The rusted rail line cut through the countryside like an old scar, half healed, half infected. We followed it east, staying in the shadows of abandoned freight cars when possible, cutting through scrubby brush when not.

  My watch said we’d been moving for four hours. It felt like days.

  “Water?” I offered, holding out the canteen Dad had stashed in the vehicle. One of the few things we’d managed to grab before running.

  Elisa took it without looking at me, her face smudged with dirt and something darker that might have been blood. Not hers. Not mine.

  The silence between us had weight, like another person walking with us.

  My stomach cramped. I fished in my pocket and found the ration bar, our last one. I broke it in half, the smaller piece for me, the larger for her.

  “Here.”

  She took it, fingers trembling slightly. “You should eat more. You’re bigger.”

  “I’m fine.”

  We chewed in silence, the dry, synthetic taste of the bar sticking in my throat.

  Elisa stumbled, wincing.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” She straightened, but I could see the pain in her eyes.

  I looked down at her feet. The boots she wore were too large, probably scavenged from wherever she’d hidden after fleeing school. The back of her right heel was raw and bloody where the leather had rubbed it open.

  “Here,” I said, sitting on a rotting railroad tie and pulling off my backpack. I dug out my spare pair of socks, the thick ones Dad had made me pack. “Put these on. Double layer.”

  She hesitated, then sat beside me, pulling off the boots with a grimace. I looked away as she peeled off her bloodied socks and replaced them with mine.

  “Thanks,” she said softly.

  We kept moving. The horizon shimmered with heat, the dust coating our throats. We passed a collapsed memorial, its concrete base cracked and listing. A Firstborn flag hung from it, the symmetrical pattern slashed through with crude red paint. Someone’s small rebellion, already fading in the sun.

  Twice we had to dive into ditches as drones passed overhead, their silver bodies glinting against the blue.

  I caught Elisa watching me. Not my face, but the back of my head, like she was trying to make sure I was real, that I hadn’t turned into something else when she wasn’t looking.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  She adjusted the bolt gun slung across her back, her mouth a tight line.

  “We helped a child. I think. And they killed my best friend for it.”

  “They didn’t kill him,” I said.

  Her eyes met mine, hollow. “Worse.”

  We walked another mile in silence. The rail line curved north, but Dad had said to keep moving east, so we abandoned it, cutting through a field of dead corn. The stalks rattled like bones in the dry wind.

  “Do you remember everything?” she asked suddenly. “About him?”

  I knew who she meant. “I think so. But I don’t know if I would know if I didn’t.”

  She nodded. “It feels different with Diego. I remember him. But I already feel myself… adapting. Like a part of my brain is trying to fill in the spaces where he should be with other things.”

  “That’s the Correction,” I said. “It works even when they’re not there to do it.”

  She studied my face. “How do you know?”

  I thought about the empty bunk in my room. The photo Dad had snatched from my hands. The brother whose name I still couldn’t recall.

  “Someone told me,” I said.

  Elisa kicked at a stone in our path. “Diego hated sports, you know. Always skipped the athletic events to read.”

  I frowned, a strange dissonance ringing in my head. “I thought he liked them? He was always talking about the volleyball team.”

  She stopped walking, her face going blank for a moment, like a television losing signal. Then she blinked, confusion clouding her eyes.

  “You’re right. He did. He was there at every game.” She pressed her fingers to her temple. “Why did I say that? It’s happening already, isn’t it?”

  The wind shifted, bringing with it the faint scent of oranges. Fresh citrus, like something just peeled. A memory crashed into me: someone laughing, tossing orange segments into the air and catching them in their mouth. Someone with my eyes. Someone important.

  I doubled over, dizzy with the force of the contradiction in my head. There was no one with my eyes. I was an only child.

  But I wasn’t.

  “Nero?” Elisa’s concerned voice seemed to come from miles away.

  I straightened, the moment passing as quickly as it had come. “I’m okay.”

  “What happened?”

  “Just… remembered something that isn’t there.”

  We pushed on. The Line was still ahead, somewhere beyond the horizon. Dad had said no one comes back the same after crossing the Line. I wondered if we’d know the difference, or if that too would be erased from our memory.

  Nightfall caught us beneath a collapsed highway overpass, its concrete supports shattered like giant bones. Steel rebar jutted from the breaks, rusted to the color of dried blood. The bridge above had fallen decades ago, leaving only this broken skeleton.

  “We should stop,” I said, eyeing the darkening sky. “Drones have infrared at night.”

  Elisa nodded, exhaustion evident in the slump of her shoulders. We picked our way through the rubble to the most sheltered corner, where two fallen slabs formed a natural lean-to.

  I pulled the emergency tarp from my pack, the one Dad insisted I take. We stretched it across the opening, weighing the corners with chunks of concrete.

  “Not exactly five star,” I said, trying for humor.

  Her answering smile was brittle but real. “Better than the UED dormitories.”

  The temperature dropped as darkness deepened. We huddled beneath the tarp, shoulder to shoulder for warmth, sharing the single thermal blanket I’d grabbed during our escape.

  “I have food,” Elisa said unexpectedly, reaching into her pocket. She produced a crumpled packet of crackers and a small can.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “Supply train. Derailed about half a mile back. Most of it was picked clean, but…” She shrugged. “I still found some things.”

  She handed me the can. Mandarin oranges in syrup. The pull tab was already half bent.

  I opened it, the sweet citrus scent filling our small shelter. I offered it to her first.

  “No thanks,” she said. “Diego hated oranges.”

  The statement hung between us. I frowned.

  “He loved oranges,” I said slowly. “Didn’t he?”

  Our eyes met in the dim light. Something passed between us, a shared understanding of what was happening. The correction working through our memories, rewriting them in real time.

  “I don’t know anymore,” she whispered.

  We ate in silence, passing the crackers back and forth, taking turns with the can of fruit. The small chemical heat pack I activated gave just enough warmth to keep our fingers from going numb.

  “Do you think people still dream of the ones who were erased?” I asked, staring at the water droplets forming on the inside of our tarp.

  Elisa pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders. “If they do, I think the dreams get flagged.”

  “Flagged?”

  “My mother told me once to never write anyone’s name down unless they were alive and scanned.” Her voice was low, like she was sharing a secret. “Names rot fastest, she said. They’ll get into your teeth and poison your tongue.”

  I thought about the key in my pocket, the data chip Dad had hidden. How desperately he’d wanted to preserve something of my brother. Something real.

  Stolen story; please report.

  “I don’t know if I ever had a brother,” I said.

  “You did.”

  “How would you know?”

  Elisa looked at me, her face half in shadow. “Because you never say ‘only child’ like someone who means it.”

  The truth of her words hit me like a physical blow. I’d never thought of myself as an only child, despite having no memory of siblings. There was always a space beside me, unseen but felt.

  Outside our shelter, the wind picked up, whistling through the fractured concrete. Elisa began to hum softly, a tune that seemed to hover just at the edge of recognition. Three notes up, two down, a pause, then repeat.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “Something my father taught me. He said it was a lullaby, but…” She shrugged. “I think it was something else. A signal, maybe.”

  I stared past the tarp at the stars emerging in the night sky. I used to know the constellations. Dad had taught me, pointing them out one by one. But now I couldn’t remember their names, or even which patterns they formed.

  “We should sleep,” Elisa said, her voice thick with exhaustion. “Take turns watching.”

  “I’ll go first.”

  She nodded, curling onto her side, the bolt gun within easy reach. Within minutes, her breathing had deepened into sleep.

  I traced patterns in the dirt floor of our shelter. Two stick figures, side by side. The wind stirred, erasing one of them.

  Sleep pulled at me despite my determination to stay awake. My eyes grew heavy, my head nodding forward.

  Then I saw him.

  A boy standing on what remained of the bridge above us. A boy with my eyes, my father’s jaw. He was burning, silently, with no smoke. But the flames made no light.

  I jerked awake, heart hammering. Nothing was there but crumbling concrete and darkness.

  It wasn’t a nightmare. It was something I used to know, flickering like static at the edge of the world.

  The bridge above us had burned long before we arrived. I think we just came to remember it.

  Dawn broke like something fractured, light splintering across the horizon in ways that didn’t quite make sense. We’d been walking for hours, following what Dad had called “ghost markers” – broken signs with specific damage patterns, stones arranged in unnatural formations.

  The landscape changed subtly at first, then with increasing wrongness. Trees bent at impossible angles. Metal warped without heat. The air felt thicker, pressing against my eardrums until they ached.

  “Something’s happening,” Elisa whispered, her voice strangely muffled despite being right beside me.

  Above us, a flock of crows flew backward, wings beating in reverse but still moving forward. My brain couldn’t process what my eyes were seeing.

  A signpost appeared ahead, half-rusted but still legible:

  YOU ARE LEAVING A CORRECTED ZONE NO FURTHER CLAIMS WILL BE PROCESSED.

  Pain bloomed behind my left eye, a dull throbbing that intensified with each step toward the sign. I pressed my palm against my temple, trying to push back against the pressure.

  “You feel it too,” Elisa said. Not a question.

  I nodded, unable to form words as the pressure increased. It felt like something inside me was resisting, pushing back against our forward motion.

  “The Line doesn’t want to be crossed,” said a voice from nowhere.

  We both jumped, Elisa reaching for her bolt gun.

  A woman stood beside the signpost, though I could have sworn no one was there seconds before. She was maybe mid-fifties, but her age was hard to determine. Her skin bore strange burn patterns, blotches of mottled tissue that seemed to shift when I wasn’t looking directly at them. But her eyes were unnaturally clear, like water so pure it appears bottomless.

  “Who are you?” I managed through the pain in my head.

  “Calder,” she said, then frowned. “No. That’s not right.” She touched her throat as if the name had lodged there incorrectly. “But it’s close enough. Names are… difficult here.”

  She wore layers of mismatched clothing, some military, some civilian. Around her neck hung dozens of keys on leather cords – no two alike.

  “You’re from the resistance?” Elisa asked, her hand still on her weapon.

  The woman made a sound that might have been a laugh. “There is no ‘from’ here. Only ‘to’ and ‘away.’”

  She stepped closer, studying us. Her gaze was clinical, assessing.

  “Which name will you leave here?” she asked.

  I glanced at Elisa, who looked as confused as I felt.

  “We don’t understand,” I said.

  The woman – Calder, or whatever her name was gestured toward the invisible line ahead of us.

  “The toll,” she explained. “To cross, you must speak the name of someone you’ve forgotten, or offer something that was taken from you.”

  The pain behind my eye intensified, nearly doubling me over.

  “That’s impossible,” Elisa said. “If we’ve forgotten them, how can we say their name?”

  Calder smiled, revealing teeth that seemed too numerous, too perfect. “That’s the point.”

  She turned to Elisa. “You first. Name what’s been taken.”

  Elisa’s face contorted with effort. “Diego,” she started, but the name seemed to catch in her throat. “He was my… he liked…” She stopped, frustration evident in her expression. “I can’t. I know who he is, but I can’t describe him anymore.”

  “Good,” Calder nodded. “The forgetting has started, but isn’t complete. You may pass.”

  She turned to me. “And you? What will you offer?”

  I reached into my pocket, feeling for the key Dad had given me before we fled. My fingers closed around the cold metal, and I pulled it out.

  “This,” I said, not knowing why. “I don’t know what it unlocks.”

  Calder’s eyes widened slightly. She reached out, not touching the key but hovering her fingers above it.

  “He burned clean,” she said softly. “That’s rare. Most ghosts linger.”

  Her eyes met mine, searching.

  “You crossed already,” she said. “But you didn’t know it.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  Instead of answering, she pointed to a half-collapsed viaduct about fifty yards ahead, its concrete supports crumbling, steel reinforcements exposed like broken bones.

  “That’s the Line,” she said. “Once you pass under it, there’s no returning the same.”

  She stepped aside, gesturing for us to proceed.

  We approached the viaduct, the pressure in my head building with each step. Elisa reached for my hand, her fingers cold but steady.

  As we passed under the crumbling structure, something shifted. The air thinned suddenly, the pressure inside my skull releasing with an almost audible pop.

  A memory flashed through me with violent clarity:

  A boy with my eyes, maybe thirteen, holding a toy rifle. Laughing. “Cover me, Nero! I’m going in!”

  Then static, a buzz of electricity and absence.

  I gasped, staggering. Beside me, Elisa doubled over, retching onto the ground.

  Calder watched us dispassionately. “Now they won’t see you the same. But you won’t see each other the same, either.”

  I straightened, touching my face. Something felt different. I ran my fingers along my jaw and found a thin scar that hadn’t been there before, a line of raised tissue from ear to chin.

  The world beyond the viaduct was…wrong. Trees grew in perfect hexagonal patterns. Buildings constructed from school desks and gravestones rose in the distance. People moved through the landscape like they were partially transparent, neither fully present nor absent.

  “I thought the Line would protect us,” I said, the words feeling strange in my mouth.

  Calder shook her head. “The Line doesn’t protect. It separates.”

  She touched my cheek, right along the new scar. “You’re resonant,” she said. “Like he was.”

  Before I could ask what she meant, she turned away, moving back toward the viaduct. As she passed beneath it, heading the way we’d come, she seemed to flicker, there, then not, then there again.

  In the distance, a child crouched in the dirt, carefully arranging bones and broken toys into a spiral pattern. Names were carved into each piece, hundreds of them, an archive of the forgotten.

  We’d crossed. But what we’d left behind was more than a boundary.

  It was ourselves.

  The path beyond the Line curved through stands of trees arranged in perfect geometric patterns, as if planted by someone who understood nature only as a mathematical concept. We followed Calder’s directions, looking for the “broken vessel half-buried in earth” where we’d find “those who crossed before.”

  When we finally spotted it in a clearing an old shipping container tipped on its side and partially sunken into the ground—I expected stealth. Secret knocks. Passwords.

  Instead, a woman stood in plain sight beside the container’s exposed end, a bolt rifle slung across her chest. She was tall and lean, her dark skin weathered by sun and wind. Her eyes tracked our approach without surprise.

  Beside the container, a child sat cross-legged on a worn blanket. A girl, maybe seven or eight, with pale hair cut close to her scalp. She was arranging broken pieces of ceramic into spiraling patterns, her small hands moving with methodical precision.

  “We expected you two days ago,” the woman said when we were close enough.

  I glanced at Elisa, who looked as confused as I felt.

  “No one told us we were coming,” I replied.

  The woman studied us for a long moment. “I’m Myla,” she said finally, though something in her inflection suggested this wasn’t her real name.

  “I’m Nero. This is Elisa.”

  The woman—Myla—nodded. “You crossed the Line alone?”

  “A woman helped us,” said Elisa. “Calder. Or… not Calder. She wasn’t sure.”

  Myla’s expression didn’t change, but her grip on the rifle tightened slightly. “And your father?”

  The question hit me like a physical blow. I hadn’t allowed myself to think about Dad since we fled the depot. “He stayed behind,” I managed. “So we could escape.”

  “He was hit,” Elisa added softly. “Bad.”

  Myla gave a curt nod, as if confirming something she already knew. “Come inside. It’s not safe to stand in the open here.”

  She turned and ducked into the container. Elisa followed, but I hesitated, looking at the child still focused on her ceramic fragments.

  The girl raised her head and met my gaze. Her eyes were strange not quite brown, not quite gold, with subtle geometric patterns in the iris that seemed to shift as I watched. She mirrored my head tilt exactly, but with a fraction of a second delay that made it feel deeply wrong.

  “Come on,” Elisa called from inside the container.

  I tore my gaze away from the child and followed.

  The interior was surprisingly livable. Crates formed makeshift furniture. Solar lanterns hung from the ceiling, casting warm light. One wall was covered in maps, photos, and strings connecting them in patterns I couldn’t decipher.

  “Sit,” Myla said, gesturing to the crates.

  We sat. Elisa was staring at the open end of the container, where the child was still visible, working on her ceramic puzzle.

  “What’s wrong with her skin?” Elisa asked suddenly.

  I looked more closely. The girl’s exposed arms and neck had a subtle sheen, almost like mother-of-pearl, with faint patterns just beneath the surface.

  “That’s not a disease,” Myla said, following Elisa’s gaze. “That’s pattern correction.”

  Neither of us knew what to ask next.

  Myla opened a crate and removed several containers of food. She didn’t explain further as she prepared a simple meal canned lentils, strips of dried citrus, and blocks of processed soy. The child continued her solitary work outside, occasionally humming notes that formed no recognizable melody.

  “Here,” Myla handed us each a bowl. “Eat.”

  We ate in silence, hunger overriding any reservations. Through the container’s opening, I watched the child draw symbols in the dirt beside her blanket. Concentric circles. Branching lines. Shapes that felt familiar, like words on the tip of my tongue.

  “Diego burned clean?” Myla asked abruptly.

  Elisa looked up, startled. “What?”

  “Your friend. The one they corrected. He burned clean?”

  Elisa exchanged a glance with me, confusion evident in her expression.

  “Some people, when Correction hits them, they smear,” Myla explained, her voice matter-of-fact. “Leave echoes. He didn’t.”

  “How do you know about Diego?” I asked.

  Myla’s eyes flicked toward the child outside. “She knows things.”

  “I don’t understand,” Elisa said.

  “Neither do they. That’s why they want her back.” Myla set down her bowl. “You helped them cross. The woman and the child. From Mexico Site Four.”

  It wasn’t a question, but I answered anyway. “We didn’t know who they were. Our friend Marcus arranged it.”

  “And now he’s been corrected, your father is likely dead, and you two are the only ones who made it out.” Myla’s voice was flat, without accusation. “Those were good people. Worth the cost.”

  The casual way she referenced Dad’s probable death made my throat tighten. I set down my half-eaten food, appetite gone.

  Outside, the girl had stopped arranging her ceramic pieces. She stood, gathering something in her small hands, and walked toward the container entrance. Her movements were fluid but somehow not quite right, as if she’d learned to walk by watching rather than doing.

  She entered without a word, crossed to where I sat, and held out her hand. In her palm lay a curved shard of ceramic, broken from what might once have been a cup or bowl.

  I took it automatically. The piece was cool to the touch, its glazed surface etched with a single word.

  A name.

  Lucen.

  I stared at it, my hands beginning to shake. Something inside me responded to those five letters, like a tuning fork struck at exactly the right frequency.

  The girl watched me, her strange eyes unblinking. Not smiling. Not sad. Just… watching.

  “How did she know that name?” Elisa whispered beside me.

  Myla looked between us and the child. “She remembers things no one taught her. That’s why they want her back.”