional dampeners. If this field turns volatile, anyone with tethering resonance is at risk of getting pulled into a feedback loop."
Sloane Verrin had said nothing. He stood near the corner wall, half in shadow, arms at his sides.
His silver-streaked black hair fell looseacross his brow, eyes fixed not on the screen—but the handprint.
Only when the others finished speaking did he finally say, "The carving. The message. That wasn't for us."
Everyone turned.
"It's written like a plea," he continued. "Like something said too many times… to someone who never listened."
He tilted his head slightly.
"Try again."
Sharon Tan was seated at her station, her posture perfect, fingers steady despite the faint pulse of stress radiating off her. Her eyes locked onto the data feed as it looped.
"Timeline inconsistencies match with recursion bleed. The phrasing, thelanguage patterns—it's not native to this version of Rowan's recorded memory files."
She tapped a key, enhancing the handwriting beside the handprint.
"The carving isn't from Rowan. It's from someone trying to reach him."
She turned her head slightly toward Evelyn, her voice lower now. "And it's not the firsttime I've seen that phrase embedded in corrupted residuals. I've found fragments in the system before. Hidden inside Lucian's earliest logs."
Evelyn Zarek was still. The kind of stillness that only came from high-level decision paralysis. Not hesitation—calculation.
"We can't ignore this," she said finally. "But we don't send them in blind. I want real-time feeds, tether anchors, full resonance dampeners—no shortcuts."
She looked to Sharon. "I want every pre-recursion data string cross-checked for that phrase. If it's showing up this often, it means the system isn't just leaking memories—it's seeding them."
Ava Halloway stepped closer to the group, voice quiet but carrying authority.
"This isn't corruption. It's grief."
Everyone looked at her.
"It's recursive grief," she said. "And thatmakes it unstable. It's not trying to harm Rowan—but it might pull everything under if it gets too close to his current state."
She glanced toward Evelyn.
"We need to deploy. Carefully. This is a memory trying to relive itself… and if we're not careful, we'll live it too."
Evelyn nodded. "We go in."
Zarek HQ – Command Deck, minutes after analysis concludes
Evelyn stood at the head of the central briefing platform, hands braced on the console edge, eyes flicking between screens and personnel with surgical focus.
"This isn't a standard rift. You all know that," she said, voice low but sharp. "We treat it like an echo destabilization event, not a combat zone."
Her eyes locked briefly on Ava, then to Sharon.
"Two units. One primary, one support. Both will enter with full tether clearance. No one goes in unlinked."
A beat.
She straightened, tone colder now. "Assignments begin now."
Primary Team – Site R4 Infiltration
"Mira Kael – marksman and resonance snare observation. You'll keep distance and eyes on the anchor points. Don't engage unless absolutely necessary."
Mira gave a short nod, unblinking. "Understood."
"Nolan Voss – you're field stabilizer. You'll monitor emotional resonance shifts across the entire unit. If any tether field spikes, you're the failsafe."
Nolan's face was unreadable, but he shifted his stance slightly. "I'll be ready."
"Sloane Verrin – terrain control and mist-layer screening. You'll handle spatial fractures and distortions if the rift begins to fold in on itself."
Sloane simply said, "Acknowledged." Nothing more.
Evelyn looked at Quinn next.
"Quinn Reyes – link specialist. You'll create short-term tether links between Rowan and the rest of the team to regulate his resonance output."
Ari shifted beside him. "Wait, Rowan's going?"
Evelyn didn't flinch. "He's the epicenter. We don't go in without him."
Support Team – Perimeter & Extraction
"Ari Winters – you're lead on external security. Keep the anchor field clear and locked. No interference."
Ari grunted. "Finally. Something I can punch if it gets weird."
"Vespera Verrin – external empathic buffering. You'll counter emotional bleed from the rift's edge and keep outer tether fields clean."
Vespera gave a calm nod. "I'll keep the resonance stabilized."
"Elias Vane – overwatch. You're on high position duty with mist dispersal. Use your spores to trace visibility paths if the interior shifts."
Elias, leaning silently against the far wall, finally looked up. "Got it."
Evelyn turned to Sharon.
"Feed live data to Mira and Vespera through closed comms. Keep triangulating the anchor point. If the rift changes position, I want to know before anyone's lost inside."
Sharon nodded once. "I'll run it on a one-second delay to preserve the field stability."
The team stood quiet for a beat. The kind of quiet before a storm—not dread, but bracing.
Ari rolled her shoulder with a sigh. "I'm getting real tired of rifts wanting to flirt with Rowan."
Vespera smiled faintly. "That's because he doesn't flirt back."
"Exactly," Ari muttered. "Drives them nuts."
Then—
The door to the command deck slid open.
Rowan entered, Lucian at his side.
Late.
Not sheepish. Just slow. As if they'd walked through a thicker kind of gravity.
Lucian's face was pale, but focused. He scanned the room, saw the assembled team, and said nothing.
Rowan looked exhausted—but grounded. Like someone who'd made a decision and was preparing to bleed for it.
Evelyn didn't break stride.
"You're late," she said, voice flat.
"We heard the briefing from the corridor," Rowan replied. "You're sending us in."
"Correct. And you'll follow protocol this time."
Lucian's eyes narrowed faintly. "I always follow protocol. I just don't always agree with it."
Evelyn looked at him sharply. "You don't have to agree. You just have to not destabilize the field."
Lucian said nothing, but there was an edge to him again. Controlled. Dangerous.
Rowan stepped forward. "I'll go. But this is memory—not corruption. If I say we pull out, you pull us out. No override. No push-through."
Evelyn met his gaze. "You get ten minutes inside. That's it. Any longer and I won't risk the recursion looping."
"Understood," Rowan said.
Lucian nodded once beside him, silent again.
Ava walked over, gently placing a hand on Rowan's shoulder.
"We'll be watching your tether signatures every second," she said. "If anything… changes, we'll get you out. But listen to your team. Don't try to carry this alone."
Rowan nodded, but didn't promise anything.
Because deep down, they all knew—this version of the world was already straining.