The golden pillar split open like a wound of light.
Not a mechanical opening — a tearing. A rending.
The kind of rupture that breaks rules and physics and sense.
Drones lunged.
Metal claws and sterilizers swung through the air.
Mnemosyne's alarms screamed until the vault vibrated.
But I didn't feel any of it.
Something inside the pillar was pulling me.
Not physically — deeper than that.
A gravity made of memory.
A force made of longing.
Ari.
"Elias—!" Lira's voice cracked behind me. "If you go in, I can't follow!"
The vault lights surged.
Ari's whisper pressed into me like a hand against my chest:
"…I'm here…"
And I stepped forward.
The world shattered.
Not violently — softly, like a glass sphere cracking under warm hands.
The cold metal vault dissolved into a smear of light.
The alarms faded into muted hums.
The drones blurred into dust.
Lira's shouting became a distant echo.
Then—
Stillness.
A warmth I hadn't felt in years.
My feet touched ground — grass, impossibly soft. My lungs filled with warm air, scented with jasmine and summer and the faint, metallic hum of an old memory.
I opened my eyes.
And I was standing on the hillside.
The one from the impossible memory.
The one that wasn't mine.
The sky shimmered like pixels caught between frames.
Clouds stuttered.
Sunlight glitched.
A distant horizon looped, repeating the same shape again and again.
I swallowed.
This wasn't the real world.
Nor was it a pure Echo.
It was an echo of an Echo — an unstable pocket of Ari's mind, stitched together from fragments and longing.
"Elias."
I turned.
She stood where the grass was tallest — barefoot, hair drifting like it remembered wind even when none blew.
Ari.
Not fully formed.
Not perfectly rendered.
Her edges shimmered, fragmenting into pixels and reforming with each heartbeat.
But her eyes—
Her eyes were whole.
A rush of emotion hit so hard my breath broke.
"Ari…"
She stepped closer.
Her face flickered, smoothing into the version I remembered — then shifting into the version from the café — then the hospital corridor — then back again.
She was all of them.
And none of them.
A mosaic of who she used to be.
"I'm sorry," she whispered.
The wind rippled — a glitch in the simulation.
"For what?" My voice cracked.
"For calling you here."
Her gaze dropped.
"For dragging you into this."
"You didn't drag me," I said. "I chose."
Her expression crumpled — grief, relief, fear all at once.
"You shouldn't have," she said softly.
"You're not supposed to be here. You're still alive."
"I don't care—"
"You should," she said sharply. "If Mnemosyne completes the audit, it won't just erase me — it'll erase you too."
A cold weight punched through my chest.
"What do you mean 'erase me'?"
She stepped closer, touching the air near my hand — the gesture of someone trying to hold, but unable to.
"Elias… your neural patterns are merging with mine. Mnemosyne reads you as contaminated. If it wipes me… it wipes whatever part of you is tied to me."
My throat tightened.
"You're in my head."
A faint, sad smile.
"And you're in mine."
The sky glitched.
A strip of clouds ripped out of place, replaced by static.
Ari winced, pressing a hand to her temple.
"It's collapsing," she whispered. "I can't hold the space much longer."
"What do you remember?" I asked quickly. "From the collapse?"
She hesitated.
"A flash," she said. "A pain. A scream that wasn't mine. Then—
light.
Heat.
Falling."
The hillside trembled beneath us.
"And then I woke up here," she said.
"In this memory?"
"No."
She shook her head.
"This is just a mask. I woke up… somewhere else. Somewhere dark."
A chill crawled up my spine.
"Where?"
She opened her mouth—
—but the ground beneath us cracked.
The hillside dissolved into cascading code.
The sky shattered.
Static roared through the air.
Outside, someone was calling my name:
"Elias! Elias, if you hear me—ANSWER!"
Lira.
Her voice trembled through the glitching world like a radio transmission through a storm.
Ari grabbed my hand — or tried to — her fingers passing through mine like light through fog.
"Don't listen!" she begged. "If she pulls you out, I'll be erased!"
"But if I stay—"
"You'll die."
The world flickered.
Then Mnemosyne's voice thundered into the mindscape, cold as a blade:
FOREIGN CONSCIOUSNESS DETECTED.
ARCHIVIST RHANE:
FINAL WARNING.
Ari's form shook violently.
Fractured pixel shards peeled off her skin.
She gasped.
"They found me."
The hillside collapsed completely.
Chunks of memory disintegrated into static, swirling into a whirlpool of broken images.
"You have to choose," Ari whispered.
Her voice wavered, breaking.
"Stay with me—
or go back."
Lira's voice cut through the collapsing world:
"ELIAS! Mnemosyne activated OMEGA PROTOCOL! If you don't get out NOW it will sever your neural link—PERMANENTLY!"
Ari's voice overlapped hers:
"Please… don't leave me again."
The world convulsed.
Two voices.
Two worlds.
Two futures.
One choice.
A blinding white light tore through the sky.
The last thing I saw was Ari reaching for me—
flickering
breaking
begging