The tunnels under Aurelis didn't hum like the rest of the city. Down here, the machine grew quiet—its perfection brittle, thinned by years of disuse and forgotten maintenance.
Eira adjusted the cracked visor over her eyes. It flickered once, then steadied, casting the world in pale blue overlays. Kael led the way through the narrow service corridor, his steps measured, careful not to brush the walls. Behind them, Ysel followed, her coil pack emitting soft pulses as it tracked radiation from the buried conduits.
The air was damp. Dust clung to every surface.
"We're two layers below the registry net," Ysel said under her breath. "They won't detect thought frequency here, but movement pings still register."
Kael pointed ahead—a collapsed access shaft, scorched along one side. "This part was sealed after the last Memory Burn."
Eira tensed. "That was before my recalibration... when my mother still knew my name."
The silence stretched. Not uncomfortable—just thick with weight neither of them knew how to put down.
Kael reached for her hand. She let him.
As they crawled under the shaft debris, Eira caught sight of something strange—a child's drawing scorched onto the metal wall, half-melted but visible. A stick figure with wild hair. A sun with too many rays.
She paused. Ran her fingers over the lines.
Someone had drawn this after the Burn. Not before. Not archived. Not corrected.
Real.
"Eira," Kael whispered, urgent. "We're exposed too long here."
She nodded and followed, but her heart beat faster now. Not from fear.
From recognition.
At the next bend, a registry scanner pulsed against the far wall—one of the newer types. Silent. Hair-trigger sensitive.
Ysel crouched beside it, slipping two coils into the dirt. "Give me thirty seconds," she muttered, fingers moving quickly over wires and interface ports.
Eira crouched behind her, watching Kael's back as he stood guard. Every sound felt louder down here. A drop of water. A distant tremor. Her own breathing.
Then: a soft click.
Ysel stood. "It'll read us as air now."
They pressed on.
A final hallway rose in the dark—narrow, ringed in pulsing fiberlines. Beyond it: the interface terminal. One they weren't supposed to know existed.
A whisper of heat rolled down the corridor.
Kael's voice dropped. "They're using old processors here."
Ysel raised an eyebrow. "That's impossible. Every system aboveground was updated six years ago."
"Which means," Eira said slowly, "whatever's buried here... wasn't meant to be found."
They stepped into the outer chamber. The lights flickered once.
And then the door behind them sealed.
Not locked.
Trapped.
The hiss of the sealing door echoed like a breath held too long.
No alarms. No sirens. Just silence thick enough to choke on.
Ysel spun, hands already on her disruptor kit, scanning for heat signatures, magnetic locks, pulse traps. "It's sealed, but not alerting the Registry... yet."
Kael stepped forward into the gloom, visor lenses adjusting as the wall panels shifted—old screens flickering to life, sluggish and unfamiliar.
The interface chamber was wrong.
Not in the way broken things are wrong—but in the way forgotten things feel sacred. The air tasted like metal and dust, and something older. Like breath sealed in time.
The walls weren't smooth synthglass. They were carved with manual etchings—lines, symbols, dates. One phrase repeated over and over, scratched with desperate precision:
"WE WERE NOT EMPTY."
Eira's pulse thudded in her ears.
"Is this a memory bank?" she asked.
"No," Ysel whispered, moving closer to a half-lit terminal. "It's... something else. A relay."
She tapped in a sequence. Static buzzed.
And then—
A voice. Cracked, genderless, human.
"To the one who finds this: I remember my son's voice. I remember his favorite color. The way he cried when it rained."
The voice trembled with a kind of pain the system had no code for.
"They call it cleansing. But I remember."
Another terminal blinked to life, unprompted.
"We are not data. We are the ghosts you buried."
Kael turned to Eira, eyes wide. "This is proof."
Ysel stared at the relic display. "This is survivor code. Voice-stored memory. Pre-Registry."
The chamber lit slowly, revealing alcoves—each one containing small crystalline shards wired to decaying memory drives.
Each drive hummed faintly, like a whisper trying to survive silence.
Eira stepped toward one—marked in white ink.
Her breath caught.
The symbol etched on it wasn't Registry-issued.
It was a circle with a thread spiraling inward. The same one she used to draw on the corners of her learning sheets when she was small. Before she even knew what it meant.
Before the dreams.
Kael moved beside her. "They tried to erase them... but some memories never left."
Eira reached out.
The drive pulsed under her fingers—warm, like breath.
Then—
A scream. Not hers. Not in the room.
Somewhere beyond.
Ysel's eyes shot to the sealed door. "We're not alone anymore."
The interface panels began to glitch—lines of code spilling across the walls like bleeding ink.
Eira looked at the memory shard again.
She could almost hear a child crying on the other side.
Not from pain.
From being forgotten.