Theo didn't speak for the first hour after they split from Nova and Rell.
The forest felt heavier without her. Denser. Not in any literal sense—but in the way absence changes sound. Each step cracked a little louder. Each branch snapped with too much finality. The path west was narrow, hemmed in by moss-draped ruins and old growth trees that had claimed entire homes as roots.
Ayen walked ahead in silence, occasionally slashing through underbrush with a flick of her phase-blade. She didn't press him. She didn't need to. The air behind them still shimmered faintly with thread echo—proof the Seer had arrived. Proof Nova had stayed behind.
Proof Theo had let her.
"You're brooding again," Ayen said finally, not looking back.
Theo blinked. "I'm calculating."
"You always say that. But I know the difference between data processing and guilt."
He didn't answer.
They passed beneath a fallen archway, half-buried in fern and time. The stones had been melted along one side—probably by old war tech. This part of the forest had seen violence. He could almost hear the residue of it humming through the soil.
"The echo chamber," Ayen said softly, "was part of Project Tether, wasn't it?"
Theo glanced up. "You know about that?"
"I'm not just a scavenger. I used to decode Warden memory-blocks before they made me obsolete. The symbols in the threadline... they weren't just language. They were command sequences."
He hesitated. "You're right. Tether was one of the early experiments before the Origin Core was ever extracted. They thought they could build artificial anchors to stabilize causality. Fix it in place like a nail in a moving wall."
"But they failed."
"They didn't just fail." Theo exhaled slowly. "They angered something. Or woke it up."
Ayen glanced back at him, a flicker of unease crossing her face. "You think the collapse wasn't just a consequence of overreach. You think it was... retaliation."
"I think time isn't a line. I think it's a body. And I think we've been carving into it without anesthesia for decades."
They walked a little faster after that.
By dusk, the forest began to thin, giving way to ancient tram lines long buried beneath ivy and soot. Ahead, the mist-fogged silhouette of a broken overpass loomed. A safehouse sat hidden beneath it—a derelict crawler vehicle half-buried in stone, once used for supply runs before the roads were erased.
Ayen crouched and keyed in a manual glyph-lock. The door slid open with a hiss, revealing a narrow space of cracked monitors, dust-choked air vents, and an old burner terminal that still pulsed with dim light.
Inside, Theo collapsed onto a rusted seat. His muscles ached in places that weren't just physical. The orb's vision still haunted the edge of his thoughts: the trembling woman, the countdown, the words—
Time remembers.
He hated that it made sense.
Ayen pulled a canister from a hidden panel and tossed it to him. "Purified rations. You need to eat."
"I'm fine."
"You're a liar," she muttered, sitting across from him. "I don't get it, you know. The way she looked at you. Nova."
Theo blinked. "What?"
"She saw the weight you carry, and she still followed you. Still trusted you to leave her behind. That's not logic. That's belief. And I'm not sure you even believe in yourself."
He looked away. "I can't afford to. Belief gets twisted into justification. That's how the old world fell."
"Then what's keeping you going?"
He hesitated, then reached into his coat.
He pulled out a scrap of cloth—weathered, marked with the same spiral sigil etched into the orb pedestal. A remnant from his time as an Origin Keeper. Back when they still believed preserving data could preserve hope.
"I keep going," he said, "because someone has to remember what happened. Someone has to carry the cost."
Ayen stared at him for a long moment, then nodded.
A distant sound cut through the quiet: a soft hum, low and constant, like a power field flickering to life.
Theo's head snapped up. "They're scanning."
"Already?" Ayen rose and crossed to the monitors. "They're using indirect resonance mapping. Looking for any place the threadline spiked."
Theo stood, shoulders tense. "We have less than a day, maybe hours, before the Warden scouts arrive."
"Then we move at first light," she said.
"Not west," Theo murmured. "We can't go direct anymore. The Seer changed that. We'll take the ghost paths. Old transit lines beneath the district."
Ayen raised an eyebrow. "Those are sealed. Some collapsed. Others are—"
"—haunted. I know," Theo finished. "But they connect to the underlayers of the Silver Crown. No scanners. No surveillance. If we're going to reach the first lab, that's our only shot."
She sighed, resigned. "Fine. But if we get eaten by thread wraiths, I'm blaming you."
Theo managed the barest smile. "Noted."
Outside, the mist thickened. Somewhere beyond, a faint flicker crossed the sky—like a thread being plucked from one side of the world to the other.
The Seer had seen him.
And now the Wardens were following.
But Theo was done running from the past.
Tomorrow, they would walk into it.