The Archive

Creative Writing | 2026

Original Fiction by Ahyun Ji

Set in a dystopian world shaped by hunger, surveillance, and a rigid system of control,

The Archive follows a fifteen-year-old girl struggling to keep six younger children alive. In

a place where people are identified by numbers rather than names, survival depends on

courage, instinct, and the few things that remain from the past.

At the center of the opening chapter is a dagger made by her father—both a tool for

survival and one of the last physical connections she has to him. As she leaves the

shelter in search of food, memories of her father collide with the dangers of the world

outside.

Selected Excerpt

My hand brushed the dagger at my side, carefully crafted by my father, whose patience I

remembered more clearly than his face now. The grooves along the grip had been

shaped for my hand over time, not by intention at first but by repetition, by use, by

necessity, and the metal itself had long since become something steady in a world that

rarely was. It was one of the few things I could depend on to remain the same.

Back then, it had meant safety in a way I had taken for granted, something that

belonged to him and therefore belonged to me without question.

That illusion did not last.

I still remember when the guards came, not because they announced themselves but

because they never needed to, their presence carried instead in the sound of boots

against metal walkways above the lower levels, measured and deliberate, the kind of

sound that did not belong to people who had anything to fear.

He had pressed the dagger into my hand without hesitation, as though he had already

decided what would matter more in the moment.

He told me to go, not loudly, not with panic, but with a kind of certainty that made it

impossible to argue with, and I remember more clearly than anything else the way he

did not look away while he said it, as if refusing to let fear enter the space between us.

I remember the door closing behind me, the sound of it cutting off everything that came

after, and then running, not because I had chosen to but because there had been no

other direction left to take.

After that, there was only silence where he used to be.

The dagger remained.

He did not.

Additional Excerpt

Most people stopped asking what the numbers meant.

They learned instead what they cost.

Every survivor was marked, a number tattooed into the inside of the wrist, a system the

authorities called registration that no one in the lower levels remembered agreeing to.

They said it was done when you were too young to understand, before memory could

form properly, before refusal meant anything at all. People who were here in the slums

for the longest had the smallest numbers.

I kept my sleeve pulled low as I moved, though I knew it made no difference in the dark,

knew that anyone close enough would already recognize what I was without needing to

see it clearly.

In places like this, you did not need a name to be known, only a number, and only

enough value for someone to decide you were worth taking.

11. That was me.