When the dust settles, the Archive is a glowing speck on the horizon. Elias looks up. For the first time in years, the sky isn't a projection. It’s vast, dark, and filled with stars he doesn't recognize.

Elias lived in the Archive, a city built entirely of glass and white marble. In the Archive, nothing was ever truly gone. You could walk down 4th Street and, for a small fee, trigger a "Residual"—a holographic loop of your sixth birthday, or the last time you saw a friend before they moved away.

"You can’t stay in the loop forever," a voice rang out. It was Jex, a Scavenger who lived in the "Lost Sky"—the unmapped territory beyond the city walls where no holograms existed. "I don’t know how to be anywhere else," Elias admitted.

For Elias, the Archive was a cage. He spent every evening at the edge of the pier, replaying the same Residual: a summer afternoon on a grassy hill, the smell of ozone before a storm, and the sound of a voice laughing beside him. Where we started, he whispered, watching the flickering light of a ghost he used to know.