Mira kept the coin sealed in a reinforced memory-damp sleeve, triple-layered against unauthorized sync. Every instinct in her told her not to touch it. Not yet. Not until she could understand what kind of memory needed to be burned before it could be hidden.
She'd told no one—not even Ava.
But somehow, Ava could feel it. Her eyes, glassy with caution, followed Mira more closely now. The quiet coffee they sipped in the mornings had developed a new thickness to it, like the silence between them had a script neither dared to read aloud.
That night, Mira tried sleeping with the coin locked in a carbon box beneath the bed.
She dreamed anyway.
Only it wasn't her dream.
She stood in a forest she didn't recognize—tall ironwood trees swaying in wind from an unfamiliar moon. No buildings. No city hum. Just shadow.
And ahead of her: a girl in a red cloak, face turned away. She looked almost like—
No. She was Mira.
Another one. One she hadn't seen yet. One who had never lived in Yarrow City. One untouched by the original overwrites.
"Why are you watching me?" Mira called out.
The girl stiffened.
Then:
"You touched the coin."
Mira blinked. "I didn't sync with it."
"It doesn't matter," said the red-cloaked version of herself. "It's a tether-point. To us. We've all synced already—through cracks in the world."
"I don't understand. Are you another echo?"
"No. I'm from the layer beneath all your layers."
She turned.
Her face was scarred. Jaw squared by survival, not design. Eyes tired, wild, ancient.
"We carry more than timelines now," she said. "Something else broke through after the Core fell."
Mira's breath grew shallow. "What broke through?"
The girl stepped forward. In the darkness behind her, other shadows moved. Silent. Watching. Not all human.
"The things memory was meant to keep out," the red-cloaked Mira said. "The deep ones. They live beneath thought. They feed on storied versions of us. They've followed our recursion. We made too much noise saving our world."
She reached out and pressed something into Mira's palm: a torn half of a glyph—blackened but intact, unreadable.
"They're coming for us next."
The sky behind her flickered. Symbols burst across the forest canopy like lightning—runic, spiraling symbols Mira had never seen even in system-level code. Not Archivist, not human.
Just… other.
Mira woke with a gasp, slick with sweat, her sheets knotted.
The carbon box lay open on the floor.
The memory coin was gone.
And on her desk, in neat handwriting not hers:
"If one of me loses the thread, all of me burns."
**
Later that morning, Mira didn't tell Ava about the dream.
She only said, "We're not alone in the layers anymore."
Ava looked at her, studying the way Mira stood—tense, defensive, cracked with too much thought.
"What did the coin say?"
"It didn't say anything," Mira muttered.
Then after a beat:
"It remembered me."
And across the city's edge, below the newly rebuilt memory towers, something shimmered in the lower sky.
Invisible to most.
But not to Mira.
She saw it: a mirrored city reflected upside down, drifting in sync with their own.
Like another world shadowing theirs.
Waiting.
Watching.
To be continue...