The transition was rough.
Not because of damage or delay—but because the Anchor they landed in wasn't finished. The tether stream frayed midway through the jump. Kael felt it like a tearing of thought, as if someone had yanked a page from his mind mid-sentence.
He hit the ground hard.
Metal beneath his boots. Not concrete, not stone—metal smoothed by use and vibrating faintly beneath him, like a living ship breathing just under threshold.
Myra landed beside him, silent this time, already scanning the dark.
They were in a corridor. Curved, cold, blinking dimly with orange proximity lights that didn't stay on long enough to illuminate anything completely. The ceiling pulsed with low static, like a television trying to remember its purpose.
Kael's ChronoMap buzzed erratically.
> "ANCHOR: UNKNOWN
TYPE: PARTIAL
ACCESS: DEGRADED
AUTHOR: REDACTED"
"This isn't just an unfinished Anchor," Myra whispered. "It's corrupted."
Kael exhaled slowly. "Perfect. First we survive the original story, now we fall into the trash bin."
They walked slowly, passing consoles that flickered when they neared, then fizzled out when they tried to interact. It was like the ship—or structure, or whatever this was—recognized them but wasn't sure if it liked them yet.
Kael ran his hand across the wall.
It was warm.
"Alive?" he murmured.
Myra touched it too. "Or dreaming."
They found the first body half a corridor later.
Not a person—at least, not anymore. A humanoid form made of thin chrome filaments, slumped against the wall. No face. No mouth. Just a slit where a voicebox should be, and a small device pulsing blue beneath its ribcage.
Kael crouched. "This is ChronoCore tech."
"From before the Knot initiative," Myra said. "Prototype era."
He looked up sharply. "You're saying this Anchor predates us?"
"I'm saying we're in a version of history we forgot."
The blue pulse intensified.
Suddenly, the body jerked upright.
Both Kael and Myra drew weapons instantly—but it didn't move beyond sitting. Instead, it emitted a sound:
> ". . .story loop incomplete . . .error in sequence . . .corrupted Kael detected . . .please define 'real' . . ."
Kael's skin went cold.
"Did it say corrupted Kael?"
The android twitched again.
Then reached out—and handed him the pulsing core from its chest.
It burned the moment it touched his skin.
A flood of voices hit his head.
> "You died here."
"You betrayed us here."
"You saved no one here."
"You weren't supposed to return."
Kael stumbled back, throwing the core to the floor, panting.
"What did you see?" Myra asked.
He looked at her. His eyes were wet.
"Not a version of me. Not an echo. Me. A Kael that never left this place."
She swallowed. "Then this Anchor is your ghost."
They pressed on, finding more shells—each one seemingly from a failed operation involving earlier ChronoCore missions. Some had journals—fragmented files burned into glass drives, showing logs of Kaelen's first experiments with rewriting time using narrative theory.
"It started here," Kael said softly. "Before the Knots. Before the Editor. He was trying to overwrite failed missions by repurposing the records as fiction."
"Which means," Myra whispered, "that every mission failure… became a chapter."
Kael nodded. "And every chapter was a way to lie to time."
The corridor ended in a hangar.
Floating in midair, tethered by coiling streams of data, was a sphere. Its surface was etched with symbols Kael remembered only from his earliest training—a language not taught anymore.
Timecode before time.
The Sphere opened.
Inside: A throne.
And sitting on it—
Kael.
But younger. Wild-eyed. Drenched in static.
The Kael who had tried to rewrite a broken mission by inventing a better ending.
The original liar.
He looked up, smiling with jagged teeth.
"Well," he said. "Look who finally came back to finish the lie."