No one said a word for a while.
Kenton had resumed fiddling with his perimeter tools—thin, metallic wires that shimmered when touched, like spider silk dipped in oil. Dani crouched beside the far wall, eyes flitting between shadow and glyph, never resting too long in one spot. Dario lay curled at Lance's feet, breathing steadily, rhythmically, like the only metronome in a town that had long abandoned time.
Lance didn't move.
He sat beneath the fractured mural, back pressed to the cold, warped bone of the chamber wall. The saint painted above him seemed to shift when he blinked—its sewn mouth straining subtly against the thread, its branch-like arms twitching just enough to notice but not enough to trust.
The words whispered earlier still lingered in the air, like smoke caught in the lungs.
"You can't walk deeper than your guilt."
Lance stared at the saint's halo—receipts, all of them. Faded, curling. Grocery receipts. Pharmacy scripts. Dates printed in soft pink thermal ink. One of them... he thought... maybe he recognized. That deli on 43rd he'd always meant to try. The place he passed twice a week but never stepped into. A receipt for a sandwich he never bought.
He stood slowly. His knees didn't want to. Dario's head lifted but didn't protest.
"You see something?" Dani asked from across the room.
Lance didn't answer. He raised a hand and touched the mural.
The paint was dry.
But his fingers came away damp.
He stepped back.
The saint's face flickered. No, not flickered—peeled. The paint pulled away, slow and silent, curling back like the corner of an old sticker.
Behind it was bone.
No, not bone—a seam.
"I think this wall opens," Lance said.
Kenton looked up sharply. "Why do you think that?"
"Because it just blinked at me."
That got Dani's attention.
She stood, weapon held low but ready. "Elaborate."
"I touched it," Lance said, heartbeat rising, "and it felt wrong. Like the paint was wet. And then... it moved."
Kenton stood slowly, approaching with caution. "Seams aren't supposed to be reachable this deep."
"Well, congratulations," Dani muttered. "Your map's now useless."
Lance touched the wall again. This time, he pushed gently.
The bone behind the mural yielded.
A soft creak. A sigh, like breath escaping something long buried.
A section of the wall folded inward, curling like an eyelid opening.
Behind it—stairs.
Narrow. Spiral.
Again.
But these were different.
They were smoother. And they pulsed. Very slightly. Like something sleeping was using them as lungs.
Kenton swore under his breath.
Dani stared.
Then smiled, just a little. "Of course there's a second spiral staircase."
"Should we—?" Lance started.
But Dani was already walking.
Kenton hesitated, fingers trembling near the edge of his notebook, then followed.
Lance looked down at Dario.
The dog stood without command.
They descended.
The second spiral was shorter, tighter. The walls were ribbed. They didn't shine—they absorbed light, drinking it like something thirsty. The air thickened the further down they went, like walking through a soup of dust and grief.
At the bottom was a doorway.
Not a door—just a jagged arch carved out of material that didn't feel like stone. It pulsed with a slow, biological rhythm. Almost cardiac.
Beyond it was a room.
And in that room: mirrors.
Dozens. Maybe hundreds. Arranged in a tight circle.
Each mirror reflected the room.
But not the same version of it.
In some, Lance saw Dani standing beside him. In others, she wasn't there. In one, Kenton was gone—and instead, there was a woman with his eyes, wearing a lab coat soaked in ink.
In one mirror—only one—Lance stood alone.
No Dario.
No Dani.
No Kenton.
Just him. Pale-eyed. Still. With something crawling just beneath the skin of his forehead, twitching every few seconds, like it was trying to learn what a face looked like.
He turned away.
"What is this place?" Dani murmured.
"A memory fracture site," Kenton whispered, pulling out a small scanner that immediately shorted out in his hand. "They used to trap pieces of identity here. Test what stuck."
Lance backed away from the mirrors.
His reflection didn't follow him.
It stayed.
Staring.
"Okay," he said softly. "That's enough. I don't want to—"
The ground shuddered.
A low groan, like pressure equalizing in something wet and cavernous.
One of the mirrors flickered. Cracked.
And something behind it leaned forward.
A face, wrong in subtle ways. The teeth didn't line up. The hair moved like it was breathing. The eyes were his, but they blinked out of sync.
Then the mirror shattered.
And the thing inside stepped through.
It was him.
But it was built wrong. Too long in the legs, too calm in the smile. Its voice came before its lips moved:
"Lance."
Dario growled low, fur on end.
Dani raised her weapon, finger twitching over the trigger.
Kenton stumbled back, jaw clenched.
Lance didn't move.
The thing tilted its head. "You're not real enough yet. But you will be. I'm just here to see what I'll fix when you become HIM."
Then it took a step.
And Lance felt something in his own spine unlock.
A phantom nerve.
An echo of pain that hadn't happened yet.
Dani fired.
The grenade didn't explode—it unraveled. Threads of energy whipped around the doppelgänger and shredded the nearest mirror instead.
Glass burst. Screamed.
The thing hissed. Turned.
And walked back into another reflection.
Gone.
But not far.
They stood in silence.
Lance was shaking again.
Not from fear this time.
From the ache in his back.
Kenton wiped sweat from his brow. "We need to leave this room. Now."
Dani didn't argue.
As they climbed back up, the mirrors didn't break again.
But every few steps, Lance could feel something watching through the glass.
One version of himself.
Waiting for him to catch up.
Or fall behind.
---
The entrance beneath the Hollow Reach library wasn't marked.
Dani found it first—her fingers tracing a false spine in the back row of theological indexes until a latch gave way with a hollow click. A heavy grate slid aside to reveal stairs that spiraled not downward, but inward, coiling like a fossilized shell beneath the town.
They moved silently, each step echoing into something that felt older than memory. Lance followed, one hand gripping Dario's leash like a lifeline, the other trailing along the wall. The stone was damp and veined with silver-like threads that pulsed softly when he touched them.
No one said a word for the first hundred steps.
Then, Kenton broke the silence. "This is it. This is where he kept the fragments."
Dani glanced over her shoulder. "Who's he?"
Kenton hesitated. "The first Archivist."
"Name?"
Another pause. "Doesn't have one anymore."
Dani rolled her eyes. "Cool. Definitely not a cult."
But Kenton didn't smile.
When they reached the base, the stairwell bloomed into a low-ceilinged chamber filled with monolithic shelves—stacks of hexagonal drawers, each sealed with glyphs and cracked wax seals. A strange luminescence emanated from nowhere and everywhere, like the air itself was carrying a memory.
Lance blinked. The floor seemed to sway slightly, like he was standing on the edge of a breath that hadn't exhaled yet.
"Welcome to the Archive Below," Kenton murmured. His voice echoed against metal and mildew. "Where the memories don't belong to anyone anymore."
Dani nudged open a drawer with her boot. Cards spilled out like bones. "Looks like someone's ego exploded."
He didn't answer.
They walked until the light thinned — and there he was.
The Archivist sat among the wreckage like a relic that refused to stop thinking. A robe of shredded lanyards draped over his shoulders, eyes reflecting the dim hum of dying lights. Around him, papers quivered in the still air as if breathing with him.
When he spoke, it sounded like the room remembering an old conversation.
"Kenton," the old man rasped. "Back again?"
Kenton froze mid-step. His hand twitched once — not fear, exactly. A reflex. Like muscle memory that had survived longer than the reason for it.
"I told you not to return," the Archivist said. "You weren't ready then. You're not now."
Lance frowned. "Ready for what?"
The old man didn't look at him. "To see what gets left behind when the noise is carved out."
Kenton's jaw tightened. He looked down — not submissive, just… contained.
Dani opened her mouth, then stopped herself. Something about the air made humor feel wrong here.
The Archivist rose, slow but deliberate, and stepped closer to Kenton. His gaze traced his face like he was studying an unfinished sculpture. His fingertips hovered near Kenton's temple but didn't touch. "Still clean," he murmured. "Still too quiet."
A tremor ran through Kenton's left hand, knuckles whitening. He said nothing.
Lance's voice cut through. "What's that supposed to mean?"
The Archivist turned toward him — not annoyed, but faintly curious, like hearing a sound he'd forgotten existed. "It means," he said slowly, "I built him to think without flinching."
"And how'd that turn out?" Lance asked.
For a moment, something flickered behind the old man's eyes. Not pride. Not regret. Just… awareness.He looked away.
"Perfection doesn't hold," the Archivist said finally. "It leaks."
Silence stretched.
Dani shifted her weight, gaze moving between the two men. She saw the subtle tremor in Kenton's hand, the faint rigidity in his jaw. Not fear. Pain remembered by a body that hadn't been asked permission.
The Archivist turned again, this time toward Mercer."And you," he said quietly. "Subject Zero."
Lance's brow twitched. "You people really need a new nickname for me."
The Archivist's face didn't move—just the faintest narrowing of his eyes, like the motion of a clock's hand. "Names keep things from unraveling. Even you."
Lance leaned his shoulder against a nearby cabinet, arms crossed. "Sounds like something you tell yourself when you start labeling people instead of listening to them."
For a moment, the silence in the Archive felt like it was holding its breath.
The Archivist tilted his head. "Still looking for meaning," he murmured. "That's rare, these days."
Lance's mouth pulled into a crooked line. "At this point, meaning's overrated. I just don't like being talked about like I'm a software patch."
That got the faintest flicker out of the old man—something between curiosity and regret, there and gone like static.
"Not a patch," the Archivist said finally. "A reminder."
"Sure," Lance muttered, stepping closer. "Remind me again what you did to Kenton first."
The Archivist didn't reply. But for a heartbeat, the faintest crease appeared at the corner of his eyes—a shadow of something like regret or sorrow—before his face smoothed into the familiar mask of cold logic.
Lance noticed it. A small, human tremor in the man who treated Kenton like a tool. He didn't move closer, didn't speak, but something tight in his chest loosened. He understood, somehow, that the old man hadn't meant for it to hurt Kenton as much as it had. That beneath all the discipline and rigor, there was a trace of guilt.
The Archivist's eyes flicked toward Kenton, sharp and unreadable again, yet for just a second, something softened—like a door cracked ajar in a fortress.
Lance straightened, letting the moment pass without pressing. He didn't need a response. Just seeing it was enough.
"Didn't think so." he added, quieter this time, almost like a benediction.
He turned back toward his throne, light pooling like dust around his feet.
"Take what you came for," he murmured. "Before it remembers you instead."
No one moved for a long time.
Then Dani reached out, caught Kenton's sleeve, and gently pulled him toward the exit.He didn't resist — just moved, too still, too quiet.
As they passed the edge of the light, Lance looked back.
The Archivist was sitting again, head bowed, hands still trembling faintly.A single tear cut a clean line through the dust on his cheek — then vanished, soaked into the paper at his feet.
As they moved into the Archive, the walls hummed around them. Drawers shifted. Memories whispered. One of them showed a child drawing with sigil-ink on a floor they didn't own. Another showed someone who looked like Lance—but older, distant—whispering to an empty chair.
And in a drawer Dani cracked open—
A torn schematic. Not of a weapon.
Of a face.
Her own.
Drawn in overlapping lines, shifting from profile to profile as if someone had never quite decided who she really was.
She slammed it shut.
Kenton reached a glyph-marked drawer, fingers hovering.
He whispered, "I was never meant to be here."
Lance, standing beside him, just said, "Me neither."
The Archive didn't laugh.
It remembered.
And it waited.
Dani hadn't meant to linger.
She'd popped the latch on the hexagonal drawer because it looked older than the others, its seal melted smooth like it had been opened many times before. Curiosity, she told herself. Tactical curiosity.
The drawer slid open with a sigh that sounded almost like breath, warm and damp.
Inside: not weapons, not coordinates, not a name.
But paper. Thin, translucent, covered in jagged lines that shimmered just wrong.
Her own face stared up at her.
Not a photo. Not a sketch.
A schematic.
Her cheekbone rendered in overlapping dimensions—three angles of the same feature shifting on top of one another, like whoever had drawn it couldn't decide if her jaw was sharp, soft, or broken. Her eyes were marked with tiny numeric notations. One had a dotted line bisecting it diagonally with the label "probable lie boundary."
At the bottom:
"DANI. V. ITERATION 6B (UNCONFIRMED)."
[ALIGNMENT UNSTABLE]
[MOTIVE: ??]
She stared for longer than she should have.
Her pulse thudded quietly. Her breath slowed. Even Dario, snuffling near Lance, paused and tilted his head toward her like he felt something shift.
Dani's fingers curled into fists at her sides. She did not reach for the schematic again.
"Everything okay over there?" Kenton called, voice echoing distantly from between the shelves.
"Peachy," she snapped, far too quickly.
Lance turned, catching just a flicker of her expression—one he hadn't seen before. Not irritation. Not calculation.
Recognition.
Like she'd seen something she thought was gone.
Kenton's footsteps clicked closer, uneven. "What did you find?"
"Nothing useful," Dani said, voice flat as dead code. "Just another drawer full of bad guesses."
She shut the drawer—harder than necessary. The glyph on the front flashed red for a second, like it disagreed.
Lance didn't say anything. But he didn't look away, either.
Dani looked back at him, and for a moment, she dropped the sardonic front—not all the way, just enough for him to see the tired edge beneath it. The crack.
"You ever get the feeling," she said, tone too light to be casual, "that people remember things about you that you don't?"
Lance, still kneeling beside Dario, gave a small nod. "Every time I blink."
Kenton, oblivious to the tension, ran a hand over a massive index wheel etched with old, burnt data. "Some of these drawers shouldn't even exist anymore. They're from places that collapsed. Memories of memories. False timelines."
"Yeah?" Dani muttered. "Then why do they still know my face?"
Kenton didn't catch that.
But Lance did. He stood, slowly, like the movement took more effort than it should have. His eyes—opaque and wavering faintly like milk-stained glass—locked on hers.
He didn't ask.
But he didn't need to.
Dani rubbed the back of her neck and turned away.
"We got what we came for," she said. "Let's move before the Archive changes its mind."
Kenton mumbled agreement, already distracted by some shimmering sigil that had begun pulsing in morse-like rhythm.
But Lance? He watched Dani walk ahead into the shadows of the Archive, shoulders stiff.
Even Dario, snuffling near Lance, paused and tilted his head toward her like he felt something shift.
And he started to wonder:
Was she even sure who she was?
Or had someone written it for her, one schematic at a time?