The Vault Remembers

The air inside the vault burned cold—unnaturally so. Every breath curled into fog, clinging to the rusted steel walls like the ghosts of forgotten experiments.

I stepped forward, the heavy door grinding shut behind me with a mechanical snarl, sealing out the world—and the masked figure still watching from the threshold.

"You're not ready for what's in there."

Their warning coiled at the edge of my thoughts, but I pushed deeper.

The chamber stretched wide and circular, its reinforced walls layered with insulation panels and biometric safeties. Dead monitors flickered along one side, their screens cracked, circuitry corroded by time.

But in the center stood the real prize: a containment pod, its glass fractured with spiderweb cracks, fluid inside half-drained, wires and neural conduits snaking out like dissected veins. And within the pod—her. Vesper.

Recognition pulsed sharp through me—not memory, but something more primal. The shards at my ribs hummed, their resonance syncing with the crystalline interface embedded in the pod's control array.

Her eyes were closed, skin pale beneath the faint blue light. Her blonde hair, a tangled halo, framed a face etched with stillness. Electrodes mapped the edges of her skull, tracking neural activity—faint, but steady. Not dead. Preserved.

The puzzle clicked harder into place. Solis didn't erase her. They locked her down—suspended in neural stasis, memories sealed behind layers of encrypted data constructs. The same constructs they embedded in me.

Which meant…

I stepped closer, fingers brushing the control panel. Readouts bloomed across the cracked interface—life signs, neural patterns, deep memory fragments encoded in crystalline nodes. Twelve nodes, like my own.

The system wasn't built for erasure. It was built for extraction—disassembling a person piece by piece, storing their mind like data shards, preserving only what the Order deemed useful. Vesper's past, her knowledge—buried. But her voice still echoed sharp in my skull: "Run, Ilyas—don't look back."

I didn't remember her. But she remembered me.

The resonance peaked—the two fragments in my coat humming harder, syncing with the pod's containment system. Behind me, the masked figure stepped fully into the vault, their presence sharp as razors but still, watching.

"You can't wake her," they said, voice calm beneath the distortion. "Not without triggering the failsafe."

I turned, pulse steady. "Failsafe?"

The figure nodded toward the cracked glass. "Solis wired a kill-switch into her neural map. Any unauthorized breach—the system collapses. She dies. You lose whatever memory fragments she's holding."

Their words hit like cold steel. Typical Solis engineering—if they couldn't control you, they'd erase you. But I wasn't walking out empty-handed.

"She's synced to me," I said, eyes locked to the flickering neural display. "Her system's identical to mine. Which means I can bypass it."

The figure's stance shifted—cautious, assessing. "Or trigger it prematurely," they warned. "Memory forgers play with echoes. This is different. This is the foundation of who she is. You mess with that—you don't just lose her. You lose every answer tied to your past."

I inhaled slow, grounding myself in the cold. The two shards in my coat pulsed like heartbeats, vibrating against the crystalline nodes within the pod—drawing the systems together, fusing fragmented edges like tectonic plates snapping into place.

Her memories weren't passive. They were calling to mine.

I pressed my palm to the pod interface. The resonance surged. In an instant, the vault blurred—walls fracturing into data streams, the floor shifting beneath me. Cold sliced through my skull, sharper than any neural scalpel.

And then—flashes. A woman's hand gripping mine. Running. Sirens wailing in the distance. Blood dripping onto steel floors. Her voice—urgent, panicked: "They're coming, Ilyas—forget me if you have to, but run."

I staggered back, breath tight, vision snapping clear.

Vesper's eyes opened—pale grey, storm-lit. She exhaled slow, weak, but conscious.

The masked figure stiffened. "You bypassed the failsafe…"

"I adapted it," I countered, scanning her vitals—stable, but drained. "They can't overwrite me without rewriting her. And they can't touch her if I control the resonance."

Vesper blinked, confusion laced with fragments of recognition. "Ilyas…" Her voice cracked, faint as brittle glass. "You—"

The vault lights flared red—alarms igniting through hidden panels, security protocols roaring to life.

"They're coming," the masked figure said. Solis strike teams—fast, lethal, precise.

No more time for questions.

I lifted Vesper gently from the pod, her limbs trembling but functional. "You can run?" I asked.

She managed a faint nod.

The masked figure drew twin blades from beneath their cloak. "You've bought seconds, not minutes."

That was enough.

We moved—slicing through the vault's lower corridors as the alarms blared louder, the resonance between us stabilizing, fragments of memory bleeding at the edges.

Solis wouldn't let this stand. But they'd made one mistake: they forgot how dangerous fractured minds can be when they start to remember.