Ezra Locke stood at the heart of Station Twelve, surrounded by a cathedral of metal, stone, and glass. The control ring beneath his boots thrummed with power, veins of blue light pulsing outward like arteries from a central glyph.
Above him, the gate hovered—an incomplete circle, its outer rim lined with command-runes etched into crystal pillars. White light spun along its surface, filling the air with the smell of hot copper and charged quartz. The energy in the room was palpable—too much to be safe, just shy of irreversible.
But Ezra didn't flinch.
He had overseen more than thirty bridge calibrations. None this ambitious. None this dangerous. And none with this many eyes watching him, both in the lab and across the Nine Cities.
"Sequence at 92%," said Mina Vale from the elevated deck. "Stabilization holding. Arc-to-core resonance is within margin."
Ezra flicked his slate to open the live array feed. The core spun clean. Glyphs danced in disciplined order:
Hold. Sync. Anchor. Pass. Return.
But something tugged at the back of his mind. A hum that shouldn't be there. A delay he couldn't see but could feel—like a skipped heartbeat in the system.
He tapped into the raw rune feed.
There it was.
A glyph he hadn't programmed.
At first glance it looked like Pass—a simple transit symbol. But the stem was wrong. The final mark curved outward, twisted like a looped thorn.
Ezra's stomach turned.
Sever.
"Pause the sequence," he said quickly. "Shut down the bridge."
"Sir?"
"Just do it. That's not our code."
His voice was sharp, but not panicked. Yet.
A murmur passed across the command deck. Technicians turned, eyes darting toward the projection he pulled up from his slate. In magnified view, the corrupted glyph pulsed faintly violet.
Mina's hand trembled.
"That symbol—where did it come from?"
Ezra didn't answer. He was already tracing its path back through the command string. The glyph hadn't been hacked in—it had been compiled into the final build, meaning someone had buried it in an earlier update, masked behind stabilizer commands.
Whoever planted it knew the system. Knew how Ezra thought.
This wasn't sabotage.
This was a targeted rewrite.
"Security—lock down the station," Ezra ordered. "Quarantine all uplink slates. No one leaves."
Too late.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw movement. A figure descending the metal stairs at the back of the lab—jacket too long, step too confident for any technician.
He turned to face them.
A quiet click echoed in the chamber.
Then a sharp crack.
Ezra staggered backward, clutching his chest.
It wasn't loud. Not cinematic. Just a small, dull sound and a sudden, suffocating heat.
He stared down at the growing red bloom on his tunic.
The gun fell to the ground as the shooter melted into the crowd—mask dissolving into glamor, vanishing before the alarms even sounded.
Ezra dropped to one knee. His vision tunneled. The floor vibrated beneath him—glass over crystal, buzzing with energy. Light flickered across his slate, still tethered to the open bridge. The sequence didn't stop.
Bridge activation: 97%
Manual override: Unresponsive
The corrupted rune surged forward.
Sever. Break. Rewrite.
He heard voices—Mina screaming, others rushing forward—but their sounds were distant, muffled like he was underwater.
Blood in his mouth.
Runes on the ceiling spinning too fast.
"Ezra—stay awake, please—stay with me—"
He felt someone's hand on his collar, lifting him just enough so he didn't collapse completely.
"Initiating failsafe sequence," the slate whispered. "Preserve identity. Reroute anchor."
A final glyph glowed at the edge of the circle. Ezra recognized it, even through the blur:
Rewrite.
Not destroy.
Not kill.
Recreate.
His last breath caught somewhere between agony and awe.
The world around him shattered into white light.
He did not die. Not exactly.
Ezra Locke's body fell.
But his consciousness—his identity, encoded in layers of runic logic across the Arcline's quantum lattice—was already gone.
Already breaking through.
Already being carried across the boundary no one believed could be crossed.
Far from the lab, beyond anything Ezra had ever known, something old stirred.
It did not call him by name.
But it knew the weight of runes.
And it saw his shape—fragmented, bright, unfinished.
So it reached out…
And began to write.