It was raining in Aldarrah.
Not the soft kind — the kind that hammered metal roofs, drowned phone signals, and made even the city's bulletproof windows shiver. Fadi said it was a good omen.
"Storms don't hide," he told her. "They announce themselves."
Layla zipped up her black coat.
Underneath: no microphone. No camera. No bomb.
Just a small USB drive… and a single paper photo.
The only remaining copy of her and Adam — their last night at the protest camp, his arm thrown over her shoulders, both of them grinning like they didn't yet know the price of hope.
She tucked it into her pocket.
Then walked into the Ministry of Interior.
No disguise.
No forged pass.
Just her face.
Which — by design — didn't exist anymore.
Security scanners paused.
Guards hesitated.
She looked at the camera above the door and said:
"You deleted me.
Now invite me in."
And they did.
They brought her to a glass room deep inside the Ministry — the one they called the Hall of Mirrors.
She knew the name wasn't metaphorical.
Every wall was reflective. Every light harsh. Every angle disorienting. It was a psychological weapon — designed to blur edges, force the visitor to see themselves a thousand times… until they couldn't tell which version was real.
Sami waited inside.
He didn't offer her a seat.
She didn't need one.
"I told you not to come here," he said, voice low.
"I came to give you a gift."
She held up the USB drive.
He didn't take it.
"You already leaked it."
"Not this one," she said. "This is the real one."
He stared.
Layla smiled — not warmly, not cruelly, but like someone holding a match over a fuse.
"This has the names of your internal censors. The ones you ordered deleted to cover your tracks. The ones you thought you could vanish before they talked. They talked anyway."
His face didn't change, but his knuckles whitened on the edge of the table.
"What do you want?" he asked.
"I want you to reinstate every deleted person in your database. I want the world to see the ghosts you made. And I want to do it… live."
A pause.
Then Sami said, almost softly:
"You know I can't do that."
Layla stepped forward.
Her reflection multiplied in every mirror.
"Then I guess I'll just have to replace you."
Outside, Fadi's Living Ledger had gone viral.
Citizen ID restorations.
Crowdsourced birth certificates.
An app called "Reappear" letting users upload photos of people the regime had erased.
The Ministry's network was being flooded with ghosts.
And Layla — the woman without a record — had become the most recorded human in Aldarrah.
Back in the mirrored room, Sami said one final thing before Layla left:
"You didn't win."
"Not yet."
"But you've made yourself unforgettable."
"And that makes you dangerous."