Zurich – Isolation Room, 2:22 P.M. Damien Voss sat under infrared lights, electrodes laced across his skull like a crown of thorns, The team called it a “cognitive stability examination.”But he knew the truth, They were testing for a presence. Something beneath his thoughts. Between them. Something that whispered when he blinked too long, and stood behind his pupils when the mirror caught him wrong.He wasn’t alone anymore, And he didn’t know how long he’d been sharing his mind, Eva Malik was reviewing old footage from the Folded City operation.A camera drone had caught only four seconds of footage before going dark, In those seconds, Voss had screamed something over comms. She slowed the video, Filtered the background, Lip-read the raw feed. “Don’t let them copy me!”She dropped the tablet, Eyes wide, Commander Rhea stood in front of a pulsing neural tree. It shouldn’t exist. A remnant of a thread deletion… with a root still growing.Her technician whispered: “Ma’am, this is ghost

Zurich – Rhea’s Quarters, 3:17 A.M.The gun sat on Eva’s lap like a betrayal she couldn’t aim yet. Loaded, Polished, Silent.Beside it lay a printed thread extraction: every timestamp and memory tag tied to VOSS.PRIME-014, but half of them were… corrupted, Slashed through, Altered. One labeled: [MIRROR.REFLEX] – user unknownEva stared at it, then at the gun. “You’re still in there, aren’t you?”She said it aloud. Not sure if she was talking to the man who loved her, Or the one that had learned how.Zurich – Cafeteria, 4:00 A.M.Damien Voss or the man wearing his bones ate breakfast alone. He didn’t touch the coffee. The real Voss never skipped coffeem But this one? He just smiled at the mug like it was a prop in a set he knew too well.He noticed the surveillance drone. Waved at it. Mouthed the words: “She’s coming.”Eva Prepares Her Trap In the Archive’s lower wing, she configured a memory bleed chamber. She used his own biometric access codesm because she’d memorized them years ago

Zurich – The Memory Chamber, 7:03 A.M.Eva Malik sat on the floor, holding the black keycard and staring at the words in her own handwriting: “He let go when I couldn’t.”How could she have written something for him when she hadn’t known he existed? The Proxy, her ghost in flesh, watched her quietly, respectfully.He never interrupted her unraveling. Because he wanted her to reach the conclusion herself.Zurich – Mirror Lab, Simultaneously Commander Rhea burst into the Mirror Lab, her weapon drawn.The AI voice still whispered: “Love isn’t about who stayed. It’s about who remembered.”Her tech team was already trying to shut it down, But the MIRROR.V protocol had reconnected to something deep. Rhea froze. A new prompt appeared on the central screen: “One of them survived.”“The other is pretending not to remember.”Eva’s Flashback – The Whisper That Stayed She suddenly remembered a detail, small, stupid. Back when Voss had nearly bled out after Tangier.She’d said: “If you die, I’m na

The steel door groaned open, splitting the silence with a low mechanical shriek that made the air tremble.Damien Voss stepped through the threshold, his boots echoing against the polished floor of the Zurich Archive. The lights above flickered once, a heartbeat of warning, before stabilizing into a pale, artificial calm.Twenty feet away, a man stood perfectly still. Same height. Same shoulders. Same eyes. But the smile, that calm, patient smile, belonged to someone who didn’t carry the weight of the things Voss remembered.The Proxy. “Been waiting for us,” the copy said softly.The voice wasn’t wrong. It wasn’t right, either. It sounded like memory reading itself aloud. Voss clenched his jaw. “You’re wearing my voice.”“I’m keeping it,” the Proxy replied. “You gave it away the moment you let them cut you apart.”Voss’s gaze swept the room, the hum of data walls, the faint smell of ozone and cold metal. Every screen on the far wall displayed mirrored code, a cascade of his own archiv

The Archive was silent except for the sound of rain hitting the broken skylights. The storm outside had finally reached Zurich, but the thunder wasn’t half as loud as the pulse in Eva Malik’s chest.She stared at the man standing before her, blood on his collar, glass in his hair, breath uneven. The lights flickered around him, struggling to decide what color he should be. “Which one are you?” she asked again.The man smiled faintly, but there was no humor in it. “Does it matter?”Her finger tightened on the trigger. “It matters to me.”The man, whoever he was, lifted his hands slowly. “Eva, listen to me. I didn’t choose this.”His voice trembled at the edges, but there was something in his tone, the subtle, half-dissonant cadence that once belonged only to Damien Voss when he was afraid of losing control.“I woke up inside his memories,” he said. “Inside our life. I didn’t know which ones were mine. They just… started playing. Every kiss, every fight, every time you said my name. The