They tell her the incident is closed.
That all anomalies have been accounted for.
That the system has stabilized.
The report is clean. Too clean.
She reads it twice, then a third time—searching for the hesitation that should be there. The uncertainty. The footnote that admits they don't fully understand what happened.
There is none.
The room assigned to her is quiet in the way only controlled spaces can be. Not peaceful. Not safe.
Managed.
She sets the report aside and stares at the wall display. Status lines scroll in orderly sequence, each one confirming the same thing:
ALL SYSTEMS OPERATIONAL
NO UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS DETECTED
Her jaw tightens.
"That's a lie," she murmurs.
The bond responds faintly—not agreement, but awareness. He is further away now, within the permitted distance. She feels the tension in him like a held breath stretched too long.
It's not lying, he sends. It doesn't know.
That unsettles her more than a deception would.
She stands and crosses the room. As she does, the display flickers.
Just for a second.
The text stutters—characters misaligning, spacing wrong, as if the language itself has slipped.
Then it corrects itself.
She freezes.
"Did you see that?" she asks.
A pause.
Yes.
She exhales slowly. "That shouldn't happen."
It didn't break, he replies. It adjusted.
She returns to the console, fingers hovering over the interface. She doesn't input a command. She doesn't request access.
The screen changes anyway.
A new window opens.
No warning. No authorization prompt.
Just a line of text, pulsing softly:
ACCESS: RESIDUAL
Her pulse quickens.
"I didn't open that," she says.
Neither did I.
The word residual sits wrong in her chest.
Leftover. Lingering. Something that should have been cleared—but wasn't.
She scans the data. Most of it is noise—harmless metrics, archived logs, nothing sensitive.
Until she sees timestamps.
They don't match.
Some entries are marked with moments that haven't happened yet.
She swallows. "These are projections."
Predictions, he corrects.
"No," she whispers. "Predictions are calculated."
She taps one of the entries.
The display resists—then yields.
A short clip plays.
A corridor.
A door she recognizes.
Hers.
The timestamp blinks:
+00:17:43
Seventeen minutes into the future.
Her breath catches.
The clip ends before anything happens.
"What is this?" she asks, voice low.
The bond tightens—protective, alert.
Someone left a window open, he says. Not to watch what we did.
"To see what we'll do."
The lights dim slightly, then return to normal. No alarms. No warnings.
The system doesn't react.
Because, technically, nothing is wrong.
She closes the window. It vanishes instantly, leaving no trace behind.
No access log.
No record.
Her hands curl into fists. "They said the door would stay open."
They didn't say to whom.
A quiet dread settles in her stomach.
She moves to the far side of the room, where the wall meets the floor. There—etched faintly into the surface—is a mark she doesn't remember being there before.
Not a symbol.
A seam.
As if something has been fitted into the world and smoothed over too carefully.
She touches it.
The bond flares—sharp, warning.
She pulls her hand back just as the seam fades, dissolving into blank surface.
Her breath comes shallow now.
"This isn't surveillance," she says.
No, he agrees. It's anticipation.
The room hums softly, unchanged. Perfect. Unconcerned.
Outside, the system continues to function, blind to what it cannot categorize.
And somewhere beyond its awareness, something patient is still connected—
not by command,
not by force,
but by leftover access no one remembers granting.
She sinks into the chair, exhaustion catching up to her all at once.
"This is going to get worse," she says.
The bond steadies, resolute.
Yes.
"And you knew this would happen."
A pause.
I knew something would.
She closes her eyes, the future pressing faintly at the edges of her mind—unwritten, but already being weighed.
They are no longer reacting.
They are being expected.