Soren's POVThe archive screen suddenly lit up again, that same glowing text searing across it.*INCOMING CONNECTION REQUEST: EARTH.*I froze, hand still on the console. “Caleb, no. Don’t touch it.”Caleb lunged anyway, fingers flying toward the panel. “This is bullshit, Soren. Who the hell is sending this? Let me shut it down before…”The connection ignored him. The screen didn’t dim. Instead it brightened, and a woman’s face filled the display.She looked rough around the edges, like she’d been through hell. Gray streaks in her dark hair, torn uniform, eyes sharp with exhaustion. “My name is Mara Venn. I’m from Orthea. We used to be connected to hundreds of worlds through the same network. The Fold was just one of our gateways.”Nadia raised her rifle. “Keep talking.”Mara didn’t slow down. “The network was built for communication and controlled travel between worlds. But the gateway on Earth went unstable after you reconnected it. That signal is racing through the entire network ri

Soren's POVThe archive screen went completely dark.Caleb stood frozen, staring at the red line stamped across the bottom of the screen. STATUS: MEMORY PARTITIONED. His face had gone the color of old paper. “That’s not possible,” he whispered. “I never touched that program. I studied folded space until my hands shook. I tested the dangers of the Fold until I thought I’d lose my mind. But this… this says I was part of it. Part of me.”Nadia didn’t lower her rifle. She just stared at him, eyes hard. “Caleb, talk to me. Right now. Every single thing you remember about the Anchor Program. Don’t leave anything out. Not one detail.”Caleb swallowed hard, then started talking fast, like he was trying to outrun the words. “I studied folded space. That was my job. I tested the boundaries of reality. I pushed the limits until things broke. I discovered how the Fold could tear a hole in time and space and suck you through if you weren’t careful. But I never went near that research chamber. I ne

Soren's POVMaelin took us to a temporary command center a few kilometres from the light column. The building was half-buried in rubble, but the inside looked like a high-tech war room. Screens covered every wall, showing live feeds from across the ruined districts. In the middle, a big holographic map pulsed with red dots marking unstable gateways. Red dots that were spreading faster now, closer to us.The missing settlement had been built around an old spatial anchor. According to the surviving records, the anchor had operated safely for years before suddenly disappearing. The settlement’s people might still be alive, but there was no reliable way to reach them. The network just… cut them off. The last feed from the settlement street was frozen on a single empty doorway, like the people had stepped through and it had closed behind them. No blood. No explosion. Just gone.I recognized the pattern of the failure. It was exactly like what happened when I used too much of my spatial sto