The child screamed again from beneath the room, its thin, desperate cry ending so abruptly that the silence afterward felt deliberate. Nyelle lifted her head from the figure in her arms, while my mother backed away from the device and the man in the white coat stared at the floor as though he recognized the sound. Zero, however, showed no surprise, and that frightened me more than the scream itself.
"What was that?" I asked.
"A memory," Zero replied, its gaze fixed on the dark screen.
"Memories don’t scream."
"Not when they belong to one person."
The imitation in Nyelle’s arms had stopped flickering, but its eyes remained closed and its breathing was shallow. Whatever we had interrupted had left it weakened, yet its warning continued to trouble me: the thing below wasn’t trying to escape; it was trying to reclaim something I had taken. When I demanded to know what that meant, Zero admitted it didn’t know, although its expression suggested it feared the answer.
"Then stop looking at me like you do," I snapped.
"I spent twenty-four years hoping that warning was wrong," Zero replied. "I knew something was missing, Veyric. That isn’t the same as knowing what it was."
I stepped between Zero and our mother before their argument could deepen. We had a screaming child beneath us, a facility that could rearrange identities, and a device that had nearly forced one of three responses out of existence; another argument would solve none of those problems. Nyelle glanced up and remarked that my body had apparently become a public access point, but her attempt at humor faded when the imitation stirred.
It opened its eyes, looked toward the floor, and whispered that something was remembering. When I asked what it meant, the figure struggled upright with Nyelle’s help and spoke two words that made our mother cover her mouth.
"The first room."
The man in the white coat immediately objected, claiming that the lower structure predated every surviving facility record. The imitation turned toward him and explained that his records began only after the first door had been closed, leaving him visibly shaken. When I asked which door it meant, the figure looked directly at me.
"The one you opened."
I felt coldness settle in my stomach. I had been a baby when the facility separated us, so I asked whether my mother had carried me through that door, but the imitation hesitated before answering that it remembered a woman carrying me while crying. It also remembered the door closing behind her, a detail that made my mother stare at it through her tears.
"That isn’t how it happened," she whispered.
"Then tell us what happened," I demanded.
My mother pressed her hand against the wall, searching for support as she explained that she remembered waking in the upper facility with me in her arms. She had asked the researchers where the other child was, but nobody had answered, and she had spent years wondering whether the voice she heard belonged to someone real. Sometimes the voice appeared in dreams or recordings, while at other times she heard it when she was fully awake.
"I thought they had used the structure to create a voice from my guilt," she admitted.
The imitation watched her without blinking. "Sometimes they did."
The room’s lights flickered, and the device displayed a new sequence of messages.
[MEMORY RECOVERY: 1%.]
[SOURCE: ORIGINAL RESPONSE.]
[WARNING: MEMORY OWNERSHIP UNRESOLVED.]
I stared at the final line, wondering how a memory could have an uncertain owner. The man in the white coat suggested that the structure was restoring information associated with the original response, but Zero warned that forcing someone else’s memories into me could damage both of us. I wanted to demand a solution, yet I recognized that Zero was acknowledging a genuine limit rather than hiding behind uncertainty.
Instead, I studied the three symbols on the screen. The blue circle remained faint, the silver circle glowed more brightly, and a crack was spreading across the white one; each time the child screamed, that crack widened. The device wasn’t simply recording our responses but reacting to whatever was happening beneath us.
I crouched beside the table and examined the energy flowing through the room. One current moved from the walls into the device before descending through the floor, while another rose from somewhere below, carrying a pattern that felt unfinished. The two streams met beneath the table, and the energy became unstable where they touched.
"Stop," I told the man in the white coat as he reached for the controls.
He withdrew his hand, allowing me to concentrate on the opposing currents. When I focused on the rising stream, the heartbeat inside my chest faltered, so I immediately broke my concentration before the sensation could intensify. Nyelle watched me carefully and complained that I had started using the phrase I’m fine far too often, forcing me to admit that I wasn’t fine but believed I had found the source of the memory.
The imitation shook its head when I described the currents as information moving in opposite directions. It called the phenomenon a remainder rather than a reflection, explaining that it was connected to the first thing that had ever been separated. Before I could ask what that meant, a narrow crack appeared beneath the table, releasing blue light and the sound of something moving far below.
Then the child screamed again, except this time the sound came from inside my head.
The room vanished beneath a flood of images: a vast black-stone chamber, an enormous circular structure suspended over a bottomless void, and countless lines of light connecting figures whose faces I couldn’t distinguish. Mountains rose through silver mist, rivers flowed upward, and cities stood around pillars of light marked with symbols identical to those carved into the facility walls. For one brief moment, I saw a civilization that had lived among these structures long before the world I knew existed.
Then the same world burned beneath a blue radiance that swallowed cities and mountains alike. Figures raised their hands toward something vast and unseen as a voice echoed through the destruction.
[THE SEPARATION HAS FAILED.]
The vision fractured, revealing a woman carrying a child through a doorway while another child reached desperately after her. A third figure stood on the opposite side of the threshold, wearing my face, and looked directly at me with an expression of terrible recognition.
"You weren’t supposed to remember," it said.
I returned to the room with a gasp, finding Nyelle holding me upright while Zero stood before the device. My mother had fallen to her knees beside the wall, and the man in the white coat was shouting that the readings were climbing because the structure was using me as a connection. I pushed away from Nyelle and demanded to know what I had seen, but nobody answered until I turned to Zero.
"You’ve seen that place before."
"I’ve seen pieces of it," Zero admitted.
"The cities, the pillars, the blue light. What was that world?"
Zero looked toward the floor. "The world before the separation."
I struggled to understand what that meant. I had assumed the apocalypse was a disaster that had awakened something ancient beneath our cities, causing technology to fail and unfamiliar energy to spread across the world. Yet the vision had shown a civilization that already possessed those structures, with people who appeared to understand them well enough to build their lives around them.
Perhaps the apocalypse wasn’t creating a new world at all. Perhaps it was bringing back one that had been hidden, and whatever had been separated from it was now trying to return.
"What did we separate?" I asked.
Zero’s expression tightened. "I think we separated a world from its own history."
Before I could question it further, the device emitted a piercing tone, and the white circle shattered across the screen. The blue and silver circles remained, but a new symbol appeared between them: three vertical lines enclosed within a broken ring. My right hand burned as the blue line beneath my skin surged toward my wrist, then stopped at the center of my palm.
[MEMORY RECOVERY: 2%.]
[ORIGINAL RESPONSE: PARTIALLY RESTORED.]
Zero stared at the messages before turning toward me with sudden urgency. It warned me not to assume that the vision had happened to me personally, because the structure might be restoring memories belonging to the original response rather than to my own life. We still didn’t know what the original response truly was, and accepting the memories without understanding their source could change everything I believed about myself.
I looked at the three symbols again, reconsidering the classifications we had accepted. The blue circle represented me, the silver represented Zero, and the white belonged to the imitation, but the new symbol had appeared between all three rather than beside any one of them. Perhaps we had been asking the wrong question by trying to determine which of us was the original.
"Maybe the structure isn’t deciding which of us is real," I said. "Maybe it’s trying to restore something that was divided between us."
The imitation raised its head, looking at me with something I hadn’t seen in its expression before.
Hope.
Then the floor split open.
Blue energy erupted through the widening crack, throwing the table against the wall and shattering the device. Nyelle dragged the imitation away from the opening while Zero caught our mother before she could fall, and I struck the floor hard enough to lose my breath. When I raised my head, the crack had become a narrow passage descending into darkness, its edges glowing with ancient symbols that made my eyes ache.
A child stood at the bottom, barefoot and dressed in white. It had the same face I had seen in the vision, and when it raised its head, my mother began sobbing while Zero became completely motionless. The child extended one hand toward me, its gaze fixed on the blue line in my palm.
"You finally remembered enough to come back," it said.
I couldn’t move, because the child wasn’t looking at me as a person. It was looking at the mark beneath my skin, as though that mark belonged to it and I had carried it away without permission.
Then it spoke again.
"Now give me back my name."