POV: Commander Elric Rael – Time Authority Enforcer
There were few things that unsettled Commander Elric Rael.
Misaligned sequences. Time-fracture feedback. The occasional echo from a deleted timeline. Those were the everyday thorns of his post.
But failure—this kind of failure—itched beneath his skin.
In the heart of the Central Authority Citadel, nestled in the suspended timefold known only as the Gridline, Rael stood before a flickering holographic replay of the last engagement. His jaw locked as he watched the moment Kael vanished again—seconds before a retrieval unit closed in.
The café scene replayed. Again. And again.
Each loop more infuriating than the last.
"Subject escaped," the projection droned flatly. "Intervention detected: Aya 7. Former operative. Classified defect."
Rael turned away sharply, hands clasped behind his back.
Aya.
The name soured the air. Her disappearance from the Authority's core nearly five cycles ago had been buried beneath classified logs and reassigned failures. She had vanished off the system like vapor—until now.
Specter Isha stepped into the chamber behind him, her mirrored mask flickering with synced streams. "You watched the sequence twenty-three times. He slips away every single one."
Rael didn't respond. He was busy reviewing something deeper—the way Kael reacted in those final moments. It wasn't just panic. The boy didn't just survive the intervention. He flowed with it. Like he knew what would happen next.
"No tether," Isha continued. "No conduit. He jumped forward and landed clean."
Rael's voice was ice. "Untrained. Unregistered. Unmonitored. Yet he breaks through Authority lockdown protocols. Do you know how many layers we had on that café? Five."
"And Aya sliced through all five like she never left."
Rael's knuckles whitened.
"She shouldn't still have access to the code."
"She doesn't," Isha replied coldly. "She's rewriting it."
That gave him pause.
Aya was no ordinary rogue. She had once been the Authority's youngest systems tactician. The one they all said could hear time breathing. And now she was rewriting the very laws she once enforced.
"She's training him," Rael said. The thought came like a warning. "This wasn't a rescue. It was a test."
Isha stiffened. "What do you mean?"
Rael finally turned. "She wanted to see how far he could go under pressure. If he could survive a live breach. If he could evade."
"And he did."
Rael nodded grimly. "Which means we've lost the element of surprise."
A silent alarm pulsed red along the wall. A status update flickered into the room:
Subject Kael: Temporally Mobile. Trail Corrupted. Coordinates Unstable.
Isha moved to the console. "We still have a residual trace. If we calibrate the entry node to the last unfractured anchor, we may be able to isolate their next drop."
Rael's voice darkened.
"No assumptions. No solo units. I want two full squads in place at all likely exits—standard time-blockers, phase-locks, and deploy the shadow relay."
"You think she'll double back?"
"She won't," he said. "But she'll want him to think he's safe."
Rael faced the screen again. The still frame hovered: Kael mid-movement, eyes wide but focused. It was subtle, but Rael had seen that look before—in defectors, in rebels, in the ones who thought they were born for more.
It was the look of someone becoming dangerous.
"They've only slipped once," he said, more to himself now. "They won't get another chance."
He stepped forward and tapped a sequence into the wall. A secure command line opened, blinking.
Deploy all agents to Echo Sector Twelve.
Subject Priority: Elevated.
Capture Alive. Terminate Aya if obstructive.
Elsewhere in the Citadel, the Echo Squad geared up. Cloaked in flickering armor tuned to time distortions, they moved without sound, without conversation. Their weapons weren't just tools—they were anchors designed to lock moving anomalies into stillness.
This wasn't a mission anymore.
It was a message.
Back in the dark of his private chamber, Rael leaned against the edge of a memory gate.
He didn't watch Kael this time.
He watched a clip from years ago—Aya, back when she still wore Authority grey, smiling slightly as she corrected a temporal alignment in the Year 2031.
"Your flaw," she had once told him, "is that you still think time's a machine. But it breathes, Rael. You just don't listen."
Now he would make sure she never said anything again.