Frost hadn't touched Winterhold in decades—not truly. The surface below was a sealed tomb of wind and ice. But up here, in Sovereign orbit, the cold was sharper.
Tavi stood at formation in the upper-level debrief ring, her spine straight, coat zipped high. Lights buzzed overhead, too bright, as if to compensate for the tension in the room.
Team Theta was nearly silent. Eleven strong—except Kael was missing, again.
Instructor Meros paced slowly before them, boots echoing on polished alloy. The man didn't shout. He never needed to.
"Cadet Virex is under sync review," he said flatly. "Medical observation. Echo-locked status."
Arrek shifted. Cesta muttered something to Myr. Tavi didn't glance. She only watched Meros, and beyond him—the place Kael usually stood.
Behind her, Vellin exhaled too loudly. Serin made no move. Dane was a wall at her right shoulder, as unmoving as ever. Juno-Seven hadn't blinked. And Nayla stood with perfect poise, lips set in a practiced line.
The squad wasn't breaking—but it was fraying.
Meros continued, "The anomaly during Simulation S-41 has been escalated. Logs are sealed under House restriction. Do not inquire."
Then he turned. Dismissed them with a motion.
"Resume standard rotation."
Tavi didn't move. Not right away. Not until the others started peeling off in groups of two and three—Cesta brushing past her with that too-sure smirk, Hollen rolling his eyes, Arrek still trying to match Serin's gait stride for stride.
She stayed behind, watching the frost gather at the edges of the viewport. Winterhold loomed below, mute and unknowable.
She knew what she had to do.
Tavi keyed the console open with a borrowed link spike and a bypass patch stitched from salvaged Concord code.
The node unlocked with a soft whine. The screen lit her face in pale blue.
Simulation S-41. She opened the logs.
Kael's telemetry should have been routine—training rig, low-risk sync, nothing above Tier I. But the waveform didn't match expectations.
Neural response lagged. But the frame moved first.
That wasn't reflex. That wasn't drift.
That was memory prediction.
She ran a secondary trace against her Concord scrape file. The hit came faster than expected.
PROTOTYPE NODE 09 – UNREGISTERED
ECHO-RESPONSIVE FRAME
OBSOLETE
UNCONTROLLED
She stared at the file. It was degraded—half-corrupted. But the lattice signature matched the anomaly from Kael's sim. Not just close. Identical.
She copied the trace, marked it under a private cipher tag, and severed the link.
Mid-Cycle – Commandant Hangar Deck
No one noticed her slip into the diagnostics bay.
The light in the hallway hummed faintly, and her terminal buzzed in a way it hadn't before. There was… something in the air. A pulse.
She paused beside the sealed service door that overlooked the underdeck vault site—017-A, officially off-limits, unofficially cracked open days ago by Kael's curiosity.
She didn't enter. She didn't need to.
The signal was coming through anyway.
She found him alone.
Kael stood with his back to her, coat dusted from frost-cycled walkways, shoulders squared like he'd been waiting for someone to stop him.
"You went back," she said.
"I had to," he said.
"It's syncing again."
Kael turned slowly. His eyes were tired. Not panicked. Not haunted. Just… resigned.
"I didn't call it."
"But it's still reaching."
Neither of them spoke for a long moment.
And then Kael said, quietly, "It remembers me. Even when I try to forget it."
ALERT – BAY DELTA
The klaxon cut the station's quiet clean in half.
Tavi was already running before the alarm fully registered—half of Team Theta's voices rising behind her in confusion as the intercom stuttered to life:
UNAUTHORIZED LINK DETECTED
CLASS I FRAME IN UNSCHEDULED SYNC
TRACE ORIGIN: UNREGISTERED PROTOTYPE
CROSS-MATCH: NODE 09
She stopped cold.
Her terminal buzzed. A final line of data scrolled across the screen—recompiled from corrupted Concord registry.
IDENT: V_N_T_H
And in her head, a single thought landed like a spoken word.
Vanth.