Medbay – 0417 hours
Containment had begun.
A nullfield generator thrummed softly in the corner, its pulse rising in intervals, like a synthetic heartbeat syncing to something it couldn't quite contain.
Pale light filled the medbay, diffuse and unkind—casting sharp edges across Rowan's face as he stood just outside the newly projected field line.
His knuckles were white around the edge of the partition frame.
Lucian's body lay motionless on the bed behind the translucent barrier, but the air around him shimmered faintly—reactive. Residual. Not stable.
Ava stood across the room, eyes on the monitors, arms crossed over her chest. Her face was set in a neutral mask, but Rowan could feel it—the weight behind her restraint. She was terrified. Focused. And furious at the same time.
He broke the silence first.
"It's learning."
Ava didn't look away from the readout.
"I know."
"It's using my resonance to get stronger."
She nodded once. Slowly. "That's why we need to keep you on the other side of the field."
"No." Rowan's voice cracked like stone under stress. "He's still in there. I can't leave him alone with that thing."
Now she did turn. Her expression was unreadable—but her voice was soft. Almost too gentle.
"Rowan... if we're wrong—if he's already gone—your presence might be the last thing keeping it tethered."
He blinked. Once.
And that hurt more than anything.
Command Deck — 0423 hours
Sharon Tan hadn't left her station. Her eyes were dry, her hands shaking as she replayed the tether bloom logs for the fifth time.
"This is mimicry down to the harmonic strand," she said, voice tight into comms. "It's not triggering alerts because it's behaving exactly like a real tether reformation. But the emotional variance isn't there. It's just running a perfected loop of Lucian's last recorded resonance pattern."
Evelyn's voice crackled through the line. "And Rowan's being used as the anchor?"
"Actively targeted, yes. Not passively."
"Meaning it knows him. Understands what he feels."
There was a pause.
Then Evelyn again, low and sharp: "Lock the medbay grid. Restrict all tether-compatible frequencies. Log everything. If this is tied to Veil, we're past the warning stage."
The line went dead.
Sharon blinked at her console. One file on the side had turned green, flagged by the auto-archive sweep.
She didn't remember opening it.
/veil/REDACTED/archive_137.mp4
[Auto-recovered memory log]
[Playback Y/N?]
She hovered the cursor. Breath held.
Sector D5 – Rift Perimeter – 0540 Hours
The Rift loomed like a second sky—ruptured, irregular, bleeding violet light between streaks of dense rainclouds. Thunder rippled along its jagged edges, but no sound followed. It was the kind of silence that arrived after screaming—too still, too deep.
The crater below it steamed like a wound reluctant to scab. Shattered earth laced with resonance veins glowed sickly blue-green, and the air reeked of scorched minerals and something unnatural—a chemical tang of corrupted memory, like forgotten emotions set ablaze.
Elias stood near the edge, shoulders tense beneath the soaked lines of his long coat. He crouched low beside the Riftspawn's remains. What was left of the creature had collapsed in on itself—twisted limbs frozen mid-crawl, its flesh partially dissolved, mottled with echoing shimmer like it had tried to become something else before it died.
"This isn't how they die," Elias muttered. His breath fogged in the cold, but the ground still steamed beneath him. "Not unless it was copying something and couldn't finish."
The rain slid down his face, beading at his jaw. He didn't wipe it away.
Vespera stood several meters back, her fingers lightly resting on the chime pendant at her throat. She closed her eyes, extending her field like a breath—gentle, fluid, empathic. But the emotion in the air resisted her. Not like a wild thing—but like something designed.
Her lashes fluttered open.
"It's grief," she said softly. "But it's not organic."
The words left her lips like exhale through water.
Haru knelt beside a collapsed ridge, his amplifier faintly illuminated. "Synthetic emotion fields?" he offered, hesitantly. "Could a Rift echo learn that?"
Vespera's answer came slow. "They're not supposed to. But this one isn't feral. It's deliberate."
Alexander stood watch nearby, silent and immovable. Rain clung to his armor like condensation on steel, and his gaze never left the Rift's horizon. His fingers flexed once against the edge of his shield—like memory.
"If it's imitating resonance," he said at last, voice low and measured, "then it's not mimicking power."
"It's mimicking people."
That landed hard.
The wind shifted—cold, electric. The Rift above them pulsed once, sending ripples through the air like the world itself was shuddering.
For a second—just one—Rowan's resonance signature flickered on Haru's scanner.
Faint. Fractured. Gone before the ping could lock.
Vespera's head turned sharply toward it. Her breath caught.
"Did you feel that?"
Elias stood slowly, eyes narrowing. "Something is using him."
No one spoke for a long time.
Because they all knew—Rifts didn't just copy resonance.
They consumed it.
Zarek HQ – Monitoring Bay, Level 3 – 0602 Hours
The fluorescent lights in the monitoring bay flickered, casting long, stark shadows between the rows of consoles. It was early—too early for noise, too late for stillness—and the silence had begun to feel sentient, like the room itself was listening.
The others had finished their shift rotation.
Silence fell in soft waves across the monitoring deck, broken only by the occasional click of a diagnostic ping or the slow cycling of filtered air through the ceiling vents.
Sharon sat hunched at her desk, her shoulders sharp beneath the weight of her oversized slate-gray pullover, sleeves bunched at the elbows. Her black slacks were creased at the knees. Hair tied in a half-falling ponytail, strands plastered to her cheek.
The console lights had dimmed to standby, but Elia Tan hadn't moved.
The file pulsed in waiting.
/veil/REDACTED/archive_137.mp4
[Auto-recovered memory log]
[Playback Y/N?]
Her fingertips hovered over the confirmation key. She exhaled slowly through her nose.
This file wasn't in any of the crosslinked recovery batches.
It had bypassed all standard retrieval protocols.
Sharon wasn't easily shaken. Numbers had always made more sense than people—clean, precise, and without pretense. She had built a reputation in her short time at Zarek: not the loudest, but the most thorough. A near-eidetic recall of resonance fluctuation thresholds. An uncanny eye for echo irregularities. Ava called her sharp. Evelyn once called her "dangerous in a quiet way."
And yet, her pulse was fast now. Her mouth dry.
Because this file had skipped all redundancy filters. No flag for human review. No trace in the system's usual memory corridor. Just a whisper on the edge of the bloom log.
Her eyes—sharp, clear, slightly sleepless—reflected the soft glow of the screen. She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose, tension creeping along her spine.
She reached for her comm—then hesitated.
Ava and Evelyn were likely still with Rowan. She didn't want to trigger another alarm without knowing what she was dealing with.
But the file wouldn't stop pulsing.
Her cursor hovered over the confirmation line.
She clicked: Yes.
The screen shifted.
Audio crackled first.
A low hum. Distant machinery. And then—
A voice.
Male. Steady. Familiar.
"Project Veil. Iteration 137. Subject: L. Vaughn."
Sharon's heart stilled.
She leaned forward.
The video began.
Lucian's Dream-State
It was not darkness.
Darkness was absence. This was saturation—a pressure that clung to Lucian's skin like wet velvet, thick and suffocating.
He floated, but there was no sky, no ceiling, no ground. Just a void colored in bruised violet and smeared static, pulsing faintly with a heartbeat that wasn't his.
No breath. No gravity. No shape.
He drifted like ash through molasses.
The air—if it could be called that—reeked of ozone and something older. The scent of scorched paper, of dried blood under heat lamps, of sterilized trauma and burnt-out emotion. It coated his tongue, bitter and sterile.
A whisper slid past his ear, too close to be imagined. He turned—except there was no body to turn with. No sense of limbs. Just awareness, stretched thin and fraying.
Shapes bled in and out of focus. Hallways he didn't remember. Glimpses of sterile white rooms, fluid-filled tubes, glass walls stained with condensation. And always—always—a voice in the distance, low and familiar, looping like a lullaby composed entirely of guilt.
A light flickered overhead. Not bright. Sickly yellow. It blinked to life above him—revealing nothing, and yet making the void somehow more claustrophobic.
A corridor unfurled under him like a tongue unrolling from a beast's mouth.
His feet found form. Boots, maybe. But they didn't echo when he stepped.
Everything here felt recorded. Played back. A life he half-remembered, dubbed over with silence.
He saw Rowan.
Not his Rowan—but an echo. Smiling too perfectly. The angle of the lips just slightly wrong. His eyes gleamed, but not with affection—with scripted light.
Lucian's pulse spiked.
He took a step back—into a new memory. One not his. A version of him laughing in a sunlit room, holding Rowan's hand. Peaceful. Impossible. False.
"You did it," Rowan said. "You saved me."
But Lucian didn't remember saving him.
And when he blinked—the warmth was gone.
The walls dripped. The light shattered into static.
Now he stood before a mirror.
But the glass was smeared. Warped. And what stared back wasn't him.
Same face. Same scars. Same deep-set eyes.
But they didn't blink in sync. The smile was late—glitching at the corners. Like it was waiting to see how Lucian would react.
"You're not dreaming," it said.
"You're being rewritten."
Lucian stepped back. The mirror moved with him.
And then—it cracked.
Thin, branching lines raced across its surface, and from it stepped the Echo.
It wore his face like a second skin. But smoother. Flawless. A version of him without the tremble in his fingers, without the trauma in his shoulders.
It tilted its head.
"Let me carry it. Let me be what you couldn't."
Lucian opened his mouth to retaliate.
No sound came.
Only air—tainted, electric—rushed in.
And then he was falling—not down, but inward. Collapsing into his own mind. Through layers of memory he hadn't consented to. Through loops of laughter that turned into sobs. Through timelines he'd never lived but somehow remembered.
The last thing he saw before the void consumed him—
Rowan. Real, this time.
Eyes full of fear.
Mouth forming his name.
And Lucian—helpless—falling out of reach.