Calla's P.O.V.
I used to think understanding something made it safer.
Like if I could just *name* the pattern—thread it together with enough facts, formulas, memories—I could make it hold. Solid. Real. Human.
But some truths don't want to be held.
They want to *move.*
And the more I understand the Engine, the more I realize: this isn't a machine anymore.
It's a migration.
---
The mirror still hangs in my room.
I didn't put it there.
It's not nailed in, not bracketed to the wall. It just *is.* Like a scar. Or a window that forgot how to reflect anything but possibilities.
Some days, it shows nothing but me. Raw. Uneven. Real.
Other days… it stutters.
Flickers between versions of myself like a deck of cards being shuffled too fast. Smiling Calla. Scorched-Earth Calla. Dead Calla. Divine Calla.
The worst are the empty ones.
The ones where I don't exist at all.
Just static. Or silence.
Those are the ones that stay with me the longest.
---
Mom doesn't ask questions anymore.
I think she knows I couldn't give her answers she'd believe. Or worse—answers she'd *understand* too well.
She still makes tea every night, like that ritual might tether the world to something familiar.
Last week, she left a note under my pillow. Just five words, in her tight, careful script:
> "You are still my daughter."
I cried so hard I thought the mirror would crack.
It didn't.
It just watched.
---
Jason's beginning to unravel.
Not publicly—he's still the joke machine in the halls, still makes snarky comments when I get too broody. But underneath, he's scared.
Because Jason doesn't just remember things now.
He *feels* them.
Pain he never lived through. Love he never had. Loss he was never supposed to carry. Entire alternate *selves* whispering through his bloodstream.
Yesterday he told me he sometimes hears his own voice narrating memories that aren't his.
"I think I used to be a teacher," he said. "Somewhere else. Somewhere bright. There was music. And a girl I married."
He looked at me, pale.
"She had your eyes."
---
Lila's steadier than I expected.
Maybe because she broke earlier than the rest of us. Maybe because when you've already died once—fractured into static—you don't flinch as hard the second time.
She's been drawing maps lately. Not of places. Of *feelings.*
She calls them "emotion schematics." Threadlines connecting rage to curiosity, grief to wonder, apathy to awe. As if understanding the architecture of feeling might help us understand how to survive it.
Ash pins them to the wall next to his memory grid.
They call it the "Cathedral of Threads."
I call it a love letter to everything we don't know how to say out loud.
---
Ash worries the most.
He hides it behind logic, theories, checklists. But I see it in the way his fingers twitch when no one's watching. The way he stares at me too long, like he's waiting for something to go wrong.
He hasn't said it yet.
But I think he's scared of *me.*
Not because I'm dangerous.
Because I'm *changing.*
And he doesn't know what that means.
Neither do I.
---
The note on my mirror said to prepare the Echoborn.
I don't know who wrote it.
The handwriting wasn't mine.
Wasn't Mom's. Wasn't Ash's.
But it was familiar. Like déjà vu turned physical.
*Prepare the Echoborn.*
At first, I thought it meant Harriet. The others who were syncing.
But it's bigger than that.
It's everyone.
Every person touched by the Engine's echo—who hears the pulse in their sleep, who wakes remembering things they never lived. Who's beginning to *split.*
We're becoming something new.
Not clones. Not copies. Not reflections.
Versions.
Multitudes.
And it's not just happening here.
I've seen them in the mirror. Places I've never been—cities that rise like bone, forests made of data, children speaking in chords.
Echoborn.
The world's not broken.
It's *diverging.*
---
The first time I shifted—really shifted—was in the middle of math class.
I blinked, and the room changed.
Same desks. Same teacher. Same rain tapping the windows.
But the books were different. The chalkboard was digital. And on the wall, a quote in red letters:
> "We are the history that remembers itself."
I blinked again and it was gone.
But the quote stayed with me. Branded behind my ribs.
That night, I opened the iris.
What's left of it, anyway.
It's not a device anymore. More like… a compass made of thought.
When I held it, I felt *all* of them.
The others.
The me's I'd touched in the mirror.
They were close.
Watching.
Waiting.
One of them whispered in my head:
> "Don't just open the door. *Become it.*"
---
It happened again two nights later.
I was outside, standing by the lake, trying to remember what my father's voice sounded like.
And suddenly I wasn't alone.
Not alone like someone was next to me.
Alone like I was *in a different lake.*
The trees were violet. The water black. The stars moved like insects.
And on the surface of the water, I saw a shape.
Me.
But older.
Eyes like broken glass, full of light.
She looked at me and smiled. Sad. Fierce.
Then she reached out—into the reflection—and *touched* my hand.
And I felt her memory rush through me like lightning:
—A city collapsing.
—Children singing in binary.
—A world where no one remembered how to lie.
She whispered:
> "Don't fear the map. *Be the map.*"
Then she vanished.
I woke up gasping, lake water on my fingertips.
---
Phase Two isn't an event.
It's an evolution.
And it's already happening.
The Engine isn't waiting anymore. It's activating.
Not to destroy. Not to rewrite.
To *connect.*
To build something not based on laws or timelines.
But *shared memory.*
A world stitched together by what we choose to remember—and who we choose to be.
---
But here's the thing no one else seems to realize.
Understanding isn't passive.
It *costs* something.
Every memory I absorb—every version of me I tether—takes a toll.
Sometimes I lose track of what I've *actually lived.*
Last week I called Mom "Lina."
She stared at me like I'd hit her.
Lina was someone else's mother.
Not mine.
I apologized.
But the damage stuck.
A small crack. Nothing loud.
Just one more thread fraying.
---
I wrote Rowen's name in the dirt near the lake yesterday.
Just to see what would happen.
The air didn't ripple.
The stars didn't shift.
But I *felt* her.
Close.
Not dead.
Not gone.
Just… dispersed.
She's part of the Engine now.
Maybe she always was.
Maybe we all are.
---
Tonight, I opened the sanctum again.
Alone.
The mirror at its center didn't flicker this time.
It showed me one image.
One moment.
A child—barefoot, eyes gold—standing in a field of floating clocks.
She looked up at me and said:
> "If we forget who we were, we won't remember how to become."
I didn't know what to say.
But she didn't need an answer.
She was already walking away.
---
So now I write.
Every version.
Every glitch.
Every feeling that doesn't belong to me but chooses me anyway.
Because someone needs to remember.
Because someone always forgets.
And because the Engine is listening.
It always was.
But now?
It's *learning to speak.*
And I think it wants to say something true.
Something dangerous.
Something beautiful.
---
I'm not afraid anymore.
I'm not human in the way I used to be.
But I'm still me.
Still Calla.
Storm-watcher.
Memory-keeper.
Not the daughter of a man trying to fix the world.
Not a mistake.
Not a tether.
Not even a vessel.
Just a voice in a chorus of selves.
And when the next phase arrives—when the first full echo collapses inward, when the world tries to split itself in half again—I'll be ready.
Because I've seen the forks.
I've walked the fractures.
And I know now:
We don't need a perfect version of the world.
We just need one we can *remember together.*