The world insisted on normalcy with a brutal, cheerful indifference. The hospital was a temple to it: bright lights, the squeak of sensible shoes on linoleum, the constant, low murmur of televisions tuned to daytime talk shows. They had kept her for two days. Observation for shock, they said. Dehydration. Minor lacerations.
They asked their questions in gentle, patronizing tones. She gave them the answers they wanted to hear: confusion, panic, a blur of noise and light. She was Delaney, a student, caught in the wrong place at the worst possible time. They nodded, made sympathetic noises, and marked her file. Another survivor of the "catastrophic geological event" at the old monastery site.
Colton was in a different wing, undergoing surgery for his leg and ribs. She wasn't family, so they wouldn't let her see him. She was alone in a sterile room, with the ghost of a mountain pressed against her mind.
The silence of the Schism was absolute. The constant, psychic pressure that had weighed on the world was simply gone. People felt lighter, though they didn't know why. They attributed their sudden good moods to the sunny weather. But for Delaney, the absence was a presence in itself. It was the space where the gate stood.
It didn't whisper. It didn't pull. It was just… there. A fixed point in her internal cosmos. Due north on the compass of her soul. If she closed her eyes and concentrated, she could feel its contours—not a location in space, but a state of being. A perfect, balanced stillness. And at its center, a familiar resonance, locked in an eternal, vigilant stasis.
Lane.
He wasn't a person anymore. He was a function. A landmark. The knowledge was a cold stone in her gut. There was no grief left for it; the emotion was too vast to fit inside her. It was simply a fact, as fundamental as gravity.
On the third day, they discharged her with a packet of brochures on post-traumatic stress and a prescription for sleeping pills she had no intention of filling. Sleep was when the memories were sharpest. The feel of his hand on her wrist as they fell. The look in his eyes in that final second—not love, not forgiveness, but a terrible, resigned acknowledgement.
She stood on the sidewalk outside the hospital, the city noise a jarring assault. Car horns, snippets of conversation, the rumble of a bus—it was all so loud, so meaningless. She felt like a deep-sea creature hauled to the surface, her body not built for the pressure of this much mundane reality.
A black sedan with tinted windows pulled up to the curb. The rear door opened. A man in a dark suit gestured for her to get in. Her heart hammered, a frantic bird against her ribs. Oriax. They'd found her.
But the man's face was neutral, professional. Not a fanatic's gleam in his eye. "Ms. Delaney," he said, his voice flat. "There's someone who would like to speak with you."
Every instinct screamed at her to run. But where would she go? The gate was always with her. And curiosity, a dangerous, stubborn flame, flickered to life. She got in.
The car didn't take her to a hidden bunker or a corporate headquarters. It took her to a quiet, anonymous office building downtown. The man led her to a sleek elevator, up to a corner office with a stunning view of the city. Sitting behind a vast, empty desk was a woman in her sixties, with sharp, intelligent eyes and silver hair pulled into a severe bun. She was not Dr. Corvus.
"Ms. Delaney," the woman said, her voice cool and assessing. "Thank you for coming. My name is Director Isley. I represent a branch of the government that does not, officially, exist."
Delaney said nothing. She just stood there, feeling the distant, silent hum of the gate.
Isley gestured to a chair. "Please. You are not in any trouble. In fact, you are something of a… puzzle. As is the event on that mountain." She steepled her fingers. "The official story, as you know, is a geological anomaly. But we both know that's not entirely accurate, don't we?"
Delaney remained silent. Colton's warning echoed in her mind. Our story stays buried.
Isley smiled, a thin, humorless expression. "We are aware of the Oriax Foundation. We have been for some time. A cult of personality built around dangerous, fringe science. We believe Dr. Corvus and his inner circle perished in the incident. A tragic end to a tragic folly."
She paused, letting the words hang in the air. They were offering her a narrative. A clean, simple story she could hide behind.
"The world does not need to know about… acoustic thaumaturgy," Isley continued, carefully enunciating the term. "About dimensional convergences. It would cause panic. It would attract the wrong kind of attention. My department exists to ensure that such knowledge remains contained."
She leaned forward slightly. "You and Mr. Colton are the only loose ends. The only living souls who know what truly happened in that mountain."
Delaney finally found her voice. It was quieter than it used to be, more measured. "What do you want from me?"
"We want you to forget," Isley said simply. "We want you to go back to your life. We will provide a generous settlement—enough for university, for a fresh start. In return, you sign a stack of nondisclosure agreements thicker than your head, and you never speak of Lane, or Corvus, or the Schism, ever again."
It was a gift. A chance to be normal. To bury the nightmare and try to build a life on top of it. She could almost taste the tempting simplicity of it.
But then she felt it. A subtle shift. A tremor in the silence.
It was infinitesimal, like the vibration of a single spider's thread. But in the perfect stillness of the gate, it was a thunderclap. It was a fluctuation. A moment of strain.
Lane.
It lasted less than a second, then the perfect equilibrium returned. But the message was received. The gate was stable, but it was not static. It required vigilance. It required a keeper.
Isley was watching her, waiting for an answer. She saw a traumatized girl, a problem to be managed and silenced.
Delaney looked out the window at the sprawling, oblivious city. They wanted her to forget. But how could she forget a part of her own anatomy? The gate wasn't a memory; it was a organ. To deny it would be to deny her own heartbeat.
She turned back to Isley. The fear was still there, a cold knot in her stomach. But beneath it was something else, something she had forged in the dark: a resolve as hard and silent as the gate itself.
"There's nothing to tell," Delaney said, her voice even. "You're right. It was an earthquake. I got lucky."
Isley studied her for a long moment, searching for a lie. But Delaney's truth was so much stranger and more terrible than any lie the director could conceive. Finally, Isley gave a curt nod. "Good. We'll be in touch about the settlement details. Your friend, Mr. Colton, has agreed to similar terms."
The meeting was over. The man in the suit drove her back to the hospital to collect her meager belongings. She was free to go.
But as she walked away from the curb, a single, small bag in her hand, she knew she was embarking on a different kind of confinement. She was a secret-keeper. The sole witness to a truth that would die with her.
She found a cheap motel room on the edge of the city. It was a bland, boxy space that smelled of disinfectant and stale cigarettes. She sat on the edge of the bed, the silence of the room pressing in on her.
She closed her eyes and turned her attention inward, toward the fixed point. The shape of the silence. It was her burden. Her purpose. The world had returned to its noisy, ignorant normalcy.
But Delaney would never be normal again. She sat in the quiet motel room, a young woman with the weight of worlds on her shoulders, and began the long, lonely work of learning the language of her new life. The first lesson was the hardest: how to live in a world of sound, when the most important thing in your existence would forever be defined by its silence.