Memories. Without them, love gets lost, and so do we.

They took Rhett’s memories, turned him into a weapon, and now I’m the target. But I still remember, and I’ll do whatever it takes to bring him home.

We worked for Vireon Systems. A biotech conglomerate that promised the future. They spoke in headlines: curing degenerative disease, enhancing cognition, building the perfect human operating system. Behind the glass walls and polished mission statements, though, was something else entirely.

I was one of their senior neural architects. Recruited out of a the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)-funded research lab when I was twenty-six. I specialized in cognitive interface modeling and adaptive memory reconstruction, cutting-edge work that blurred the line between healing and control. My job was to design the blueprint for Vireon’s most ambitious program: direct memory manipulation.

At first, I believed we were saving lives, helping veterans, trauma survivors, patients trapped in neurodegenerative decline. But the deeper I got, the more I realized we weren’t restoring people.

We were rewriting them.

Rhett and I met in the classified division where security was tighter than most military installations. He was ex-Special Forces, hired by Vireon as a tactical systems advisor, but he had a mind for interface tech too. We worked side by side for months, building prototypes, arguing over ethical lines, falling in love in the shadows of servers and secrecy.

And then they took him.

Stripped his memories. Reprogrammed him. Turned all that training, mine and his, against the people who trusted us.

They made him into something unrecognizable.

And I helped them do it.

Now I’m a loose end. Rhett is their knife.

And they sent him to silence me.

The smell of metal and mold hits me first, sharp and sour, like blood left too long in the air.

I force the door shut behind me and flick on my flashlight. The beam cuts through the dark, revealing the ruin of what used to be one of Vireon’s underground beta testing labs. Concrete cracked from thermal damage. Ceiling tiles caved in. A long-dried blood smear leads into a hallway they never meant anyone to see again.

It’s been months since the facility was “cleared”, Vireon’s word for abandoning a project that got too close to exposure. When the test subjects started slipping out of their programming, the company pulled out overnight. They scrubbed the servers, black-bagged the staff, and left the rest to rot. Including the people.

But I knew this place. I helped design it. I knew it was too unstable for demolition crews to clear, too buried beneath the dead zones to track. Which made it the perfect place for what I needed to do.

I navigate the wreckage until I find Lab C, once a testing suite for deep sync prototypes. It’s mostly intact. Rusted out, but shielded. Contained. Still offline.

I drag a metal table out from the wall and lay the sync device on top. My hands tremble as I unpack the neural bridge nodes, re-check the calibration code, and force the cold drive to boot. It’s a stripped-down version of the original model, cobbled together from scavenged tech, old backups, and a black-market stabilizer Rhett and I swore we’d never use.

It’s crude. Unstable. And very, very illegal.

But if it works, if even a fraction of the neural signature I preserved can break through the layers Vireon rewrote, I might be able to pull Rhett’s memories from the void.

And if I can do that…

Maybe I can bring him back.

I close my eyes and breathe.

I wipe the sweat from my brow and triple-check the sync calibration. Once I link our neural pathways, I’ll only have seconds before his implant detects the breach. After that, either I break through… or I don’t walk out.

I tuck the injector pad into my belt and take one last look at the schematics on my tablet. The light flickers once, then dies.

Everything goes still.

Then I feel it.

Not a sound at first. Just presence.

Like the room itself tightens around me.

Footsteps. Heavy. Measured. Boots on tile.

My pulse kicks up.

He steps through the ruined doorway, framed by broken glass and shadows.

Rhett.

His silhouette is the same, broad shoulders, precise movement, that old scar beneath his jawline. But the man standing in front of me isn’t mine.

He’s dressed in black tactical armor, Vireon-issue. Weapon holstered. Knife drawn.

His eyes lock onto me. Silver. Blank. Wiped clean

“Calla Ardent,” he says, voice flat and cold. “You are in breach of facility lockdown protocol.”

I take a slow breath. “Rhett… it’s me.”

His expression doesn’t flicker.

“You are classified as a level-three internal threat. Surrender immediately.”

He takes a step forward. And then another.

The sync device is behind me, too far to reach without turning my back.

“Please,” I whisper, backing up slowly. “You don’t have to do this.”

But he’s already moving.

Fast.

The blade slashed toward me in a clean arc. I duck, barely. Sparks fly as it clips the steel shelf behind me.

“Rhett!” I shout.

He doesn’t stop.

A boot slams into my chest and throws me backward. I hit the floor hard, wind knocked out of me. He’s on me before I can breathe, knife raised, ready to finish it.

I roll. The blade stabs the ground beside my head.

“Rhett, please… look at me!”

No reaction. His face is blank, utterly detached.

I kick up, catch him in the ribs. He stumbles back. I scramble to my feet, gasping.

He comes again. Fast. Mechanical. Terrifying.

I grab a broken chair leg, swing wildly. It bounces off his armor like nothing.

He pins me to the wall. One hand crushing my throat. The knife presses against my jawline.

His eyes are empty.

“You are designated as a hostile threat to Vireon Systems,” he says, voice robotic. “Authorization: lethal force approved.”

My fingers shake. My lungs burn.

He pushes the knife harder. Just enough to draw blood.

I don’t want to die. Not like this. Not by him.

But I force myself to meet his eyes.

“I trust you,” I whisper.

For a second. Just a second, he hesitates.

The blade wavers.

He blinks. A crack ripples across his expression like something old and buried is trying to surface.

“I… know you,” he says, barely audible.

I don’t move. One wrong twitch and the knife could still end me. But I speak again, lower, steadier.

“You do,” I say, voice shaking. “You were mine. And I was yours. Until they took you.”

He twitches. Like something just glitched inside him.

His hand trembles against my throat.

“Subject 07A. Protocol error-” He cuts himself off. “-error. Target profile… conflicting.”

His grip slackens just enough. I seize the moment.

With everything I have left, I twist away from the wall, slam my elbow into his side, and grab the neural sync from the table.

He’s fast, but so am I.

The device snaps into place on my temple. I shove the second node against his neck.

“Don’t fight it,” I breathe.

The link activates.

His body jolts, stiffens. Lights flash. The sync whirs to life, scanning, matching neural patterns, pushing memories through locked circuits.

He screams.

So do I.

It’s like being hit by lightning.

Our minds collide. Memories flash.

_His hand in mine as we built our first neural bridge._

_Laughter over coffee in the lab at 2 a.m._

_A rooftop kiss in the pouring rain._

_The night he told me he was afraid of losing himself._

_The night they came and took him anyway._

Rhett gasps. He stumbles back, clutching his head.

I fall to my knees. My nose is bleeding.

The sync wasn’t meant for this much data. It’s burning us both.

He drops the knife.

He looks at me, really looks, and something fractures behind his eyes.

“Calla…?” His voice breaks.

I nod, tears streaking my cheeks. “You’re in there. I knew it.”

He takes a shaky step toward me. His hand lifts, not to strike, but to touch.

But then

His pupils dilate. His body seizes. The implants scream.“Memory integrity compromised. Executing failsafe protocol.”

“No,” I gasp.

I dive for the device, override the firewall, and reroute the fail-safe, straight through my own cognitive backup.

It fries the system.

I scream. It’s like a fire tearing through my mind.

I see his childhood. His mother’s laugh. Every dream he ever had, and then…

Darkness lingers like smoke behind my eyes.

I come to slowly, drifting up through layers of static and silence. My limbs are heavy. My head is full of echoes. Someone is saying my name over and over.

“Calla… Calla, please. Come back.”

Warm arms cradle me.

Familiar arms.

Rhett.

I blink. His face swims into view, tear-streaked, frantic, real.

“You’re here,” I whisper, though my voice is nothing more than air.

He pulls me closer, his hand trembling as it cups my cheek. “You did it,” he breathes. “You brought me back. I remember everything.”

I want to smile. I try.

But something feels wrong.

A fog curls at the edges of my mind.

“What’s my name?” I ask.

His expression flickers. Confused, but gentle. “Calla.”

I nod, once. “And yours?”

He answers without hesitation.

I close my eyes.

It should feel like coming home.

But it doesn’t.

He helps me sit up, slowly. We’re surrounded by scorched metal, sparks still hissing from the blown-out sync device. The facility is a tomb now.

Silent, hollow, dead.

I look at him, really look at him. And I know I saved him.

But in doing it, I lost pieces of myself.

Not all of them. Just… enough.

Memories drift in like dreams I can’t fully touch. His voice humming in the dark. The way he held my hand before every system launch. The way we said I love you without ever saying it.

But the exact words? The full picture?

Gone.

Still, I reach for him.

Because even if I can’t remember it all, I know how it felt.

He remembers us. That’s what matters. Even if I have to fall in love with him again from the beginning.

And I will.

Because love isn’t just memory. It’s choice.

Memories. Maybe they don’t bring us back. Maybe they’re what we become when we fight to hold on.

They turned the man I loved into a weapon.And when the weapon remembered me, we ran.

Now, weeks later, we’re hiding in the dark.

Recovering, rebuilding, and preparing to burn their empire down from the inside.

We sit in the hollowed-out safe house, nothing more than exposed concrete, flickering lantern light, and silence. Rhett sharpens a combat knife across a whetstone, not for defense, just to remember the weight of something in his hands that isn’t theirs.

He doesn’t speak, but I can feel it in him. Restlessness. Rage. The kind that settles in your blood and waits.

I finish soldering the last node on the signal jammer. It’ll mask our neural signatures for twelve hours, just long enough to get in, extract the others, and burn Vireon’s empire to the ground.

There are eight facilities. Two mapped. Six hidden. I have the coordinates. Pulled from the data I nearly died retrieving.

“I counted thirty-seven names in the archive,” I say. “That’s how many they erased.”

Rhett stops moving. The knife stills. “How many are still alive?”

I look up. “Three, including you.”

His jaw tightens. “Then we end it.”

I nod, sliding a black chip across the table. “We go in silent. No signals. No IDs. We take their system apart from the inside, and when we’re done, there won’t be a single trace of what they did.”

He picks up the chip. Turns it over in his hand. “And if they send more of me?”

I smile without warmth. “Then we show them what happens when their perfect weapon remembers who he is.”

They tried to erase us.

Now we’re inside their system, corrupting it from the core.

And we’re not coming back for mercy.

We’re coming to shut it all down.