Silence hung heavy in the underground chamber, thick with the weight of revelation. The screen's glow cast flickering shadows across Kiera's face, her own name staring back at her from the past she had been forced to forget.
PROJECT: RECLAMATION
SUBJECT: KIERA LORAN
STATUS: REPROGRAMMED
The words felt like chains tightening around her mind. They rewrote me.
She took a breath, trying to steady the storm raging inside her. The woman at the console—someone who had clearly known her before all of this—hadn't moved, her sharp eyes watching Kiera with something between caution and expectation.
Kiera forced herself to focus. "You said I knew something. Something worth all of this." She gestured at the screen. "What is it?"
The woman tapped a few keys, and the blinking marker on the city map zoomed in. It settled on a sprawling complex, nestled deep in the heart of the Architects' territory.
"Their core system," she said. "The place where everything is controlled."
Marek's arms were crossed, eyes narrowed. "That could mean anything. Surveillance? Military control? We already know they have total dominance over the city."
The woman nodded. "They do. But what they don't have—what they fear—is losing control over people. That's what this place is for."
Kiera's pulse quickened. "You're saying it's not just a command center?"
"It's where they store the consciousness backups."
The words sent a shock through the room.
Rhys stiffened. "Backups?"
The woman turned to face them fully. "The Architects don't just control people through surveillance. They control them through memory. Every citizen, every enforcer, every Specialist has a file stored in that facility. Their pasts, their identities—altered, erased, rewritten as needed."
Kiera felt like the ground beneath her had disappeared.
"That's how they did it," she murmured. "That's how they changed me."
The woman nodded. "When they captured you, they didn't just train you. They rewrote you from the ground up. But they never erased your original mind. They couldn't—not completely." She glanced at the console again. "Your unaltered memories still exist. Locked away in their system."
For a moment, the room was utterly still.
Kiera's past wasn't gone.
It was imprisoned.
Rhys exhaled sharply. "If that's true, then it's not just Kiera. They could have done this to thousands of people."
"Millions," the woman corrected. "Every time someone resists, every time someone questions the system too much, they don't just disappear. The Architects take them, reprogram them, and put them back into society under new directives."
Marek's jaw clenched. "That's why no rebellion ever lasts."
Aerin folded their arms. "Because every time we rise up, they turn us into them."
Kiera's breath came fast, her mind racing. It was worse than she had ever imagined. She had thought the Architects ruled through force and surveillance, but this—this was rewriting reality itself.
And she had been one of their victims.
Her hands curled into fists.
"How do we break in?"
The woman studied her for a long moment before turning back to the screen. "It won't be easy. The core system is locked down tighter than anything else in the city. AI defenses, biometric locks, Specialists stationed at every entrance."
"Then we need a way in that they won't expect," Kiera said. "Something they can't predict."
The woman hesitated. Then she pressed another sequence of keys. The screen shifted, revealing a blueprint of the facility.
"There is one way."
She pointed to a section beneath the main structure, hidden beneath layers of security networks.
"The original system wasn't designed to be impenetrable," she said. "It was designed to be updated. There's an old access point deep beneath the facility. A forgotten entryway from when the system was still being built. The Architects buried it once they perfected the current structure, but it still exists."
Marek frowned. "And how do you know that?"
The woman's expression darkened. "Because I helped build it."
Another silence.
Kiera studied her. "Who are you?"
The woman let out a quiet breath. "Once, I was someone like you. Someone who saw the truth and fought against it. But unlike you, I wasn't strong enough to resist when they came for me."
Her gaze flickered to the screen again, as if seeing ghosts in the data.
"They rewrote me. Just like they did to you. Just like they've done to countless others."
A cold weight settled in Kiera's stomach.
"But you remember now," she said carefully.
The woman nodded. "Memories have a way of breaking through, no matter how hard they try to erase them."
Kiera's pulse pounded.
This was it. The key. The way to take back what had been stolen.
She turned to the others. "If we get into that system, we're not just freeing my memories. We're freeing everyone. Every person who has ever been reprogrammed, every mind they've ever tampered with."
She looked back at the screen, her resolve hardening.
"This isn't just about me anymore. This is about undoing everything they've done."
Rhys nodded, his jaw tight. "Then we'd better figure out how to make it happen."
Marek crossed her arms. "Assuming we survive getting in, do we even have a plan for what happens next?"
Kiera exhaled. "We start by getting in."
Her hands clenched at her sides.
"And then we end this."