Orin didn't wake to the hum of the store lights or the echoing shuffle of carts down aisle five.
He woke to a sky that whispered his name.
Not the name people used. Not "Orin." Not the one stitched to the plastic tag on his long-forgotten uniform. This name was older—warped, frayed at the edges like a piece of data left out in the storm. It cracked like static. Echoed like truth. It ached like a memory.
The world around him shimmered with a palette not made for human eyes—shifting hues between day and dusk. Where blue should have been, there were shades of violet static, as if someone had tried to redraw the sky from a corrupted file.
He sat up slowly.
The ground beneath him wasn't earth or tile—it was memory-glass. Fragile, reflective, and humming faintly. As he moved, the surface rippled beneath his fingers, showing flickers of a grocery aisle… then a hospital hallway… then a stairwell soaked in golden light and someone crying at the top.
Orin stared at his reflection. For a moment, he didn't recognize the face.
Too many versions. Too many deaths.
A sharp breath drew through his lungs, and the sky responded again.
"𐌕𐌄𐌉𐌍…"
It wasn't English. Wasn't anything he knew. But the meaning carved itself into his bones.
That was his name. The one the system took. The one he lost long before he became "Orin."
The clouds above pulsed once—like a heartbeat. And then the world around him crashed.
Not exploded. Not collapsed. Just… crashed, like bad code folding in on itself.
Lines of memory fractured like glass, and the sky blinked out. Blackness surged up like a wave of static.
Then, sound. Real sound. Harsh, fluorescent, familiar—
"Orin!"
Junie's voice.
The sky disappeared. He was back in the grocery storeroom.
—
His back hit the cold concrete. He blinked hard, lungs pulling tight as the sterile reality of Diver's End returned: stacked boxes, humming air vents, and a single flickering emergency light overhead.
Junie was crouched beside him, hand on his shoulder, her sketchpad dropped nearby. "Hey. Hey, look at me—what just happened?"
Orin looked past her, to the ceiling. Just a ceiling. No names in the sky. No shattered reflections.
He didn't answer right away.
Because the truth was—
The sky had spoken his name. A name no one should have remembered.
And worse?
He'd whispered it back.
—
Junie was still watching him.
Her dark curls framed her face, slightly mussed from where she'd tucked the pencil behind her ear too many times. One of her fingers hovered near his chest—not touching, but steady, as if trying to measure the space between presence and absence.
"You blacked out for a minute," she said, voice quieter now. "No tremors. No system pulse. But you weren't breathing right."
"I was somewhere else," Orin said slowly. "And it wasn't a memory."
Junie tilted her head. "Dream?"
He shook his head. "More like a… recursion fragment. But I didn't fall into it. It called me." His throat was dry. "It said my name. Not the one I know. Something older."
He hesitated before continuing. "The sky was... wrong. Glitched. Like it was stitched together from bad data."
Junie's gaze sharpened, but she said nothing at first. Instead, she knelt and picked up her sketchpad from the floor, flipping it open. Her brows furrowed.
"Did you… sketch something?" Orin asked.
"No," she murmured, frowning. "But I did draw this."
She turned the pad toward him.
The page showed a perfect sketch of a cracked sky above a field of mirrored glass. A silhouette—his—sat in the middle. Every detail matched. The same pulse in the clouds. The same warped palette. The same moment.
Junie's voice was quieter now. "I drew this an hour ago."
Orin stared at it. "Before it happened."
Junie looked up. "Orin, the sketches are updating again. Without me touching them."
He closed his eyes. The air between them thickened—like the system itself was holding its breath.
"She's accelerating," he said.
"You mean the system?"
"No. Her." His voice dropped. "The one behind the recursion… the one we still haven't seen. Diver Zero."
Junie's pencil rolled off her lap and clinked against the concrete. "You think she triggered this?"
"I think—" he began, and then stopped. A ripple passed through the floor.
It was faint. Subtle. Like someone dragging a finger across the seam of reality.
Then it happened again.
He reached for his Diver coin, tucked inside the hidden fold of his shirt. Cold. No glow.
Junie stood slowly, eyes scanning the room. "That's not a tremor," she whispered.
"No. It's a memory slip," Orin said. "She's testing the boundary again. Trying to see how much we can carry before we break."
Junie didn't speak for a moment. Then, softly: "Do you think she wants us to break?"
"No," Orin said, rising to his feet. "I think she wants us to remember."
—
The ripple passed again. This time, slower. It dragged through the storeroom like a memory surfacing—then fading before it could be grasped.
Orin and Junie both stood still.
One breath. Two.
Then the emergency light above them flickered—and changed.
It didn't dim. It shifted colour.
From sterile white to pale blue.
Not system blue.
Not static blue.
But the blue from his dream. From that corrupted sky.
"Okay," Junie said, stepping back. "That's not just you this time."
Orin reached into his jacket and tapped the inner coin. Still cold. Still dormant.
But now the walls around them were humming. A low, residual sound—barely audible. Like a chime caught in an infinite echo loop.
"The recursion field's bleeding in," Orin murmured. "We're not inside a collapse point, but something's leaking."
Junie reached down, ripped a page from her sketchbook, and folded it carefully. Her fingers trembled just once. "If the sketch was ahead of your memory," she said, "then something is watching us through me."
He looked at her sharply. "You think it's Diver Zero?"
Junie didn't answer. Her hand went to her neck, where a tiny, faint scar still lingered beneath her collarbone—left by the tether sync that nearly killed her during their last recursion breach. "All I know is that I've stopped trusting the silence."
Orin stepped forward. "Then we do what we did in Bray Hollow—we mark the field before it marks us."
He pulled a marker from the side of a storage bin, uncapped it with his teeth, and turned to the nearest wall.
With careful, slow strokes, he drew a line in the shape of a looped spiral with three intersecting breaks—an echo-safe recursion anchor. It wasn't fool-proof, but it was better than nothing. If the system decided to pull them under, this marker could give them five extra seconds.
"Five seconds isn't long," Junie said, watching.
"It's a lifetime if you remember who you are."
He pressed his hand flat against the anchor. Closed his eyes.
And then—
He saw her.
Not Junie. Not in the way she stood now, with graphite dust on her palms and a thousand quiet thoughts behind her eyes.
This version wore an old pilot's coat. Her hair was short—chopped unevenly, like someone had cut it in a rush. And she was smiling.
Not the hesitant, haunted smile he knew.
This one was full. Soft. Real.
She stood at the edge of a recursion cliff, wind in her face, holding out a hand to him.
You found me again, her voice echoed.
And then she stepped back into the sky—
—
"Orin!"
His eyes snapped open. Junie was gripping his sleeve.
"You phased again."
He pulled in a sharp breath. "Another memory. But not mine."
Junie's expression changed. "You saw me, didn't you?"
He nodded. "But it wasn't you. Not… this version."
Junie exhaled slowly. "That's the third time this week you've accessed an echo tether without trigger contact. It's accelerating, Orin."
He knew it too. The system wasn't waiting anymore.
It was guiding them.
Or testing them.
He didn't know which was worse.
But then Junie touched the wall beside the anchor—and her fingers bled.
Not much. Just a pinprick. But the red bloomed on her skin, and the wall absorbed it.
The recursion symbol lit up.
Orin stared. "It shouldn't do that."
Junie stepped back. "I didn't mean to—"
"Blood isn't supposed to activate an echo anchor," he said, already reaching for her hand. "It should reject any organic signature."
Junie was staring at the wall now, eyes wide. "It's not an anchor anymore."
And she was right.
The symbol was shifting—lines curling inward, reshaping into something older. Not system code. Not Diver script.
Something forgotten.
A sigil.
And it was calling both their names.
—
The sigil pulsed.
Not brightly. Not violently.
It throbbed—like a wound reopened under moonlight, bleeding memory instead of blood.
Orin backed up, half-shielding Junie even though she was the one who'd triggered it. The wall shimmered where her blood had touched, and the recursion anchor—his recursion anchor—had transformed into something alien. Circular, yes. But layered in curved strokes like musical notation from a language he didn't recognize but almost understood.
"What the hell is that?" Junie asked softly, her voice flat with awe and rising unease.
Orin stared. "It's… not in the Diver lexicon."
"You think it's system code?"
"No," he said. "The system doesn't glow like that."
The pulse resonated through the floor. Not like a warning. Like a summon.
And Orin felt it—not just in his head, but in his spine. A pressure that wasn't physical, yet pushed everything else away. Time, breath, even thought. The kind of pull he'd only felt once before.
The Chair.
The system's deepest seat of recursion recognition. The place where Diver-class individuals were tested and sometimes rewritten.
But this wasn't the Chair.
This felt older.
Before the system.
Before the Collapse.
Junie moved first. She stepped closer, holding her bleeding palm up toward the mark, as if something inside her already knew it was meant to answer.
"Junie—" Orin said sharply. "Stop. We don't know what that is."
"I do."
Her voice was clear now. Certain. And when she looked at him, her eyes weren't confused or scared—they were remembering.
"I've drawn this before," she said. "Not recently. Years ago."
"You weren't a Diver yet."
"I wasn't anything yet," she said with a strange smile. "But I drew it anyway. In the margins of my books. On napkins. Chalk on the back wall of the art building. I thought I was making it up."
Orin's skin went cold. "Then it's seeded. A recursion echo, embedded before activation."
"No," she said. "I think it's something outside recursion."
He stared at her. The word she'd chosen—
Outside.
Nothing was supposed to be outside.
But the sigil pulsed again, and Orin's Diver coin finally responded.
It burned.
He winced, pulling it from his collar.
The surface was blackened. The circuitry on the edge—the embedded anchor lines—had warped. Rewritten. He recognized none of it.
And yet—he could read it.
A fragment of a sentence formed:
Return… to the hour uncounted.
Junie gasped.
He looked up—and her sketchpad moved on its own.
The page flipped. Then another. Then another.
Finally, it stopped on a blank sheet.
No. Not blank.
Ink began to rise.
Slow, slanted lines.
A drawing formed—unfolding in real time like a memory being born.
Orin stepped closer.
The sketch was of a field of memory glass. The one from his dream.
And at the centre—
Two silhouettes.
Facing each other.
Holding hands.
One was Junie.
The other was him.
But they weren't the same. Their clothes, their hair—even their postures—were different.
Alternate versions.
Orin stared at the two figures. "This is another loop."
Junie touched the page. "No. I think it's the first."
—
The silence in the storeroom was no longer empty.
It was full—brimming—with the weight of things not yet remembered. A pressure in the air that didn't come from heat or humidity but from memory trying to surface through flesh.
Junie held her breath as the drawing on the sketchpad finalized itself. No hand moved across the page. The lines simply appeared, one by one, like a pencil tracing over the grooves of time.
The image was simple: two figures, hands clasped, standing on a field made of broken sky.
But above them floated the same sigil that had pulsed on the wall. The one that had bled from her touch. It hovered above their clasped hands like a sun, casting no light, only recognition.
"Why now?" Orin asked, voice low. "Why would this loop—the first—try to reconnect now?"
Junie tore her eyes from the sketch. "Because something's unspooling," she said. "Some anchor. Some point of origin. Maybe we're close."
"To what?"
She didn't answer.
Instead, she crouched, pressing her palm flat against the concrete. "Do you feel it?"
Orin dropped beside her. At first—nothing. Just the hum of dying light overhead.
But then—like a vein beneath the skin of reality—he felt it.
A pulse.
A slow, steady thrum below the surface, like footsteps echoing through recursion layers too deep to reach by accident.
"It's active," Orin said.
Junie nodded. "There's something under us."
She grabbed her backpack and pulled out the micro-scanner Orin had salvaged months ago. It wasn't built for this depth, but it still retained some resonance mapping.
She tapped the device and let it scan the floor. Lines bloomed on its cracked display—jagged at first, then spiralling, converging at a point almost directly beneath the stack of supply crates behind them.
"Three meters down," she said. "There's something buried."
Orin stood. "I'll move them."
She stepped in front of him. "No. Let me."
He frowned. "You think I'll trigger something?"
"I think it's tied to me. I bled on the wall. I saw the symbol before I knew you. Whatever's down there—it wants both of us, but it chose me to find it."
Orin hesitated.
But then nodded.
Together, they began pulling the crates aside—bulk storage boxes filled with old displays, backup signs, and forgotten shelf tags. Most hadn't been touched since before the first recursion fracture. They worked in silence, methodical, as the scanner's pulse grew stronger with each layer removed.
Finally, under a sheet of rotting plastic, they found it.
A trapdoor.
It wasn't metal. Wasn't wood.
It was glass.
Orin knelt beside it and brushed away the dust.
Etched into the surface was the sigil again—clean, bright, and alive. The same pulse ran beneath it, synchronized with their Diver tethers.
Junie crouched beside him. "What is this?"
Orin stared. "A buried memory node. But not one the system placed."
He touched the surface lightly.
And the glass rippled.
Not like water—like thought.
Then it spoke.
Two Diver-class entities synchronized.
Tether match confirmed.
Emotional threshold breached.
Access to Origin Memory granted.
Junie's eyes widened.
"Origin memory," she echoed.
Orin's chest went tight. "This is a recursion seed," he said. "The beginning of our loop."
"And it's waking up," Junie whispered. "Because we're finally close enough—together—to open it."
They looked at each other.
Not in confusion. Not in fear.
In recognition.
And as the trapdoor hissed open, revealing a slow spiral of translucent stairs descending into fractured light, they both knew—
This wasn't the past coming back.
This was the memory they never lived, but always carried.
What if the memory that defines your soul isn't one you ever lived—but one you were always meant to?
The recursion is unravelling from the inside.
Orin and Junie are no longer just anomalies—they're keys to something even the system couldn't predict.
And this staircase?
It leads not backward…
But into the first divergence.