Had I Known
Regret is the one memory that cannot be erased
Ren had one friend at the Archive, a technician named Mira Sol.
If he had known what his would cost her, he would have stayed silent.
But fear, when carried alone, grows heavier, and one evening he told Mira everything.
She listened without flinching, then said the words he would replay for months afterward.
"If they buried a whole city," she whispered, "they can bury two technicians too."
Mira, braver than sense allowed, began quietly searching for records of Cael Doran.
Had she asked permission, the system would have flagged her, so she asked no one.
For three nights she stayed late, mapping deleted files that should never have existed.
"I wish I had started this years ago," she told Ren, her eyes bright with .
On the fourth night, she messaged him a single line: "Doran is alive. Meet me."
Ren arrived at their usual cafe, but Mira never came, and her chair stayed empty.
Her phone was dead, her flat was locked, and the Archive listed her as "on leave."
Had Ren known she was so close, he would have begged her to wait for him.
Instead she had gone alone, and now the city had simply folded her away.
"I wish I had never told her," he thought, though the wish could change nothing.
If he had kept the capsule hidden, Mira would still be laughing at their cafe table.
, he learned, is a memory that refuses every command to be erased.
He searched her desk and found one note, slipped beneath the drawer's false bottom.
"If anything happens," it read, "the truth is in the wing, level nine."
Ren had never been granted access to level nine, which officially stored only broken equipment.
Had the wing truly held only machines, they would not have guarded it so heavily.
He understood, too late, that Mira had traded her freedom for that single address.
"Had I refused to look," he murmured, "she would be safe, and I would be blind."
But blindness, he now believed, was simply another word people used for comfortable forgetting.
That night Ren forged a maintenance pass and walked, , toward the ninth level.
Whatever waited there, he owed it to Mira not to turn away again.