They ran.
Through dust and sirens, through collapsing code and coughing stone, through the gullet of a beast built to store forgotten lives.
The Regenesis vault groaned behind them, steel ribs tearing from concrete spine, the servers bleeding sparks like veins in revolt. The lights stuttered, red to black, red to black, until even the alarms sounded tired.
Alon gripped Nora’s hand like she was vanishing.
The boy led them.
Barefoot, fast, sure, like the corridor had been carved for his feet, like he’d run this path in dreams or data, again and again, waiting for the day the door would finally open and mean escape, not erasure.
At the end of the passage, a metal hatch waited.
Manual lock.
No keypad.
Just a rotary crank and a series of concentric etchings, old-fashioned, ancient even, pre-digital. A failsafe no code could fake.
The boy reached up, hands trembling, and touched the center.
It responded not with light, but sound.
A hum.
Low, harmonic. Like the first note of a cello before the bow moves. A frequency buried so deep it vibrated their bones instead of their ears.
The door opened.
The room beyond was round, lined with copper veins and dark glass.
Silent.
No lights.
No motion.
Just a single pedestal in the center. Upon it, a cube.
Charred at the edges. Warm.
Alon stepped forward.
The boy followed but didn’t speak.
Nora stood still, chest rising and falling too fast, her pupils wide.
“What is this?” she whispered.
The boy answered.
“The Zero Archive.”
Alon frowned. “What does it store?”
The boy looked at him, no longer small. No longer afraid.
“Everything they didn’t want to forget, but couldn’t risk remembering.”
Alon lifted the cube.
It hummed softly in his palm.
Then it spoke.
Not with a voice.
With a feeling.
Grief.
Hope.
Regret.
Each emotion triggered a flicker in the dark glass surrounding them, projecting images like ghosts made of breath.
They saw:
Nora as a girl, laughing beneath a fig tree in Haifa, before the silence took her voice.
Alon in Berlin, wounded, cradling a flash drive that bled heat into his skin.
The clone who died with her palm on glass, humming lullabies meant for war.
Yael Rimon, recording her last message in a darkened corridor beneath Eilat, her eyes wet but her voice unshaking.
And the boy, wired into a chair, whispering songs to machines while strangers tried to write code into his dreams.
It was a library.
Of wounds.
Of what memory cost when turned into weapon.
Of everything Regenesis had been, and everything it failed to destroy.
Nora stepped closer.
Her hand brushed the cube.
It brightened.
One final image surfaced.
A video feed.
Dated today.
Timestamped: twenty minutes in the future.
A location: Mount Carmel.
A figure: Eli Koren.
He stood at the edge of the mountain, wind tearing at his coat, a transmitter in his hand.
Voice: calm.
“If you’re seeing this, it means you found the Zero Archive. Which means you know I was right. Memory isn’t truth. It’s strategy. And now, you have a choice, bury this, or broadcast it. But either way, the world forgets you. Just like it forgot me.”
The screen blinked out.
Silence.
Then the boy spoke.
“He’s going to wipe the global net.”
Alon turned. “How?”
“Pulse signal. Scramble cascade. All distributed Regenesis backups, including what you’ve become.”
Nora whispered, “We have thirty minutes.”
They left the vault burning.
The sun was rising over the Beqaa hills as they emerged, skin streaked with ash, breath tight in their chests, the cube wrapped in Nora’s arms like a child she wasn’t ready to name.
They didn’t speak as they drove.
They just moved.
Faster than the signal.
Faster than the past.
Toward the mountain. Toward the man who had taught the world how to forget.