The desert air turned cold, leaching the day's heat from the adobe walls of the motel. Delaney didn't feel it. Her internal world was a blizzard of cold panic. The memory of the gate's fluctuation was a fresh brand, seared onto her consciousness. The perfect, balanced silence had become, in an instant, a terrifyingly fragile thing.
She spent the next week in a state of hyper-vigilance that bordered on paralysis. She canceled her plans to investigate a whispering canyon in Utah. She barely ate, her stomach a knot of anxiety. Sleep was a series of fitful micro-naps, each one jarringly interrupted by the instinctual need to check the anchor point. It was always there, the silence restored, but the memory of its faltering had poisoned its stability. It was no longer a monument; it was a patient in intensive care.
She tried to rationalize it. A surge. A cosmic burp. A temporary spike in pressure from the convergence. But the research she'd done on isolation and human endurance screamed the more likely truth: Lane was failing.
The thought was untenable. If he broke, the gate would collapse. The controlled flow would become another cataclysm. All of it—Colton's sacrifice, her own loss, the delicate peace of the world—would be for nothing.
She had to do something. But what? She was a cartographer, not a mechanic. She could map the cracks in reality, but she had no idea how to patch them. Her only tools were a stolen understanding of vibrational physics and a void where her soul used to be.
Frustration boiled over into a reckless need for action. She packed her few belongings and drove north through the night, not toward another thin place, but toward the one person who might understand. It was a risk. Isley's people were likely monitoring him. But she was out of options.
She found Colton in a small, rain-sodden fishing town in the Pacific Northwest. He was living in a cabin that looked like it was held together by moss and stubbornness, perched on a cliff overlooking a churning gray sea. When he opened the door, he looked older. The lines on his face were deeper, and the wild light in his eyes had banked to a dull ember. He was leaning heavily on a carved wooden cane.
He didn't look surprised to see her. He just grunted and stepped aside, gesturing her into the dim, cluttered space. The cabin smelled of salt, woodsmoke, and old man.
"Took you long enough," he said, his voice a gravelly echo of its former self. He lowered himself into a worn armchair with a wince.
"You knew I'd come?" Delaney asked, standing awkwardly amidst the chaos of books, fishing tackle, and strange artifacts.
"I felt it," he said, not meeting her eyes. He gestured vaguely toward the window and the sea beyond. "Not the same way you do. But the world… it hiccuped. A shiver in the bones of everything. I figured you'd be the first to know."
She told him. She spilled it all out in a rushed, desperate torrent—the tremor, the fluctuation, her fear that Lane was breaking down. She told him about the thin places, about her grim conclusion that the gate's stability was psychological, not physical.
Colton listened in silence, his gnarled hands resting on the head of his cane. When she finished, he let out a long, slow breath.
"Yeah," he said, the single word heavy with resignation. "I was afraid of that."
"You knew?"
"I guessed. Eternity's a long time to stay focused. Even for him." He finally looked at her, and his gaze was piercing. "You think finding these other weak spots will help?"
"I don't know!" The admission was a cry of frustration. "It's the only thing I can think to do! Maybe if I can understand the whole system, I can find a way to… to reinforce it. To take some of the pressure off him."
Colton shook his head slowly. "You can't take his pressure, kid. That's the whole point of the bargain. He's the cork. You're the… I don't know, the person who makes sure the bottle doesn't get knocked over." He sighed. "But you're right about one thing. Sitting here waiting for the sky to fall isn't a strategy."
He struggled to his feet and limped over to a cluttered desk. He rummaged through a pile of papers and pulled out a yellowed, folded map. It wasn't a geographical map. It was a hand-drawn chart of symbols, ley lines, and notations in a cramped, spidery script.
"I wasn't just fishing," he said, spreading the map on the table. "After they patched me up and Isley's people lost interest, I started digging. Old contacts. Forgotten archives. This…" he tapped the map, "…is the world according to the people who came before Oriax. Mystics, madmen, a few who actually knew what they were talking about. They didn't call it a Schism. They called it the 'Grand Discord.' And they believed it was part of a pattern."
Delaney leaned over the map. It was chaos, but as her eyes traced the lines, she began to see it. The thin places she had visited—the Scottish moor, the Mexican sinkhole—were there, marked with strange sigils. And they were connected by faint, arcing lines that intersected at a single, heavily inked point: the mountain.
"The gate isn't the only anchor," Colton said, his voice low. "It's the primary. The others… they're like buttresses. Leech fields. They siphon off the excess energy, diffuse it. Corvus's machine… it wasn't just using Lane. It was suppressing these natural outlets, forcing all the pressure into one point to make it controllable. When the machine blew, the pressure should have normalized, distributed back through this network."
A cold understanding dawned on Delaney. "But it didn't."
"No," Colton said grimly. "It didn't. Because the network is damaged. Decayed. Look." He pointed to several of the symbols on the map. They were crossed out, or marked with a notation that looked like a skull. "These points are dead. Silent. They've been… severed. Maybe naturally. Maybe not."
The implications crashed down on her. The pressure on Lane wasn't just the natural pressure of the convergence. It was the pressure that should have been shared by a dozen other, smaller anchors across the globe. The gate was shouldering a burden it was never meant to carry alone.
"So the fluctuations…"
"Are because the system is failing," Colton finished. "He's not just holding back the tide. He's holding back the tide because all the spillways are blocked."
The problem was infinitely larger than she'd imagined. It wasn't about Lane's sanity. It was about the structural integrity of reality's defenses.
"What do we do?" she whispered, staring at the map of a broken world.
Colton's jaw tightened. "We unblock the spillways. We find these dead anchors and we… wake them up." He looked at her, his eyes old and tired. "I can't come with you. This leg… and Isley's people would notice if I started globe-trotting again. But this map… it's a start. It's a purpose."
He was handing her the torch. The lonely watch was becoming a desperate crusade.
She looked from the ancient map to Colton's weathered face. The weight of the task was astronomical. But for the first time since the fluctuation, the paralyzing fear was replaced by a clear, cold purpose. She wasn't just a sentry anymore. She was a repairman.
She carefully folded the map and tucked it into her jacket pocket. It felt heavier than lead.
"Where first?" she asked, her voice steady.
Colton pointed to a symbol on the coast of Norway, marked with a skull and a series of frantic question marks. "There's a dead anchor there. A place they called 'The Singer's Maw.' If we're going to test this theory, start with the one that screams the loudest."
Delaney nodded. The Second Tremor had passed. The silence of the gate was steady once more. But as she left Colton's cabin and walked back to her car in the dripping rain, she knew the reprieve was temporary. The battle for reality had just entered a new phase. And she was the only soldier on the front line.