The stairs creaked with memory.
They weren't just old — they were decaying in a way that had nothing to do with time. As Kairo followed Astra deeper into the tower's data shaft, the metal around them seemed to flicker in and out of past versions of itself.
Sometimes rusted.
Sometimes clean.
Sometimes… gone entirely.
"Is this normal?" he asked quietly.
Astra didn't look back.
"It is when you're drifting."
They reached a room lit only by the soft glow of flickering screens and glitch-tinted maps. The floor was scattered with wires, broken glass, and strips of printed echo-data — old courier dispatches that hadn't updated since the Mirrorfall.
Kairo stepped over one. It had his name on it.
Not just his name — the version he didn't remember being.
"Verin.Kairo.42-E | Status: Deceased | Cause: Core Overload"
He stared.
"That's not me."
Astra finally turned, crouched near a projection pad.
"No. But it was."
She activated something on the floor — and the center of the room lit up.
A slow, spiraling holo-map bloomed from the dust.
Layer-17's layout.
But glitched.
Fractured.
Whole sections blinked red.
Others rotated out of sync.
"This is a live echo-map," Astra explained.
"It shows the resonance instability across this Layer."
Kairo squinted at the floating data.
"So why does part of the map… overlap itself?"
"Because we're standing in two versions of this tower."
He looked at her.
She looked back.
"That's why no one comes here. The Core pruned this area but left the echo behind."
Kairo sat slowly, letting that sink in.
He felt it in his bones.
That glitchy pull. The feeling of being just slightly out of place.
Astra walked toward a wall and pulled something from a drawer.
A thin, metal box — charred, sealed shut by a memory lock.
"This belonged to a version of you," she said, handing it to him.
He took it carefully.
"How many versions are there?"
"More than a hundred."
"Alive?"
She paused.
"Not for long."
Kairo placed the box on the ground.
The Core's symbol was faintly burned into its surface — a six-pointed circuit spiral, like a snowflake built from wire.
He traced his fingers along the edge.
"Why me?" he asked quietly.
Astra knelt beside him.
"Because your signature doesn't match anything the Core has archived. You're… undefined."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning you were never meant to exist."
The silence that followed hit harder than any glitch.
Kairo didn't feel special.
He felt wrong.
Like someone who stepped into a party that had already ended — but the room hadn't noticed yet.
"I saw myself die," he whispered.
"But I didn't feel it."
"That's because it was only the first Drift. The Core doesn't let you remember pain until you reach higher tiers."
Kairo looked at her sharply.
"There are tiers?"
Astra nodded.
"Twelve. Only four are survivable. You're already at Tier 2."
A long moment passed.
Then the box hissed.
Kairo flinched as the seal cracked open — and inside, he found… a recorder.
Small. Scarred.
He picked it up. It vibrated softly — as if recognizing him.
[Voice Echo – Kairo-21]
"If you're hearing this… I didn't make it."
"Which means you're next."
Kairo froze.
"The Core isn't trying to kill you. It's trying to overwrite you. It doesn't erase mistakes — it replaces them."
"You're just a bug in a system that's running out of memory."
"Don't trust anyone who remembers you clearly."
"Especially not her."
The message ended.
Silence again.
Kairo looked up.
Astra was watching him carefully.
He stood slowly.
"He was talking about you, wasn't he?"
She didn't flinch.
Just said:
"He was wrong."
The air between them was colder now.
Kairo didn't know what to believe — or who.
But something told him that message wasn't a lie.
And yet…
He still followed Astra as she moved to the next door.
"Where are we going?" he asked.
She glanced back.
"To meet someone who remembers all the versions of you."