Chapter 41: The Architect Is Gone The drive stopped feeding me memories. Just like that. No warning. No fade. No gentle letdown. One second I was drowning in Mirabel’s face, her voice, her last breath under my hands, and the next—nothing. Silence. Cold. Empty. Like someone yanked the plug while the movie was still rolling. I stood there, body still locked, knees barely holding me up. My lungs sucked air like they were trying to pull the whole room in. Thirty-eight breaths left. That’s all. The number glowed on my chest, steady, quiet, ticking down like it had all the time in the world. Like it wasn’t counting the seconds until I stopped existing. Mira stepped back. Not far. Just enough to put space between us. She crossed her arms. Didn’t say anything at first. Just watched me. Like she was waiting for the last piece to click into place. Like she already knew what I was about to ask. I turned my head toward her. My neck cracked. My muscles screamed. I didn’t care. I needed to see her face. I needed to know if she was going to lie to me again. “Now you remember why you built the erasure protocol,” she said. Her voice wasn’t loud. Wasn’t angry. Wasn’t sad. It was flat. Final. Like she was reading off a label on a box that had already been shipped. I swallowed. My throat felt like sandpaper. “Can I reverse it?” She didn’t hesitate. Didn’t look away. Didn’t soften. Just shook her head. “Only the architect can undo it.” I waited. My chest rose. Fell. Thirty-seven. “And he’s gone.” I looked down at the drive in my hand. Still warm. Still humming faintly. Still plugged into the port under my skin. I could feel it there. Like a second heartbeat. A parasite. A key. A tombstone. The architect. Me. The man who designed this. The man who built the machine that erased Mirabel. The man who signed the forms, pressed the button, watched her eyes close, then walked away like it was just another Tuesday. That man was gone. Buried. Deleted. Just like her. But I was still here. I wasn’t him anymore. I didn’t want to be him. I didn’t even know how to be him. All I had were the memories the drive forced into me. The blood on my hands. The silence after the flatline. The way she looked at me—not with hate, not with fear, but with something worse. Disappointment. Like I had let her down long before I ever picked up the scalpel. I squeezed the drive. Hard. My fingers trembled. Not from fear. Not from grief. From something deeper. Something colder. A decision forming. A path clearing. If the architect was gone, then someone had to take his place. Someone had to rebuild what he destroyed. Someone had to undo what he did. Even if that someone didn’t know how. Even if that someone didn’t deserve to. Even if that someone was going to die trying. I looked up at Mira. She hadn’t moved. Still watching. Still waiting. Like she knew this was coming. Like she had been waiting for me to say it. To think it. To become it. I didn’t speak. Didn’t need to. The drive in my hand was answer enough. I had to become the architect again. Or die trying.