The Corridor of Almost.

That was the name I'd given to this space that was slowly beginning to solidify - if you could call it that.

It didn't have any right angles. The walls, if you could call them that, were made of a faintly glowing, hazy nothingness that stretched into the distance, like a blueprint for a world that hadn't finished rendering. The floor was the same. Just a quiet, endless void.

But as we walked through the corridor, blurry doors and frames began to appear and float. Pockmarks of reality in the infinite haze of almost. Each one was different. Some were ornate, others were simple. Some were covered in peeling paint, while others were new and fresh.

They were all waiting.

Not in a creepy, horror-movie way. More like tabs in a browser I didn't remember opening. Each door had its own weird, unique gravity. Some tugged at my chest like old lullaby. Others just sat there, faint and hollow, barely real.

Mayari walked a half-step ahead of us, hands loose at her sides, eyes half-lidded as if she were listening to something under the silence.

Sonata stayed close enough that her shoulder brushed mine whenever I drifted. Her aura moved in quiet pulses, little ripples of pink-gold in the fog. She kept looking at the doors like she could hear them humming.

Then, we passed one that felt like a punch to the ribs. Sharp, metallic, New York sirens in the distance.

Mayari's head turned that way for a fraction of a second, then deliberately away.

"Not that one," she said softly. "Too loud. Far too loud."

"Great," I muttered. "Gotta love the ones that qualify as loud in your personal catalog of horrors."

We walked a little further.

Another door drifted by, warped and rusted, with peeling stickers I almost recognized. My stomach clenched, but the feeling slid off before I could grab it. Like trying to remember a dream after waking up.

Then we came up on this one.

Plain metal. Dented. The sort of door you'd see on the side of an old city building. It was a service entrance, maybe. A faded spray of white paint across the middle that might once have been a tag.

The air in front of it smelled faintly of hot concrete and exhaust.

My feet stopped moving.

"Something catch your eye?" Sonata asked, very quietly.

I stared at the door. My throat had gone dry. The half-formed sensation in my chest wasn't the full-on panic spike of New York. It was smaller. Closer. A bruise you'd forgotten about until someone poked it.

"I'd…" My voice came out hoarse. I swallowed and tried again. "I'd almost forgotten this."

Mayari's gaze slid to me. For a second, the analyst vanished and something almost gentle took its place.

"You didn't," she said. "Your nerves remembered for you."

Sonata's fingers twitched at her sides. She looked at the door, then at me, her expression tightening.

"Thoughts?" she asked Mayari.

"Sharp," Mayari said. "But not a core fracture. A… hairline crack."

"Comforting," I muttered.

Sonata stepped forward until she stood right in front of the door. Her hand hovered a few centimeters away from the metal, not quite touching.

Her magic reached out before she did—thin, searching waves of soundless music. The door shivered.

"It's stable," Sonata murmured. "For now. No external pressure on this one. The ugly thing outside doesn't seem to have found it. Might even say it likes it."

"Of course it does," I said. "Trauma, but make it manageable. Very on brand."

She glanced back at me, something complicated flickering through her eyes.

"I'll keep it shallow," she said. "If it spikes, we pull out. All right?"

My palms were sweating. My heart already knew what was on the other side, even if my mind didn't have the file name anymore.

"Yeah," I said. "Sure. Let's… look."

Sonata's fingers closed around the handle.

The metal was warm enough that even from where I stood, I could feel it.

The door swung inward.

The heat hit me first.

The kind that rose in shimmering waves off sun-scorched concrete. The smell of old smoke and fresh oil. A distant chorus of bird calls.

Vision snapped into place like someone hitting play on a paused video.

We stood in the middle of a street in downtown Philadelphia.

Or what was left of it.

Half the buildings were newer. Terran 'American' composites, smooth and utilitarian, stubbornly clean. The other half were wounded survivors of the old world, brick and glass patched with metal braces and shimmering barrier fields. Some floors were missing. Others wore scars where chaos beast claws or artillery had gouged out chunks of history. The iconic LOVE sign that once dominated the park was missing most of the O and the entire L, leaving a jagged 'V E' in its place.

People moved through it all, threading between vendor stalls bolted to the sides of armored trucks. Food. Salvaged tech. Bottles of filtered water labeled with six different safety certifications.

It was busy, noisy, alive.

And there, halfway down the block, was… me.

Smaller. Skinnier. Wearing a hand-me-down hoodie and a backpack whose straps had been repaired three times. Ten, maybe eleven. Head bowed over a beat-up tablet, lips moving silently as my eyes flicked across densely packed text.

I knew that e-book. Introductory Signals and Systems. The one I'd pirated from a university archive and the solutions PDF half-memorized before I was twelve.

The air in front of it smelled faintly of hot concrete and exhaust.

My feet stopped moving.

"Something?" Sonata asked, very quietly.

I stared at the door. My throat had gone dry. The half-formed sensation in my chest wasn't the full-on panic spike of New York. It was smaller. Closer. A bruise you'd forgotten about until someone poked it.

"I'd…" My voice came out hoarse. I swallowed and tried again. "I'd almost forgotten this."

Beside him. Beside me - was Izumi.

Right around eight years old. Hair pulled back in a messy knot that already had strands breaking free. Hoodie sleeves pushed up. Knees on her jeans scuffed. She bounced more than walked, every few steps turning into a half-hop as she tried to see over the crowd.

"Whoa... look, look!" memory-Izumi crowed, pointing.

Her hand slipped out of memory-me's without resistance.

My younger self made a distracted noise that could technically be interpreted as acknowledgment, eyes never leaving the screen.

She darted toward a stall built out of half a shipping container and three sheets of mismatched metal. Someone had bolted an old truck grille to the front to serve as a counter.

Suspended from hooks and wires were bits of Terran mech scrap, exosuit parts, and drone guts: scraped-up knee plates, cracked visor helmets, servo joints with frayed cabling, a dented quadcopter frame held together by zip ties and optimism.

Of course she went straight for the weapons-adjacent trash heap.

My chest tightened.

"I remember that stall," I muttered. "He used to sell 'guaranteed authentic battlefield salvage' for like three times what it was worth."

Mayari didn't answer, but I felt her attention clock the vendor, the layout, the angles of the surrounding buildings. Looked like habit.

Sonata's eyes were on Izumi.

The kid planted her hands on the counter and leaned in like the whole universe had narrowed to a single object on the table: a battered drone controller, screen spiderwebbed, one thumbstick missing.

"How much is this?" she asked, wide-eyed.

The vendor - a thin Caucasian man in a patched-up vest, graying hair shaved close on the sides - chuckled.

"For you? Too much," he said. "That thing's junk anyway."

"We can fix it," Izumi declared immediately. "My dad's a mechanic. He taught us. And my brother—"

She turned to point at me.

I wasn't there.

I watched her face hitch, just a fraction, when she realized she was pointing at empty air. The vendor was already busy with another customer, having dismissed her entirely.

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Her little shoulders squared. Her lips thinned.

Then her gaze dropped to her wrist, to the spot where she'd been holding my sleeve.

She looked up and down the street, scanning the crowd. She wasn't panicked yet. More annoyed. A tiny firecracker of frustration fizzing in her chest.

Up the street, memory-me finally registered that her presence was gone.

He stopped walking.

The tablet hovered halfway between one step and the next. His eyebrows pinched; he looked down, then up, scanning the crowd.

"Izumi?" he called, voice still casual. "Sis?"

No answer.

The word folded back into the noise of the street: barter haggling, engine hum, the distant thrum of a patrol drone overhead.

He turned in a slow circle.

From where I stood, watching, it was obvious where she'd gone. A straight line. Even smaller, she'd always moved like a launched firework.

But eleven-year-old me was shorter than most of the adults around him. Faces and shoulders blurred into a wall. The stalls that had seemed spread out from above now crowded tight as a maze.

The memory tightened around that note in his voice.

The air shifted.

It was subtle at first. A prickle at the nape of my neck, a heaviness in the heat. The ongoing murmur of the crowd faltered, a few heads turning toward the end of the street.

Then the siren went off.

Not the screaming, nails-on-glass shriek from my New York nightmares. This one was lower, a warbling, throat-deep tone that rolled over the street in pulses. Somewhere overhead, a loudspeaker crackled.

"Minor spatial turbulence detected. Citizens, remain calm. Stay clear of open intersections and remain within the market's boundaries. This is a precautionary advisory only."

"Sure," I muttered. "Precautionary. They always said that right before the newsfeeds cut out."

Memory-me jerked like he'd been slapped.

The tablet slipped from his grasp. He fumbled it, caught it again, barely. His head snapped toward the sound, then back to the empty space where his sister should've been.

"Zuzu!" he yelled now, panic cracking through. "Where are you!?"

He plunged into the nearest gap between bodies, shoving past a pair of adults who swore at him. His too-big hoodie snagged on someone's bag; he tore it free, not looking back.

The ground gave a low, teeth-rattling rumble.

Bits of gravel skittered across the asphalt. A loose sign clanged against its bracket. Somewhere, a baby started to wail.

Steel reinforcement creaked as the tremor worked through them. Dust puffed out from a web of old cracks. One of the makeshift balconies -an oversize scaffold welded onto the side of the building - shuddered as crates of scrap metal stacked on top shifted.

My heart climbed into my throat.

The crates lurched.

For a split second they hung on the brink. Terrible physics and worse construction fighting gravity.

Then one slid.

It slammed into the building's exterior hard enough to knock a rusted support free. The whole stack tilted. The top crate toppled over the edge.

Down.

Right toward the salvaged-tech stall.

Right toward Izumi.

Time fuzzed around the edges.

The vendor saw it first.

"Kid!" he shouted, lunging across the counter.

Izumi looked up.

Her eyes went huge as the shadow fell over her.

Sonata made a sound I'd never heard from her before. A choked, furious intake of breath. Her hand shot up like she was about to throw a barrier or a blast.

Her palm smacked uselessly into the invisible divide of the memory. Gold light sparked and disappeared, and went nowhere.

She froze, fingers splayed, staring at the girl below like sheer will could become a shield.

The crate hit.

It didn't crush her.

The vendor's tackle didn't make it in time; he only managed to knock the controller out of her hands. What saved her was something far stupider.

The stall was cheap. Half the supports were welded at bad angles. When the crate smashed into the top edge, the whole counter assembly collapsed inward like a kicked card table.

Metal shrieked.

Izumi vanished under a rain of junk and tarp.

Memory-me was still shoving through bodies, and suddenly there was nothing between him and the scene. The crowd had recoiled from the impact, leaving a clear path that was somehow worse than any obstacle.

"Izumi!" he screamed.

My own throat echoed with the remembered rawness of it.

Dust blossomed in the air, turning the sunlight into a dirty haze. Bits of metal and plastic clattered across the street. Someone yelled orders about containment protocols. Somewhere, deeper in the city, something boomed, like a far-off drum.

"Boundary flare," Mayari said quietly. She hadn't moved. Her eyes were tracking something above the buildings, far beyond the scope of the memory we could see. "Low-level. The negentropy barriers had it under control."

"Tell that to him," I said.

My younger self reached the wrecked stall and nearly ate pavement as his foot hit a fallen beam. He stumbled, caught himself on the twisted edge of the counter, and looked down.

The exosuit parts were scattered. A helmet rolled in a lazy circle, visor cracked. The drone controller lay smashed, screen in shards - and for a heartbeat, the empty space beside it might as well have been a body outline.

I watched eleven-year-old me go white.

His knees wobbled. His hand, the one still clutching the tablet, spasmed. The device tumbled out of his grasp and hit the ground, bouncing once before skidding away, screen cracking diagonally.

He didn't notice.

"Izumi?" he whispered. "Zuzu?"

The vendor coughed, shoving himself up from where he'd hit the ground behind the stall.

"Kid... kid!" he wheezed, shoving scrap aside. "Don't just stand there, help me shift this—"

Something under the jumble of metal made a strained noise.

"I am helping!" Izumi snapped, voice muffled but angry and very much alive. "It's freaking heavy!"

Relief hit so hard my eyes stung, and I was just the observer.

Memory-me made a tiny, broken sound and threw himself into the pile.

He grabbed a warped panel with both hands and yanked. For a skinny kid, he put his whole body into it. The vendor added his weight; together they heaved the makeshift roof up enough for a small figure to wriggle out.

Izumi scraped her way free on her elbows, knees and knuckles raw, hoodie smeared with grime. A trickle of blood ran down from a cut at her hairline. There was a new rip on one sleeve.

And I noticed something I'd been too distraught to pay attention to all the way back then.

Her locket glowed faintly, a reddish pulse tinged with orange visible through her grimy fingers as she clutched it at her chest.

She blinked in the dusty light.

Then memory-me hit her.

Not literally. He slammed into her with a hug hard enough to knock both of them back onto their butts.

"What were you thinking?" he choked out. "You can't— you can't just run off like that. You—you. What if Dad—"

Words tangled up in his throat, tripping over each other. His hands clutched at her shoulders like he expected her to dissolve if he loosened his grip.

"I was fine," Izumi protested automatically, voice wobbling. "It was just— just a crate and the stall and it was stupid, okay? Don't make that face."

Her own face crumpled when she got a good look at his.

Her hands came up and grabbed his hoodie in return, fingers twisting in the fabric.

"I'm okay," she said, fierce and shaky. "See? I'm not squished. You're so weird."

"You could've been," he said.

His voice dropped.

"You could've been."

He pulled her closer, burying his face in the crook of her neck. For a second, the bustling street fell away for him. There was only that small, trembling circle of dust and scraped knees and a promise he'd already made once without remembering.

"I'm supposed to watch you," he muttered. "That's my job. I—"

He stopped himself, swallowing hard.

Izumi's fingers fisted tighter in his hoodie.

"Then watch better, dummy," she said into his shoulder.

There was no heat in it. Just hidden terror with nowhere to go.

The memory hung there, saturated.

My chest hurt. My eyes were stinging in a way that had nothing to do with phosphor afterimages.

"I'd almost forgotten this," I repeated, softer. It felt less like a sentence and more like an apology. "It wasn't that long ago, too."

Beside me, Mayari inclined her head.

"You suppressed details," she said. "The body rarely does."

Sonata was watching the scene with a careful distance, but even she wasn't immune. Her fingers had curled in at her sides, nails pressing faint crescents into her palms.

"She's just a baby," she whispered. "They both are."

I snorted, a shaky, humorless thing.

"Don't let Izumi hear you say that," I said. "She'll challenge you to a pull-up contest and then complain your costume's not practical enough."

A corner of Sonata's mouth twitched, but her gaze didn't leave the huddled pair in the dust.

"How could you forget something like this? It feels... important. More than the other parts."

"It's not that I forgot," I said, trying to put the shape of it into words. "It's just… a small cut in a sea of them. You learn to stop cataloging them If you counted every scrape, every close call, you'd spend your whole life inventorying your own ghosts. You'd never get out of bed."

"Was this what it was like growing up there?"

She was asking about Earth. About my life.

I thought of the salvaged-tech stall, the warbling siren, the phantom ache of a phantom bruise on my back where I'd fallen trying to pull her out.

And then, I looked at the memory again. At the way my younger self held her. At the way she held him right back.

"We kept each other alive," I said. "Dad, her, me. Dad's friends, their friends, our neighbors. That was the job. The only one that mattered."

Izumi, in the memory, finally pushed herself back enough to inspect her scraped knees with a critical frown.

"This sucks," she grumbled. "Dad's gonna freak."

"Dad can freak at me," memory-me said immediately.

Izumi blinked at him. Then she rolled her eyes.

"You're such an idiot. A total, complete dumbass," she said fondly.

The edges of the scene began to feather.

Dust turned to static in the corners. The shouts and vendors' calls muffled, like someone slowly turning a volume knob down. The siren, still droning faintly in the background, stretched into a thin, warbling tone and then snapped off.

The Philly street froze. Dust motes hung suspended mid-air. A gull, mid-flap in the background, became a still frame.

Izumi and my younger self stayed softest around the edges, like the construct was reluctant to let them go.

Sonata let her hand drop.

She looked like she wanted to kick something.

"Something about this memory makes me... angry," she said. The admission was raw. "I see the way the crowd barely looked. I hear the sirens telling everyone to remain calm. You see this as normal. This... everydayness of terror. It's no different when things get bad here, but the..."

Her eyes narrowed as she tried to find the word.

"The intimacy of it," she said finally. "It's just. So personal."

Mayari's gaze softened. She turned away from the memory, her attention fully on me.

"Because you were there," she said, answering me as much as Sonata. "That is the secret of the Gossamer. It doesn't care about grand history. It doesn't care about battles or saviors. It cares about the scars."

She pointed a finger at the fading image of my younger self holding my sister.

"That is an anchor point," she said. "Not because it was traumatic. Not because it was loud. But because it was real. It was the shape of your love for her. A promise you made without words: I will protect you."

Her eyes met mine for a second.

Something in her expression eased. Just a little.

My eyes landed on Izumi's necklace. It was brand new, at the time, as far as I could remember. A gift from our father. The same one I still had, tucked away somewhere.

The faint glow I'd noticed before was still there. A faint reddish pulse barely visible through her grimy fingers as she clutched it. It wasn't uniform, but irregular, like a flickering flame.

I'd always assumed it was just a trick of the light that day. A reflection off the polished silver.

A thought, sharp and cold, pierced the warm haze of the memory.

I pointed. "I never brought that up again."

Sonata looked at me, then at the faint pulse around the necklace. "That glow? I thought it was just... I don't know, an artifact in the memory. Something weird in the encoding. The way the afternoon sun reflects off the buildings..."

Mayari leaned closer, her analytical focus sharpening. The softness was gone, replaced by the field surgeon. "No," she said quietly. "It's not a memory artifact."

She turned her full attention to me. The intensity made my skin prickle.

"This is important, Ikki," she said. "Think. Did you see that glow at the time? In the real moment?"

I looked back at the image of my little sister, her face smudged with dirt, a trickle of blood on her forehead, her hand clutching the simple silver locket. The reddish-orange pulse was so obvious now. How had I missed it? How had eleven-year-old me missed it?

The world flickered.

The memory-image of me and Izumi distorted, her face smearing like wet paint.

"I... I can't be too sure," I said, my throat tight. "It was chaos. I was... scared out of my mind. I might have."

"No," Mayari said, her tone leaving no room for argument. "You didn't. Because if you had, the memory wouldn't have had to hide it. It would have been part of the event. The Gossamer Echo is showing you what you remember. But the glow isn't part of what you remember. It's an annotation. A footnote." She paused. "A warning."

My head throbbed. A warning of what? That my sister's locket was... weird? That was the least weird thing in my life at this point.

Sonata stepped closer, her gaze fixed on the fading light of the memory. "So you're saying something about this locket... was important enough for the Gossamer to flag it after the fact? To hide it in plain sight?" Her aura, a soft pink-gold, flared with curiosity and a hint of alarm. "But why would it hide it?"

"Because it's an external variable," Mayari replied, her gaze unwavering on me.

My mind raced. External variable. An anomaly. The locket had been a gift from Dad. He said it was a keepsake. That was all. He wasn't one for sentiment, not when sentiment got in the way of practicality.

He'd given it to Izumi for her eighth birthday. She hadn't taken it off since.

As suddenly as it'd come into existence, the frozen scene peeled back like a hologram being shut down. Light stripped away, colors draining to grayscale, then to faint outlines, then to nothing at all.

Heat faded. Smell of exhaust and hot concrete dissolved into the neutral emptiness of the Corridor.

In a blink, we were once again facing a plain metal door hanging in hazy almost-space.

My heart was still pounding like I'd sprinted the length of the street.

Sonata flexed her fingers, as if shaking off phantom impact.

"That wasn't the worst you've got," she said, very quietly. "Was it?"

The back of my neck prickled.

"No," I said.

I didn't look at the door that had felt like New York. I didn't need to.

"We're not touching that one," Mayari said. "Not unless we have to."

"Agree," Sonata said immediately.

They glanced at each other, a rare, perfect accord.

Somehow, that helped.

"Okay," I said, rolling my shoulders out, as if I could physically shrug the memory off. "One near-disaster down. Let's… not collect the whole set today."

The Corridor of Almost stretched ahead, dotted with doors. Some pulsed faintly. Some waited in perfect stillness.

Behind my ribs, the old promise to a scraped-up tomboy in a dusty street thrummed like a live wire.

"Whatever was important about that memory, we can't figure it out from out here," I said. "Let's keep moving. See what else this palace of mine has to offer."

Sonata shot me a look I couldn't read—a mix of worry and something like… respect? It was gone in a second.

"Right," she said, falling into step beside me. "The next... exhibit."

Mayari drifted up on my other side, a silent, watchful shadow.

We walked.

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