The fire should have spread faster.
But it didn't.
Instead, it moved like it was thinking.
Eating only the edges of the clean room. Avoiding the chair. Avoiding him.
As if the place still knew who it belonged to.
Rhea didn't look back again.
She gripped my hand and pulled me down the corridor as the alarms resumed, louder now—less like warnings and more like mourning bells.
"This place is alive," I said breathlessly. "Isn't it?"
Rhea didn't answer.
Because we both knew the answer wasn't science.
It was memory.
And memory never dies easy.
The stairwell should've led up.
It led down.
"Rhea—"
"I know."
The lights flickered again, slower now. Red strobes like a heartbeat. Like a countdown.
And beneath that, faint and rising—
Children's voices.
Singing.
Off-key. Out of time. Like something repeating itself long after the children were gone.
"Do you hear that?" I asked.
She didn't nod.
But I saw it in her face.
She remembered it, too.
Sublevel R was cold.
Not temperature-cold.
But memory-cold.
Like the hallway had been carved from old trauma.
There were doors here, dozens. Some open. Some welded shut.
They weren't numbered.
They were named.
I stopped in front of one.
VALE, ADRIAN – Revision 3
My stomach turned.
Next to it:
VIRELLE, RHEA – Failure / Unclear Outcome
I touched her arm gently.
"I thought you said they made me," I said. "But if there's a third revision…"
She exhaled like the breath hurt.
"They tried again. Every time you resisted."
I looked at her.
"What happened to the others?"
She didn't look at me.
"I never saw them leave."
The hallway ended in a door.
Rust-stained.
Unmarked.
It pulsed slightly, like something was behind it that breathed.
I didn't want to touch it.
Neither did she.
So it opened on its own.
Inside—
There was no ceiling.
No floor.
Just black.
And in the center, suspended by wires, was a child.
A small one.
Eyes closed.
Unmoving.
But when the door opened—
It opened its mouth.
And whispered:
> "Adrian."
Rhea gasped.
Because it wasn't just a voice.
It was mine.
> "Is that—" I began.
Rhea's voice cracked. "That's the first."
> "The real AV-09."
The original.
The one who never left.
The one who broke too soon, remembered too much—and had to be sealed.
I stepped forward.
The air crackled around me.
Time bent.
"I don't want to remember anymore," I said.
> "But I do," the child said. "I remember everything you forgot."
The walls pulsed.
The wires began to retract.
Rhea screamed something, but I didn't hear it.
Because I saw it—
The moment everything had gone wrong.
The room. The blood. The choice I made when I was too young to understand it.
And what I'd done to her.
The reason her mouth was stitched.
The reason we were locked away.
I collapsed.
Hands over my ears.
But the truth was in now.
And it wasn't leaving.
The child-thing floated toward me, its eyes wide.
"You buried me," it said. "But I'm still here."
Rhea caught me before I hit the ground.
"Adrian," she whispered. "You're not him anymore. You're not the first."
"I was," I choked.
"You're what survived," she said. "That's different."
I looked up.
The door behind us was still open.
But something else was coming.
Something old. A sound like breathing metal.
> "What is that?" I asked.
Rhea gritted her teeth.
"The system's final lock. The one they left in case any of us remembered."
She pulled me up.
"We can't just leave it," I said, looking at the child suspended in wires.
She nodded slowly.
"No," she said. "But we can seal it. For good."
"How?"
She reached into her coat.
And this time, the thing she held wasn't a key.
It was a matchbook.
Marked with the same symbol I'd been drawing since I was fourteen.
The symbol on the matchbook was faint.
Faded from age.
But I recognized it instantly.
The curve. The slash. The circle.
The thing I'd been drawing for years without knowing why.
It wasn't a memory.
It was a map.
A burn mark.
Rhea looked at me, something unreadable in her eyes.
"They called it the Sigil of Retention," she said. "It wasn't meant to protect you. It was meant to trap you. To burn your mind shut."
I swallowed hard.
"But then why did I keep drawing it?"
"Because part of you kept trying to break it," she said. "Every line was a crack in the cage."
Behind us, the room shuddered.
The child-thing floated closer, arms outstretched. Not angry.
Just waiting.
"I'm what's left," it said. "Of the first you. The raw version. The one who felt everything."
"I don't want to feel it anymore," I whispered.
"You have to," Rhea said. Her hand brushed mine. "We both do. That's the only way it ends."
Then she struck the match.
The flame didn't behave like fire.
It remembered.
And as it flared—
The air twisted.
The walls screamed.
Not metaphor.
Not imagination.
The facility itself howled—like something ancient and cruel was being peeled from inside its own bones.
> "Rhea—what did you do?"
She held the flame toward the child, and the moment it touched—
Everything split.
---
We weren't in the room anymore.
We were in a memory.
But not mine.
Ours.
A room lined with beds. Children, small and silent, each with blank stares and stitched mouths. Needles. Machines. Teachers with gloves and no faces.
And in the corner—
Me.
And Rhea.
Smaller. Staring at each other.
She had blood on her sleeve. I had ink down my neck.
But neither of us spoke.
Because we weren't allowed to.
> "You tried to save me," Rhea whispered, voice shaking. "Back then. Even before you remembered."
The fire around us pulsed—turning pages in the memory like a book trying to finish its story.
We saw it all:
The first failed prototype.
The removal of names and the replacement with codes.
The day I screamed too loud.
The night they put the symbol on me, and buried the rest of me alive inside my own mind.
> "They didn't just erase you," Rhea said. "They rewrote you over someone else."
"Who?" I asked.
But I already knew.
Her.
---
The memory snapped.
We were back in the room.
The fire had reached the ceiling.
The child-version of me was flickering like a candle flame.
And it spoke, one last time:
> "If you walk out of here… you'll never be whole again. Not fully. You'll forget parts. You'll lose things."
"I've already lost enough," I whispered.
"Then choose."
I looked at Rhea.
Her eyes weren't pleading.
They were offering.
To burn with me.
To walk through it.
To carry whatever was left of us into the dark.
So I nodded.
And I stepped into the flame.
---
It didn't hurt.
Not like I thought it would.
Because the fire wasn't made to destroy.
It was made to remember.
And once it had burned through all the lies, all the false versions, all the locked doors—
All that was left…
Was me.
Not clean.
Not whole.
But mine.
And as the fire died—
So did the hallway.
The doors. The wires. The mirrors.
All of it.
Ash in silence.
---
We emerged from a trapdoor behind the chapel.
It was morning.
Somehow.
Birds were singing.
The school looked the same.
Too much the same.
I turned to Rhea.
She looked tired.
But not broken.
She reached up, touched the side of my face.
"You're not what they made anymore."
I managed a breath.
"Then what am I?"
She didn't answer right away.
Then:
> "You're the version who chose"