Glass City

Chapter 2

Virelia looked different from the rooftop.

Up here, the angles warped. The city lost its symmetry—no longer a sleek utopia of mirrored towers and electric trains, but a crumbling mosaic of secrets, stitched together by power lines and lies. The dome above shimmered with programmed clouds and synthetic sunlight, but now Lyra could see the thin seams in its illusion.

She crouched beside Elias on the grated platform of an old maintenance rig, wind curling past her hair like invisible fingers. Below, the world moved on—citizens in gray coats marching in regulated currents, unaware that a surveillance drone hovered three meters behind every tenth step.

"Tell me everything," she said. "Start with the ghost protocol."

Elias leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. "It's a failsafe buried deep inside the neural grid. Not part of the Index—not exactly. It was created by the original architects of Mnemosyne."

"The project I helped build and then tried to destroy," Lyra muttered.

He nodded. "Mnemosyne was supposed to perfect memory control. Not just deletion or manipulation. But complete rewriting. Fabricating pasts. Merging consciousness. Turning people into programmable identities."

Lyra's mouth went dry. "Like synthetic souls."

Elias looked at her. "Exactly. And you—your neural architecture—was the prototype."

She reeled back. "That's not possible."

"You were the first subject to integrate the full mnemonic lattice without neural collapse. You weren't just a designer. You were the final experiment."

"No." She stood, pacing the narrow ledge. "I signed on as a systems developer. I worked on encryption. Not integration."

"You don't remember, Lyra. That's the point. They made you erase it. You were a threat to them the moment you understood what the project was really for."

She turned sharply. "Why? What was I planning?"

Elias hesitated. "A full leak. Exposure to the underground networks. You had contacts—people who believed in you. You were going to dismantle Mnemosyne from the inside."

"Then why erase myself?"

"Because they got to your network. Turned them. Killed them. You said it yourself—the only way to keep the weapon out of their hands was to become the vault."

Lyra gripped the railing, heart hammering. It was too much. A half-life of silence suddenly echoing with things she couldn't yet prove or deny.

And worse—deep down, she didn't think he was lying.

"Where are the rest of the fragments?" she asked.

"They were scattered—buried in illegal memory repositories and black-net minds. You've already found one. The rest are encoded in a pattern. A trail only you can follow."

"Why me?"

"Because the key is your mind," Elias said softly. "You designed the lock."

Lyra didn't respond.

Below, alarms flared—brief and coded. A flash of red across the billboard sky.

"They know you accessed Archive 7," Elias said. "That's a tier-three violation. Your face will be on the scanfeeds by nightfall."

"I've handled worse," she said.

"You didn't used to be alone."

She didn't answer that.

Elias stood, adjusting the pack over his shoulder. "There's a safehouse in Sector Wren. Deep in the forgotten metro lines. We can regroup there—start tracing the others."

Lyra's eyes narrowed. "You keep saying we. You think I trust you now?"

"I think you don't have the luxury of being alone anymore."

She hated that he might be right.

Still—there was something about him. Not familiarity, exactly, but weight. A gravity. Like the faint echo of a memory trying to reach the surface.

"All right," she said at last. "But if you're lying—"

"I know," he said, faint smile returning. "You'll gut me."

They dropped into the alley and disappeared into the shadows of a city that had long since forgotten them.

⸻

The entrance to Sector Wren wasn't marked on any official maps.

It lay beneath an abandoned transit hub near the city's edge, where old rails coiled like rusted snakes and the synthetic fog hung thick enough to taste. Lyra followed Elias through a tangle of decaying scaffolding, past broken cameras and shattered memory-banks whose data had long since bled out into the soil.

Once, this place had been alive—back before the Index took full control of transit systems, back when citizens still used tokens and footpaths instead of retinal scans and biometric locks.

Now, it was a ghost artery, pulsing only with silence and rot.

Elias pulled a bent metal panel aside and gestured for Lyra to duck in. She did, boots scraping across metal as they descended into the dark. The corridor beyond sloped downward, lit only by the cold blue pulse of emergency backup nodes.

"What exactly is in Wren?" she asked.

"A place built before Mnemosyne. Before the Index." Elias's voice echoed off the walls. "There were resistance networks then. Cells that believed the city was heading for collapse. Most of them were crushed. But some left behind safepoints. This is one of them."

Lyra said nothing. Her fingers brushed the blade at her hip—not because she didn't believe him, but because instinct said be ready anyway.

At the end of the corridor, Elias keyed in an override code on a panel so old it barely registered. The door whined open.

And there it was.

The safehouse was buried in the shell of a forgotten control room—concrete walls thick enough to muffle the world, reinforced glass overlooking nothing but shadowed tunnels. Inside were old surveillance rigs, disassembled drones, shelves stacked with worn data scrolls and handheld interfaces.

It was dusty. Silent. But not dead.

Generators hummed beneath the floor. Energy still pulsed in the veins of the walls.

Elias moved with practiced ease, lighting the space with low amber lamps and activating the shielding mesh that cloaked their location from Index scans.

Lyra stepped into the room, running her hands across an ancient terminal. Her reflection flickered on the dark screen—familiar, but distant. Like looking at someone through a pane of ice.

She turned to him. "I need to know what's in these memories."

"You'll remember," Elias said. "But it won't come in a flood. They're protected. Layered beneath false neural markers. It was the only way to prevent someone else from stealing them."

Lyra frowned. "Can you unlock them?"

"I can help you find the anchors," he said. "But only you can break the locks."

He opened a side drawer and pulled out an old cortical uplink—sleek, worn, wrapped in a silver band of insulation. Lyra took it without a word.

She hated the idea of tampering with her mind again. But the truth was already unraveling her—fragment by fragment. And she needed control before someone else seized it.

She sank into one of the chairs, clipped the band around her temple, and felt the static heat as it interfaced with her skin.

"Ready?" Elias asked.

"No," she said. "Do it anyway."

The room faded.

And the memories began to surface.

Not as visions. Not yet.

But as sounds.

A voice—her own, distorted by time—whispering numbers. Coordinates. Code strings she didn't recognize but somehow knew were hers.

The sound of alarms. Footsteps. A name shouted in panic.

Elias?

No.

Someone else.

A woman's voice. Broken. Screaming—

"Lyra, don't trust—!"

Then static. Pain. And white.

Her eyes flew open.

She was shaking. Gasping.

Elias caught her. "What did you see?"

"Not much," she croaked. "But there's someone else. A woman. She tried to warn me."

"Then she's still in there," Elias said. "A ghost in the code."

Lyra pressed her palms to her eyes. "We need to find the rest of the fragments. Before the Index finds me."

Elias didn't speak. But the tension in his jaw said he agreed.

They had little time. And the hunt had already begun.

⸻

The lights in the safehouse dimmed to amber as night fell across Virelia, but the city's neon glow never truly faded. It bled through the cracks of forgotten places like Sector Wren, a dull reminder that time never stopped in the Grid.

Lyra paced the edge of the room, fingers flexing as she processed what she had seen. Not much—but enough.

A woman's voice, distorted and buried deep in her subconscious. A warning cut short. Coordinates. Elias had jotted them down as she murmured them in her trance, cross-referencing them now with old metro schematics and data vault registries.

"I think they point to the Iris Vault," he said finally, turning the screen toward her.

Lyra narrowed her eyes. "That's an Index data core."

"Unofficially, yes. Publicly, it's a museum archive. But beneath it is a black cell—access restricted to Directorate-level agents. It's where they bury high-risk memory fragments they can't delete."

"And that includes mine."

He nodded.

Lyra didn't like how steady he was. Like he'd always known where this would lead.

She crossed her arms. "Tell me why you really helped me. All of it."

Elias hesitated. "Because I owed you."

"That's not enough."

He looked up, eyes dark. "You saved my life, Lyra. Back when we worked together. You intercepted a kill-code meant for me. It burned half your cortex trying to shield me."

She blinked.

There was no echo of that memory. But something in her chest tightened anyway.

"I ran after that," he said. "I couldn't face what they'd done to you. But when I heard whispers that you were alive—still running—I knew I had to find you before they did."

"You still haven't told me who they are."

He hesitated. "The Directorate answers to something deeper. Something older than the Index. They call it the Veil."

Lyra's stomach dropped. The Veil. She'd heard the name before—once, whispered in an encrypted chatroom. A myth, or so she thought.

"They're the real architects of Mnemosyne," Elias said. "Not the engineers. Not the scientists. The ones who designed the city's silence. The memory trade. The culling. They're the reason you became... this."

Lyra sat slowly, pulse pounding. "Then I need to destroy them."

"You will," Elias said. "But first, we recover who you were. Only then will you know how."

For a moment, the room was quiet—nothing but the hum of old tech and the city's heartbeat far above.

Then the motion sensor chirped.

Elias snapped to the monitor. "Shadows in the tunnel. Three contacts. Moving fast."

Lyra grabbed her blade and pistol in one motion. "They found us."

He was already at the exit panel, activating the burn route. The tunnel behind them lit up with red glyphs, coded escape paths only visible to those who knew the safehouse's legacy.

"Go!" he barked.

Lyra sprinted after him, heat rising in her chest. Not fear—focus.

Behind them, the door to the safehouse cracked. Boots. Heavy. Trained.

A voice echoed behind them. Robotic. Chilling.

"Lyra Venn. Halt. You are designated property of the Directorate."

"Not anymore," she whispered, and dove into the dark.