Fragments
1276 Words
Chapter 2
“You knew.”
The words echoed in the cramped flat like a dropped knife. Elara stared at Jace, her mind grasping for the right emotion—betrayal, anger, sorrow. But all she felt was cold.
Jace didn’t look away. “I didn’t lie,” he said quietly. “I just didn’t tell you everything.”
“That’s the same thing.”
“No, it’s not.” His voice was strained. “I didn’t know for sure. Just pieces. Rumors. And what would I have said? ‘Hey Elara, I think your entire identity is fabricated and the government wiped your past?’ You weren’t ready to hear it.”
“And you decided that for me?”
“I was trying to protect you!”
She took a step back, the chipped floor tiles groaning under her weight. “You don’t get to decide what I remember.”
Jace ran a hand through his hair, pacing. “You were broken when I found you. No memory, no name, no past. I gave you a place, a purpose. I helped you survive.”
“I thought we were partners,” she said, voice tight. “But you were always holding something back.”
He looked at her then, eyes glassy. “You think I didn’t want to tell you? Every day I looked at you and wondered if today would be the day you remembered who you were. But it never came. And I—I got scared. If you found out, maybe you’d leave. Maybe you’d change. Maybe you’d forget me.”
Her anger faltered.
Because part of her understood. Fear was the strongest currency in their world.
“I’m not leaving,” she said. “But I am going to find out who I was. I need to.”
Jace nodded slowly, defeated. “Then I’ll help you.”
She didn’t smile. Not yet. Trust had to be earned again.
The chip the memory forger gave her contained twelve names. Twelve people who carried fragments of her stolen self—memories transplanted into their minds like hidden viruses. Some knowingly. Some not.
The first name blinked on the screen:
Mae Ardyn. Age: 47. Status: Comatose. Location: Central Neural Recovery Facility, Sector Five.
Elara cursed under her breath.
Sector Five was high-tier, strictly monitored. Not a place someone like her could just walk into. They’d need clearance, disguises, and a plan. Jace sighed as he scanned the profile.
“She’s been comatose for three years,” he said. “Stabilized but unresponsive. They’re using experimental memory therapy to reactivate neural pathways.”
“She’s the host,” Elara said. “My fragment’s in there.”
Jace hesitated. “Elara, if she’s in that deep, there’s a chance accessing the memory could destabilize her brain. You could hurt her. Or yourself.”
“She has a piece of me,” Elara said. “I have to try.”
The next night, disguised in hospital-grade white and masked under false IDs, they entered the facility.
Elara’s heart pounded beneath her uniform. Every security checkpoint felt like a guillotine waiting to drop. But Jace was good—scary good—and no one questioned them.
Mae Ardyn’s room was sterile and silent. Machines beeped softly, tracking the still woman’s vitals. Tubes snaked from her arms. Electrodes lined her temples. She looked peaceful. Or empty. It was hard to tell the difference anymore.
“She doesn’t look like someone with a secret,” Elara murmured.
“Neither do you.”
Jace attached the neural link, connecting Elara’s headset to Mae’s. “You’re only syncing, not extracting. A soft pull. Anything more and it could fry both of you.”
Elara lay back, her breath shallow. “Set the timer. Ten minutes.”
“Eight,” he said firmly. “After that, I cut the feed.”
She closed her eyes.
And fell inward.
The memory didn’t greet her. It swallowed her.
She was standing in a circular room made of glass and gold, walls rippling with light. A man stood before her—tall, cloaked in gray, his face obscured.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said. “This wasn’t meant for you.”
“I don’t care,” Elara said. Or Lora. She wasn’t sure who she was inside this echo.
“You saw the archive,” the man continued. “You remembered what we tried to erase.”
“Why erase it?” she demanded. “What are you hiding?”
He raised a hand.
The walls around her shifted. Memory fragments spun through the air like paper caught in wind—faces she didn’t know, laughter she couldn’t place, a scream that might’ve been hers.
Then a girl appeared in the center of the room. Nine or ten. Wild curls. Bare feet on stone. She was crying. And she looked exactly like Elara.
“I was the test,” Elara whispered.
“Yes,” the man said.
“Why?”
“Because you were the only one who could hold all the memories. The only one whose mind didn’t fracture—until it did.”
Elara stepped forward. “Tell me who I was.”
The man paused.
Then said, “You were the Archive.”
She gasped awake.
Jace was shouting her name. “Elara! You flatlined—just for a second, but—damn it, I said eight minutes!”
Her head throbbed. Her skin was cold. But her mind blazed.
“She called me the Archive,” Elara said hoarsely. “They didn’t just erase my memories. They used me. I was the vault. The container. I held the evidence—everything they wanted to bury.”
Jace stared at her in horror. “That’s why they scattered your memories. They weren’t just trying to erase you—they were trying to delete the truth.”
She nodded slowly.
And for the first time, she felt it: purpose.
Not survival. Not revenge.
Reclamation.
They escaped the facility undetected. Barely. Jace’s nerves were fried, his hands shaking as he peeled off the fake ID bands. “You flatline again, I’m done,” he muttered. “You’re not dying on me.”
“I’m not planning to,” Elara said.
She looked at the chip. Eleven names left.
She’d recovered only a sliver—but that sliver had shattered the walls around her.
The Council erased her not because she was dangerous. But because she remembered things the world wasn’t meant to know. She had seen the Archive—a hidden record of crimes, edits, disappearances. If she could piece herself back together, she could expose everything.
Her memories weren’t just hers.
They were evidence.
Back in the flat, she couldn’t sleep. The memory played over and over again in her mind—the voice of the man, the fragments, the girl.
She stood before the mirror. Touched her face. Her hair. Her eyes.
Who had she been before the theft?
A test subject? A rebel? A pawn?
Or something else entirely?
“Elara,” Jace said, leaning in the doorway, his voice softer now. “If you do this… there’s no going back.”
“I know.”
“They’ll come after you.”
“They already have.”
He hesitated. “Then I’m in.”
She turned to him, surprised. “You are?”
“I don’t care who you were,” he said. “You’re you. Now. That’s what matters.”
Something flickered in her chest. Gratitude, maybe. Something close to hope.
“Then we start tomorrow,” she said. “One name at a time.”
- Writer
