CHRONOVAIL

Chapter 2: Resonance

“Don’t move.”

Lira’s voice cut through the half-dark like a warning shot. The observation glass behind her hummed, a spiderweb of hairline fractures running across it, but it hadn’t shattered. Kael didn’t answer. He kept staring at the place where a reflection had smiled at him a moment before — a smile that was gone now, as if it had never happened.

“What happened to the reflection?” Lira whispered.

“It wasn’t a reflection.” Kael’s hands trembled as he forced his breath to steady. “Something’s in the system.”

“Something?” She stepped closer, but the emergency locks hissed and sealed the lab. The red lights blinked once and held.

“System lockdown,” Kael said under his breath. “No exit.”

Lira jabbed the panel beside the door. Nothing. “Comms are dead,” she said.

“No outbound signal either,” Kael replied, eyes flicking to the faltering monitors. “ChronoVail quarantined the whole facility. Automated containment.”

“So it thinks we’re contaminated?”

Kael looked at her. “Maybe it’s right.”

The silence thickened until the failing generators’ rasp became the room’s only heartbeat. Lira moved to the central console and brushed glass from the surface with a ragged fingertip.

“We need to stabilize the reactor or it’ll meltdown through the floor,” she said.

“Forget the reactor,” Kael snapped. “There are two versions of me in the system, Lira. Two.”

She frowned. “You sure that’s not a glitch?”

“Do I look like a glitch?”

She softened. “No. You look terrified.”

He ignored the tremor in his chest. “Pull the quantum feedback logs. I need to know when the split occurred.”

Her fingers moved over the keys with fast, practiced motions. “Logs are corrupted. But the sync data shows something… odd. Your neural signature isn’t static — it’s echoing.”

“Echoing?” he echoed.

“Like there’s a second Kael trying to sync through the same channel.”

Kael swallowed. “Then maybe he’s still here.”

“Kael…” Lira hesitated. “You said you saw yourself. Maybe it was visual — temporal residue.”

He shook his head. “It was me. I could feel him.”

“Feel him?”

“Like déjà vu, but heavier. Like remembering pressing the button twice.”

A shadow crossed Lira’s face. “You need to breathe. The neural interface—”

“I’m fine,” he snapped. The edge of his voice fell away; quieter, “I’m fine.”

She watched him a long beat, then turned back to the console. “If the reactor’s unstable we’ll both fry before you find your echo.”

Kael ran a hand through his hair and let out a breath. “Fine. We fix it.”

They worked in a wordless rhythm. Sparks flared from exposed conduits. The lab smelled of ozone and copper and something metallic under the air — blood or oil, he couldn’t tell. Lira’s hands shook as she cranked the coolant regulator.

“You always do this,” she muttered.

“Do what?”

“You lose yourself in the theory — forget you’re made of flesh, not equations.”

He almost smiled. “You used to like that about me.”

“I used to think it made you brilliant,” she said, “now it just makes you dangerous.”

He met her eyes. “You once told me danger was the price of progress.”

“I said that before you made a machine that argues back with reality,” she replied.

A faint hum ran through the room. The reactor lights steadied; for the span of one breath the lab felt almost normal — then Lira froze mid-motion and the wrench slipped from her fingers to clatter on metal.

“Lira?” Kael reached for her shoulder. “Talk to me.”

She blinked, expression flattening. “Kael?” she said, as if hearing him for the first time.

“I’m right here.”

Her head tilted. “You’re the wrong one.”

“What?”

Her lips trembled. “You shouldn’t be here. You’re… you’re not supposed to be the one who pressed it.”

Kael took a step back. “Lira, what are you talking about?”

Her voice dropped to a whisper. “He said I’d know when I saw your eyes.”

A cold wind curled through Kael’s gut. “Who said that?”

She blinked, and suddenly she looked dazed, confused. “What?”

“You just said—”

“I didn’t say anything,” she insisted, rubbing her temples. “I— I blacked out for a second.”

Kael didn’t believe her. He turned toward the console, craving something tangible. The words echoed through his head: the wrong one. Something brushed his wrist. He reached into his lab coat and found a scrap of paper, its corner singed.

His handwriting: Don’t trust Lira. Don’t press the button again.

His chest clenched.

“Kael?” she asked.

He folded the note and slid it back into his pocket. “Nothing.”

“What did you find?”

“Nothing,” he said too quickly.

Lira’s gaze sharpened. “You’re hiding something.”

“So are you,” he said, low.

She stepped forward, eyes unreadable. “You think I’m lying?”

“I think I don’t even know what’s real anymore.”

Before she could answer the main screen snapped awake. Two biometric tracings scrolled across the display — both labeled RIVEN, K. One throbbed steady and even. The other jumped in jagged bursts, like a heart in fright.

Lira stared at the numbers. “That’s… two of you again.”

Kael nodded slowly. “And one of them is in here.”

The lights above them sputtered, dimmed, then died. Darkness swallowed the lab in one breath.

“Kael?” Lira’s voice trembled somewhere close.

“Stay still,” he said, forcing his breath to slow. “Backup power will kick in.”

A faint static crackled from the ceiling intercom. Then a voice — low, rough, and unmistakably his — spoke out of the speakers.

“Kael… step away from her.”

His heart stuttered.

The voice continued, slow and deliberate. “You have no idea what she really is.”

Lira’s hand found his sleeve. “That wasn’t you,” she said.

He had no answer.

“Kael,” the voice said again, nearer now, “she’s not who you think.”

Then, as abruptly as it had come, the intercom went dead.

Lira exhaled, breath shaking. “That wasn’t your voice.”

“It was,” Kael said in a flat whisper. “Every inflection. Every breath.”

“But—how?”

He swallowed. “Maybe the other me is still alive. Maybe he’s in the system. Watching.”

“Or maybe,” Lira whispered, cold with a different fear, “you’re losing your mind.”

Kael almost laughed — it came out a small, ugly sound. “If I were, it’d be easier.”

A gunshot crack from the reactor threw sparks across the floor. Kael grabbed Lira’s arm. “Behind the panel!”

They dove as a surge of blue light tore along exposed cable, emergency power snapping back online. The lab filled with a hard, clinical glow.

Kael turned to Lira, chest pounding. “Are you okay?”

She brushed hair from her face and nodded. “I’m fine. Just—” Her words caught.

“What is it?”

She looked up at him slowly. The light snagged on her pupils: they shone silver, cold and metallic, mirrored like liquid chrome.

“Lira,” Kael whispered, voice breaking. “Your eyes…”

She blinked once, blank and still. “What about them?” she asked.

He stepped back as if struck. “They’re not yours.”

Her mouth tilted in a small, almost curious smile. “You’re still the wrong one.”

Beneath their feet the reactor thrummed, a slow, inexorable pulse. Kael could not draw breath. In Lira’s mirrored eyes he saw himself — and behind that reflection, impossibly, another Kael was smiling.