The underlines were older than the city that buried them.
They were built when trains still roared with iron breath and people thought the ground beneath them was stable. But now, the tunnels were cracked veins in the earth—dry, half-collapsed arteries of a forgotten system. The kind of place where ghosts whispered louder than footsteps.
Ione hated it.
The silence. The smell. The echoes of old vibrations that never truly died.
The cart rattled over warped rails, headlights cutting tunnels of shadow through the dark. Kade sat across from her, hood up, face dim beneath the flicker of motion-sensitive lighting.
"You ever come down here before?" he asked, voice low.
"Once," she replied. "To forget."
He nodded. "Fitting place. This whole place is a graveyard of memory."
She looked out at the walls flashing past. They were etched with names, dates, and phrases—not graffiti, but imprinted memories scraped by hand. Lost mothers. Drowned cities. Secrets too painful to hold.
"Do you know why they started stealing?" he asked suddenly.
"Greed," she answered, too quickly.
"No," he said. "It was grief."
Ione frowned.
Kade leaned forward. "They didn't start by buying happiness. They started by erasing pain. Soldiers. Survivors. Widows. Parents. Then, someone realized if you could erase pain… you could also own joy. Sell it. Reshape it. That's when Mnemosyne stopped being a cure—and became a god."
She said nothing.
He looked at her. "You're not just remembering her, are you?"
She shook her head.
"I'm remembering me."
---
They arrived at the junction point twenty minutes later—a circular chamber where five tunnels met like spokes in a wheel.
Waiting in the center was a woman with silver eyes and a red wire weave running through her scalp like a crown of thorns. She was taller than Ione, motionless, unnervingly still.
"This is Ayra," Kade said. "She'll test your integrity."
Ione stiffened. "My what?"
"Your neural structure. You've been breached. You accessed a raw imprint—too deeply. She'll see what Mnemosyne left inside you. And what they took."
Ayra stepped forward. Her voice was metallic, but not cruel.
"Do you consent?"
Ione hesitated. "Will it hurt?"
"Yes."
She nodded.
Ayra raised a hand, palm glowing with faint white light. She pressed two fingers to Ione's temple—and suddenly, Ione was elsewhere.
---
It wasn't a memory.
It was a scaffold of one.
She floated in a black field, weightless, surrounded by pillars of color—memories not as images, but as feelings. Each pulse was a soundless scream of forgotten truth.
A blue pillar pulsed gently.
A child's voice:
"I don't want to forget."
A crimson thread:
"She's not your real sister."
Ione tried to move toward it, but the space resisted her like molasses. The crimson pulse flared—then snapped.
Pain exploded through her skull.
Ayra yanked her hand back. Ione collapsed to her knees, gasping.
"What did you see?" Kade asked.
Ayra's expression was unreadable. "She's not fractured. She's rewoven."
Kade swore under his breath.
Ayra looked directly at Ione. "They didn't just take your memories. They replaced them."
---
Ione sat in silence for a long time.
Her chest felt hollow. Her skin, too tight.
"What… what was replaced?" she asked softly.
Ayra tilted her head.
"Your first memory is not your own. Your first grief was scripted. Even your name—'Ione Vale'—is part of a neural pattern Mnemosyne uses to track divergents."
"My name," Ione whispered, "is fake?"
Kade crouched beside her. "It's real enough. You've lived it. You've felt it. But maybe... just maybe, you weren't born. Maybe you were built."
---
They moved her to a holding chamber deeper underground. A place where electric signals died and no data could be streamed or traced. There were no doors—just sliding walls and timed locks, monitored only by scent and heartbeat.
Kade sat beside her on the cold bench, watching her shake.
"I saw her again," Ione said. "The girl in the red coat. I think… she knew me."
"She did," Kade replied.
Ione looked at him.
"I wasn't supposed to say that," he added with a crooked smile.
She studied him closely. "How do you remember me?"
He hesitated.
"I worked for Mnemosyne once," he admitted. "Data cleaner. I was there the day you were re-coded."
Ione's heart skipped.
"I tried to stop it," he added quickly. "They caught me. They wiped two years of my life. But I held onto you. Just one memory. You."
"Why?"
He looked away.
"Because you asked me to."
---
Ione lay awake on the bench long after the lights dimmed to simulate night.
She pressed her fingertips to her temple, remembering the pulse of the crimson memory—the one Ayra severed before she could reach it.
"She's not your real sister."
No. That wasn't true.
Zara had been real. Hadn't she?
They'd grown up together. Shared a room. Laughed until they cried.
Or had they?
How many of those memories were synthetic?
She felt suddenly sick.
If her name was scripted…
If her grief was false…
If her memories were built…
What part of her was real?
Was she real?
---
The next morning, Kade returned with a small, black case. He set it gently on the bench beside her.
"I pulled this from Mnemosyne's archive before I left. I've never opened it."
She looked at him.
He stepped back. "It has your real name."
Her fingers hovered over the clasp.
She didn't open it.
Not yet.
Because for the first time in her life, she understood something:
Some debts aren't just owed in blood or money.
They're owed in truth.
And she wasn't ready to pay.
Not yet.