Cold swallowed me whole, yet I didn't drown.
I opened my eyes. Suspended in liquid metal. Silver light, like billions of micro-lightning bolts, skittered across my skin. No buoyancy. No weight. As if held aloft by time itself.
Alex floated to my right, his hair drifting like black seaweed. Reflected in his pupils: 13:13:13. A countdown.
—Tick.
The digits hit zero. The mercury sea collapsed. A vacuum suction yanked us into deeper darkness. Our backs slammed onto hard ground.
Lights flared. Harsh white.
A circular chamber, barely ten meters across. Walls made of seamless mirrored stainless steel, reflecting infinite, fractured replicas of Alex and me. The floor was black basalt, carved with Ω symbols, edged by a band of dim red light like cooling magma.
The air smelled of ozone and verdigris.
At the center stood an old mantel clock. Its brass pendulum frozen at 13:13:13. Below the clock face, a slit opened, spooling out a strip of black film.
Alex reached it first. Only three frames:
Frame One: A brightly lit lab. A teenage Alex lies on a surgical chair. Kaelen Shaw leans over, extracting cerebrospinal fluid with a syringe. The boy's eyes are clear, filled with blind devotion.
Frame Two:** The same lab. Adult Alex implants the chip into his own neck. Fingers tremble, but without hesitation. A screen beside him reads: UPLOAD 100%.
Frame Three:** Blank. Pure white. Like unexposed film.
"The third frame is for us. Now." Alex murmured.
My throat tightened as I stared at the second frame. "You volunteered?"
"I forgot." He gave a bitter smile. "Maybe I believed then... memory could be purified. Made perfect."
The mirrored walls slid apart. Thirteen doors opened simultaneously. Behind each stood a person. Expressionless. Eyes vacant.
Maya. Viktor. Sophia. Benjamin. Amina. Diego… and one empty doorway.
They wore lab coats, numbered E-1 to E-7 on their chests.
Before us, stood E-0.
"Welcome back to the 'Prototype Sequence'." Kaelen Shaw's voice came from everywhere, yet nowhere. "Behind each door, a deleted life. A failed experiment. Choose:
1. Enter your door. Reclaim your original memory. The price: the other six fragments vanish forever.
2. Destroy the clock. All memories return to their owners. But you... you lose yourselves.
3. Open the empty door. Gamble on the unknown—rebirth, or oblivion."
Thirteen seconds of silence.
I tightened my grip on the Glock, aiming at the clock.
Alex lifted his hand, gently pressing down the barrel.
"There's a fourth path," he said.
He walked to the empty door. Reached out. Beyond wasn't darkness, but a mirror. It held no reflection of us. Only teenage Alex in a hospital bed, smiling at the camera.
"I give all the memories back to him." Alex turned to me. "Including yours. We rewrite the ending. Together."
I took a deep breath, holstered the gun, and stood beside him before the mirror.
"Then gamble."
We touched the surface together.
The mirror liquefied into mercury, swallowing our fingertips, crawling up our arms.
The countdown echoed again:
3—
2—
1—
Darkness consumed everything. A woman's voice laughed softly in our ears:
"Good. Echoes. The game levels up."
Blinding light detonated.
We opened our eyes. Lying in an unfamiliar Parisian apartment bed. Outside the window, the Eiffel Tower glittered. 1:33 AM.
On the nightstand lay the 1856 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal. On page thirteen, line thirteen, a new word circled in red ink:
"Liberation."
Alex and I locked eyes.
"Step one," I said. "Find the real Kaelen Shaw."
He nodded. For the first time, his eyes burned with an anger entirely his own.