There was no sunrise in Site V9.
Only static.
It filled the air, shimmered across the walls, clung to Lucian's skin like fog. Time didn't pass here. It folded. Reversed. Twisted. The corridors were too long one moment, too narrow the next. He stopped counting how many doors he'd passed, how many loops he'd walked.
He no longer remembered when he'd last eaten. Slept. Breathed without feeling like he was drowning inside his own head.
His footsteps echoed where they shouldn't.
He turned a corner, and the hallway was made of glass—shards suspended in air, refracting light that didn't have a source. His reflection fractured across them in a hundred angles. All of them wrong.
In one, his eyes glowed red.
In another, his face was older—lined with years that hadn't passed.
In the last one, he was holding Rowan.
Dead.
Lucian stepped back.
The image didn't disappear.
He stopped in a room that looked like an operations bay. Or maybe a dormitory. He couldn't tell anymore. The walls were pulsing with resonance interference—lines of code scrolling like veins. He didn't know how long he'd been here, but his chest hurt like something had been torn loose.
"Rowan," he said aloud. Just to hear it. Just to anchor himself.
No answer.
Only the hum of power and madness, echoing like breath through broken glass.
He dropped to his knees. Fist clenched. Gritting his teeth against the weight in his chest.
He pressed his hand to the floor.
Nothing. No warmth. No tether.
He missed the tether.
He missed him.
"Where are you," Lucian whispered.
The room responded. A whisper—not a voice, but a flicker of memory, an echo of resonance:
"Come back to me."
Lucian's eyes snapped open. That had been real. He knew it.
It was Rowan's voice.
He stood up too fast, body swaying. Pain lanced down his side where the Echo had pierced him. The wound was healing strangely, like the corruption in this place was trying to remake him, overwrite him.
He reached the far wall and dug a nail into the panel. Scratched words. A single message.
I'm still here.
Then the wall shifted.
It became another hallway. Another loop.
He passed a console left flickering on its side. Static danced across the screen.
A message blinked, then vanished.
[ANCHOR NOT FOUND.]
[RECONNECTION FAILED.]
Lucian's breath hitched. His hand curled into a fist.
He moved forward blindly now, pain and panic lacing his steps. His control was slipping. He could feel it. The calm precision he held like a shield outside was gone now, cracking at the seams.
"You always die before I reach you."
The words echoed from behind him.
He turned.
There—just beyond the next threshold—stood a figure. Obscured by glitching light. Not Lucian. But like him. Wearing the echo of his presence, shrouded in silence.
Its head tilted.
Lucian's jaw clenched. "You."
The figure didn't move.
Lucian's resonance flared, swirling in purple arcs from his palms, tracing the veins beneath his skin like lightning ready to snap. He didn't hesitate this time.
He attacked.
The room ruptured into a fight.
Lucian hurled a wave of spatial distortion forward, intending to rip the ground from beneath the echo's feet. The figure dissolved—like mist—and reformed behind him, copying the exact move.
Lucian pivoted too late.
Pain struck his ribs again—sharp, precise, like the last battle all over again. Blood sprayed across the floor. He staggered, breath ragged.
The echo moved again. Blades of violet space tore through the air. Lucian rolled beneath them, catching himself on one knee.
"You're just a shadow," he snarled. "You don't get to wear his face. You don't get to use my hands."
The echo stilled.
Then opened its palm.
A pulse of resonance spilled outward—and for a fraction of a second, Lucian saw himself.
Not the echo.
Himself.
Eyes blank. Covered in blood. Cradling Rowan's limp form.
"No," Lucian whispered. "No—no—no."
His power surged with the scream he didn't let out. He launched forward, blades forming in both hands—mirror-edge distortions of his own reality. He struck once. Twice. Parried a third.
The echo bled.
So did Lucian.
He didn't win.
But he didn't fall either.
The echo vanished into static again, but not before whispering—
"It always ends with you breaking."
Lucian dropped to his knees.
His breathing was wet now. There was blood in his mouth. His vision pulsed at the edges.
He didn't know how much longer he could last.
But before he blacked out, he felt it—
A thread.
Faint. Flickering. Distant.
Rowan.
His anchor.
He clutched it like it was the only real thing left in the world.
And whispered—
"Don't stop looking for me."
—
Lucian lay curled on the cold floor of Site V9.
His pulse thundered in his ears—too loud, too real. Every breath scraped raw down his throat, and every movement sent flares of pain through his ribs. Blood soaked his side.
The room no longer resembled anything coherent; it flickered between forms—command deck, hallway, medbay, dormitory—none of them stable.
He was bleeding into a place that wasn't even trying to be real anymore.
"Rowan..." he rasped again.
No answer. Just the slow, rhythmic hum of corrupted machinery and broken systems.
He pressed a hand to the side of his head, as if he could force the thoughts to stay still. But they scattered—memories playing out like broken film reels.
Rowan's laughter.
The way his brow furrowed when he was concentrating.
The weight of his hand on Lucian's shoulder.
The way he whispered, "I'm not afraid of you."
Lucian's fingers trembled. He dug his nails into the floor. Anchor. He had to hold on.
His resonance flickered, seeking the tether.
For a heartbeat, he felt something—Rowan's energy, faint and uncertain. A pulse like a hand brushing his cheek. But then it slipped again, dragged into the shifting pulse of Site V9's chaos.
"Don't let me become like him," Lucian whispered to no one. To everyone. "Don't let me become the one that kills you."
He couldn't let go.
He wouldn't.
Even if every other version of himself had failed.
Even if this place was a graveyard of Lucians who had already lost.
—
Time passed. Maybe minutes. Maybe hours.
Lucian eventually pushed himself up, swaying. His hand pressed to the wall, which pulsed faintly beneath his fingers—like the heartbeat of a dying machine.
A door materialized ahead.
Or it hadn't been there before.
It was small. Plain. But something tugged at him.
He stumbled toward it, leaving a trail of red in his wake.
As he touched the handle, something whispered behind him—a memory that didn't belong to this version of him.
He kissed Rowan once, knowing he'd never make it back.
Lucian closed his eyes.
"I'll make it back," he said aloud. "I don't care what this place takes from me."
He opened the door.
And the light swallowed him whole.
Command Deck – Zarek Technologies
Warning lights pulsed red across the upper displays. The room smelled faintly of scorched circuits and ozone. Rowan stood at the center of the command deck, his jaw locked tight, eyes fixed on the live spatial feeds still trying to stabilize from the aftermath of the Echo encounter.
Evelyn leaned over one of the secondary consoles. "Anything?"
"Nothing stable," Ava said beside her, frowning as she tapped through corrupted data logs. "Lucian's tether spiked during the last distortion. He's alive... but it's fading."
Rowan didn't speak.
He was watching the waveform on his wrist console jitter with static. The readings were erratic—Lucian's signature flickering in and out like a dying flame. Every pulse made his gut clench tighter.
The logs hadn't stopped updating.
And the last recorded entry from Site V9 read:
[RESONANCE PERSISTENT]
[ANCHOR RECALL – FAILED]
[MULTI-LAYERED ECHO SIGNAL – DETECTED]
Rowan stepped back from the console. He could feel the same cold hum crawling beneath his skin from before. Not pain. Not fear.
Premonition.
Something was coming.
Something wearing his face.
Evelyn noticed his expression. "Rowan?"
He looked up. "We need to find a way in. We need to pull him out before he disappears entirely."
"Rowan—"
"I felt him," Rowan snapped. Then quieter, his voice cracking: "I felt him. He's holding on. Barely. But he's still there."
The silence stretched.
Then Ava nodded. "Then we find a way to get to him."
Evelyn exhaled through her nose, tension coiling in her jaw. She turned toward the team slowly gathering in the command bay—Quinn, Ari, Vespera, Alexander, Elias. Kira stood just behind them, eyes like steel.
"Prep a briefing," Evelyn ordered. "I want everyone focused on a re-entry plan. We've lost too many versions of him. We're not losing this one."
Strategy Room
The command deck had gone quiet—no longer out of fear, but anticipation.
A digital schematic of Site V9 flickered across the center holo-display, incomplete and jittering with corrupted layers. Red-laced distortion veins pulsed in and out of the static, like something alive trying to hide inside the data.
Ren stood at the edge of the briefing table, bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet. His short black hair was slightly tousled, and his steel-gray eyes, flecked with faint gold, scanned the overlay with uncharacteristic seriousness.
Rowan watched him closely, arms crossed, exhaustion thick beneath his eyes.
"You're saying," Evelyn began slowly, "you can slip between the layers?"
Ren gave a sheepish grin and nodded. "Sort of. I mean—I can't force my way into V9 directly. The site's sealed off with temporal armor. But the seams? They're... unstable. If I anchor on a point in time that used to exist, I can ride the echo ripple into the present."
"You're talking about phasing between timelines," Ava said cautiously. Her eyes were calm, but her voice held the weight of layered concern. "That could splinter your core."
Ren flashed a finger-gun. "That's why I'm cute and reckless, not dumb. I'll anchor myself to a living resonance. Rowan's."
Rowan blinked. "Me?"
"You're connected to him deeper than anyone. Whatever happened in there—it centers on you. Your signal flares through every broken loop around the site like a lighthouse. If I lock onto your anchor point... I think I can punch through."
"It's dangerous," Evelyn said, eyes narrowing.
Ren shrugged, then looked down briefly, hands flexing at his sides. When he looked back up, he didn't smile.
"He saved me. I was out of control and scared, and he grounded me without hesitation. I owe him."
The silence that followed was heavy with quiet agreement.
Rowan met Ren's gaze and gave a slow nod. "Then we go together. But you don't go ahead of me."
"You're not my type, but you're hot when you're bossy," Ren teased gently, trying to break the tension—but the crack in his voice betrayed the nerves underneath.
Kira leaned against the wall, arms folded, watching with a reserved frown. "What if what we find inside isn't Lucian anymore?"
That question rippled through the room.
A pause.
Then Rowan answered softly, "Then we bring him back. Or die trying."
Alexander stepped forward, jaw tight, posture solid. "Then let's not screw it up."
The Plan Took Form.
A split team—Rowan and Ren would enter via temporal seam-points identified through the Rift overlays.
Vespera and Quinn would stabilize from the outside, buffering the bleed. Evelyn and Ava would monitor from the command deck, recalibrating the signal fluctuations in real time.
Elias would act as outside security—his corrosive field neutralizing any anomaly breaching the boundary during the operation.
Kira would assist in anchor tracking—her cryo fields able to temporarily freeze volatile echoes during the phase.
The team disbanded briefly to gear up.