The world had stopped making sense.
Lucian blinked.
And when he opened his eyes, the corridor was different. Again.
This version of the hallway was fractured—pieces of the wall suspended midair, frozen like shattered glass caught in stasis. The ground pulsed under his feet, humming with unstable resonance, and a sickening whine twisted through the silence, too high-pitched to be heard fully but impossible not to feel in his teeth.
He staggered forward, the glow of his anchor link flickering erratically at his wrist—dim one second, blazing the next.
Rowan.
His name was the only thread Lucian could still hold onto. Everything else was breaking apart.
He didn't remember when he started bleeding. His side throbbed with the dull ache of reopened wounds. The fight with the Echo had torn through more than his body—it had stripped something internal, some thread of cohesion, and now his mind felt like it was being tugged in directions that didn't exist.
Lucian stumbled forward and braced against the wall, but his hand phased through it like it wasn't there. He recoiled.
Then looked down.
His hand was wrong.
Too many fingers. Not enough. The shape distorted, pulsing, then snapped back to normal like the moment hadn't happened.
He pressed his fist against his mouth, breathing hard.
Keep moving. Don't stop. Don't think.
He couldn't tell how long he'd been trapped here. Time was meaningless. Minutes stretched like hours; entire memories unfurled and collapsed within seconds. He saw Rowan's face in every mirrored surface—sometimes whole, sometimes lifeless, sometimes burning.
In one flash, Rowan's corpse lay sprawled across the floor, a hole through his chest.
Lucian dropped to his knees, clutching at his head.
"No, no, no—"
The vision vanished. The floor beneath him returned to dull gray metal.
His pulse raced. The anchor tether surged again, but it felt weak. Distant. As if it were searching for something that had already been lost.
He laughed, but the sound was brittle. Wrong.
There were no tears. He couldn't remember how to cry.
He pressed his palm against the wall again, harder this time—until the friction burned his skin. Until his wrist glitched and fractured and came back together again. He didn't care.
He slid down the wall and curled into himself.
His hand reached down toward the knife strapped to his thigh—trembling fingers brushing the hilt.
He unsheathed it slowly.
"Focus," he whispered. "Real pain. Something real."
He turned the blade and dragged it lightly across the inside of his forearm. Just enough to feel it. To see the blood bead red against too-pale skin.
It grounded him for a breath.
Then the hallway blinked again—and he was back on the battlefield.
Not a battlefield. That battlefield. The first Rift. The one that changed him. His parents' bodies still burned behind his eyes. His screams echoed off the metal.
"Stop—"
He turned the knife toward his palm, pressing it in deeper.
Pain flared. Bright. Cutting. Real.
"Rowan," he whispered again, a cracked prayer. "Please..."
And that was what finally broke him.
He slumped forward, forehead pressed to the floor, blood smeared along his arm. The resonance around him flared, distorting the corridor in a rippling wave.
[ANCHOR LINK: INTERFERENCE DETECTED]
[STABILIZER UNRESPONSIVE]
[FEEDBACK SURGE INCOMING]
He didn't see the lights flickering across the corridor wall. He only saw Rowan's hand in his memory—warm, steady, always reaching for him.
He reached back.
But this time, there was no one there.
—
The walls were breathing.
Or maybe it was him.
Lucian stumbled through a corridor of impossible angles, the metal pulsing with residual resonance—his own, and something else. Something older. He pressed one blood-slicked hand against the wall, but it recoiled like it had skin. His breath came in ragged, shallow bursts, the taste of copper thick in his mouth.
A whisper threaded through the air again—low, breathless, and wrong.
"Rowan…"
Lucian froze. His hand trembled against the steel.
That voice hadn't come from him. But it wore his voice.
His fingers twitched. One of them was bent at a wrong angle from the last confrontation—snapped clean, numbed by adrenaline. He hadn't bothered to fix it. There were worse injuries now. Gashes along his side that had stopped bleeding, burns curling up his forearm from overcharged resonance discharge. His ribs ached, each inhale catching like broken glass.
But it wasn't the pain that was killing him.
It was the memory.
Every hallway was a half-formed reconstruction—memories bleeding into reality. The room where Rowan had smiled at him for the first time. The chair where he'd once sat, wrapped in his shirt. All out of place. Glitched into walls. Twisted.
Lucian blinked, and the door in front of him turned into Rowan's face.
He didn't scream. He didn't move.
He watched as Rowan's eyes hollowed, blackened, and stared through him.
"You let me die."
Lucian crumpled to his knees. The breath tore from his throat like a scream, but made no sound. He clawed at his temple, desperate to anchor himself—to remember the warmth of Rowan's touch, his voice, anything real.
Blood smudged across his fingers.
He slammed his head against the floor once.
Twice.
The corridor fractured.
Site V-9 rippled around him, the reality stuttering. The red lights blinked into violet. The walls shrieked with static.
He was losing control.
He was losing himself.
And somewhere in the haze, an echo of his own voice whispered—
"Still alive. Still waiting."
Zarek Command Deck – Present
"Anchor spike!"
The cry came from Quinn at the resonance console, his voice shaking for the first time in years.
Rowan shot upright from where he'd been monitoring the rift anomalies, his pulse slamming into his throat. The pain that shot through his chest wasn't physical—it was a tether backlash.
His tether to Lucian.
Rowan's wrist console flickered violently—error codes overlapping the last pulse log.
[ANCHOR POINT DESTABILIZED]
[RESIDUAL PULSE DETECTED – SITE V9]
[SUBJECT: LUCIAN VAUGHN]
[CORRUPTION THRESHOLD: CRITICAL]
"Where is he?" Rowan's voice cracked.
Ava crossed to the panel beside Quinn, already moving to override system alerts. Her jaw was clenched, eyes wide with fear masked behind pure instinct.
"He's still alive," she said, breath tight. "But barely. He's anchored in. Something in that site is suppressing outgoing signal—he's been cut off."
Across the room, Evelyn gripped the edge of the terminal. Her usual steel composure fractured, just slightly, around the eyes. "Prepare the breach team. We're out of time."
The room surged into motion.
Alexander snapped to his feet, shoulder still bandaged from the last battle, but already strapping on his armguard.
Dain stopped joking for once. "Let's move. No more echoes. We're pulling our own back."
Vespera stood tall beside them, her face paled but eyes blazing. "He's unraveling. I can feel it across the command link."
Kira got up from her seat, palms against the table, her coat billowing at her back. "I'll be damned if I let V9 make a fool out of me again" she gritted her teeth.
Quinn reached Rowan and took his arm. "You're the only thing still tethering him. We wait any longer—"
"I know," Rowan breathed, voice barely holding together. His hands were shaking, and his face had gone pale, eyes wide with a volatile blend of fear and fury.
Ren rushed in from the hall, still pulling on his jacket. "I felt it. The time distortion—Rowan, I felt him scream through the anchor tether."
Rowan didn't reply. He just moved.
Straight to the ready bay. Straight to Lucian.
Evelyn stepped in front of him. "You're going. But not alone."
He stopped. The command deck fell silent as all eyes turned to her.
She nodded once. "This time—you go as a full team. I'll rally Mira, her abilities should be advantageous."
The Breach Team Crosses Over
The chamber hummed with resonance—the kind of sharp, high-pitched frequency that tickled the inside of the skull like static and dread.
Lights pulsed along the breach corridor's walls, lining the circular platform where the Rift gate had been forcibly stabilized. It wasn't the clean blue-white of standard sync.
It flickered—unstable, touched by echoes, veined with strands of red like blood in water.
The Rift to Site V-9 was reopening. Not by their hands. But on its own.
And they were stepping into it.
"Final pulse calibration holding," Ava said, her voice steady as she monitored the sync convergence from the side console. "You'll have twenty minutes before the window begins collapsing again. After that, we lose the tether."
Rowan barely heard her. He stood near the edge of the platform, fingers twitching near his side, eyes locked on the undulating tear in the air.
He could feel Lucian beyond it. Distant, frayed. But still there. Still calling.
Alexander was already kitted out in full shield gear, standing like a stone wall at Rowan's flank. "We go in as one. We come out with him."
"Or not at all," Dain added from the back, twirling a short-range pulse detonator in one hand. He flashed a grin, but it didn't touch his eyes.
Vespera stood between them, hand wrapped around her resonance amp. Her violet eyes were unreadable, but her pulse was calm—measured. The kind of calm that came before a storm.
Ren tightened the strap on his chrono-brace and stepped forward, bouncing on his heels with kinetic energy barely held in check.
"I'll keep the gate open on this side," Ava called out. "But Ren—if you lose track of the time pulse, call it immediately."
"Got it!" Ren gave her a thumbs-up, but his eyes were locked on the Rift.
Beside him, Rowan's expression remained cold and unreadable.
He was already halfway inside.
Mira approached last, rifle strapped along her back, kinetic modules thrumming with restrained power.
The gate screamed.
The air split.
And they stepped through.
Site V-9 – Inner Zone
It was like falling sideways through a memory.
Heat. Then cold. Then a pressure that crushed the lungs but whispered like breath against their necks.
And then—
They landed.
Hard.
Metal shrieked beneath their boots as the team staggered into the corridor of Site V-9.
The space was warped—stretched in places like a ribcage twisted the wrong way. Lights flickered overhead in irregular pulses. One of them sparked blue, then blinked out.
The floor was lined with residue. Echo scars. Fragments of resonance burst into visibility with each step—a ghost of Lucian's combat form flickering mid-strike, a shadow of Rowan's tether line stretching down the hall, distorted and tugged in the wrong direction.
Alexander raised his shield. "Keep your formation tight. No visuals yet."
Vespera held her amp steady, her voice a low murmur. "Something's wrong with the air here."
Rowan knelt, one hand brushing along the floor. "There's a recent anchor pull here. Fifteen minutes ago. It's his."
Dain swept his arm out. "Whatever pulled him deeper, it didn't leave tracks."
"No," Ren said, his voice suddenly tense. "It didn't need to."
They looked up.
The wall at the far end of the hall pulsed, then opened.
Not physically. Time itself peeled back like fabric—and standing just beyond it was a figure.
Humanoid.
Staticky.
Wearing no face.
But every movement mirrored Lucian's combat profile with chilling precision.
It tilted its head.
Rowan's stomach dropped.
Vespera whispered, "That's not just an echo."
The moment shattered.
The figure moved—faster than sight. Rowan threw up a shield, Ren snapped time into half-speed around their formation, and Alexander caught the hit mid-air with his shield raised high.
The impact sent cracks through the barrier, resonance peeling like bark.
"Contact!" Alexander shouted. "We've got movement!"
Ren launched a time flare, slowing the entire section of the hallway, while Dain surged forward, a gravity pulse distorting under his feet as he slid across the tiles.
Vespera pulsed a suppression wave, but the echo dodged it before she even released it—anticipating the attack.
"Gods, it's like it knows us," Dain muttered.
"Because it does," Rowan whispered, stunned. "It's from him. It's a corrupted version of Lucian."
The Echo-Lucian turned toward Rowan at that exact moment.
And smiled.
Rowan felt something rip along his spine—a pull, deep and wrong.
A pulse like the beginning of death.