The impact hit him like a memory violent, disorienting, familiar in the worst way. Fowler hit the glass hard, breath exploding from his lungs.The thing wearing his face pinned him there, its six eyes gleaming like molten fractures, its mouth stretched in a too-wide grin that made his skin crawl.Up close, it wasn’t just a copy. It was an autopsy. Layers of his past failures, doubts, regrets were stitched into its form. Every scar he wished he didn’t remember.Every moment he tried to forget. All dragged to the surface and carved into living anatomy. Its voice slid out of it like oil: “You ran from every version of yourself. Where will you run now?”Fowler didn’t answer. He drove his knee into the creature’s torso or what passed for it and rolled out from under it. The surface beneath him cracked from the impact, fractures rippling outward like frozen lightning.Echo-Fowler rose slowly, smoothly, as if unaffected. Fowler braced himself. “I’m not here to fight you.”The creature tilted

He didn’t feel the impact. He felt the break. The moment his hand touched hers, the breach convulsed not like a doorway opening, but like a bone snapping under pressure.The shockwave rippled through both worlds at once, folding light into darkness, memory into raw sound. Fowler’s fingers closed around Selene’s. And the universe screamed.The beach. The shattered sky. The witnesses’ realm. The collapsing Echo corridors. All of it detonated inward and outward, as if caught between two competing realities that refused to surrender.Selene’s grip tightened painfully. Her voice strained through the chaos. Fowler, it’s not stabilizing, it’s rejecting you. His jaw locked. “Then push harder.”I am pushing. The light tore sideways, splitting the world into jagged panes like shards of a window suspended mid-explosion.Through the fractures, Fowler could see every version of the two of them: lying on the beach, held in containment, running through the Sanctum, dying, surviving, reaching, missi

He didn’t fall. He plunged. Downward was not a direction, it was a verdict. The light around him sheared away into bands of color, then into raw sensation, then into nothing at all.For a moment, Fowler had no body. No breath. No heartbeat. Just momentum. Then the world caught him. Hard.He hit something that felt like a floor, though the word felt too simple. The impact rippled through the surface like he’d landed in a pool made of stone and memory. He staggered upright.The air down here wasn’t air; it was density. A thick, humming pressure that made every breath feel stolen, not granted.The space around him stretched wide a canyon of suspended darkness lit by long, vertical strands of luminous thread. He realized the strands weren’t light.They were voices. No moments. A thousand whispered timelines braided into glowing ropes, hanging from a sky he could not see, sinking into a ground that wasn’t there.Every strand shook quietly, like something breathing inside them. Fowler swall

The corridor did not begin so much as notice him. When Fowler stepped inside, the air thickened not humid, not hot, just aware. As if the space had eyes but no face, watching him with a quiet, curious intelligence.The floor beneath him rippled like shallow water. The walls bent inward and outward with each breath he took, mimicking the rhythm of his lungs. He hated it instantly.“Selene,” he whispered under his breath, “if this place kills me before I find you, I swear”The corridor shifted. The walls flattened, the floor hardened, the air stilled. It was listening. Good. He walked.The first ten steps were normal or as normal as anything could be in a place without a real axis of gravity. His boots touched something solid, and the space didn’t distort around him. Then the corridor began to forget.At step eleven, the wall to his left vanished, replaced by black static. At step twelve, the static became ocean waves lapping against stone.At step thirteen, the waves transformed into a

For a moment, Fowler forgot how to breathe. He stood face-to-face with himself. Not a reflection. Not a memory. Not an echo.A presence solid, breathing, unmistakably real. Every detail matched: the scar on the jawline, the faint unevenness in the left eyebrow, even the tension in the shoulder from an old shrapnel injury.But there was something off. The other Fowler stood too still. Too calm. Too certain. Like a man who already knew how the next ten minutes would unfold.Selene stepped slightly in front of the real Fowler, her body angled protectively without her even realizing it. “It learned your shape, your neural signature, your history,” she said quietly. “But not your choices.”The copy smiled Fowler’s exact smile, but wrong in ways Fowler couldn’t name, sharp around the edges. “Don’t worry, Selene,” it said. “I didn’t come here to hurt him.”Fowler narrowed his eyes. “Then why are you wearing my face?”“Because the Engine trusted you,” the copy replied. “And it needed someone