The rain hadn't let up by the time Jonah dropped Mira off outside her apartment.
"Stay safe," he said, watching her through the open window. "And call me if anything else comes up."
"I will," she promised.
He drove off into the gray drizzle, leaving her standing on the sidewalk with a chill settling deep in her bones.
She hurried inside, locking the door behind her. The apartment felt colder than usual — or maybe it was just the weight of everything pressing down on her.
She walked straight to her desk, pulled out her laptop, and powered it on.
Daniel had texted her earlier: *Got something for you. Wait until you see this.*
Now, as the screen flickered to life, she opened his message again.
> "I decrypted more of the voicemail file. There's a hidden layer beneath the voice recording. I ran it through an audio spectrogram and found coordinates embedded in the signal. They point to an abandoned psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Portland. Thought you'd want to know… because guess what? You were treated there after the fire."
Mira's stomach tightened.
She clicked the attached file — a map with a blinking red dot.
Coordinates confirmed.
Location: **St. Vincent's Psychiatric Hospital**
Closed for over fifteen years.
And yes, she remembered it now — the sterile halls, the cold metal beds, the whispers in the hallways long after visiting hours.
She had blocked most of it out.
But somehow, Future Mira hadn't.
Her phone rang.
Daniel.
She answered on the second ring.
"You got my message?" he asked.
"I did," she said. "You're sure these are real?"
"Cross-checked them twice," he said. "They were buried under a noise filter in the original voicemail. Whoever sent this knew how to hide it."
Mira stared at the screen. "Why would someone send me coordinates from the future?"
"To lead you somewhere," Daniel said. "Or warn you."
She swallowed hard.
"What else is in the file?" she asked.
"There's more," he said. "Not much. Just fragments. But one line stood out."
"What line?"
He hesitated.
Then he read:
> "*ChronoSync Protocol Initiated. Subject 014: Memory Lock Engaged.*"
Silence stretched between them.
"ChronoSync?" she repeated slowly.
"No idea what it means," Daniel admitted. "But it's not in any database I can access. Feels like a code name."
Mira didn't answer right away.
Because for the first time since this started, something clicked.
A memory — faint, fragmented — surfaced in her mind.
White coats.
Needles.
A woman's voice: *"You'll forget this ever happened."*
ChronoSync.
It wasn't just a name.
It was a program.
One she might have been part of.
Without realizing it.
---
### 🔍
By midnight, Mira was pacing.
She had gone through every file, every note, every piece of evidence again.
ChronoSync.
Subject 014.
Memory Lock.
None of it made sense — and yet, none of it felt foreign either.
She sat back at her desk, rubbing her temples.
There was only one person who could help her make sense of this.
Evelyn Hart.
Her childhood therapist.
The woman who had helped her rebuild her life after the fire.
The same woman who might have erased parts of it.
Mira reached for her phone.
No hesitation this time.
She dialed Evelyn's number.
Three rings.
Then:
> "Mira."
The voice was calm. Measured. Not surprised.
"How did you know it was me?" Mira asked.
"You've called this number twelve times in the last three years," Evelyn said. "I always know when it's you."
Mira exhaled. "We need to talk."
"I assumed we would."
"About ChronoSync."
There was a pause.
Then Evelyn said, "Where are you?"
"My apartment."
"I'll be there in twenty minutes."
Click.
Mira set the phone down, heart pounding.
This was it.
The truth.
She just didn't know if she was ready for it.
---
### 🧠
Evelyn arrived exactly twenty minutes later.
She stepped inside without knocking, coat damp from the rain, eyes sharp as ever.
"You look like hell," she said, setting her bag down.
Mira crossed her arms. "You always did have a way with words."
Evelyn took a seat across from her. "What do you want to know?"
"The truth," Mira said. "About ChronoSync. About me."
Evelyn studied her for a long moment.
Then she nodded.
"All right," she said. "Let's start with what you remember."
Mira hesitated. "Not much. Flashes. A lab. A white room. Voices. You."
Evelyn's expression didn't change.
"That's more than I expected," she admitted. "You weren't supposed to remember any of it."
Mira leaned forward. "Tell me what happened."
Evelyn exhaled slowly. "After the fire, you were severely traumatized. Standard therapy wasn't working. Your memories were fractured, unstable. You kept reliving the fire, but the details never matched the official report."
Mira swallowed. "What are you saying?"
"We believed you had dissociative amnesia," Evelyn continued. "Your brain was protecting you from something too painful to process."
"But you went further than standard treatment."
Evelyn nodded. "Yes. We did."
Mira's breath caught.
"ChronoSync was an experimental program designed to map traumatic memory pathways using neural stimulation. It allowed us to isolate key moments and attempt controlled retrieval."
Mira stared at her. "You were experimenting on me."
"We were trying to heal you," Evelyn corrected gently. "But something went wrong."
"What kind of something?"
Evelyn hesitated. "During one session, your consciousness destabilized. You began speaking about events that hadn't happened yet. People who didn't exist. Places you'd never been."
Mira's pulse pounded.
"You thought I was losing it."
"No," Evelyn said. "We thought you were accessing something beyond normal perception. Time, memory, identity — all of it became fluid."
Mira shook her head. "That doesn't make sense."
"It didn't then either," Evelyn admitted. "So we terminated the program. And we locked away what you experienced."
Mira's voice was barely above a whisper. "How?"
"We used a technique called Memory Locking," Evelyn said. "It suppressed the neural pathways associated with those anomalies. You forgot everything."
"And now?" Mira asked.
Evelyn looked at her carefully. "Now, it seems like something has unlocked it."
Mira sat in stunned silence.
Everything she had been feeling, everything she had seen — it wasn't madness.
It was memory.
Fragments of something real.
Something buried.
And now, it was coming back.
She looked at Evelyn.
"What happens if I remember everything?"
Evelyn didn't answer right away.
Then she said softly:
"You might not survive it."
Mira wakes up the next morning to find Evelyn gone — and a single note left on the table: *"Don't go to St. Vincent's alone."* But Mira isn't the only one heading there. Jonah has tracked the location too, and so has someone else — the mysterious man in sunglasses who's been watching her since the beginning. As she steps onto the grounds of the abandoned hospital, she realizes she's not just uncovering the past…
She's walking straight into it.