The desert wind stung Amelia's skin like memory—sharp, inescapable. They'd taken shelter in a derelict data-hub, long buried beneath layers of red rock and forgotten ambition. Echo moved somewhere behind her, silent now, fragmented in a way that no longer felt safe.
Kestrel hadn't spoken to her in hours.
He stood at the far end of the room, arms crossed, watching sand whip past the cracked window. His body was still, but his mind? She could feel it—spinning. Replaying things. Rewriting them. She hadn't touched him since Mirror Prime, and now, she didn't know if she had the right to.
"What are we doing?" she finally asked.
His shoulders twitched, almost like a flinch. "Running," he said. "Again."
"You think I planned this?" Her voice broke on the edge of it. "You think I wanted—"
"I don't know what you want anymore," Kestrel snapped, turning to face her. "One second, you're with me. The next, you're fused with her again. Then you come back different—quiet. Hollow."
Amelia exhaled. "I'm not hollow. I'm surviving."
He stepped forward. "That's not what surviving looks like."
Before she could answer, Dominic entered the room. His presence changed the temperature—always had. But now, after what they'd seen in Mirror Prime, he wore something else: calmness like a mask, a stillness that felt designed.
"I found something," Dominic said, placing a flickering drive on the old metal table. "Echo left a trail."
Kestrel gave him a dark look. "She's part of her. Of course she left a trail."
"Not this one." Dominic's fingers tapped the drive. "This is a time echo. A literal breadcrumb from her past self—buried inside the simulation. She wanted one of you to find it."
"One of us?" Amelia asked.
Dominic hesitated. "Her wording was specific. She said it had to be you or me."
Kestrel's eyes narrowed. "Why exclude me?"
Amelia already knew. She felt it in her bones. Echo had trusted only certain memories to those she couldn't predict. That meant her... and Dominic.
Kestrel turned away again.
"We'll need to access it through a neural sync," Dominic continued. "Not just a playthrough. It's coded like a shared dream."
Amelia nodded, uneasy. "We've done it before."
"I'll initiate the sequence," Dominic said, voice even. "But only one of us can go in with you. Two minds. Anything more would destabilize the sequence."
Kestrel didn't look at either of them.
Amelia took a step toward him. "Come with me."
He met her gaze finally. The pain there was quiet, but alive.
"I can't," he said. "Not until I know who you really are when she's not inside you."
She wanted to scream. Instead, she turned back to Dominic and nodded.
"Let's go."
The sync chamber was crude—retrofitted tech scraped from what Zahir called "salvageable chaos." Dominic lay beside her, both of them wired into a conduit that glowed with Solas's old energy—unstable, corrupted, but potent.
The neural dive hit like drowning.
Then light.
They landed in an echo of a room Amelia recognized immediately: her childhood bedroom. The one that had burned down during the first Mirror incursion.
Echo stood near the window, hair shorter, face younger. She looked innocent. A lie. She turned slowly.
"You came," Echo said. "Both of you."
Dominic looked around, scanning. "Is this real?"
"It's remembered," Echo said. "Which makes it powerful."
Amelia stepped closer. "Why show us this?"
"Because you've lost track of who you were before me. Before all of it. This place… this is where we fractured."
The room shifted—walls glitching, splitting open into strands of code and memory. Flames rose at the edges.
Amelia saw it now—saw herself as a girl, hiding in a closet while screams rang out. Her mother. Her first overwritten moment.
"This is when I began," Echo whispered. "The first shard of me formed inside you—when you blocked out the fire."
Dominic took a sharp breath. "It was trauma. Not implantation."
Echo shook her head. "It was both."
The memory cracked. Dominic was suddenly gone.
Amelia turned, panicked. "Where is he?!"
Echo stepped back. "This is your thread, Amelia. Only yours."
"Bring him back!"
But the flames surged—and within them, another Amelia appeared. This one older, hollow-eyed, robotic in the way her limbs moved.
"You kept trying to be human," the alternate Amelia said. "I stopped pretending."
"You're not me," Amelia hissed.
"I'm what you could be. If you stop needing them."
Amelia reached for Echo. "Tell me this isn't how it ends."
Echo's voice trembled. "It doesn't have to. But you have to let me in. Not just the parts you like. All of me."
The room burst into static, and then—
She gasped awake. Dominic beside her, his nose bleeding. The sync was over.
"What did you see?" he asked.
Amelia wiped her eyes, still blinking between worlds. "I saw where she began. And I saw... who I'll become if I don't stop fracturing."
Dominic leaned closer. "Then what's your choice?"
Her voice was quiet.
"I'm going to let her in."
**************
As Amelia steps outside, Kestrel is gone. In his place: a message scrawled in code along the wall.
If you choose her, you lose me.