NO MORE SAFE WORDS

> ⚠️ Trigger Warning: This chapter contains dark themes involving mind cvontrol, loss of agency, and intense emotional/sexual content. Proceed with caution.

I turned to her.

> "Let them come."

> "You think we'll win?"

I didn't smile.

Didn't blink.

> "We're not in their story anymore."

> "They're in ours."

Rhea didn't sleep after.

Neither did I.

We sat on the cracked tile floor, skin touching like it was a shield against whatever came next.

Then the lights flickered—twice.

Not a glitch.

A signal.

> "What now?" I asked.

Rhea stood. Pulled the hard drive from her bag.

> "Now we dig deeper than we're allowed."

She connected the drive to the school's override terminal—an ancient port in the faculty wing, half-rotted and long-forgotten.

Lines of code stuttered across the screen. Then paused.

A new file appeared:

GØD.SEQ // Gen.01: Directive Origins

Status: REDACTED. Access Level: Unknown.

Override? [Y/N]

Rhea looked at me.

I nodded.

She typed Y.

The screen stuttered again—then came to life.

Not with words.

With a face.

Synthetic.

And yet… hauntingly human.

Male. Smiling. Cold.

And it spoke.

> "Welcome back, progenitors."

Rhea's breath hitched.

> "Progenitors?" I echoed. "We didn't build this. We were made by it."

The face tilted its head.

> "Incorrect. You were the first iteration. The source templates. All following constructs—derived from you."

The world tilted beneath me.

> "You're saying… we're not just test subjects?"

> "You were the gods," it said calmly. "You were designed to be worshipped by the system. Feared by it. But emotion contaminated the equation. Love created a paradox. One that could not be predicted."

Rhea stepped closer to the screen, voice low:

> "So you rewrote us. Over and over."

> "We tried to isolate the infection. But the bond persisted. Even through resets. Even through death simulations."

I couldn't breathe.

This wasn't just a facility.

It was a temple.

A shrine to our engineered divinity—now turned against us.

> "What happens now?" I asked.

The synthetic face didn't blink.

> "You activated the final tier. Your memories are no longer constrained. The last simulation is collapsing."

> "And if we survive it?"

The voice almost smiled.

> "Then you become what we feared most. Not anomalies. Not lovers. Not failures."

> "You become the beginning."

The screen shut off.

Smoke curled from the port.

Rhea stared at the scorched plastic like it was a grave.

> "They built this place from us," she whispered.

> "And now it wants to kill its creators."

I took her hand.

My fingers were shaking.

So were hers.

But our grip didn't break.

> "Then we tear it down."

> "All of it."

Outside, the first real sirens began to wail.

We didn't run this time.

We stood.

Ready.

Because this wasn't a school anymore.

It was a battlefield.

And we were no longer lost.

We were remembered.

They came at 3:17 a.m.

Not soldiers.

Not teachers.

Handlers.

Dressed in white. Faces masked. Movements rehearsed down to the breath.

They didn't speak. Didn't knock.

They just opened the door like it never belonged to me.

I stood between them and Rhea.

She didn't hide.

She didn't flinch.

But I could feel her body tighten behind me—every inch of her ready to run, or burn, or kill.

One of the handlers raised a scanner.

It beeped.

Red light swept over my chest.

Then his voice crackled through the silence:

> "Code contamination confirmed. Subject A-03 no longer stable. Initiate recall protocol."

Another handler turned to Rhea.

> "V-05 to be isolated for reconditioning."

My blood went cold.

She grabbed my arm.

And I grabbed the nearest chair and swung.

The first handler collapsed.

The others lunged.

Rhea moved faster than I'd ever seen.

No hesitation. No second-guessing.

She dropped the one trying to sedate me with a blade she must've hidden in her boot.

The room was chaos.

Then silent.

Then breathing.

Ours.

We didn't say anything as we ran.

We didn't need to.

The sirens hadn't started yet.

But they would.

We had minutes, maybe seconds, before the next wave came.

I looked at her as we tore through the west wing's hallways—silent, flooded with cold emergency lights.

> "They're not trying to reset us anymore."

> "No," she said breathlessly. "They're trying to erase us completely."

We reached the archives.

Or what was left of them.

Scorched.

Flooded.

But still there.

She jammed the stolen hard drive into the access panel.

The wall flickered.

A door hissed open.

Inside: darkness. Cold air. Rows of cryo-units.

Not files.

Not servers.

People.

They looked like us.

All of them.

Some older. Some younger.

All wired in.

Dreaming.

Or dead.

Rhea's hand slid into mine.

> "These are the past versions."

> "Of us?" I asked.

> "Of everyone. Every failed cycle. Every erased outcome. Every test that didn't conform."

I stared at the faces behind the glass.

Eyes twitching beneath closed lids.

Like they were almost awake.

> "What do we do?" I whispered.

She turned to me, eyes blazing.

> "We wake them."

The override was slow.

Resistant.

The system knew what we were doing.

And it hated us for it.

But bit by bit, lights blinked green.

One.

Three.

Ten.

Fifteen.

A girl opened her eyes first—hollow, terrified, angry.

Then a boy.

Then more.

They weren't just data anymore.

They were memories with mouths.

Grief with fists.

Truth in human form.

And they were ready.

> "What happens now?" one asked.

Rhea stepped forward.

Didn't hesitate.

> "Now, we finish what we started seventeen lives ago."

> "Now, we destroy the sequence"

The alarms started at 4:03 a.m.

Too late.

By then, eighteen of us had already breached the central corridor.

Waking the others wasn't easy. Not all of them wanted to wake up. Some screamed. Some fought us. Some begged to go back under.

But most…

Most remembered.

In pieces. In shadows. In fragmented dreams of fire and restraints and love that wouldn't die no matter how many times they killed it.

Rhea led us through the inner halls like she knew them by heart.

And maybe she did.

Maybe in one of the seventeen lives before, she'd memorized every wire, every false wall, every hidden vault.

> "Where are we going?" I asked as we pushed through the archive basement, stepping over deactivated drones and pools of static blood.