You are late.
The thought hit Alex like a thrown stone.
Not a voice.
Not words from air.
A pressure in the back of his skull.
A frame of cold logic folded into a single sentence.
He froze.
Phineas kept moving, two steps ahead, light on his feet.
Alex's hand tightened on the rail until his knuckles ached.
The corridor shimmered—like heat over asphalt—like an image misprinted.
At the far end, where the passage bent into the heart of SRD's inner rings, a shape stood.
Not solid.
Not reflected.
Not a shadow thrown by a lamp.
A silhouette folded into the distortion.
Still.
Patient.
Watching.
Phineas didn't look up.
He never looked up unless someone shouted his name.
He didn't flinch.
Alex's skin crawled.
"Phin," he mouthed, barely moving the syllable.
Phineas glanced over his shoulder, grin still stuck to his face—dizzy-excited, adrenaline-sweet.
"What? You see a spider?" he whispered.
"No."Alex's eyes burned."Look."
Phineas followed the line of his stare and blinked.
"Where?"
Alex realized with a pebble-drop clarity that he alone could see it.
The figure did not move.
It did not breathe.
It did not belong to the corridor.
Alex felt its attention like a gaze across water:
cool,
measured,
curious in a way that was not kind.
The thought returned.
You are late.
It slotted into his mind as if the Agent had laid down a reason and expected an answer.
Who are you?Why are you here?What do you want?
Questions followed like knives.
Alex's lungs narrowed.
He remembered Kayden: strapped, silent, a thing being measured.He remembered Phineas: joking his way through terror.He remembered a humming—thin, precise—that had carved the Ghost Passage.
The Agent's silhouette remained a void at the corridor's edge,
the air around it wrinkling as if the world had difficulty continuing past that point.
"Alex," the silhouette seemed to say, not through speakers, but by the way the corridor temperature shifted."Why are you late?"
Alex swallowed and felt saliva gone dry.
"Because Kayden's inside," he answered aloud,
stumbling over the candor of the sentence.
The Agent's attention sharpened.
Not anger.
Not approval.
A calculation.
"You moved poorly," it thought, almost gentle.
"You are predictable."
Phineas laughed too loudly two paces ahead.
The sound ricocheted off cold concrete and was swallowed.
Alex's fingers dug into the metal rail.
"What—what do you want from us?" he asked, voice a thread.
The Agent's response hovered, precise and distant.
"Proof."
A smaller word than he'd imagined.
Heavier.
"Proof of what?" Alex whispered.
"Of decision," it answered.Short. Clinical. Inevitable.
Alex blinked.Decision?
Phineas turned back, sensing the wrongness now, teeth bared in nervous half-smile.
"Dude, either you're having a seizure or the—" He stopped. His eyes widened. He hadn't seen the figure before; now he saw the light around it—the distortion—a slight shimmer like heat, like a film.
"Did you see that?" Phineas whispered.
Alex let his mouth open and the confession out:
"Yes. I saw her."
Phineas's grin vanished.
They were two boys in a big machine.
The corridor's sensors, if they were watching, registered nothing unusual.
No alarms.
No drone calls.
No patch in the cameras.
Only Alex and now Phineas were in the loop of observation.
The Agent stepped—no, the corridor simply reconfigured itself—and the figure seemed closer by a breath.
"You will be tested," it said without moving its lips.
"You will be observed choosing."
Alex swallowed hard enough to taste copper.
"What kind of test?" he whispered.
"You will be offered paths," it answered."Obvious paths, easy paths, dangerous paths. Each reveals the same truth."
Phineas spat on the floor nervously.
"Great. Tests. Just what we've been training for," he said, voice brittle.
"You will be judged on the speed of your choice," the Agent continued.
"Not the morality.
Not the consequence.
The speed."
Alex felt something like ice wrap his spine.
Speed meant reflex.
Reflex meant default.
Default meant whatever training or fear lived in his marrow would decide more than his thought.
"Why speed?" Alex asked.
A beat.
"Decisions taken slowly are polluted," the voice-thought said.
"A slow choice can be contaminated by pity.A fast choice shows the true alignment."
The word alignment tasted foreign.
He thought of Kayden strapped in a chair, eyes empty, APEX thin as thread, and wondered how any of this was about him at all.
Because the Agent was not asking for them to break the system for Kayden.It was asking to see how their bones were shaped.
Alex's teeth ground together.
"What do we do?" he said.
Phineas looked between them—fear and bravado collapsing into a businesslike calm.
"We improvise," he said."And hopefully we don't die."
"Not good enough," the Agent observed.
"You will choose now."
A panel embedded in the corridor wall hissed and rearranged itself.
Three faint lights blossomed—
left, center, right—candles against the sterile concrete.
Each lit patch showed a sliver of consequence:
Left— a static image: Kayden's face—alive, confused, freed—then flicker—blurred.Center— a corridor of red—alarms, running figures—chaos.Right— darkness—impossibility—Hale's voice calling, then silence.
They were not promises.They were suggestions.
Alex's heart beat jagged lines.
Phineas swallowed.He reached out—trembling—and his finger hovered over center.
Alex thought of training.
Of rules.
Of not giving the enemy leverage.
He thought of the Citadel's voice: You are late.He thought of the cold hum that carved blindpaths through reality.
He thought of Kayden's silence—resistance as weapon or as tomb.
His hand moved.
Not with speed.
Not with slow calculation.
Not with the theatrics of a hero.
Just a decision.
He touched one.
The lights answered.
The corridor bent.
Behind them, the faint pulse in the monitoring feed—inside the Orientation chamber—registered a small deviation.
APEX flickered.
Kayden's vitals hiccupped.
The Agent's silhouette shimmered once, then steadied.
It did not smile.
It had what it wanted.
Alex could feel the weight of a thousand futures compressing into that one flicker of response.He had moved.
The corridor closed in behind them like a book.
No more options.
Alex swallowed.
He did not know whether they had done right.
He only knew they had chosen.
He felt the Agent's thought recede—less observation, more note taking.
"You are late," it repeated, softer now."And you moved."
Alex clung to the rail as if it might stop the world from sliding.
Phineas muttered something—comfort or curse, he couldn't tell.
They moved deeper into the belly of SRD.
And somewhere, under glass and antiseptic, Kayden's silence held.