The moment that bell rang, I felt something shift.
It wasn't just in the air—it was in my bones. A vibration deep beneath the surface, like my body recognized a code my brain couldn't yet translate.
Hana and I stood frozen in the mailroom. Her phone lit up with incoming messages from a secure comms app—encrypted pings from Uncle Lucifer's task force.
"Something's wrong," she whispered. "Those chimes weren't in sync with the university's time protocol. They came early."
"Deliberately?"
She nodded. "To someone on the inside, that bell wasn't just a time check. It was a message."
The clock was no longer ticking.It was counting down.
We raced to the safehouse.
Not ours—another one. One only Hana and Uncle Lucifer's task force knew about. Buried in the understructure of the old Arts and Culture block, behind rusted theater props and forgotten design boards.
It wasn't just secure—it was off-grid.
Sergeant Kane was already there, flanked by two silent operators dressed in plain clothes. They were watching live surveillance feeds on a bank of flickering monitors. The party, the mailroom, the library.
And the basement hallway I hadn't walked since I found the Oculus Aeternum prototype.
"Tell me that place has been empty," I said.
Kane didn't look away from the screen. "It was. Until last night."
He hit play on the recorded feed.
There, on the grainy screen, was someone walking into the same room I'd stumbled into in Chapter 4.
Tall. Hooded. Confident.
They moved like they owned the space. Like it wasn't a secret—they belonged there.
But when they turned just slightly…
Hana squinted. "Pause."
Kane froze the frame. Zoomed.
The side profile.
I leaned in.
"No way…"
It looked like Wilburt.
But something was off. His posture was different. Less casual. More… trained. The way he scanned the room. The speed with which he opened the hidden drawer I hadn't noticed weeks ago. This wasn't the anxious Wilburt I knew from the pub.
This was someone else.
Or maybe this was the real him all along.
Kane switched to another feed—this one a facial recognition attempt.
FAILED.FAILED.MATCH BLOCKED.
"Whoever this is," Kane muttered, "they're either using spoof tech… or they're under a blacklisted ID."
Hana pulled me aside. "Lucas… What if the real Wilburt is out there somewhere, and this one—this version—is just a shadow? A decoy. Meant to manipulate us. Meant to lead us into something worse."
I looked back at the paused image.
Was that the Wilburt I trusted?
Or the one who built the trap?
And suddenly I realized something else: the message in my mail hadn't come from Wilburt.
It had come from whoever was watching him.
Because maybe… just maybe…
Wilburt was in trouble too.
Or maybe, we all were.