Driftroot held its breath.
The fractured sky above shimmered with threat—not from weapons, but from intent. The Architect's Hand loomed, its shadow bleeding across the orbital frame. Within it, Amira-9's voice settled over Driftroot like frost.
> "You know what this is, Kye. You understand what you've undone."
Kye stood inside the Vaultseed chamber, hands pressed to the rootlight core. Around him, the vines twisted with a slow, defiant glow. The Chronicle flame at his wrist spun tight, not as defense—but anchor.
Zeraphine paced the garden perimeter, rerouting power from the atmospheric loops to reinforce the outer relay rings. Children and civilians had been moved to the sublevel—those who had come here seeking shelter in memory now forced to witness its potential erasure.
"Say it," Kye said into the comms. "Say what you really want."
Silence.
Then Amira answered.
> "Cease all Vaultseed propagation. Erase embedded memorybeacons from non-System-aligned territories. Surrender Chronicle fragments still active."
Her voice didn't waver.
But Kye heard something behind it.
Grief.
"She believes in the System," Zeraphine said quietly, joining him. "She always did. That's why they chose her to deliver this."
Kye shook his head. "No. That's why she's afraid I'm right."
The Architect's Hand deployed its second compression spike.
This time, not into infrastructure.
Into the seedcore.
The Vaultseed reeled.
Kye dropped to one knee as a spike of memory was forcibly extracted and pulsed into a containment field orbiting the ship.
The field shimmered.
> "Preserved anomaly," the System reported. "Containment of deviant article complete."
Kye felt the loss.
A name, gone.
One of the unspoken—the cook who never asked for witness, whose story had become the soil's first bloom.
Gone.
Not deleted.
Archived without consent.
"No," he whispered. "That was the point. No one needed permission to be remembered."
Amira's voice echoed again.
> "You can still walk away. Surrender the seed. Driftroot will be spared. We will reabsorb the memorylight and secure the stable core. The narrative will correct itself."
Zeraphine's hand trembled against the comm panel.
"She still thinks this is a threat to the System. She doesn't see that it's a release."
Kye stood.
"The System needs one story. One timeline. One ledger."
He stepped forward.
"But we've proven memory can be plural. That it's not a danger to remember differently."
He activated a wideband broadcast.
Not to the Hand.
To the network.
To the Driftroot-linked beacons.
Across the Interstitia, the sleeping lights stirred.
Every thread grown from the Vaultseed. Every place that had whispered back. Every exile and echo and unspoken root.
They answered.
One by one, the lights flared.
Not in attack.
In agreement.
And Kye spoke only once:
> "You don't need to be part of a story to make it real. You only need to hold your piece of it—and share it without shame."
The Vaultseed surged.
Chronicle flame burst through the floor of Driftroot, traveling through cables, through air, through belief.
The containment field cracked.
The stolen name—returned.
The compression spike—shattered.
Amira-9's voice didn't rage.
It quieted.
> "You've made your choice."
> "Prepare for full Redaction Sequence."
Zeraphine stepped beside Kye.
"We're staying?"
He nodded.
"We're remembering."