ECHOES OF YOU

Turning In

They didn’t speak for a long time after escaping the tunnel.

The safehouse Eli brought them to was buried in the outskirts of the city — a place designed for disappearance. No windows, no Wi-Fi, no connection to the outside world. Only silence, shadows, and the slow thrum of adrenaline fading.

Lyra sat cross-legged on a worn leather chair, eyes locked on him.

“I don’t know what you are,” she said quietly, “but I know what I felt. And I don’t feel things unless they’re real.”

Eli stood near the corner of the room, silent, stripped of his usual charm. The man who could talk his way through steel now stared at the floor like it held the answer he couldn’t say aloud.

“I’ve had other missions. Dangerous ones. But never like this,” he muttered. “When I saw you… it was like a switch flipped in my head. No briefing. No plan. Just… a pull.”

Lyra shook her head. “It’s not just a pull. It’s recognition. We’re remembering something.”

She rose, moving to her bag and pulling out her notebook — the one filled with charcoal sketches. “These are dreams I’ve had since I was a teenager,” she said. “Places I’ve never been. A sky that doesn’t exist. *You.*”

Eli moved to the table and opened his phone, scrolling through encrypted photo storage. He showed her paintings — vivid, unsettlingly similar. “Me too,” he said. “And these started before I even knew your name.”

They stared at the images in silence. Visions of the same violet field. The same hill under a twin moon. The same embrace they had never shared in real life — but both had *remembered*.

Lyra flipped to a page in her journal. “This place,” she said, pointing to a spire-like temple on a cliff, etched in detail. “I’ve seen it in flashes.”

“So have I,” Eli murmured. “And I think that’s where we’re supposed to go.”

She looked up. “You believe me now?”

“No,” he said. “I believed you the moment you looked at me like I already broke your heart.”

That silenced her.

But then the air around them shifted.

A low vibration pulsed through the floor, like a frequency too deep for the ear but not the soul. Both of them froze as the room darkened—not visibly, but emotionally. The air became thick. Then, like a whisper through static, a voice neither of them had ever heard—yet somehow knew—spoke into the stillness:

*“It’s time to remember.”*

Lyra’s knees buckled. Eli caught her, but he staggered too, clutching his head as if it were splitting open. The safehouse flickered like bad film. And for a moment, they were no longer in the room—

They were *there.*

Standing at the edge of the cliff. The spire rising above them. Wind in their hair. Light in their eyes.

Their fingers brushed.

And then it vanished.

They were back.

Both trembling. Both changed.

Lyra gasped. “It’s not a dream. It’s a memory.”

Eli nodded, eyes wide. “And we’re getting closer.”

The silence that followed was heavy—charged like the air before lightning. Lyra stood first, pacing, her mind racing faster than her breath.

“That place was real,” she said. “I felt the wind, the stone under my feet. It wasn’t imagined. That memory *belongs* to me.”

Eli nodded slowly. “To us.”

She stopped pacing. “So what are we, then? Experiments? Reincarnations? Connected through some neural frequency?”

Eli moved to the map spread across the table. His fingers traced a pattern—a curve through Eastern Europe. “I’ve seen terrain that looks like the cliffs. This—here.” He pointed to a remote region in Croatia. “There’s an abandoned outpost with a collapsed observatory near a mountain edge. It’s restricted airspace. No tourism. Rumors of black-site experiments decades ago.”

“Of course,” Lyra muttered, almost bitter. “It couldn’t be something easy, like a psychic coffee shop.”

He smirked. “You’d be bored.”

She raised a brow. “Says the man hiding a spy thriller under his skin.”

Eli’s smile faded, his voice lower. “Lyra… this could be dangerous. What we’re uncovering—it may not want to be remembered.”

She crossed her arms. “I’ve walked through war zones. I don’t need a warning. I need answers.”

Their eyes locked. That tension again—not just between body and breath, but between fate and fear.

Eli softened. “Then let’s find the truth. Together.”

Lyra stepped closer. “Just don’t lie to me again.”

“I won’t,” he said. “Not about this.”

And in that moment, a flicker—so brief it almost passed. A phantom memory flashed behind Eli’s eyes: Lyra, standing on the same cliff—but her eyes glowing, her hands trembling as she whispered, *“Don’t remember too much… it’ll break you.”*

Eli blinked. The vision vanished. But the echo of her voice stayed.

He didn’t tell her.

Not yet.