They landed on concrete like discarded trash, the impact jarring them back into their bodies.
Plato blinked first. The corridor around them pulsed dim yellow, the lights struggling against a deep, moist gloom. The smell had changed—no longer metallic, but fungal, like rot left to think.
Lira sat up, dragging the Third closer. The remnants of his amulet clinked softly in her palm.
"Sector Zeta?" she asked.
Plato stood slowly, leaning against the wall. "Worse. No sector tags. We're outside indexed space."
The Third stirred. Just barely.
Lira whispered, "Do you think the Sweepers followed?"
"No. The Rite displaced us too far. They don't chase outside entropy gradients. Not yet."
A silence followed, disturbed only by the low thrum of reality trying to reassert itself. Then they heard it.
Steps.
Echoing.
From nowhere. From everywhere.
Plato raised his hand to silence Lira. "Don't move."
The corridor twisted, not visually, but gravitationally. The angles warped beneath their feet, like the ground questioned its own geometry.
Then they saw him.
Naze.
Standing at the other end of the corridor. Except it wasn't just him. Behind him—or within him—three shadows mimicked his every twitch. Not reflections. Not echoes. Variants.
Lira drew her shard blade. "He shouldn't be here."
"He isn't," Plato said. "But part of him was." He stepped forward. "Naze!"
The boy didn't react at first. Then his head turned, slow and uneven, like a puppet remembering it had strings. His eyes flickered with static.
"Which... one?" he rasped.
Plato froze. "What?"
"Which one of you... remembers me?"
Lira gripped her blade tighter. "He's splintering."
Then Naze began to walk toward them. Not run. Walk. With every step, the lights overhead burst, one by one. Behind him, the corridor folded in impossible geometry—stairs growing from ceilings, walls turning to glass. Broken physics hissed like steam.
Plato felt his balance sway. The space was slipping.
The Third began to chant again, but this time it was a clear phrase:
"Echoes of the self echo self echo self echo—"
His voice distorted into reverb.
Naze stopped just meters away.
"I left something here," he said.
Plato met his eyes. "What did you leave?"
Naze raised his hand. On his palm, an object began to form—a small cube, metallic, covered in glyphs.
"Me."
The cube pulsed.
Everything tilted. Not the floor, not the walls. Perception. Plato fell to one knee, clutching his head. Lira screamed. The Third began to bleed from the second eye.
Images bled into the corridor: dozens of Nazes, looping through their final moments, folding in and out of static. A Naze hanging from wires. A Naze whispering to a hole in the sky. A Naze smiling with too many teeth.
A Naze being consumed by a black lattice that spoke in reverse.
In the chaos, Naze stepped forward, dropped the cube—and the world snapped.
---
White.
Just white.
Nothing else.
Plato woke first, lying on an endless white plane. No shadow. No sound. No edge.
He sat up slowly. The weight of his memories pressed into his skin like bruises.
Then he heard breathing.
He turned.
Naze sat cross-legged across from him, alone now. No shadows. No variants. Just the boy. His skin was pale, like photocopied paper. His eyes shimmered with unread languages.
"This is what's left," Naze said. "Where they go when they die."
"Who?"
"The versions. The failures. The might-have-beens."
He gestured to the whiteness around them. In the distance, Plato could barely make out shapes. Faint outlines. Human forms, still and silent. Like memories shelved for later.
Plato approached cautiously. "Are you dead?"
Naze shook his head. "I'm choosing."
Plato looked around. "This place—it doesn't follow normal entropy."
"No. It remembers too much. That's why it's empty."
A pause.
"You should go back before the others notice."
"Others?"
Naze didn't answer. He smiled. Sadly. Then handed Plato the cube.
"When you hear yourself screaming, don't answer."
Plato blinked.
"Wait—"
---
He gasped.
Back in the corridor. Lira hunched beside him. The Third unconscious. No Naze. No cube.
But his hand was clenched around something cold.
A note.
> You are not where you think you are. But you're closer than you should be.
He sat up, still reeling from the dissonance. Around him, the corridor seemed longer now, as if they'd traveled a fraction deeper into something vast.
Lira looked at him, brow furrowed. "You were gone for ten seconds."
"Felt like hours," he replied.
She gestured at the ground. There was a faint imprint where Naze had stood. Burned in.
Plato opened his palm. No cube. No glyphs. But the sensation lingered.
The Third stirred. His eyes fluttered open. One eye normal. The other blank. Not blind, but holding something behind it.
He whispered a name. Not his own.
Plato turned toward the corridor's far end. The hallway had shifted again. It now split into three distinct passages. All led downward.
Lira rose to her feet, brushing dust off her coat. "Where to now?"
Plato stared at each path.
One smelled of ash. One of ocean. One of ozone.
"None of them are real," he said.
"Does that matter?"
He folded the note and tucked it into his pocket. Then pointed to the middle path.
"It matters enough. That one bleeds less."
Together, they stepped forward, into the path where memory had yet to dry.