"Veyric, you came back."
I stood motionless in the corridor, listening to my mother’s voice fade into the darkness ahead. It carried the same softness I remembered from childhood, with that slight exhaustion at the end of each sentence, as though she had spent the entire day worrying about something she couldn’t explain to me. That familiarity was precisely what made it dangerous.
I remembered her hands fixing my collar before school, her voice calling me downstairs when dinner was ready, and the way she could tell I was lying simply by looking at me. The voice ahead sounded right, but I had already encountered something beneath the city that could imitate her well enough to make me hesitate. Sound wasn’t proof, and I couldn’t afford to forget that.
"Mom?" I called before I could stop myself.
The corridor answered with silence.
I closed my eyes briefly, annoyed with myself for giving whatever waited ahead a response. The System appeared with a brief flicker.
[RESPONSE DETECTED.]
A second line flashed beneath it, disappearing before I could read the words. I stared at the empty space, then muttered, "Excellent. Even the System thinks I’m making poor decisions."
I forced myself to examine the corridor instead. Smooth black stone formed the walls, interrupted by silver lines that curved around corners and disappeared beneath the floor. The symbols shifted whenever I looked away, changing their positions before settling into patterns I almost recognized, while the air carried a faint smell of rain and metal.
There were no visible doors or windows beyond the entrance behind me, yet a dim silver glow illuminated the passage. I turned and pressed my palm against the sealed metal door, keeping my right hand away from its surface, but nothing happened. When I struck it once with my pipe, the sound travelled ahead and returned several seconds later, quieter than it should have been.
There was no echo from the other side.
I checked my phone, although I already knew what I would find. Its screen remained black, and neither the side button nor repeated taps brought it back to life. After slipping it into my pocket, I started walking; if the voice wanted to draw me deeper into the structure, standing still wouldn’t make me safer.
I counted my steps, memorized the shifting symbols, and watched for changes in the air. The corridor descended so gradually that I might have missed the slope if I hadn’t been paying attention. After thirty-seven steps, the silver lines began converging, and five steps later, I heard slow, uneven breathing somewhere ahead.
I stopped and raised the pipe.
The breathing continued for several seconds, accompanied by a faint scraping sound between each breath, before suddenly falling silent. Then a voice emerged from the darkness, carrying a familiarity that unsettled me more than the breathing had.
"You’re taller than I remember."
My grip tightened. It sounded like an observation from someone who had watched a child grow up, the sort of thing my mother used to say when she found old photographs. For one brief moment, I nearly forgot where I was, until the photograph on Nyelle’s phone and the message from the device returned to my mind.
ORIGINAL SUBJECT: STILL PRESENT.
"Who are you?" I asked.
"You used to ask me that."
"No, I didn’t."
"You were very small."
"I don’t remember you."
"I know. You weren’t supposed to remember."
I raised the pipe higher. "That’s what everyone keeps telling me. My mother, the System, things beneath the ground. Apparently, my entire life has been a group project, and nobody thought to include me."
A faint metallic click sounded ahead, followed by the movement of something approaching. I backed against the wall as a pale light appeared at the far end of the corridor, slowly revealing a figure in a long, dark coat. One hand rested against the wall as though the person needed its support to remain upright.
"Come closer," the voice said.
"No. I’ve seen enough doors, shadows, and mysterious figures today to develop a preference for keeping my distance."
"You always were cautious."
"Then you should know asking me to come closer won’t work."
The figure stepped into the light, and the pipe nearly slipped from my hand. A woman stood before me, her dark hair streaked with silver and exhaustion etched into her face. A faint scar ran from her left temple toward her cheek, but none of those details mattered as much as her eyes.
I knew those eyes. I remembered them watching me from the kitchen doorway, following Nyelle and me through crowded markets, and softening whenever we returned home after an argument we pretended wasn’t serious. The woman looked older than the mother I remembered, though not by as much as twenty-four years should have allowed.
My mother.
"Veyric," she whispered, offering a small, tired smile.
I wanted to run to her so badly that my first step came before I had consciously decided to take it. I stopped myself, and the smile on her face faded slightly as she recognized my hesitation.
"You don’t believe it’s me."
"I don’t know what to believe."
"That’s fair."
"Prove it."
She studied me before mentioning the kitchen window I had broken when I was six, trying to catch a bird. I had blamed the neighbor’s son, but Nyelle betrayed me after I promised her half my birthday cake to keep quiet. My mother had made me clean the entire kitchen while I complained that I was being punished for trying to help an animal.
I stared at her. I remembered the broken glass, the escaping bird, and Nyelle laughing so hard that she nearly fell off the kitchen stool. It was a memory I had never shared with the stranger or the System, and seeing it reflected in this woman’s words weakened the distance I had been trying to maintain.
"You always wanted to become someone who could fix anything," she continued. "Broken toys, machines, problems at school. You thought that if you understood how something worked, you could always repair it."
"Mom..."
Tears gathered in her eyes. "I’ve waited a long time to hear you say that."
I took another step, then noticed her hands. They were unnaturally clean despite the dust coating the corridor and the dark stains along her coat, and she wasn’t breathing heavily anymore. More disturbing still, the pale light behind her cast no shadow at her feet.
"Are you alive?" I asked.
She glanced down. "I am here."
"That isn’t what I asked."
"I know."
My right palm began to burn, and I looked from it back to her face. "Are you really my mother?"
Her expression changed. "I am your mother, but I don’t know whether the person standing in front of you is everything that remains of me."
The words settled between us as I tightened my grip on the pipe. Before I could demand an explanation, she looked toward the sealed entrance and whispered, "You don’t have much time. You need to listen carefully before they find you."
"Who?"
The corridor trembled before she could answer. Silver lines went dark one after another, leaving only the pale light around her, while a heavy impact shook the structure far below us. Then came a sound I recognized from the chambers beneath the city: three knocks, a pause, and three more.
My mother flinched, and the fear in that single movement chilled me more than the darkness.
"You shouldn’t have come through the station."
"The device told me to enter alone."
Her face drained of color. "Which device?"
"The one recovered from the facility."
She stared at me as though I had confirmed something she had spent years hoping wasn’t true. Then she crossed the distance between us and grabbed my uninjured hand. Her fingers were warm, and the solid pressure of her grip overwhelmed my suspicion for one reckless second.
Then she looked at my right hand.
"Did it touch you?" she asked.
"The thing beneath the city? Yes."
She released me as though I had burned her. "No. No, no, no."
"What is it?"
"Veyric, you have to get out of here."
"You just said I didn’t have much time. Start explaining."
"I spent twenty-four years keeping it from reaching you. I thought the distance would be enough, that if you never remembered what happened in that room, it wouldn’t be able to find its way back."
"Find its way back from where?"
She met my eyes, and whatever hope I had been holding onto began to collapse.
"From you."
Before I could respond, the System appeared.
[ORIGIN RESPONSE DETECTED.]
The message flickered, then changed.
[IDENTITY CONFLICT: ACTIVE.]
A third notification appeared beneath it, remaining visible long enough for me to read every word.
[WARNING: TWO INSTANCES OF SUBJECT 01 DETECTED.]
I stared at the display. Two instances of Subject 01. The corridor seemed to grow colder, and my mother looked at the message with an expression of pure terror.
Then another voice spoke from the darkness behind her.
It sounded exactly like mine.
"Mom?"
She turned toward it, and for the first time since I had found her, my mother looked at me as though I were the thing she feared most.