The world snapped back. Adriana was back in the Lost and Found, but the basement was wrong.
The walls were flickering between brick and white light. The young man who had been crying was frozen in a jagged, digital stutter halfway between a scream and a statue.
"Kora!" Adriana shouted.
Kora's voice came through the mental link, but it was distorted, as if she were underwater. "Adriana... get out!
The Architect has initiated a 'Total Reset' of the sector.
He's deleting the frequency to stop the virus!"
Adriana looked out the small, high window of her office.
The street outside was vanishing.
Not into darkness, but into Pure Zero.
A wall of white, featureless void was moving slowly down the block, erasing everything in its path.
Taxis, trees, buildings, and people weren't being destroyed they were being un-written.
Caius stood in the center of the room, his form glitching wildly. One of his eyes was still a cold winter blue, the other was now a swirling vortex of violet light Adriana's light.
"He's going to erase us all," Adriana said, grabbing her ledger and the First Memory.
"How do I stop the Reformat?"
"You can't stop the Architect from deleting,"
Caius said, his voice a strange mix of logic and fear.
"But you can... you can Compress.
You have to pull the 'Spirit Notes' of this entire block into the First Memory before the white wall hits them.
If they are in the Source, they cannot be deleted."
"I can't hold an entire neighborhood in my heart!" Adriana cried.
"It'll kill me!"
"Not alone," the Tuning Fork in her chest chimed.
Vaelen's presence surged, providing a protective shell around her spirit.
"I am the anchor.
You are the weaver.
But we need a conduit."
Adriana looked at Caius.
He was a creature of the Architect.
He was built to handle massive amounts of data.
"Caius, you were made to manage the grid,"
Adriana said, reaching out her hand.
"Help me save them.
If you stay as you are, he'll delete you too.
You're a 'flaw' now."
Caius looked at the white wall devouring the shop across the street.
He looked at his hand, which was starting to dissolve into pixels.
The logic was simple
survival required a new alliance.
He took her hand.
The moment their fingers locked, the world exploded into a sensory overload.
Adriana became the center of a spiritual vacuum.
As the white wall approached, she reached out with the Root Thread of her lineage.
She didn't fight the deletion
she "copied" the souls.
Every person on the street, every memory in the bricks, every ghost in the alleyways was pulled into a golden thread that funneled through Caius and into Adriana's chest.
The pain was unimaginable.
It felt like her veins were being filled with molten lead.
"Hold it!"
Caius screamed, his porcelain skin turning entirely into glowing violet crystal.
"The Reformat is 90% complete! Just ten more seconds!"
The white wall hit the Lost and Found.
The shelves, the umbrellas, the old ledger everything vanished into the blank void.
Adriana and Caius were standing in a white nothingness, the only two things left in the sector.
Then, the world went silent.
Adriana fell to her knees in the white void.
In her chest, the First Memory was no longer a stone
it was a sun.
It was heavy, pulsing with the lives and memories of an entire city block.
She was a living ark, drifting in the Architect's blank canvas.
"What now?"
she whispered into the emptiness.
From the white silence, a new shape began to form.
It wasn't a man or a machine.
It was a giant, unblinking eye made of golden gears.
The Architect.
"The archive is empty," a voice boomed, vibrating the very atoms of her being.
"Why does the file size remain the same?"