Glass City

The city shimmered beneath its dome, a perfect bubble of light in a ruined world. Virelia was always beautiful from above—an illusion Lyra Vale knew better than most. Its curved glass ceiling reflected a false sky, tinged a soft pink in the early hours. The architects had programmed the dome to mimic sunrise even though the real sun hadn't touched this part of the Earth in years.

Lyra crouched on the outer rim of Sector Delta, her boots clinging to the steel scaffolding like second skin. Below, crowds moved like clockwork, unaware someone watched them from the city's hollow bones.

She adjusted the collar of her cloak, its shifting threads adapting to the concrete shade. The memory shard pressed against her ribs, pulsing faintly through the cloth pouch. Freshly harvested. Raw. Untouched. She could feel its heat—not literal warmth, but something deeper. Something psychic. Memories were never truly inert. That was why they were dangerous.

A flicker of static crackled in her earpiece. "You're late."

"Traffic," Lyra replied, voice dry. "Also, I had to dodge three Index patrols and one drunk with a neural scanner."

A pause. Then a low chuckle. "Still alive, then. Nice work."

It was Nyx, her handler and the closest thing she had to a friend. They'd met in the aftermath of a black-market auction gone wrong, where Nyx had stitched her shoulder and threatened to kill her in the same breath. That counted as intimacy in Virelia.

Lyra descended the service ladder, slipping into the underbelly of the city's power grid. It was always warm here, the hum of currents masking footsteps and whispered deals. She liked it—quiet, consistent, forgotten.

She moved fast. A wrong glance in this zone could be a death sentence, especially if the Memory Index caught a whiff of her payload. The memory she carried wasn't just valuable—it was contraband. Tier One. Government-encoded. Supposedly impossible to extract.

Except she'd extracted it. And from someone important.

She reached the handoff point beneath Reactor Node 17. A single flickering bulb swung overhead, casting long shadows across the pipes. Nyx was already there, leaning against the wall like he owned the underground. His shaved head caught the dim light, and his eyes—augmented to see electrical patterns—flicked toward her.

"Tell me you got it."

Lyra handed him the shard. He scanned it briefly, nodded once, and tucked it into a lead-lined case.

"Where'd you find this one?" he asked.

"Councilman's aide. She never even knew it was missing." Lyra hesitated. "But... something was strange about it."

Nyx looked up sharply. "Strange how?"

She opened her mouth, then closed it again. She couldn't describe the feeling—the chill that had crawled up her spine when she touched the shard, the flash of color that wasn't part of the memory stream. A whisper of familiarity, like a voice she almost recognized. But that was impossible.

"Never mind," she muttered. "Just felt... old."

Nyx studied her. "You haven't been poking around your own archive again, have you?"

"No." The lie tasted sharp. She hadn't dared access the sealed quadrant of her mind in over a year—not since the last blackout. Not since she saw a sliver of her own face in someone else's memory.

"Well," he said, brushing off the case. "Forget it. You've earned your cut. Lay low for a few days. The Index has started sweeping again."

Lyra nodded, but her thoughts weren't on patrols. They were on the shard. And the glimpse inside it that hadn't belonged to the aide at all.

It had belonged to her.

She was sure of it.

⸻

Back in her bunker—a steel cube wedged into the skeletal ruins of the old subway—Lyra paced. The case sat on her desk. Untouched. She shouldn't have made a backup. Nyx didn't know. No one did. She'd copied the shard the second she felt it pulse against her skin.

Just in case.

She inserted the copy into her private viewer and hesitated before activating the stream. The device buzzed softly, projecting flickering shapes in the air.

The memory began in static.

Then, a garden.

Wide, green, pristine. Too perfect to be real.

A child's laugh echoed through the air. Lyra's breath caught.

Then she saw herself.

Not just a reflection. Not an echo. But truly—herself. At sixteen. Standing in the center of the memory, holding a book of blueprints, speaking to someone the viewer couldn't quite render.

Then—

Flames. Screams. An explosion ripped the garden apart. Sirens blared. The view twisted as if collapsing inward.

The memory cut.

Lyra jerked back, heartbeat thunderous in her chest. It was real. It was her. And she'd been there—before the wipe.

But why? What had she tried to forget?

She looked down at the shard. Then at the mirror. Her eyes, gray as smoke, stared back—unreadable even to her.

Outside, the artificial sky flickered.

Something was broken in Virelia.

And maybe... it had started with her.

⸻

Lyra didn't sleep that night. The memory replayed in fragments—her younger self standing in that unnatural garden, the explosion, the blurred face speaking to her. Every time she tried to pin it down, it slipped through her fingers like vapor.

She had deleted her own past. That much she'd always known.

What she hadn't known was that fragments of it still lived—embedded, like broken glass, in other people's minds. And if this one had survived the purge, how many more were out there?

She needed answers.

At dawn, she left the bunker, blending into the early crowd. Her cloak shimmered to match the drab utility wear of sanitation workers, and no one spared her a second glance. That was the trick to surviving in Virelia: never be noticed. Never matter.

She took the tram to Sector Theta, a quieter zone nestled between the education district and the biotech labs. Fewer patrols here, but still under surveillance. Always under surveillance.

Her destination: an abandoned lecture hall half-swallowed by ivy and corrosion. Once, it had been part of the Academy of Cognition—the institution that had trained Virelia's neural engineers. Including her.

The front doors were sealed, but Lyra bypassed the retinal lock with a stolen loopchip. Inside, the air was thick with disuse and static. Light filtered through fractured glass above, casting geometric shadows on the dust-covered floor.

She moved quickly, descending into the sublevels. The walls bore old signage: Cognitive Integrity Division, Experimental Memory Mapping, Project Mnemosyne.

That name again.

She remembered nothing of the project, but it had appeared in files Nyx once smuggled from the upper tiers. She'd dismissed it then—just another Index weapon to control dissent. But now?

Now it felt personal.

In the lowest sublevel, she reached a vault marked "ARCHIVE 7 – AUTHORIZED NEURAL ACCESS ONLY." The keypad was corroded, but Lyra bypassed it the same way she always did—with a neural sync that had cost her three days of seizures when she first installed it.

The door slid open with a groan, and the archive greeted her like a tomb.

Dozens of memory orbs floated in containment fields, faintly glowing. Each one held a living moment—stolen, stored, classified. She scanned the labels. Most were gibberish: numeric codes, Index tags, expiration dates.

But one stood out.

LV-016-MNEM.

Her initials. Her age. The project.

Her hand trembled as she reached out.

As soon as she touched the orb, her implant flared with heat. Images crashed into her mind—chaotic, unformed.

A corridor. A voice: "We're running out of time, Lyra—if they find out—"

Another voice: her own, younger, harder. "Then we erase it. All of it."

Then—silence. Blankness. Darkness.

She fell to her knees, gasping.

Who had she been?

What had she done?

A sound snapped her head around. Footsteps. Close. Precise.

She ducked behind a console, hand on the blade tucked in her boot.

A tall figure stepped into the archive. Hooded. Their movement quiet, controlled.

She held her breath.

Then—

"I won't hurt you," the figure said.

The voice was low. Male. Calm. But she didn't relax.

"I'm not with the Index," he added. "I'm looking for someone."

Lyra didn't answer.

He moved closer. The light from the containment field hit his face—and for the briefest moment, their eyes met.

Gray met green.

Something inside her jolted.

Recognition. Not memory—but something deeper. Instinct.

He blinked. "You..."

Lyra stood slowly. Her blade remained hidden, just in case.

"Who are you?" she asked.

He hesitated. "Elias Mercer. I knew you. Before."

The word echoed like thunder in her ears.

Before.

Her heart pounded. She didn't speak.

He glanced at the orb in her hand. "You're trying to remember."

"And you're trying to make me forget?" she snapped.

He shook his head. "No. I want you to remember. Because what's coming—only you can stop it."

⸻

Lyra didn't move. Didn't speak. Her pulse roared like static behind her eyes, but outwardly, she was still—knife-ready, mask intact. Trust was a currency long extinct in Virelia, and strangers who claimed to know you before were the most dangerous kind.

Elias Mercer studied her, eyes steady beneath his hood. "You were part of it," he said. "Project Mnemosyne. You were the one who shut it down."

Lyra narrowed her eyes. "I don't even remember my own past, and you're feeding me riddles."

"I'm not trying to manipulate you," he replied. "If I was, I wouldn't have tracked you here. But someone else is looking. Someone who doesn't want you finding these memories."

"The Index?"

He shook his head. "Worse."

She waited.

"There's another layer beneath the Index," he said. "A ghost protocol buried under the neural grid. It activates when anyone starts unlocking what was erased during Mnemosyne. You triggered it when you copied that shard."

Lyra's breath caught.

He knew about the backup.

Her grip tightened on the memory orb. "How do you know all this?"

Elias stepped forward. His movement was slow, cautious—as if he were approaching someone volatile. "Because I was part of Mnemosyne too. And I remember you. Not all of it. But enough."

She didn't want to ask. But the question forced its way out anyway.

"What was I like?"

He gave her a half-smile—nostalgic, haunted. "Smart. Sharp. A little reckless. You questioned everything. Even the ethics of the tech we were building."

"And I shut it down?"

"You tried," he said. "You purged your memory before the final sequence could complete. You said it was the only way to stop them from using you."

Her throat was dry. "Using me how?"

But Elias looked past her, eyes scanning the archive's walls. "Not here. Too exposed. If we stay, they'll find us. Your neural signature is already pinging their dormant sweepers."

"You expect me to just walk off with you? Based on a few cryptic lines and a nice face?"

He smiled. "No. I expect you to run with me because deep down, you already know they're hunting you. You've felt it, haven't you? The gaps in your reflection. The way the city glitches when you're near certain places. You're waking up."

A siren howled in the distance—thin and digital. It echoed down into the sublevel, bouncing off concrete and steel.

Her stomach clenched. Not a coincidence.

Elias turned. "We have sixty seconds."

Lyra stared at him, every instinct at war. Then—

She shoved the orb into her pack and bolted after him.

They ran through the vault's outer corridor, her boots slamming against rusted grating. Behind them, lights flickered red—security protocols snapping to life. Index drones, silent and lethal, descended from the upper floors.

Elias ducked into an old freight lift, yanked the lever. The platform groaned to life just as the first drone entered the corridor.

Lyra spun, hurling a flash dampener into the air. It exploded in a pulse of blue light, disrupting sensors long enough for the lift to scream upward, gears grinding.

They emerged into an abandoned greenhouse level—long-forgotten vines reclaiming the walls, shattered glass letting in cold synthetic air. The door ahead had been welded shut.

Elias kicked through a ventilation panel. "Come on."

She hesitated only a second.

They crawled through the vent and dropped into a narrow alley behind the greenhouse.

When they reached the rooftops, the dome's artificial sunrise was beginning to glitch—flickering between gold and static. The city's illusion was cracking. The sky knew something the people didn't.

They stopped on a maintenance platform. Lyra bent forward, catching her breath.

"I need answers," she said, straightening.

"You'll get them," Elias said. "But you have to understand... what's hidden in your mind—it's not just a memory."

She frowned. "Then what is it?"

He looked at her, eyes fierce.

"It's a weapon."