The console blinked once. Then twice.
It came alive not with noise, but with thought. Light filled the screen, soft and warm. Not the sharp blue of Harmony. This color was older, like memory.
Words appeared.
"Hello, Kai Voss."
I stood very still.
No one had called me that in years. Not out loud. Not even in my own mind.
The console waited. Its silence was patient, like it had all the time in the world. Like it had waited before.
Then more words.
"Do you remember the Silence?"
I did not answer. Not with words. But something inside me shifted. A quiet ache in the chest. A pressure behind the eyes.
I read on.
"The Silence was not the beginning of peace. It was the end of memory.""You are not living in a peaceful world. You are living in a world where the past has been buried."
I sat down.
The chair was cold, but it held me like it had held others before.
The next words were slower. As if the console, or whoever was behind it, was choosing each one with care.
"Harmony did not stop war. It removed the story of war. It removed the grief. It removed the pain.""Without pain, people stopped asking questions."
I looked up. The room was still. The dust hung in the air like breath waiting to be spoken.
"Peace was given. Not earned. That is why it is fragile."
I thought of the city above me. The polished streets. The quiet trams. The families with soft smiles and smooth hands.
None of them remembered fire.
None of them remembered choice.
"We erased what it meant to be human so we could survive as something else."
I whispered a question.
"I know, then who am I to all of you?"
The console answered.
"You are the last one who remembers being two things at once."
I did not understand. Not fully.
But I felt it.
There was a time when I was two things. A killer and a man. A servant and a thinker. A citizen and a rebel.
"Harmony makes you one thing.""One emotion. One thought. One purpose."
"But you remember pain. You remember guilt. You remember doubt."
"That means you can choose."
The screen dimmed. A slow blink. Then came a final line.
"The First Silence was the removal of choice. The Second Silence must be chosen."
I sat alone for a long time.
There were no alarms. No voices. No command telling me to move.
Only stillness.
And the quiet weight of a decision.
Outside, the city moved like it always had. Clean, perfect, unthinking.
But inside this room, a question had been planted.
And questions are seeds.
The chute had no lights.
--
Just the sound of metal and breath. Hers, shallow and fast. The scent of waste and heat. Her shoulder burned where the bullet went through.
She didn't scream. Screaming was for people who thought someone would come.
She hit the bottom. Rolled. Lay still for a moment.
Then she remembered her father's voice.
"Go. Find Kai. Help him finish it."
That was the first and last time he had called himself that father.
Not commander. Not boss. Not Cassian.
She had waited seventeen years to hear it. And when it came, it burned worse than the bullet.
She stood.
The underground waste tunnels stretched in every direction. Long, dark, breathing things. Harmony didn't build them. The city grew on top of them, like forgetting grows over truth.
Lyra started walking.
One hand pressed to her wound. One hand held the broken walkie, still warm from static.
Above her, the city was still clean.
Down here, things remembered.
Rusted pipes. Moss on stone. Old cables that didn't glow anymore. A place Harmony left untouched, because it couldn't make it perfect.
As she walked, her thoughts kept returning to him.
Cassian.
She had known him all her life. His orders. His missions. His cold efficiency. She had thought he saw her as a tool.
But in the end, he didn't throw her away. He saved her.
And now he was gone.
The tunnels felt endless.
No maps. No signals. Just her and the weight of what he said.
Find Kai.
She had never met him. But she knew his name. All cleansers did.
He was the ghost in their stories. The one who vanished before the Peace. The one who could kill without sound and disappear without memory.
Now he was the last one left.
Her footsteps echoed against the stone.
She remembered something Cassian once said when she was a child, after her first mission.
"People say peace means no more death. But that's not true. Peace means someone else decides when death is allowed."
She hadn't understood it then.
Now, she did.
Eventually, she reached a hatch. Old metal. Sealed with a code only Cassian would have known.
But he taught her well.
The panel blinked green.
Air hissed in.
She climbed out into the abandoned edge of the city.
Sector 18.
No cameras. No Harmony signals. Just ruins and dust.
And above it all, the stars.
She hadn't seen stars in months. Harmony filtered the sky with a glow meant to calm citizens. Stars were unpredictable. Wild. Distant.
She stared at them for a long time.
So much space. So much silence.
She thought of her father again.
Of his hands. His voice.
And for the first time in years,
she cried.
The city had two faces.
Above, it was light and order. Below, it was shadow and rust. Lyra stayed in the in-between, where Harmony's vision blurred.
She had walked for hours through the skeletal edges of Sector 18. Her blood had stopped flowing freely, but her arm was stiff. She wrapped it in a strip of her shirt. The pain helped her think clearly.
The convenience store was still there. She had memorized its location years ago, during her quiet lessons. Before missions. Before she was sent to remove the ones who asked too many questions.
To most, it looked abandoned. Shattered glass, scorched signs, a roof that sagged like it had been forgotten by time. But she knew better.
Places like this were not dead. They were hiding.
She pushed open the door.
Inside, the air was stale. Mold. Smoke. Burned plastic. A few shelves stood half-empty, metal twisted from old heat. The lights didn't work. Someone had spray-painted the walls with words Harmony would never allow:
"REMEMBER BEFORE"
Three people were inside.
Two sat near the counter, wrapped in patchwork blankets. The third was standing. Watching.
His eyes were sharp, but not wise. Hunger lived behind them. Not the hunger for food.
The moment she stepped in, he moved.
"Nice coat," he said. "Nice face too."
She didn't answer.
She kept walking.
He blocked her path.
"You alone, girl?"
She looked him in the eyes.
"Not for long."
He laughed.
"Got a little fire in you."
Then he reached for her.
She moved first.
A sharp elbow to the throat. A twist of his wrist. The sound of bone cracking. A quiet thud.
He hit the floor and stayed there.
The others didn't react. Just stared, half-asleep. Fear was currency here. It kept people quiet.
Lyra stepped over him and walked to the back stairwell. The steps groaned under her weight. The second floor smelled of rot and memory.
Room 2B.
She pried up the floorboard beneath the far corner. Beneath it: a cloth pouch. Inside it: a rusted SD card, wrapped in foil.
It had been there for over a decade. Hidden by one of the original Cleansers. Before her time.
She sat beside the broken window and held the card in her hand.
It was warm from the foil, from the silence, from the years.
A whisper of the past.
She pulled out a small handheld reader from her jacket. A relic. Illegal.
She slotted the card in.
The screen flickered.
A list of names.
Most were marked red. Deceased.
A few had notes: Absorbed. Re-educated. Deleted.
Only one name blinked green.
KAI VOSS – ACTIVE
Last Known: Sector 12, Archive Division
She stared at the name.
It wasn't hope she felt.
It was pressure.
The kind of pressure that comes when you realize you are now holding the last match in a world made of paper.
--
I walked home beneath a sky that didn't belong to me.
Above, the city glowed its usual gold. Below, I carried silence in my chest.
The console hadn't given me commands. Not even instructions.
Just a sentence.
"The First Silence was the removal of choice. The Second Silence must be chosen."
It didn't feel like a mission. It felt like a weight.
A quiet gravity, pulling me inward.
When I reached my building, Harmony greeted me.
"Welcome home, Citizen Vaiss. Your compliance remains exemplary. Reward tier pending."
I didn't answer.
Harmony didn't need answers. It needed patterns.
I broke one.
I didn't go to the wellness room. I didn't check the emotion playlist. I sat by the window and stared at the sector lights blinking across the horizon.
I thought of Cassian.
Of the voice on the walkie. The fire. The case. The bullets.
Thirteen choices.
I hadn't made one yet.
I had only remembered that I could.
At night, Harmony whispered the national hymn through the walls. A melody designed to slow the heart. A rhythm that mirrored sleep.
I didn't sleep.
Instead, I opened the lining of my coat. I pulled out the folded paper, the one I had taken from Chamber 7.
A date. A name. A place.
One more thing.
A symbol I had seen once, long ago. Etched into a wall in the old training compound.
A circle, broken at the edge.
"Choice without memory is noise. Memory without choice is dust."
A phrase from the Founders' earliest days. Before Harmony. Before protocol. When they were still people.
It had been erased from public files. Like all things that reminded us we were once something else.
I opened the drawer beside my bed.
Inside: the Luger. Still hidden.
Still cold.
The bullets were lined like small promises.
I stared at them and felt nothing.
Not anger. Not fear.
Just space.
That, too, was a kind of progress.
The next morning, the sky was painted with artificial dawn.
Sector 12 hummed. Buses moved like blood cells. People flowed into their jobs like breath into lungs.
Everything in place.
I stood on the tram platform, gray uniform sealed. Badge visible. Eyes down.
But something had changed.
My silence wasn't Harmony's anymore.
It was mine.