"Your memory ends here."
The voice wasn't human. It had the tone of something engineered precise, cold, surgical. And it was the last thing Cassian Vire remembered before the world bled into static.
Then: darkness.
Now: chaos.
Cassian staggered into the open, drenched in cold sweat. The rain in Arceia never smelled natural anymore too much circuitry and ash in the clouds. His head throbbed as if someone had driven nails through his temporal lobe. His fingers trembled as they brushed the back of his neck.
The implant was overheating again.
Flickers of images stabbed behind his eyes a woman's silhouette at sunset, the sound of a child's laughter, the coppery scent of blood on a rooftop.
He fell to one knee.
And then it came again.
The melody.
Soft at first. A single note, lingering in the corners of his mind. Then another. Together, they wept like a memory trying to crawl out of a grave.
It wasn't just any song.
It was the one no one had ever written.
Arceia District 4. Echo Zone Perimeter. 03:06 A.M.
The advertisements above him pulsed in digital neon:
"Forget to Feel. Remember to Win. OroTech the Memory of Tomorrow."
Cassian's lip curled. He pushed himself upright and melted into the night, a blur beneath flickering holograms and surveillance drones. His breath steamed in the air, caught between two worlds flesh and data.
Somewhere, deep inside, something was waking up.
(Meanwhile, beneath the Hall of Echoes)
Elara Yun adjusted the alignment lens of her glove and traced her fingers along the curved panel in front of her. The walls of the Echo Room were alive with circuits and sound. Memory-codes danced across the glass in vertical waves, each line representing a piece of someone's forgotten past.
But only one mattered now.
"Load Symphony 917," she commanded. "Cassian Vire. Final backup sequence."
ACCESSING ARCHIVED ECHO.
WARNING: FRAGMENTED EMOTION STRINGS DETECTED
INHERITED TRAUMA LEVEL: RED
"I said load it," she snapped.
The air vibrated.
A melody began to play fractured, dissonant, beautiful in its ruin.
It wasn't just music.
It was his scream, bottled into notes.
She closed her eyes and remembered the last time she'd heard it.
(Seven Years Ago)
Cassian had stood on the rooftop of OroTech's east tower, bleeding from a shrapnel wound in his side. His eyes stormy gray and full of fire had found her even as the world burned behind them.
"You did it," he had said, smiling through the pain. "You got inside the Archive."
She nodded, tears mingling with soot. "You'll forget this. All of it."
"Then remember for both of us," he whispered, just before the sedative hit.
She did.
And she hated herself for it every single day.
(Now)
The Echo Room flickered. A single surveillance screen went black.
Her breath hitched.
"Track 917 just spiked," said her assistant through the comm. "He's triggering something. Emotional recognition patterns are firing like hellfire."
Cassian was remembering.
That wasn't possible.
Not unless…
"Elara?" the voice echoed. "What do we do?"
She removed her gloves slowly, staring into the audio-visual spectrogram of Cassian's memory signature.
"…He's listening to the Symphony again," she said.
"And?"
Her fingers curled into a fist. "He wasn't supposed to *ever* hear it."
(Back in the Hollow District)
Cassian found himself drawn to a decaying music hall at the edge of the Hollow. Its roof had caved in years ago, but something about it felt familiar like he had bled there. Or kissed someone there. Or both.
Inside, the old grand piano sat like a grave marker.
He reached out, hand trembling, and let one finger press a key.
The note echoed like thunder.
And in that sound, something broke.
FLASH MEMORY SPIKE \[UNKNOWN ORIGIN]
He was holding a woman. Black hair, ink-stained fingers, fire in her eyes.
"Elara," he whispered.
Then a gunshot. Blood. Screams.
Then nothing.
Cassian staggered back, chest heaving. His implant blazed red beneath the skin. He ripped his shirt collar down and caught sight of the subdermal pulse monitor: erratic. Dangerous.
But his mind wasn't on the pain.
It was on the name.
Elara.
Where had it come from?
Who was she?
Why did his heart react like it had loved and lost her a thousand times?
(Elara's Office Underground Archive Sector)
She moved through the files like a conductor through a symphony, calling up fragmented memories, assembling timelines, and cross-referencing emotional decay sequences.
Cassian Vire. Status: ALIVE.
Memory Condition: UNSTABLE.
Emotional Link Detected: ACTIVE. Subject YUN, ELARA.
She froze.
The system shouldn't have been able to detect a link.
She had erased it herself.
"Elara?" a voice buzzed again. "You're not authorized to.."
"Override protocol Echo-Veil. This is my project. My failure. My.."
Lover...
She didn't say the word. But it echoed in her chest like a bullet.
(Midnight Surveillance Drone Feed Cutoff)
Cassian looked up as a drone descended through the fog then sparked, buzzed, and fell from the sky.
He knew what that meant.
Someone had found him.
Someone was coming.
His pulse spiked.
And across the city, in the memory-core vault, Elara moved with purpose grabbing her coat, a sonic disruptor, and the old silver locket that contained the only untouched echo of their past.
(Later That Night)
Cassian sat alone in the ruins of the music hall, staring at the sheet music scattered across the dust-ridden floor.
All blank.
But in his mind?
The melody played without pause.
Not just a song.
A scream.
A farewell.
A warning.
(Far Away, in a Private AI Observatory)
A figure in white silk stood before a bank of screens, watching Cassian and Elara with a predator's patience.
"She's breaking protocol," the woman murmured.
Another voice behind her a deep, masculine tone replied: "Let her. We want him to remember. It begins with the song."
"And ends?"
The man smiled.
"With fire."