The hesitation lasted only a heartbeat. But in a war of creation, even a heartbeat was enough to change fate.Through the widening crack in the white sky, the Prime Echo stared down at the Interstice like a god realizing something had slipped beyond its grasp.Selene felt the shift immediately. “The Engines know,” she whispered.Fowler’s jaw tightened. “Good. Let them.”The being no longer trembling, no longer fading stood taller. Not fully grown, not fully defined, but present. A new kind of light rippled beneath its skin, as if it had veins made of dawn.“They’re trying to calculate me,” the being said, voice layered with strange harmonics. “They can’t. I’m no longer the command they remember.”Selene stepped beside it. “They’ll try anyway.”The crack burst wider. Sound flooded in the orchard burning, roots tearing, Engines screeching like metal dragged across a dying universe.One of them dropped toward the fracture, a spear of cold geometry. The Interstice rippled, reacting instin

Light swallowed them whole. Not the warm, responsive glow of the Sovereign Field this light was clinical, cold, structured with mathematical precision, as if reality had been reduced to its bare geometric bones.Fowler felt the shift immediately. “Selene… don’t move.”She didn’t need the warning. Her fingers tightened around his.The corridor they’d stepped into dissolved behind them, collapsing into thin vertical bands of data that bled upward into the ceiling like evaporating ink.The space ahead widened into a circular chamber suspended in a void without beginning or end. The floor beneath them wasn’t solid.It was memory rendered flat scenes flickering under glass, unfinished threads trapped mid-formation. “This isn’t Engine architecture,” Selene whispered. “This is”“A thinking space,” the being finished, hovering beside them.“Primitive. Unrefined. A prototype intellect.”At the center of the chamber stood the splinter-being now more stable, its outlines sharpening, its form ali

There was no sky. No sand. No horizon. Only the sensation of falling slow, deliberate, like gravity itself had been instructed to savor his descent. Fowler didn’t scream. He’d done this before. Just never willingly.A dim light appeared beneath him, growing, sharpening, forming the shape of a corridor. Metal walls. Flickering overhead strips. Smoke. The distant sound of boots slamming the floor in panic.Not the desert. Not the outpost. This was earlier. Too early. “Not this,” Fowler breathed. “Not here.”But the Engine didn’t care. His boots hit the floor with a jolt, echoing down the narrow hallway. And he knew exactly where he was. The evacuation tunnel.The place he had never spoken about not to Selene, not to command, not even to the ghost of Reyes in his dreams. A voice echoed down the hall, young and furious: “We don’t have time! Move!”Fowler’s stomach clenched. His younger self sprinted past the junction ahead helmet dented, rifle bouncing against his shoulder, shouting over

The light faded slowly, like a breath being released after years held inside. When it cleared, Fowler and Selene stood on an empty plain flat, silver, horizonless. No doors. No corridors. No past versions of himself glaring at him like ghosts.Just silence. But it wasn’t peace. Selene stepped beside him, scanning the emptiness. “This isn’t a memory.”“No,” Fowler murmured. “It’s what’s left when one collapses.”A soft hum rose beneath their feet deep, rhythmic, old. The Engine adjusting. Processing. Struggling. It wasn’t angry.It wasn’t relieved. It was confused. Fowler could feel it. He’d given it something it didn’t know how to file an unchosen choice.Selene knelt and touched the ground. Silver ripples spread outward from her hand, like water disturbed. “It’s rebuilding itself,” she whispered. “But it’s not sure what shape it should take.”Fowler looked into the empty distance, squinting. Faint outlines flickered there half-formed structures, dissolving before they could settle.

The chamber tightened around them the moment the Other Fowler spoke. Air sharpened into points. Light thinned into blades.Reality contracted around competing gravitational centers: two Selenes, two Fowlers the Engine choking on contradiction. His Selene clutched Fowler’s arm. “Don’t move,” she whispered.But the Other Fowler…He was already moving. Every step he took was clean, surgical, like he’d carved the path out of the air itself. The Dream Engine bent around him not in welcome, but in recognition.He belonged to its logic. Fowler felt it immediately: the precision, the danger, the narrowness of a life stripped of her softening influence. This was him at his coldest. His most weaponized. His most obedient.The Other Fowler stopped in front of young Selene. He didn’t look at his older self. He looked only at her. “Are you hurt?” he asked.Young Selene stiffened. “I’m not the variable here.”“You are.”His voice was low, lethal. “This isn’t your chamber. Someone altered it.”His S