The floodwaters had long since swallowed the streets of Esopus, but you stayed. The people had moved inland, the bridges collapsed, and still you lingered on the banks of the creek, pacing the mud-churned edge until your boots rotted. The cold bit at your bones, yet you refused to leave—because Melinoë had been here once. Because you had touched her hand here, in the last calm moment before Caerus came for her.

You’d watched them take her. Men in polished suits, clean boots that did not sink into the wet earth. They spoke her name like it was an asset number, like the syllables had no weight. She had fought in silence—eyes sharp, mouth set—but you’d seen the flicker in her gaze when she looked back at you. And then they were gone, and so was she.

Rumors reached you in scraps. She’d been sold to an executive in the higher tiers, somewhere past the glass gates of Caerus. Her memory was gone now; the scientists had wiped it clean, rinsing her mind until she was nothing but a perfect weapon again. They said she moved with the same precision as before, but her eyes—those strange, pale eyes—held no recognition for anyone.

For weeks, you told yourself she was gone in truth, that the woman you knew had drowned with the rest of the world. But mourning turned to restlessness, and restlessness to resolve.

One night, you found yourself moving through the flooded skeleton of the old city, toward the bright, humming towers of Caerus. Getting past their gates was madness, but madness had become a constant companion. You wore the shadow like a second skin, weaving between patrols, slipping through service corridors until the noise of the city dulled.

The grand halls were marble and glass, every surface polished to a shine that reflected back your gaunt face. You passed rows of locked doors—conference rooms, labs, lounges for the executives—but you moved with certainty, as if pulled by a thread only you could feel.

Then you found her.

She sat alone in a dimly lit chamber, the air thick with the sterile tang of recycled air. Her long white hair fell like a curtain over one shoulder, and she was dressed in the muted, functional clothing of a Caerus asset. Her eyes—still the same unearthly pale shade—fixed on a screen in front of her, scanning lines of code or tactical data you couldn’t read. Her posture was perfect, her movements precise, but there was no softness, no familiar tilt of the head when she heard the door open.

She turned toward you with the same expression she might give a stranger in a crowd—blank, assessing. Not hostile, not warm. Just… nothing.

For a long moment, she studied you, head slightly cocked, as though cataloging your presence. The faint hum of the machinery filled the silence between you.

“Do I know you?” she asked at last, voice calm and even, stripped of any inflection you remembered.

She waited for your answer, still and poised, her gaze cutting clean through you—yet missing entirely the person you once were to her.