There is a place beneath the building where light has never touched. Where memory decays like rotting flesh, and time folds in on itself like a book burned halfway through its story.
It is not a basement.
It is not a cellar.
It is not a forgotten floor.
It is the heart—the black, pulsing core around which the building was unknowingly built.
And Jamie was now standing at its edge.
He hadn't walked here.
He had been taken.
Dragged, pulled, whispered into by the creature that once crouched beneath the hole. His legs felt numb, not from cold, but from the sheer psychic weight of what this place remembered. It was as if every lost soul, every scream that had been swallowed, had been funneled down here to rot in the dark.
The space around him was cavernous, alive with twitching wires and writhing pipes that moved like serpents in a dying man's dream. The walls were made of brick, but the brick pulsed like muscle. The air was thick—humid, metallic, and wet, as if the whole chamber had been crying blood for centuries.
In the center of the room floated a mass.
It looked like a heart.
It beat slowly, each thud shaking the walls, echoing across miles of forgotten stairwells. But it wasn't a heart—it was a memory engine. A brain. A root. All things that had ever been written, rewritten, or erased had flowed through it.
Jamie stepped forward, the floor beneath him squelching with each step.
The thing responded to him. It knew him.
Because it was him.
Or parts of him—pieces of past iterations, versions the Rewrite Machine had discarded, stitched back together with madness and spit. And now it beat with the same rhythm as his own heart.
As if, somewhere along the line, the building had decided:
"You and I are the same."
Elsewhere—nowhere—Mira fell.
She did not hit the ground.
There was no ground.
She plunged, endlessly, into a world of colorless images—blurry photos and flickering memories, all unfinished, unwritten, unwatched. Rooms she'd never seen. People she might have met. All of them whispered her name in a hundred wrong voices.
Mira. Mira. Mira.
They spoke to her as if she were the forgotten thing.
And she screamed—but no sound came.
Only her breath, misty in the void.
Only the crushing pressure of the place between the place.
And then—he was there.
Not Jamie.
The thing he had shed.
The one left behind when Jamie first walked into the Rewrite Machine. The husk. The echo. The failed first attempt at memory. It crawled toward her with too many fingers and a smile that bled from cheek to ear.
"Are you the real one?" it whispered in a voice not made for words. "Or are you just another version I've forgotten to forget?"
Mira could not move.
The thing opened its mouth wider than humanly possible.
And screamed her back into herself.
Ansel clawed his way down a vent shaft that should not have existed. His hands bled on the metal edges. He didn't care. His thoughts were static now, fragments of who he had been before this building decided he was no longer real enough to remember properly.
But there was one thing that still guided him.
Jamie.
He saw him. Or a flicker of him.
A shadow in the guts of the building, descending deeper still.
And Ansel had to follow.
No matter where it led.
Even if it meant facing the origin.
Even if it meant losing the last of what made him himself.
Jamie reached out.
His hand touched the heart.
It didn't feel like flesh.
It didn't feel like metal.
It felt like every mistake he had ever made.
The moment he forgot his mother's face.
The time he lied to stay alive.
The screams of those who were rewritten in his place.
All of it, in one cold, pulsing surface.
He saw a version of himself run through a burning corridor, eyes wild, screaming names he couldn't remember.
He saw another curled into a fetal position, whispering to a wall.
Another stood at the Rewrite Machine and refused to step in, leaving the others to burn.
He had been so many things.
Too many things.
And now he was none of them.
The heart beat once.
Boom.
And Jamie's knees buckled.
Boom.
The floor cracked beneath him.
Boom.
The building began to collapse in on itself—not physically, but mentally. Corridors looped into each other. Doors blinked in and out of existence. The memory that held the architecture together was unraveling.
Because Jamie had touched the center.
Because he had been the center all along.
Mira opened her eyes.
She was lying in a long hallway now, but the walls were covered in names.
Every name she'd ever known.
Every name she had been.
It was a hallway of her rewrites.
She ran her hand across one.
MIRA, VERSION 3.17
OUTCOME: SUICIDE BY STAIRWELL
RESULT: UNSTABLE, REWRITTEN
Another.
MIRA, VERSION 4.01
OUTCOME: ASSIMILATION WITH BUILDING
RESULT: MEMORY FAILURE
And finally:
MIRA, VERSION 5.00
OUTCOME: ACTIVE
RESULT: OBSERVED
She felt the weight of them press down on her.
She was no different.
She was a script. A file.
A line of code in a machine that had forgotten how to die.
But this version of her remembered. This version of her fought back.
And she stood.
Eyes burning with resolve.
Down below, Jamie lifted his head.
He heard Mira's voice.
He heard Ansel calling his name.
He heard the heart of the building groan.
He understood now.
This wasn't about escape.
This was about unwriting the building from the inside out.
It was time to stop being part of the memory.
It was time to become the thing the building feared most:
A truth it could not rewrite.
The building has shown its heart, but in doing so, it may have cracked open the one thing it cannot control: Jamie. Mira. Ansel. Versions or not, they are waking up. And as they descend deeper into madness, they begin to ask the one question the building never accounted for:
What happens when the memory fights back?