Versions of us

I arrive at Vireya University twice.Or maybe it’s just once, and the memory of the first time is a lie stitched into my skull,something pulled from someone else’s timeline and grafted onto mine. Either way, I step through the iron front gates and feel like the buildings are watching me.Everything smells like ozone. Like rain on static.A girl passes me in the crowd and flinches when our arms brush. Her mouth moves like she’s going to say something,maybe "sorry" or "wait",but no sound comes out.I look back.She’s gone.The admissions building is tall and narrow, like a filing cabinet turned upright. There’s no one at the front desk. The walls are covered in peeling announcements: lectures, lab trials, lost items, missing students. One flyer reads: ❝Temporal Stability Seminar Rescheduled. If you remember it differently, report to Archives.❞ Another has been scratched over with thick red ink: ❝DO NOT FOLLOW THE FLICKERING VERSIONS OF YOURSELF.❞ My fingers tingle. The receptionist returns eventually, holding a to-go coffee cup and looking vaguely annoyed. She types my name,Cassiel Moreau,into her system, squints, and says, “You checked in this morning.” “I didn’t.” “You sure?” She rotates her screen so I can see it. There’s a timestamp. 8:13 a.m. It’s 1:47 p.m. now. I’ve never been inside this building before. “I don’t remember that,” I say. She shrugs. “Welcome back, I guess.” Room 407 is supposed to be in the east dorm, fourth floor. I find the hallway, count the doors.There’s no 407.403, 405, 409. A blank section of wall where the next door should be. I hesitate, then knock on the wall.It opens.A door that looks like a wall. And behind it, my new roommate.He’s tall, narrow-shouldered, wearing a hoodie zipped to his throat. His dark hair is sleep-tousled, his eyes like stormclouds just before the downpour. He stares at me, then down at the paper in his hand. “…Cassiel?” I nod. “I thought you’d be taller.” “You thought I—?” I stop. “Wait. You already knew who your roommate was?” Arlen Dross lifts one eyebrow. “You’re on the assignment list.” “I haven’t even been here a day.” He steps aside. “Then you must be new in more ways than one.” The room is bigger than I expected. One side is a sprawl of chaos,books, loose paper, tangled cords, mugs with ancient tea stains. The other side, mine presumably, is pristine. Empty. Waiting.I wheel my suitcase inside. “Don’t touch the closet on the left,” Arlen says, not looking up from a half-assembled circuit board on his desk. “It opens to places it shouldn’t.” He might be joking. I can’t tell. I sleep badly that night. There’s no noise,no city hum, no people in the hallway, not even creaking pipes. Just an awful silence, as if the room exists slightly out of sync with everything else.Sometime after midnight, I dream of fire.I’m standing in the library rotunda, flames crawling up the walls, pages burning mid-sentence. Someone is crying my name. No,not crying. Begging.Then comes the whisper: “Don’t trust your memory. Don’t trust your reflection. Don’t trust me.” I wake up gasping.Arlen is sitting on the windowsill, staring out at the quad. His face lit blue by something on his phone. He doesn’t turn around. “You talk in your sleep,” he says. “What did I say?” “Nothing helpful.” The next morning, I find the library by accident. I was trying to find the dining hall but the campus map loops wrong,the paths connect at angles that don’t physically work. I walk in a straight line and end up somewhere else.The library is cathedral-shaped, glassy and tall. It doesn’t feel real. Or it feels too real, like a place that’s dreaming me instead of the other way around.Inside, I follow a narrow spiral stair to the lowest level. Everything here smells like dust and copper. And something… burning.I turn a corner and stop.There, carved into the wood of a study desk, is my handwriting. I recognize the slope of the "s," the way I loop "e" into "r." ❝You promised not to fall for him again.❞ I reach out and trace the words. My fingertip burns.By day three, I have three classes, two memory gaps, and one growing obsession: Arlen.He’s impossible to read. Some days, he barely speaks to me. Other days, he asks questions that feel more like traps. “Do you ever feel like you’ve lived this before?” “Do you think memory makes us who we are?” “If you had the chance to rewrite your past, would you?” He leaves notes for himself all over the room,yellow paper, blue ink, sharp instructions like: DO NOT TELL CASSIEL ABOUT THE CLOSET STOP GOING TO THE EAST WING AFTER DARK TRUST ELI — UNTIL YOU CAN’T I ask who Eli is. He shrugs. “Someone I used to know.” “Used to?” “It’s complicated.” It gets worse when I meet Rhea Lysenne. She’s everything Arlen isn’t,warm, open, confident. She’s a philosophy major with ink-stained fingers and a laugh like sunlight. She offers me half her sandwich the first time we talk. “You look lost,” she says. “I usually am.” “Lucky me. I like puzzles.” She sits close when we talk. Too close. Her eyes are unnerving,they watch me, like she’s memorizing something no one else can see. “You smell like rust,” she says one afternoon, brushing a leaf out of my hair. “Like someone who’s been through time and didn’t quite make it back.” I want to kiss her.I also want to run. There’s a gallery in the art building,a student showcase, only partially curated. One wall is covered in charcoal sketches. One sketch in particular grabs me: a boy asleep in a burning room.The details are familiar. The angle of the face, the scar on the collarbone.It’s me.I spin around, searching.That’s when I see him: Elior.He’s leaning against the wall, pale and soft-eyed, watching me. His hands are stained with charcoal. His clothes smell like lavender and something colder. “I thought you might come here,” he says quietly. “Do I… know you?” He nods. “Not yet.” That night, I stare at the ceiling and try to make sense of myself.Rhea makes me feel like I’m someone real.Arlen makes me feel like I’m someone dangerous.Eli makes me feel like I’ve already made a mistake I can’t undo.I open my notebook to write it all down and stop cold.There, scribbled in the margins in my handwriting: "Don’t fall for him again." No context. No name. No timestamp.The next day, a student vanishes.No announcement, no alert. Just silence. One of Arlen’s sticky notes disappears too.I ask him about it. He just looks at me and says, “Memory is a cage if you never question who built it.” I don’t know whether to be terrified or in love. Maybe both. [End of Chapter One]