The city did not sleep.
It remembered.
And memory, when awakened too fast, did not return in calm sequences. It came crashing, mosaic-fractured, urgent. Not all streets welcomed the song. Not all buildings turned their lights back on. Some resisted. Some screamed.
Others simply crumbled—because they had been built upon forgetting.
In the eastern districts, automated sirens looped error chants once used to erase communal gatherings. But now, the recordings twisted midstream, voices replaced by archival confessions.
"We buried the last breath of the old tongue under concrete. We called it progress."
"We renamed the children and called it peace."
"We made the silence efficient."
The recordings did not stop.
People listened.
Some fell to their knees.
Others began to dig.
—
Yara walked through the lower tiers of the Memory Grid Tower, her body still fragile, her presence now impossible to miss. No guards intercepted her. Doors unlatched before she touched them.
