Kael moved fast.
The rain had slowed, but the city still pulsed under low-humming lights, steam rising from cracked vents, screens flashing predictions, ads, surveillance metrics. All of it—noise. He barely noticed. Not anymore.
He kept checking over his shoulder. The figure hadn't followed him in the thread, but it didn't have to. It had marked him.
He needed Aya. And she wasn't where she was supposed to be.
The place she called her safe zone was a sub-level under a forgotten arcade in Sector Eleven. No cameras. No scans. Just heat signatures and old chemical light. She'd called it "off-grid."
Now it was just off.
Kael scanned the entrance. The elevator shaft had been torn open, wires dangling like vines, and the panel had been burned—clean, deliberate. Someone had erased access.
He didn't hesitate. Dropped into the shaft.
Five floors down.
The bottom hit hard.
He stepped out into Aya's hideout—if you could still call it that. The long hallway was lit by backup cells, flickering yellow. Her equipment was gone. Every trace. Cleaned.
Except one thing.
Her coat, the one with the gray inner lining and frayed collar, was still on the back of a chair.
Kael reached for it slowly, unsure if it was a message or a trap. Inside the coat's inner pocket, tucked neatly, was a folded scrap of synth-paper.
"They loop from inside. Never trust the first version of yourself."
His stomach dropped.
It was her handwriting. But the ink was smudged, and the paper… aged. Like it had sat there for days, not minutes.
Kael backed out, instincts twitching.
The walls felt thinner now. The air buzzed with something unnatural.
He activated a short thread-jump—ten seconds forward, just to scan.
And for the briefest moment, reality staggered.
He was still in the room. But something had changed.
Aya's coat was gone.
The chair it hung on had been overturned. There were footprints—one set. His own.
Then a voice, not loud, but clear, from behind:
"You shouldn't be here, Kael."
He spun.
Aya stood near the corridor's exit, soaked from rain, eyes sharp.
But something was off. She looked like her—but not quite. Her hair was longer. Her scar—gone. Her voice, flatter.
"I've been waiting for this version of you," she said. "Did you read it?"
Kael said nothing.
Her expression tightened.
"That message. I didn't write it for you. Not this one."
He blinked—and in that fraction of hesitation, she flickered.
Just for a second. Like a signal glitch.
Then she was gone.
No footsteps. No echo. Just air where she'd been.
Kael stood frozen.
Not fear. Not confusion.
Recognition.
Because that version of Aya—he'd seen her before. In a thread he hadn't told anyone about. One he wasn't supposed to access. A divergent path he'd closed and buried.
Or thought he had.
He left the safe zone fast, heart pounding.
Now the problem wasn't just that something was watching him.
It was that multiple versions of him might already be involved.
And not all of them wanted him alive.