Dani walked like someone who knew the layout of places that didn't exist anymore.
She didn't pause when the orchard shifted again—when the trees began to hum, when their bark shimmered with sigils too old to belong to any written language. She just shifted her lunchbox on her shoulder, and kept moving.
Her path curved in a way real roads didn't. But Dani had learned a long time ago not to trust angles.
She stopped beside a clearing.
There was a monolith in the center. No markings. No sound. Just wrong.
Wrong in a way her bones remembered.
Dani frowned.
Sector Delta had a phrase for this.
"Residual Harmonics: Points of Reality Degradation where human cognition becomes unreliable."
Translation: if something looked normal but made your blood pressure spike and your gums itch, it was probably a relic of a broken law of physics—or a conceptual leak still hissing in the seams of the world.
Dani opened the lunchbox.
She selected the jar. Shook it once.
The thing inside—a white slug coiled around a silver nail—stirred.
She held it near the monolith.
The slug didn't react.
Dani blinked. "Huh. Not a breach point. Not a memory pocket. So what the hell are you?"
The monolith pulsed. Once.
And then—just for a moment—
It turned into a doorway.
Old and wooden.
Splintered.
And familiar.
Dani didn't move. She didn't breathe.
The doorway was not supposed to be here.
It was an exact match to a house she'd burned down. Years ago. On purpose. With the thing still inside.
Back before she had a clearance level.
Back when she still thought names were stronger than anomalies.
A memory flashed:
Blood on her shoulder.
A man—blurred.
Screaming.
She'd locked the door from the outside.
That moment passed.
Dani set the jar back down. Carefully. Calmly.
Then pulled the briefcase.
She popped it open, and fired a sigil shell directly at the monolith.
Boom.
The reality shimmered, cracked, and reset—like it had never offered her anything at all.
Dani lowered the weapon.
"Not today."
She re-holstered the case and moved on.
Sector Delta had a simple mission: contain and neutralize events, objects, or phenomena that broke the logic scaffolding of reality.
But "simple" didn't mean "effective."
Most agents didn't last long. The ones who did?
They weren't really agents anymore.
They were Instruments.
Not quite people.
Not quite weapons.
Dani didn't talk about that part.
She moved faster now.
Just ahead, a sleeper node beacon glowed faintly behind a twisted arch of branches. Old Delta tech—abandoned years ago. She scanned it. Still functional. Power source degraded but pinging.
As she approached, it flickered to life.
:: INSTRUMENT RECOGNIZED — 7V-K ::
:: STATUS: UNSTABLE COMPATIBILITY. THREAT INDEX UNAVAILABLE. ::
:: WARNING — INCOMPLETE DEACTIVATION. ::
Dani stepped back.
"You've got to be kidding me."
The light blinked again.
:: DANIELA VEGA — ACCESS LOGGED ::
She stared.
No one had called her that since—no. She didn't remember.
Didn't want to.
The beacon's next message stuttered.
:: Do you remember what you left behind? ::
The voice wasn't synthetic this time.
It was hers.
Her old voice. Human. Before whatever happened during Operation Glassmouth.
She crushed the beacon under her boot.
Hard.
It sparked once. Died.
The orchard grew darker.
Dani adjusted her coat and tapped her glyph detector again.
No ping.
But she didn't believe it.
She muttered: "Still think I can shoot my way out of this."
Her voice was steady.
The lie was solid.
But the place behind her still smelled like burnt lemons and static.
And her fingers were twitching.
Dani didn't hear it approach.
Because it didn't approach.
It just was.
One moment: orchard.
The next: corridor.
White tiles, institutional. A long hallway with sealed steel doors and faded red emergency lights pulsing above.
She exhaled sharply. The hallway was familiar.
Division training facility?
No.
Too narrow. Wrong proportions.
Too... deliberate.
Her fingers brushed her lunchbox.
"Not real," she muttered.
She tapped the briefcase open. Loaded an adhesive sigil shell into the chamber. Fired once, dead center.
Boom.
The hallway trembled.
Tiles rippled. Lights shattered.
But the hallway snapped back like a rubber band. Same as it was. Like she'd never pulled the trigger.
Then—
A voice behind her.
"You missed."
Dani turned.
There was someone there.
Faceless.
Shapeless.
But present—like the idea of a person, scribbled hastily in the margins of reality.
She raised the Tether Bolts, the heavy crossbow-like launcher creaking under its own weight. The reels hummed faintly, tiny pulses of blue light dancing along the spike's shaft. Each bolt was linked to an Ontological Tether Reel, meant to pin an anomaly in place, locking it to a precise point in space-time. If it held, it could buy time—control—but if the anomaly's conceptual mass shifted too fast, the tether would snap, useless against something like this.
"I don't miss," she muttered, teeth tight.
She fired.
The spike left the launcher with a metallic twang, spinning toward the anomaly.
It hit.
And then... nothing.
The bolt twitched, shivered, and rolled backward through the air. It returned to her hands as if gravity had forgotten it existed. The reel's hum sputtered, confused.
She blinked.
The Tether Bolts were loaded again. Ready to fire. But every attempt unraveled before it could take hold.
"You can't be bound," the anomaly whispered, voice liquid, stretching around the room. "You're trying to hold me in a cage that doesn't exist."
Dani's hands shook on the launcher. The metallic spike in her grip felt heavier than it should. The hum of the tether reel pulsed faster, almost frantic, as if it knew the rules themselves were bending.
"Even your Sector Delta toys... useless," it said, stepping closer. Its shape folded over itself like a living origami of fear.
Dani gritted her teeth. She fired again. The spike arced forward.
It collided with the flickering mass—and instead of embedding, it unraveled midair, a phantom tether unraveling into smoke. It tumbled back into her hands, as if the universe refused to let it land.
Her chest heaved. She pressed the launcher to her shoulder again, knuckles white. Every firing attempt only reminded her: this creature—or idea—was immune to containment. Even weapons designed to lock anomalies into place were irrelevant.
The corridor twisted around her, the lights pulsing unevenly, reflecting off every surface like a warped mirror. The Tether Bolts hummed nervously in her hands, screaming that control had failed.
And she understood: whatever this was, it didn't just survive—it knew how to survive, even against the most disciplined, precise tools Sector Delta had ever created.
She scanned its form.
No consistent outline.
It flickered between silhouettes—agent, child, mirror. One flicker was even her own shape.
Her hand twitched toward the lunchbox. The motion was automatic, practiced—a reflex of training overriding terror. She popped the latch open and grabbed the space-eater slug, the kind of thing that shouldn't exist outside a sealed lab. It pulsed faintly, as if aware of what she meant to use it for.
"Stay still," she hissed.
The anomaly tilted its head—her head—and said, "You think that thing knows what 'space' means?"
She didn't wait. She shook it violently.
The slug convulsed once, twice—then collapsed. Melted between her fingers like wax under thought. A smear of iridescent fluid hissed on the floor, evaporating into nothing.
Her pulse spiked. "No," she breathed.
"There's no space here," the anomaly murmured. "Space isn't real when I'm known. You brought that thing into a lie."
Dani's breath grew louder in her ears. Every inhale like dragging air through a cracked helmet.
She stepped backward—two steps. Then forward. Then back again. Trying to break whatever looping geometry she'd stumbled into. But the hallway didn't change. The lights above her head buzzed faintly, synchronized to the rhythm of her own heartbeat.
"Reset," she whispered to herself. "Reset pattern. Reorient. Don't look too long."
She pressed her palm against the wall.
It felt soft. Not like flesh. Not like anything alive. Just... unfinished. Like reality hadn't decided what texture to commit to yet.
"You saw me," the anomaly said again, closer now, though it hadn't moved. "And that's what hurt you. You recognized me. That makes me real."
"I didn't recognize shit." Dani spat, but her voice cracked halfway through.
Behind her, the corridor reformed—the same smear of shadows, the same flickering hazard lights. Every turn she made was a loop folding in on itself.
The thing smiled again.
"Yes, you did. That room. The house. The hallway. You've been here before."
Dani's teeth clenched. "No."
"You were never cleared for Sublevel 3," it continued, almost kindly, "but you peeked. You weren't supposed to look. But you did."
Flashes erupted—bright, instantaneous frames like a strobe pressed into her eyelids.
She saw herself in grainy monochrome footage. A younger Dani. Her Sector Delta uniform sharper, less worn. Leaning toward a sealed door. Clipboard in hand. Peering through the narrow viewing slit.
And something—something inside—looked back at her.
The hallway around her dissolved into static. At first she thought the lights were dying, but the static moved—each pulse syncing to her heartbeat. The air tasted like copper and recirculated oxygen.
When the shapes reformed, they weren't this hallway anymore.
They were that one.
---
Sublevel 3 wasn't supposed to exist.
It wasn't on the schematics, yet everyone whispered about it—the floor you never volunteered to check, the one where memory audits always came back "inconclusive."
Dani had been new then—eager, bright-eyed, still under the illusion that understanding the dark meant controlling it.
She'd been assigned cataloguing duties: Rift exposure tests, something about visual contagion. She didn't ask.
But the notes bothered her.
Each file ended the same way: "Subject exposure—terminated after observation event."
She'd told herself she was just confirming a containment integrity. That she'd peek for a second, purely procedural.
The door was metal, dense, padded along the edges as though sound itself wasn't allowed to leave. Cameras pointed away from it, not toward it. A small viewing slit ran chest-height, shielded by a flip cover engraved with DO NOT OPEN WITHOUT SUPERVISION.
Dani had lifted it anyway.
Inside wasn't darkness. It was something like a reflection, warped through thick glass. The cell showed a dim room—bare walls, a chair, and someone sitting in it.
A woman. Her uniform was the same as Dani's, but older, frayed.
And she was looking directly back.
Dani froze. For a second she thought it was a delay, a reflection. But the woman's lips moved first.
Her own voice came out:
"DON'T OPEN."
Then the lights above the slit shuddered. The reflection's pupils dilated until they swallowed the whites. Behind her—behind both of them—the walls started bending inward, like paper pulled by breath.
The clipboard fell from Dani's hand.
And for the first time, she heard something breathing from the other side of her eyes.
Then alarms screamed.
Red light. Shouting over comms. The cover slammed shut automatically.
By the time command arrived, the logs showed no record of her presence. No footage. Just a single note appended to the file she'd opened:
"Replication event confirmed."
---
She stumbled, the breath ripping from her lungs. "That's not real," she whispered, but her voice had no conviction.
"It is now," said the anomaly. "You made it so."
Her skin crawled. She yanked open her coat, moving by instinct—her final backup plan. A last resort they were never supposed to use.
Inside the lining was a Null Casing—a dull, coffin-sized capsule etched with Sector Delta sigils, its surface rippling faintly like brushed metal submerged in oil. It hummed with dead context—a pocket reality stripped of story, memory, or meaning. Anything sealed inside would cease to exist, not destroyed but forgotten by the universe itself.
She thumbed the latch.
The air changed pitch.
Sound warped downward, as if gravity had found her voice. The casing unfolded into a perfect absence, edges collapsing inward like a hole punched through causality. The hallway bent toward it, drawn by its hunger for narrative.
Her coat closed itself, the latch clicking.
Her knees went weak. "No weapon's working—nothing," she said, trembling. "You're not causal. You're—"
"I'm proofed," it said, with quiet satisfaction. "Because you proved me."
Dani's throat locked. "What the hell does that—"
"You tried to understand me. That's what I am. Understanding. Recognition. Fear that you might remember."
Its shape twisted, resolving for a heartbeat into something that looked almost kind.
"But you can't unprove me."
She shook her head, eyes watering from the strain. "Forget me," it whispered.
"I... I can't."
"Then I grow."
The air rippled. The ceiling split open, spilling out the illusion of orchard branches swaying gently overhead—too calm, too serene. Her mind snapped back to the present—whatever that meant—and suddenly she was back.
Still standing.
Her fingers trembled uncontrollably. A thin burn mark scorched her wrist—a circular welt like a faded seal. The only proof something had happened.
Even the smell of ozone was already fading.
She blinked, and the corridor looked normal again. Empty. Clean.
But her chest hurt in a way that wasn't physical.
The realization crept in slowly, whispering through her nerves:
She hadn't escaped it. She'd remembered it.
And now it would never stop existing.
Dani turned and ran.
Not tactically. Not trained. Not graceful. Just ran.
Her boots slapped the floor in rhythm with the flickering lights. The hallway didn't change, but she needed movement—needed the illusion of leaving.
Her pulse screamed in her ears.
She didn't know what she'd seen, or if she was still seeing it.
But she knew, with absolute certainty, that it had known her first.
And that was the worst part.