The aftermath lingered like static.
The command deck was a controlled storm of noise. Flickering data streams surged across the central display table, casting shifting light on the tired, strained faces surrounding it. Alarms had quieted, but their ghostly echo remained in the tense silence that had followed. Systems were slowly stabilizing after the surge triggered by the reopening of Site V9—but that didn't mean anyone in the room had.
Rowan stood at the edge of the table, hands braced against the console surface, jaw tight. His wrist console flickered with residual data from the previous resonance spike. Anchor loop signature: disrupted. Sync tether: severed. Lucian's identifier: offline.
Every line confirmed the thing Rowan already felt splintering inside him.
"Run it again," Evelyn said sharply, crossing her arms. She looked like she hadn't sat down in hours. Her black uniform jacket was creased at the shoulders, hair tied back in a high, strict tail, the tension in her spine unmistakable. "I want the Site V9 projection overlay against known anchor fluctuation maps."
"Already compiling," Ava replied beside her, tone calm despite the exhaustion tugging at her features. Her fingers moved swiftly over her console, the glint of her resonance amp pendant catching the overhead lights.
"There's a burst anomaly at the last timestamp. Spike mimics a field collapse but it's localized. Almost... tunneled."
"He was taken," Rowan said, voice flat.
The room turned toward him.
"Not killed. Not erased. Taken. I felt the tether pull until it snapped back like a recoiled thread. Lucian's resonance didn't vanish—it folded."
Elias stood nearby, arms crossed. His grey eyes narrowed as he processed the data on the board. "Folded?"
"Like space. Like time," Rowan muttered.
Vespera's voice cut through gently. "You believe the Echo didn't destroy him. Just pulled him across."
Rowan nodded, eyes dark. "And it didn't just disappear. It went somewhere. V9 opened again. The signal re-registered on the net. It's still active."
A grim silence fell.
Kira, arms still crossed and leaning near the side terminal, spoke quietly, "And if it leads back to that same place—"
"Then we're walking into another recursion spiral," Evelyn finished for her. She exhaled sharply and glanced at Ava, who gave a small nod in return. No one said it, but the term sent a ripple of unease through the room.
"That thing," Rowan said, pulse flaring at the memory, "it used his powers. Every move, every fracture—identical. But it wasn't him. It didn't feel like him."
"Because it wasn't Lucian," Ava said gently, stepping closer. Her hand found Rowan's shoulder, grounding him. "Not our Lucian. Not the one you tethered with."
"Then what the hell was it?" Elias asked, voice harder than usual.
No one had an answer.
The room fell into the quiet hum of machines and the faint tap of data updates.
Finally, Evelyn straightened. "I want full spectrum trace paths mapped around V9's pulse signature. Elias, you'll take point on the analysis. Vespera, monitor emotional fluctuations within the resonance cloud. Kira—I want visual correlation on the humanoid figure. Map it. Anything out of place, I want flagged."
"And me?" Rowan asked.
Evelyn looked at him for a long moment. "You rest."
Rowan didn't look away. "No."
Ava stepped in gently. "We'll need you stable when we go in. That means time to reset."
Rowan opened his mouth to argue—but Ava touched his hand again, and the silence that followed made the words catch in his throat.
He nodded.
Evelyn turned back to the projection table. "Team brief in two hours. We prepare to follow that signal. We bring him back."
No one questioned the command.
But in the data stream still looping faintly above them, one line refused to fade:
[UNREGISTERED PRESENCE DETECTED. ORIGIN UNKNOWN. ANCHOR POINT: FLUCTUATING. SYSTEM INTEGRITY: DEGRADED.]
And somewhere beneath that, hidden behind layers of encrypted protocol:
[ROWAN_MERCER: ID CONFLICT. POSSIBLE ECHO RESONANCE. STATUS: ANOMALOUS]
They didn't see that part.
Not yet.
—
The command deck had gone still again, but not with the eerie silence of earlier. This time, it was the stillness that came from breath held tight in the throat, the kind that settled like cold weight in the chest while waiting for something to break.
Rowan stared at the shifting data streams on the central screen. His eyes flicked back and forth as he scanned incoming resonance feeds, pulse markers, environmental readouts—anything. Anything that might point to Lucian's presence. Anything that might prove he was still tethered.
So far, all they had were fragments.
"Ren," Rowan called out, voice taut with strain. "You said the temporal echo around Site V9 didn't start until the figure vanished. But before that—was there anything else? Anything unstable?"
Ren glanced over from his post, hair mussed, still in his field gear. He looked tired, but the light in his eyes burned focused and sharp. "The air was warping. Not from Rift energy. It was like... every second was lagging behind the last. When the Echo touched Lucian, the time-thread around him snapped. I felt it, like a rubber band recoiling."
Rowan's hands tightened into fists. "So that confirms it. Site V9's distortion wasn't just environmental. It's a containment mechanism."
Ava stepped forward, setting a fresh diagnostic feed on the side display. "We've picked up layered anomaly residue in the upper quadrants of V9. It's not a standard Rift signature. It's... older. Or deeper. The structure wasn't meant to hold Rift creatures—it was meant to trap resonance patterns."
Evelyn folded her arms tightly. She hadn't spoken for several minutes, but now her voice cut through the tension. "A facility like that doesn't get buried and forgotten without reason. And if it's reactivating itself now—on its own—we have to assume it's responding to Lucian."
Rowan's gaze flicked to her. "You mean... it wants him?"
"No," she said. "It's recognizing him."
The words settled like lead.
"I want a full remap of V9's internal echo grid," Evelyn added, turning to the system. "Scrape every passive data stream we have. If that facility is using recursive spatial logic, it might not even exist on a single map. We'll need Ren's help to parse it."
Ren straightened at that, though his voice was hesitant. "You want me to... break into its time layer?"
"You might be the only one who can," Ava said gently. "But not yet. We don't even know if Lucian is alive in there."
Rowan flinched. He hadn't let himself think that. Not out loud.
"I'd know if he was dead," he murmured. "The tether didn't snap. It just went silent."
Silence pressed again.
A console flashed a fresh alert. Rowan turned toward it instinctively.
[SIGNAL FRAGMENT DETECTED - V9 RESONANCE SPIKE STATUS: PULSE INTERMITTENT ANCHOR RESPONSE: DELAYED, DEGRADED]
He barely breathed. The reading was faint, skipping—like a heartbeat echoing across fractured stone. But it was there. And it was him.
"Lucian's still in there," Rowan whispered. "He's flickering... but he's fighting it."
Ren moved beside him, scanning the pulse. "That delay—it's temporal interference. We're not just looking through space. We're seeing across a stuttered loop."
Evelyn's eyes narrowed. "Explain."
Ren stepped back, brushing damp bangs from his forehead. "If a time layer's collapsing or repeating on itself, it can trap a person in fragmented continuity. Lucian might be living seconds—or entire events—over and over without realizing. Or... he might be stuck between them."
Rowan's face was pale. "And if we pull him out the wrong way?"
"We break the loop," Ren said. "But not in the way we want. We risk shredding his current identity."
No one spoke.
Ava moved to Rowan, placing a firm hand on his shoulder. "We'll find the right entry point. We have time."
Rowan didn't nod. He couldn't.
Then, from the lower deck, rapid footsteps sounded.
"Commander!" It was Kira, breath sharp, eyes wide. Vespera followed behind her, paler than usual, but composed.
"Something's wrong," Vespera said, holding out her console. "We just encountered a presence—humanoid, but wrong. It spoke with Rowan's voice."
Kira added, "It moved like him too. But it wasn't him. I followed it—it vanished right as I got close. Left this on my wrist-feed."
She held out her watch. The text glowed ominous:
[UNREGISTERED PRESENCE DETECTED ORIGIN UNKNOWN ANCHOR POINT FLUCTUATING SYSTEM INTEGRITY DEGRADED]
Rowan's stomach dropped.
Evelyn's expression turned grim. "How many more copies of us are out there?"
No one answered.
But beneath the deck, where resonance fields hummed in quiet pulses, a system node activated.
[INITIALIZING TEMPORAL SCAN]
[PROJECT: V9 ANCHOR – STATUS: AWAKENING]
And in the dark, where Site V9 waited like a wound unhealed, something began to stir again.