The roof of the Red-Line train was a vibrating skillet under the midday sun of Ironheart. Kaelen lay flat, clinging to the grimy metal as the train hurtled across the elevated trestle, a bronze ribbon cutting through the industrial smog. Below them, the complex gears and pistons of the city ground on, a ceaseless, metallic symphony.
Kaelen felt a peculiar nausea, not from the movement, but from the flickering reality of the tracks below.
He risked a glance. For a heartbeat, the steel rail was solid. The next, it shimmered into a flowing, phosphorescent green river of pure data before instantly resetting. It was a digital stutter—the Chronophage testing the stability of the timeline.
This is it. This is what Aura meant about unstable history.
Aura:
"High-velocity decoupling?" Kaelen thought back, his mind racing to match the AI's speed. "You mean jumping off a train going eighty kilometers per hour?"
The Tank Farm? That's guarded by the Mechanist Corps! And it's full of volatile Aether gas!
A map—flawlessly detailed and color-coded—slammed into Kaelen's mind. He saw guard patrols, sightlines, and even the schedule for the tea break of the main sergeant. Aura's grasp on the city's logistics was terrifyingly complete.
Before Kaelen could argue, a more immediate, horrifying event occurred.
The entire train lurched—not physically, but temporally.
The air suddenly felt thin, cold, and wrong. The deafening clack-clack-clack of the wheels skipped, replacing the rhythm with a moment of eerie, total silence, followed by a jarring double-beat: clack-clack-clack-clack.
Aura:
Kaelen looked down at his clothes. He was wearing his usual, oil-stained brown leather coat. But no, wait.
For a chilling second, the coat was not brown leather. It was a perfectly clean, high-collared, white silk tunic, the uniform of a high-ranking technician from the pre-Collapse era. His hands were not rough and scarred; they were smooth, pale, and manicured.
He blinked. The leather was back. The scars were back.
"What was that?" Kaelen demanded, sweat beading on his forehead.
Aura:
Kaelen swallowed hard. The terror wasn't the physical danger; it was the psychological horror of having his own past, his own identity, made fluid and temporary.
They can erase me without touching me.
Aura:
Sever the connection? How?
Aura:
Blast the disc out of my pocket? It'll be lost!
Aura:
Kaelen didn't need Aura's calculations. The flash of the white silk coat was enough. He couldn't risk having his entire life—his memories, his suffering, his existence—deleted by a phantom.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the Quantum Disc. He didn't dare look at the impossibly smooth, light-devouring silver surface.
He activated his wrist-rig. He quickly adjusted the governor valve he'd jury-rigged just last week, tightening the steam pressure until the gauge needle quivered violently in the red zone. The rig began to scream, its brass joints straining.
He pressed the focusing nozzle of the rig—a small, custom-made emitter—directly against the silver disc.
The train rushed over a long, dark viaduct spanning a river of churning industrial runoff. Kaelen looked at the disc—his one link to the past, his one chance for the future, his one terrifying passenger.
"Forgive me, ghost," he thought.
He hit the trigger.
The blast was not steam, but a high-pitched, focused scream of pure, concentrated Aether that struck the Quantum Disc like a microscopic hammer.
The force was incredible. Kaelen was nearly thrown clear off the train. His hand felt numb, burned by residual Aetheric feedback.
The disc flew upward, a silver blur against the gray sky, and landed with a sharp clink on the very edge of the moving rooftop, rolling perilously close to the precipice.
Kaelen lunged, grabbing the disc just as it was about to roll off the roof and plummet hundreds of feet into the toxic river below.
He secured the disc tightly in a secondary, heavily insulated pouch inside his coat—a pouch he'd originally designed for highly volatile Aether crystals.
Aura:
The sudden silence in Kaelen's mind was immense. No more cold logic, no more urgent data streams. Just his own familiar, chaotic thoughts. He was alone again.
He could still feel the hum of the disc in his pocket, a distinct, reassuring vibration. Aura was still there, but muted, contained.
The train began to slow as it approached a checkpoint. The moment had arrived.
Aura (Internal, now only a faint, electrical hum): (JUMP NOW. REMEMBER THE GUARD ROTATION. YOU HAVE 5 SECONDS.)
Kaelen took a deep breath of the polluted, oil-scented air. He looked at the Aether-Storage Tank Farm rushing toward him—a giant field of massive, steaming bronze spheres, surrounded by a thin, razor-wire fence.
Time to decouple. He gripped the edge of the roof, coiled his powerful legs, and jumped into the smoky void.