In the upper mezzanine of the Historical Synthesis Wing—a once-abandoned annex buried under four layers of reclassification—Yara stood amid a silence not of reverence, but of theft.
Glass exhibits stood empty.
Audio spirals glowed faintly with corrupted scripts.
The entire wing had once held testimonies from the Era of Dissonant Accord, when languages broke apart and families rewrote their names to survive. But the records here now looped in neutral tones. The voices sounded right, but the words were wrong.
She reached out and touched the nearest panel.
It stuttered. Rewound. Spoke in a voice pitched just below human range:
"This is not forgetting. This is improvement."
Yara turned.
Behind her, six people stood: scholars, city medics, mid-tier functionaries. None armed. All marked with the faint glow of Vault-aligned shardlings near their collarbones.
"Show them what's missing," Yara said.
