"The real store didn't exist above ground. It was always a mask for the system's oldest lie."
They didn't speak on the way back.
Junie walked two steps ahead of Orin, her sketchpad strapped tight against her back, as if it weighed more than the city itself. The name—Seira—still hung between them like static. She hadn't said it again. He hadn't asked her to.
But she had remembered something.
And now, so had he.
The bell tower had marked them.
Three tolls. One vision. A trap made of time. And a whisper from Kaito himself that refused to fade.
"She knows."
Junie didn't deny it.
Not anymore.
[01 – Return to the Cradle]
They arrived back at Unit 402 after dusk, though the sky didn't agree. The clouds were locked in place—grey and unmoving, as if the sun had refused to complete its descent.
The front of the store still pulsed faintly beneath the surface, visible only to Orin's altered perception. He could feel it now—through the Diver symbol etched into his skin like a second heartbeat.
Junie stopped at the edge of the sidewalk.
"Something's changed."
Orin nodded.
The windows, once translucent and passive, now shimmered with recursive residue—tiny pulses of red and gold at the edges of the glass. The building didn't feel abandoned anymore.
It felt guarded.
And not from the outside.
From within.
They slipped through the side entrance again. Junie took the lead with her flashlight. The floor creaked as they passed the backroom corridor—until suddenly, it didn't.
The floor changed texture. Metal gave way to something older—smoother, denser, like layered stone beneath synthetic polish.
Junie turned.
"Did you feel that?"
Orin nodded. "The overlay dropped."
[02 – Beneath the Shelf That Wasn't]
Back in aisle seven, Orin stopped.
Something was missing.
The shelves hadn't restocked.
That, in itself, wasn't strange.
What was strange was that the shelf itself—row seven-B, where the spike had once risen—was now just gone.
No unit. No supports. No memory of ever having been there.
But the seam in the floor remained.
Junie knelt.
"It wasn't sealed," she whispered. "It was hidden again. Like a command override pulled the room back into its cover identity."
She pressed her hand to the floor.
It rippled.
Orin gasped as the illusion collapsed.
The ground split apart again—not as violently as before, but with deliberate permission.
The hatch slid open.
And this time, stairs descended further.
Much further.
They descended for seven full minutes.
The air changed with every turn.
First came the scent of rust and ozone. Then something older—damp stone, dry paper, and something faintly sweet… like rotting fruit.
Orin knew the scent.
It was canned peaches.
From the store.
But deeper.
More precise.
He didn't ask how. Some part of him knew already.
They weren't just descending into a lower chamber.
They were entering a buried version of the store itself.
[03 – The Shadow Market]
The stairs opened into a vast underground hall—cold and humming, walls built from mismatched materials: metal plates fused with obsidian glass, worn brick veined with artificial circuitry.
And shelves.
Hundreds of them.
Lining the space in a perfect mirror of the store above.
But every product was wrong.
The packages were warped.
Their colours too saturated. Their fonts flickering with garbled code.
Orin walked to a box of noodles. The label read:
MEEEMORY-PROTEIN-7
Flavour: Clean Loop. Best before: YOU FORGOT.
He turned it over. Instead of a nutrition label, it listed:
Echo Reduction Value: 34%
Emotional Saturation Tolerance: MID
Diver Compatibility: NULL
Warning: CONSUMPTION CAUSES RECURSION BLEED
He dropped it.
The box landed with a wet squish.
Not a dry clatter.
Junie walked past another shelf and picked up a bottle.
Its contents shifted like oil and static.
There was no label.
Just a scratched message on the glass:
She tasted the memory. Then the System rewrote her tongue.
This wasn't storage.
It was a containment vault.
A ghost-store built beneath the real one to mimic it, invert it, distort it.
Orin whispered, "Why is this here?"
Junie scanned the space.
Her voice was barely audible.
"This is a memory sink. The System builds false realities when it can't cleanly erase. It creates containment spaces to absorb the contradiction. This one is modelled after your store because…" She trailed off.
Orin stared at her.
"Because it was never just a store."
She looked at him.
"You've always been the anomaly."
[04 – The Diver Mirror]
At the centre of the ghost-store was a service counter.
Identical to the one above.
But this one had a mirror behind it.
Cracked. Covered in fingerprints. And humming softly.
Orin stepped toward it, breath catching.
The mirror didn't reflect the room.
Only him.
But not the version he knew.
The reflection wore darker clothes. His badge said K-0. And his eyes were glowing faintly silver.
Then the mirror whispered.
"Not all of you was rewritten. Some of you was buried."
Orin stepped closer.
His reflection stayed still.
But the mirror rippled.
And on its surface, a second figure appeared beside his.
Junie.
But older.
Wearing the Seira robe from the sketch.
She wasn't looking at him.
She was looking away.
At someone else.
Behind her… stood Diver Zero.
[05 – Fracture Pulse]
Suddenly, the shelves rattled.
The walls screamed—high-pitched system static filtered through organic distortion.
Junie fell to her knees, gripping her head.
Orin rushed to her, but the moment he touched her shoulder, he was pulled—
[Vision Event – Corrupted Memory Layer Engaged]
He stood in the ghost-store again.
But it was on fire.
Cables sparked. Shelves melted. The mirror had shattered.
And Kaito stood in the centre.
Holding something glowing.
A coin.
"They tried to bury it beneath the store."
"But you are the store."
"You remember for them."
"That's why they made you forget yourself."
Kaito looked up.
His face flickered with code and pain.
"Don't trust the girl until she chooses to remember without drawing it."
"Then she's real again."
"Until then—she's a sketch with a soul."
Orin reached for him.
But the vision imploded.
[06 – Return and Reflection]
He awoke to Junie shaking him.
The ghost-store was still intact—but quiet.
The mirror had gone black.
Junie looked at him, terrified.
"I just remembered something else."
He sat up.
"What?"
She held up her hand.
There was a coin in her palm.
Etched with a single letter: K.
"I didn't draw this," she whispered.
"It found me."
The ghost-store beneath the real one was never a warehouse. It was a memory vault. And Junie has recovered an artifact Kaito once held—but what price will remembering it demand?
© 2025 Ofelia B Webb. All rights reserved.
This is an original work published on WebNovel.