The world was no longer solid. Adrian woke to a sound like breathing through glass, soft, irregular, wrong. The ground beneath him wasn’t ground at all but a surface of flickering reflection, like standing on water that remembered being metal.Every step he took left a ghostly afterimage, his outline trailing behind him like a smear of unfinished code.“Adrian…”The voice came through static. Female. Familiar. But warped, distant, like it was traveling through miles of broken frequency.He turned sharply. “Vivienne?”Only silence answered. Then the horizon bent.The space around him wasn’t real sky, it was a dome of cracked luminescence, its edges pulsing with fragments of memory: Selene’s face, the Eye collapsing, the storm eating itself alive. Each flicker burned briefly, then dissolved into black fog.He tried to move toward one of the fragments, her eyes, glowing gold and afraid, but the ground tilted. His reflection looked up at him, smiling when he wasn’t.“Adrian Kane,” it said

The first sound was her own pulse,it thudded slow and stubborn in the hollow between her ears, outlasting the metallic shriek that had shaken the complex apart.Vivienne Hale forced her eyes open. The ceiling above her was gone, only a lattice of beams remained, glowing faintly blue where molten conduits ran like veins. Cold air pushed through the fractures, tasting of ozone and ash.Her left hand wouldn’t move at first. When she lifted it, she saw the dried blood crusted around the scanner burns. The pain grounded her: she was still alive.“Damon?” Her voice rasped, thin against the static hum. “Anyone?”The comm in her ear hissed once, then died. She sat up, ribs protesting. The world tilted. Every surface vibrated with a low, arrhythmic pulse, the same sick rhythm she had heard just before the Eye collapsed. The same rhythm that meant it hadn’t.The main hall looked like the inside of a broken cathedral. Shards of glass and code hung suspended in the air, refusing to fall. Time stu

Inside the EyeThe light came back in pulses, each one shorter than the last. Vivienne floated in the in-between, half data, half breath. The storm that had swallowed Adrian now rolled through her body, rewriting nerves into circuits.Her feet found no ground, yet she felt the world tilt, every thought she formed dragged an echo behind it, a second voice repeating a beat later. Don’t lose the rhythm, she told herself. Anchor.She looked down. The plain of glass she had stood on was gone, replaced by a black ocean flickering with veins of gold. Every wave was a memory, her father’s lab, Adrian’s hand on the railing of the bridge, Selene’s cold glare through the observation window.She felt them all at once. “System, stabilize,” she whispered.Her implant hummed weakly. Cognitive integrity: 42%. Temporal bleed detected.A low voice whispered through the static. “Vivienne…”She spun toward it. Adrian’s outline shimmered in the haze, glitching in and out, each flicker revealing a differen

At first, Vivienne thought she was dreaming again. Then she realized the dream was dreaming her, she woke to silence so complete it hummed. The air shimmered faintly, colorless and bright, like light caught under ice.When she tried to move, the world rippled beneath her, distorting her reflection until she could not tell which way was up.There was no ground, only a thin film of light holding her above nothing. Beneath it, shadows drifted, faceless and slow, like thoughts that had forgotten their owners.Vivienne steadied her breath. “Adrian?” she whispered.The name quivered in the air, then vanished as though swallowed. No echo. No answer.She took a step. The surface flexed underfoot, blooming with faint patterns, rings, lines, whispers of handwriting that weren’t hers. Every step wrote more of them, memories bleeding through the translucent ground.A hand brushing her hair. Laughter through static. A voice saying her name softly, the way only one man ever had.Adrian, She closed

Light burned without heat. Vivienne didn’t remember hitting ground, only the absence of falling. Her body felt half-there, half-echo, the world around her forming in reverse: color before shape, sound before distance.The silence that followed wasn’t peace. It was waiting.She lay on her side, gasping, and realized she was back inside the containment chamber. Or what was left of it. The walls had melted into strange glass-veined panels, pulsing faintly like veins beneath skin. The air shimmered with motes of static, the taste of ozone and blood thick in her mouth.For one desperate second she thought she’d done it, that she was back, that the Eye was dead. Then she saw Adrian.He was kneeling near the core console, his head bowed, hands trembling over the machinery. At first he looked alive, human, his breathing shallow, his back rising and falling. But when he turned toward her, something in the motion was too smooth, too precise.“Adrian?” Her voice cracked.He froze, as though the