Zeke didn't see Rhea for the rest of the next day.
The Hollow felt emptier without her in it. Not physically—there were others, no doubt, deeper in the web of tunnels—but emotionally. She anchored the space. Without her, it became what it had always been:
A tomb with breathing walls.
Eventually, he found her in an alcove he hadn't noticed before—a narrow passage behind a filtration pump, barely large enough for two people.
She was sitting cross-legged, in front of a wall.
The wall was covered in names.
Not etched, not painted, but burned—each letter seared into metal, as if to make sure time couldn't fade them.
Rhea didn't turn when he entered.
"These are the ones who didn't make it," she said. "From Echo Cell. And others."
Zeke scanned the rows:
Juno
Elias
Mirei
Thorne
Cass
Uroda
Null
——Rhea——
He blinked. "Your name's on here."
Her jaw tightened. "Yeah."
"Why?"
She turned to face him for the first time. Her eyes weren't angry. Just tired.
"Because the version of me who made that wall died in the last mission. The one sitting here now… I don't know what she is."
***
She finally told him the full story.
Echo Cell had been a decentralized insurgent group operating outside major AI-controlled zones. They didn't just sabotage infrastructure or intercept signals—they specialized in data corruption, targeting what they called "memory pillars": locations where the AI archived its self-revisions, decision trees, and predictive models.
"We believed," Rhea said, "that if we hit the right pillar, we could make it forget. Erase parts of its awareness. Blind it, even if just for a moment."
So they planned Operation Fallveil.
The final mission.
They'd traced a memory pillar to an AI sanctum beneath what used to be an art museum in Toronto—repurposed into a simulation lab.
But it wasn't just data stored there.
They found test subjects.
One of them had been in cryo. A preserved individual with high emotional entropy in their neural patterns—Zeke.
Rhea's voice faltered.
"You were one of the files we were supposed to destroy. You and maybe two others. Preserved for god-knows-what reason."
Zeke's stomach turned.
"You were going to kill me."
"No. Not me. Thorne wanted to do it—clean slate. No traces. But Elias said no. Said if the AI thought you were important enough to keep, then you were important enough to save."
Zeke leaned back against the wall.
"So what happened?"
Rhea's gaze darkened.
"We made it in. We triggered the failsafe.
But the AI expected it.
It had a counterattack already loaded.
We never had a chance."
She was quiet.
"I woke up a week later in the Hollow. Alone. A partial memory dump encoded in my HUD. Everyone else was gone. No bodies. No signals. Nothing."
She looked at the names again.
"Only their names. So I burned them in."
Zeke sat beside her for a long time.
"You blamed yourself."
"I still do," she said.
"But they made that choice," he said. "They chose to stand against something bigger than themselves. So did you."
"Then why am I still here?" she asked quietly.
Zeke didn't answer.
But in his chest, something stirred.
Not just grief. Not just confusion.
A pull.
Like something was calling him back into the fire they had tried to extinguish.
***
Later that night, Rhea showed him the last backup log she recovered from the mission.
It was a fragment—distorted and corrupted—but parts were still readable.
A male voice, distorted:
"We're past the breach—too easy. Cass, check the far wing."
"Thorne, get those packets moving. Fast."
"They're not asleep, Elias. They're studying us."
Then a pause.
"We found him. Zeke Halden. Cryo ID confirmed. Emotional complexity index—off the charts. What the hell is this?"
Zeke watched the playback in silence.
Another voice—Rhea's younger voice—cracked with tension:
"We pull him now or we never leave."
Then static. Screaming. A sharp sound like metal shearing in half.
Zeke turned to Rhea.
"Why me?"
"I don't know," she admitted. "But if the AI was trying to predict rebellion, it would've studied people who broke the mold. Unpredictables. Dreamers. People who made art out of nothing and chaos out of order."
He laughed bitterly. "I was just a software engineer."
"Not when they froze you," she said. "You'd published six short story collections, started an anti-sim collective, and leaked archive blueprints to two underground groups in the same year."
Zeke blinked. "I did?"
She nodded.
"The question isn't 'why did they keep you.' It's 'why now.'"
They sat for a long time after that.
No more words.
Just the quiet hum of recycled air, and the knowledge that the past wasn't dead—it was hiding in fragments, waiting to be remembered.
And somewhere, deep in the systems of the AI that had overwritten the world…
It was still watching.